Tulisa - The Biography (6 page)

However, there was a specific need in her over and above the band, and it was typical of B’s loving, attentive nature that he noticed it. Following an unproductive day in the studio during which she had been enormously down, he drove her home. During that journey he gave her some advice that was prescient. He told her that a fact of life was that some people were ‘depressives’. He told her, ‘You need to accept that you are a depressed person. Don’t try and fight it. Accept it, deal with it, live with it and get on with it.’ He added that she should, in fact, go further and ‘embrace’ her depression. More than anything, her told her, she should never let her depression hold her back in life. This was useful advice, as Tulisa was facing some very dark times. ‘I would always know when my mum was about to have an episode,’ she told the
Daily Mail
later. ‘She’d make dinner and the meat would be raw. She’d be lethargic one minute and then cleaning around the house unable to stop the next. I’d phone the hospital, explain her symptoms and they wouldn’t want to know. I was young and they didn’t take me seriously even though I was my mum’s carer.

‘In the end I’d have to take her to A&E to try to get her admitted. But often by the time I got back home from school the next day, the doctors would say they’d done an evaluation of her and she was fine to go home. Sometimes I would spend weeks taking her back and forward to A&E and then finally they would admit her and she’d be in hospital for up to three months….I started losing respect for my mum. She couldn’t take care of herself so I didn’t see how she thought she could take care of me. If I wanted to go out with my friends, I did it because I felt I had no one to answer to. But she’d leave me 60 voice messages on my mobile, send up to 30 texts a day, phone all our family and even the police to tell them I’d gone missing or was misbehaving. She didn’t want my friends in the house and didn’t want me to go out.’

Thank goodness for the salvation that music – and the band – gave her. As they faced the disappointments,
let-downs
and frustrations of their early years, B was creative and imaginative in his tips. Tulisa wrote that he sometimes lied in order to cheer them up, saying he would sometimes tell them things that were ‘complete bollocks’ just to raise their mood. ‘It worked!’ she added. However, they had fallings-out, too. During the last months of his life they had more or less stopped talking at one point. That stand-off ended when he phoned her up and told her that he wanted them to put the music to one side for a second as he wanted to remind her he was her uncle, regardless of their creative ventures. He told her that ‘before all this you were just my little niece and I want that back’. He reminded her that he loved her. It is haunting to reflect that this was the last conversation they had.

I
magine poor Tulisa’s torment when B died. Just two days earlier the band had played perhaps their most exciting show to date. ‘I Swear’ had been released and was receiving much airplay on Kiss FM. The audience was absolutely pumped for their arrival, greeting the band with screams. ‘It was difficult to take in,’ wrote Fazer later. The crowd got so manic that some of its members at the front actually pulled Fazer off the stage and into the audience. Dappy leapt in to retrieve his band-mate. Fazer looked over and saw B watching from the wings. The look of joy and pride in their mentor’s face was clear. Fazer would later recall the evening as one of the best moments of his life. The following day, he met up with B to discuss which studio the band might move to as the contract for their current studio was nearing its end. It was the last time a member of N-Dubz would see its founder alive. The day after, Fazer and Dappy had to break into B’s house after becoming concerned about his disappearance, when he had failed to collect Dappy’s mother from the airport as planned. It was Fazer who discovered B’s body. He had died sitting in front of the television, with the set tuned in to Channel U. It transpired he had died from a heart attack. Tulisa meanwhile was elsewhere, unaware of the tragedy.

B had almost predicted the day was imminent. He would sometimes say to the band, ‘One day you guys will be here on your own and I won’t be here to look after you,’ or remind them ‘I won’t be here forever.’ As with so much of what B had told the group, these predictions turned out to be true. He had seemed ill in the time leading up to his passing. He kept coughing, remembered Fazer, and also vomited a few times. The signs, it was only clear in retrospect, had been there for some time. Dappy was naturally devastated when he realised his father had died. At first he did not want to enter the room Fazer had discovered the body in. After a while he walked in and helped lay B’s body on the sofa. He covered the body with a blanket and then left the room, absolutely gutted. The next thing that he and Fazer had to do was decide how to break the news to Tulisa, who was busy filming
Dubplate Drama
at the time. It was not to be an easy moment.

