Tulisa - The Biography (7 page)

Instead, they eyed a musical ‘third way’: audaciously cutting their ties with Polydor and seeking a new label to call home. Many established acts leave a big record label but to do so at such a fledgling point in one’s career takes particular self-confidence. Tulisa had rarely lacked belief in the band, neither had Dappy and Fazer. Their self-assurance had been given a major boost by the arrival of their new legendary manager, Professor Jonathan Shalit. He was best known for having discovered Welsh singer Charlotte Church, who sold more than 5 million CDs with him, and for his ‘rediscovery’ of harmonica player Larry Adler, who recorded an album with him featuring the likes of Cher, Sir Elton John and Sting. He has also guided and managed the careers of Myleene Klass, Lorraine Kelly and Kelly Brook. He has also been a successful manager of urban-styled acts, including Jamelia and Big Brovaz, who both enjoyed critical and commercial success while under his wing and won eight MOBO awards between them. He is a regular in industry power lists and has himself estimated dining at the Ivy restaurant hundreds of times a year. The owner even once even took out an advertisement in an industry magazine thanking Shalit for his regular custom! Shalit has been described as ‘a legend in his own lunchtime’.

Shalit had expressed an interest in managing the band even before B passed away. Tulisa said that while her uncle had initially been opposed to the idea he had begun to change his mind a few days before his death. They were left in need of a new mentor and when they researched Shalit’s track record they were, naturally, very impressed. They met him and decided to sign up with his company, Roar Global. It is a relationship that continues to this day. After leaving Polydor they signed to a smaller label called All Around The World. The label’s announcement of its new acquisition included a howler of a mistake. It read: ‘MOBO award-winning N-Dubz have found a new home with AATW. Hailing from Camden in south London the trio’s music has variably been described as hip-hop, garage and RnB but their style is pretty unique, blending traditional song structure and inspired lyrics with distinctly urban elements and influences.’ The description of their musical sound was close enough to the mark, but given how central Camden Town has always been to the band’s image, it was a particularly bad error for the label to describe Camden, arguably the most celebrated district of north London, as being in south London.

The band added its own statement to the announcement. It was a diverting combination of confidence and cheek. ‘You’ve heard of us, even if you don’t know it yet,’ it began. ‘Remember that boy driving you mad every morning on the No 42? The one playing music on his mobile at full volume? He’s listening to our music. So is his sister, his best mate, his best mate’s older brother and his teacher. Throughout our career we’ve strived to become masters of the melody, kings of the chorus and rulers of the ad lib, simply put we balance straight-up pop smashes with a street smart style and our music’s for everyone. We make songs for your mum, your dad and your nan.’ After adding some more background to their act, and also revealing some of their signature sayings, it concluded with an ebullient promise. ‘We know it’s rare to come across a group you totally believe in and there are a lot of good acts in the UK, but great ones? Not so many, but we definitely aim to change that…’

They would succeed in their aim but first there was to be more trouble and controversy. By this stage, Tulisa needed to respond to something that she would become quite familiar with in the years to come: controversy erupting around her cousin Dappy. He recorded a song called ‘Love For My Slum’ with another artist, and then filmed a promotional video for it. In one 10-second segment of the video, Dappy stands next to a character labelled as ‘rich boy’ and angrily warns, then punches the rich boy, who falls to the ground. A newspaper asked whether the video encouraged young music fans to pursue a life of ‘criminality’, adding that ‘senior members’ of the Metropolitan police believed it certainly did. Superintendent Leroy Logan of Hackney police, a former Chairman of the Black Police Association, spoke of ‘Those out there who are keen on hijacking the [grime music] scene, and using these videos to spread negativity, anger, and aggression. And whether the messages are coded or explicit, they often play themselves out on the street.’

Another extra-curricular venture Dappy took part in was a track called ‘Babylon Fi Get Shot’, which he recorded alongside another rapper called Face Killa. For those unfamiliar with street lingo, the song’s title translates roughly as ‘Police to get shot’. He has since distanced himself from the song and the sentiment. ‘I was young and dumb, and I’ve grown up a lot since then. I’m an adult now and turned my back on those views a long time ago as they are wrong,’ he said. ‘Doing the job I do now has made me realise you don’t have to hate the police and be negative about them. N-Dubz are all about positivity.’