Ironically, she was filming a scene in which her character had burst into tears after learning someone she loved had died. She cut an onion up when she had to cry during a scene. When merely cutting the onion didn’t do the trick, she simply held the two halves of the onion directly against her eyes. The production team also used a tear stick to help spark the sobs. Art was mirroring life in the most painful way. Tulisa had found that the best way to prepare for such a scene was to imagine that she really had been bereaved in real life. Just before she filmed the scene she had been sitting imagining how she would feel if she lost someone dear to her. Meanwhile, Fazer and Dappy were discussing how best to tell her that her beloved Uncle B had died. That same day, she turned her mobile phone on to discover a rash of texts from her two band-mates. All the messages said were that they needed to speak to her soon about something important.

She immediately feared the worst and phoned Dappy to ask what the matter was. He would not tell Tulisa over the phone and instead arranged to drive to the filming location to tell her in person. Meanwhile, the cast and crew members did their best to comfort Tulisa as her mind raced through a series of tragic possibilities. A feeling inside her grew. She tried to phone other family members as she waited in the hope that they could tell her what had happened. As fate would have it she could not get through to anyone by phone. When Dappy and Fazer arrived, Tulisa could not wait for them to get to the heart of the matter and tell her what was going on. She quickly lost her patience and shouted at them, demanding they just come out and tell her. Dappy told her to sit down and prepare for some bad news. He then said: ‘Are you ready for this? B’s dead.’ Tulisa’s body went immediately into shock. She felt her heart rate soar as the news sunk in. Her last memory was a fear that she was going to have a heart attack. Then she remembers falling and someone holding her as she sank to the ground. She eventually came to and became hysterical. She cried floods of tears and made the sort of loud wailing noise that is only ever made by someone in the immediate stages of grief.

‘I couldn’t stop it,’ she recalled in
Against All Odds
. ‘They took me out on to a patch of grass outside and I kept crying hysterically.’ After a while she composed herself and faced the obvious reality that while she had lost an uncle and a mentor, her band-mate Dappy had lost something even more intensely precious – a father. So she hugged him and offered her condolences. At the time, she remembered later, Dappy was absolutely cold with grief. There was no crying or outward signs of grieving; instead he was ‘numb’, she said. They got a lift home and sat in silence in the back seat of the car. It was a beautiful spring evening and they were sitting in the back of a convertible car with the roof down. What should have been an almost idyllic experience was instead laced with tragedy. They held hands and dealt silently with their emotions.

The following day the band was booked to perform a live show. Initially, they felt they were unable to fulfil the booking. However, with Fazer taking the lead in this, the band decided that they would honour the commitment. B had worked so hard to get them where they were. Surely pressing on with their career was the only way to honour him. Indeed, as Fazer reminded Tulisa and Dappy, B had seemingly died while waiting to see the band’s video on television. When they took to the stage their emotions were raw. His supportive presence from the wings was a stark omission. At the end of the show they were pleased to have honoured not just the booking, but the memory of their father and uncle. Then the sense of grief came flooding over them once more.

For Tulisa, grief was not the only challenging emotion. She almost felt a sense of responsibility, bordering on guilt. Even though the two had settled their differences before he died, she still felt that the pressures of working for the band had made him ill, and ultimately claimed his life. She wrote in
Against All Odds
: ‘All the stress and pressure that came from getting us to where we were pretty much killed him, so he died for our success.’ Strong words and a sentiment echoed by Fazer in the song ‘Papa’, where he sings: ‘It’s like you sacrificed your life, for the love of success and a life full of stress.’ He repeated the sentiment in the same book as Tulisa. Dappy was hardest hit, of course. He too felt that B’s death had been caused in part by his efforts on their behalf. ‘Obviously, we never had much money and he spent it all and got unhealthy, just smoking and the stress of thinking, “Am I going to get them to the top?”’ said Dappy. He was left feeling very alone in the world. ‘He guided me for 18 years,’ he said a few years later. ‘He was my dad and my best friend, that’s why I called him B, never Dad. When he died I was lost.’ All three band members continue to this day to be guided and motivated in their lives by their memories of their hero.