However, he also made more positive appearances in the mainstream media, which in turn brought Tulisa further into the public mind. In the autumn of 2007, he appeared on the BBC’s music panel show
Never Mind
The
Buzzcocks
. Host Simon Amstell described him as being part of ‘urban collective N-Dubz’. He soon made jokes at Dappy’s expense, saying that Lee Ryan from the boy band Blue had been booked but had pulled out at the last moment, adding: ‘I won’t say who replaced him, I shouldn’t say that, should I, N-Dubz?’

Dappy then produced one of his famous hats, and asked the audience: ‘Who wants to see Simon wear a Dappy hat?’

He threw the hat to Amstell who calmly placed it to one side, and carried on with the show, promising ‘I’ll wear it later.’ In due course, he encouraged Dappy to remove his own hat so the audience could see how he looked without it. As Dappy obliged, Amstell commented: ‘It’s Kenzie from Blazin’ Squad.’

Noel Fielding said: ‘I was thinking more Stan Laurel.’ He added that the hat made him look like a ‘woollen dog’ or a ‘knitted poodle’. Dappy might have preferred to be a Doberman, if he had to be a dog at all. He took it all in as good humour as he could, though. Tulisa, too, must have giggled when she watched it.

There was plenty more fun surrounding Dappy during the show. He tried – and failed – to lead the audience in a sing-along of George Michael’s ‘Careless Whisper’. It’s always cringe-worthy when such attempts fall flat. He then joked that Willie Nelson looked ‘perverse’ in a video they were shown. He then joked that it looked as if Nelson was saying to a woman with his smile, ‘If I had you alone for two seconds I would smash your back doors in.’ He said that Camden Town is the capital of London, asking the audience, ‘Who knows about Camden Town?’ only to be met by silent indifference.

‘Please stop talking to them,’ pleaded Amstell.

Dappy threatened Fielding, saying that ‘the people who listen to my music’ would take him to task for mocking his hat. He and Phil Jupitus made hard work of the ‘intros’ round in which they perform the introduction of a song for the third team member to guess. Why, Amstell asked Dappy, did he give him a hat with a smaller bobble than his? ‘That was the last one I had under my bed,’ replied Dappy. All in all, it had been a memorable appearance by Dappy, whose quirky charisma had captured the attention of viewers and consequently brought N-Dubz to the attention of new people. He would go on to become quite the
Buzzcocks
cult legend.

Tulisa, too, was appearing on television in 2007 and was pleased to have a foot in an industry in which she had long held aspirations to work. As we have seen, she appeared in the UK television series
Dubplate Drama
. When it was launched in the autumn of 2005,
Dubplate Drama
caught the attention of viewers as it was billed as the world’s first interactive drama series. It followed characters including MC Shystie and a female MC called Dionne. Tulisa, who was 17 when it launched, loved watching it, describing it as ‘the best thing I had ever seen’. She felt that here was a programme that was ‘pretty much’ about her and her friends. Viewers would be given the chance to vote on the outcome of each episode, an exciting melding of the drama and the popular reality television formats of the likes of
Big Brother
and the
X Factor
with their public votes. ‘We made it interactive because we want young people to talk about the various issues raised by the weekly dilemmas,’ said
co-founder
Michelle Clothier, of the youth marketing group Livity. ‘Young people have less loyalty to brands and programmes than before so we wanted to use as many media as possible.’

Tulisa loved
Dubplate Drama
so much that she would sit and daydream about getting to appear in it one day. She was hooked for the entire first series and could not have been more excited when the programme makers approached her to be a part of the second series. Originally, she was considered to take the role of – in her words – a ‘slutty chick’, but in the end Tulisa took a more serious and emotional part, in the shape of a character called Laurissa. From playing Tallulah in
Bugsy Malone
and now Laurissa in
Dubplate Drama
, it seemed that Tulisa was attracting parts whose names corresponded to parts of her own name. For the next series she got an even bigger part, as she had impressed the production team first time around. Her
Dubplate
character was a cocaine addict who was in pop group The Fam and got abused by her manager and boyfriend ‘Prangers’, played by Ricci Harnett. It was not to be a light-hearted experience. That said, she performed the part well and would return to the show for subsequent seasons, as would Dappy.

However, their main focus remained musical. They wanted to do justice to legacy of Uncle B by producing a winning debut album. To make plain that the effort was to be a tribute to him, they dropped the original title and named it after him.