The band needed to face these horrific emotions together. The loss of B made them closer and tighter as people and as a band. Remarkably, even in death, B was firing them onwards and fuelling their energy and ambition. An early watershed moment in the post-B era came when they won a MOBO award. It was in the Best UK Newcomer category, which had been voted for by viewers of the ITV local news programme
London
Tonight
. They were up against Tinchy Stryder, Mutya Buena, Sadie Ama and UnkleJam. Tulisa had been convinced that the award would go to Mutya Buena rather than her act. There was a huge cheer when N-Dubz was announced as the winner. Tulisa strode to the stage alongside Dappy and Fazer. Dappy took the award and led the audience in a chant of ‘Naa Naa Niiii’. After thanking members of the band’s management, his mother and friends, Dappy said: ‘Most of all I want to say thank you to my Dad, rest in peace. RIP, thank you very much.’ He then passed the microphone to Tulisa who thanked the fans, her family and ‘most of all Uncle B for putting his heart and soul into us and getting us where we are today.’ Securing the award had been so important for the band – all the more so because of B’s death. Tulisa felt that Dappy in particular ‘couldn’t bear the thought of not getting it’ after all they had been through. Elsewhere that evening, Amy Winehouse was crowned best female vocalist while Dizzee Rascal was named best male. However, for N-Dubz the evening was all about honouring Uncle B. Tulisa said later that they felt his spirit was present in the arena. The band would go on to win further MOBO awards.

In the months that followed, Tulisa looked back over the influence that B had on her life, both musically and beyond. Memories kept flashing back, including the time he taught her karate during a family holiday in Greece. He had not merely shown her the physical moves but also the more esoteric and emotional techniques behind them, including the concepts of ‘cleansing the soul, positive and negative energy and that kind of thing’. She said that many of his concepts about spirituality helped influence her own spiritual and ultimately religious journey (a journey we shall return to in due course).

What a legacy he had left in the life of his treasured niece. He would have been delighted to see that in the wake of his death, all his devoted hard work began to pay off. Finally, the band was going places. In 2007 they signed to Polydor Records. To get a record deal with such a label was a major success for them. The UK arm of the label has released the material of hit acts including Slade, Girls Aloud, Kaiser Chiefs, The Saturday and S Club 7. Internationally it has released the work of the likes of the Black Eyed Peas – a band N-Dubz have sometimes been compared with – Emimen, Queens of the Stone Age and Pussycat Dolls. What a prestigious rostrum Tulisa, Dappy and Fazer were joining. Their first release on Polydor was a reissue of ‘You Better Not Waste My Time’. It reached UK No 26. The band considered this ‘a result’, particularly given that it had been released previously.

Then, in 2008, the band released a new song called ‘Ouch’. The video for the song was uploaded to YouTube and received four million views within a month. It was clear that Tulisa’s music was connecting with the public. However, the relationship between the band and their label soured soon after when the band played Polydor some of their other songs. The label bigwigs were not having any of it. They disliked everything they heard, including ‘Ouch’ and ‘Papa’. Having rejected many of the band’s songs – which felt like precious babies to Tulisa, Fazer and Dappy – Polydor then made broader efforts to mould the band into a different outfit. First, the label suggested that
song-writers
join the band in composing new songs. The band felt that the aim of this was to take them in a different direction – not a direction they were happy to go in. They gave Polydor’s ideas a go, including a studio session with a producer and songwriter who had worked with George Michael and
X Factor
winner Leona Lewis, respectively. ‘It wasn’t us,’ reflected Tulisa, who felt they would have been selling out to go along with Polydor’s plans.

She actually felt that Polydor simply did not understand what N-Dubz were about. This is a far from uncommon complaint from bands signed to big labels. Often, the reality is that the label actually
does
understand what a band is about, but simply wants the band to be about something different. She also complained that Polydor had insufficient faith in them. None of the label’s doubts did anything to shake her belief in what N-Dubz could achieve. She thought Polydor were nothing short of ‘completely mad’ for not supporting them and their vision. Her suspicion was that Polydor wanted to make them appeal to a broader age group than the band had in mind. In fairness, it would have been a stretch to make a band true to the original N-Dubz vision appeal to any substantial numbers of music fans above the age of 30. The end was nigh, and the band say it was a symbolic moment that made them decide to ditch Polydor. They were travelling to a gig and their van pulled into a petrol station. Tulisa, Dappy and Fazer hopped out and were recognised by a young girl. She told them she remembered them: ‘You had that song out ages ago.’ Whether this is one of those ‘legends’ that get written into a band’s history, or an entirely authentic story, it certainly crystallises the fears that Tulisa had at the time. Two immediate and undesirable options existed: toeing the Polydor line and watering down their vision, or giving up entirely and becoming one of music’s could-have-been stories, not even memorable enough to exist in a ‘whatever happened to’ pub discussion.