T
he upward trajectory in the career of Tulisa, Dappy and Fazer was crystallised when their first album was released in November 2008. They had originally planned to name it
Against All Odds
, but actually called it
Uncle B
, in honour of the man who had been pivotal in the band’s early days. Rarely in the modern era are debut albums so long in coming – the band themselves estimate that
Uncle B
was made over a period of eight years. As Fazer noted, it was almost like a ‘best of’ effort, as every song on the album had already been released via one route or another prior to the album’s release. It entered the UK charts in a high position: No 11. In Ireland it fared less well, only reaching No 36. The first full track on the album is ‘Wouldn’t You’, and opens – after a brief and tame ‘Na Na Nii’ from Dappy – with Tulisa’s soulful lyrics. Nonetheless it is quite a low-key song with which to open an album effectively. Certainly compared to some of the stompers that would appear on future N-Dubz albums this is a tame affair. Within a few lines of ‘Strong Again’, the ante has been upped as Dappy confesses to violence. The music is fiercer as he bemoans getting community service as a result of his misdeeds. Tulisa takes over in the chorus, and then handles the next verse. Opening a theme that would become a regular concern for the band, Tulisa reminds listeners that life is short. A similar sentiment appears in ‘Don’t Get Nine’.

‘I Swear’ blends Tulisa’s singing and Dappy’s intense raps with an upbeat hip-hop/grime track. She mourns having lied and delivers a convincing tone of regret. The lie had involved cheating by the girl in the song. Typically for the land of N-Dubz, she is caught out after her man spots an unknown pair of Nike trainers and then seeing her kissing another man. In ‘Ouch’, the issue of infidelity is tackled again but this time it is the man cheating. Tulisa’s high vocals are impressive. The backing track includes piano and violin. ‘It’s all about a whole debate between a woman and man after finding out the man’s cheated,’ she said. ‘It’s just a whole storyline, the whole aftermath of it. The video’s got a whole storyline too that people can relate to.’ There are also strings at the start of ‘Love For My Slum’. Other notable tracks on the album include ‘Feva Las Vegas’. Tulisa complains in it that success can provoke jealousy, even among friends. Was this a reflection of issues she had faced? In ‘Sex’, Dappy spares no blushes or details. Then comes ‘Secrets’, a tamer affair set to an acoustic guitar. ‘Dappy, turn my mike up,’ requests Tulisa before revealing that in the song she is going to reveal a thing or two about herself. Dappy then joins the vocals to reassure her that she is not alone.

‘Papa Can You Hear Me’ is, of course, the band’s tribute to Uncle B. Very emotional it is, too. David Balls was – as he acknowledged – rather harsh in his assessment of the song on the website Digital Spy. ‘The mix of uber-serious rapping and abrasive beats is fundamentally awkward, while their lyrics are as crass as they are heartfelt. By showing their softer side, the Camden collective are probably hoping to win some new fans, but they should probably stick to making hip-hop bangers in the futureside,’ he wrote. It is hard to agree: this song quickly became and remains a central part of the N-Dubz musical canon. Dappy’s tribute to his late father might not be as gentle as some musical tributes are but in its own,
rough-around
-the-edges way, it is a tearjerker and a heartstring puller. The album closes with ‘Outro’.

Due in part to the somewhat obscure label it was released by, and the fact it was a debut, the album was not reviewed widely in the mainstream media. Describing the album as being made by ‘the sort of young people who wake
Daily Mail
readers up in a sweat,’ a reviewer on the
In The News
website described Tulisa as the band’s ‘chief warbler’ and complimented her on her ‘impressive chest’. He concluded that the band should not be dismissed and compared them to punk legends the Sex Pistols. He said his readers should ‘Buy this album and enjoy it for what it is: the sound of young Britain. Resistance is futile.’ Tulisa will have found it hard not to smile at the compliment paid to her chest. Another review brought to her attention was that on the Orange website. It concluded: ‘Parents won’t be too impressed, mind you, but
Uncle B
will likely be lauded for its furious party jams made with the
Skins
generation of reckless teens in mind. All that, and it’s actually quite a good listen.’ The RapReviews.com website said: ‘All in all, N-Dubz have coughed up an impressive debut that has been a long time coming.’ The reviewer, Jesal ‘Jay Soul’ Padania, identified Tulisa’s place in the band thus: ‘You have two rappers, one of whom sings a lot, and a single white female taking care of choruses and a few verses.’