Susan Boyle

by Alice Montgomery

  Ironically, Susan has gone on to sing a Rolling Stones number on her album, eliciting praise from Mick Jagger himself. Such an outcome would have seemed unimaginable to the little girl.

  Were Susan to have been born today, it is possible that someone would have realized that her musical ability was a way of compensating for the problems she had experienced, using it as a way of communicating with the world. But this was a small village in Scotland in the 1960s, and it didn’t occur to anyone that this might be Susan’s way of making her mark on the world. Instead, she was simply acknowledged as an odd little thing, who didn’t really fit in with anyone else, and who was destined for an existence on the sidelines of life. The thought of a singing career as such would have been inconceivable, and it was this attitude that prevailed well into Susan’s adulthood, and against which she had to fight in order to achieve success.

  As Susan grew up, the fact that she was a little different from the other children in the village isolated her even more. Although as an adult there were many people in the village who would befriend her and watch out for her, as a child that wasn’t the case. Instead, she lived an increasingly isolated life, as her concerned parents observed her inability to form close bonds with other children and to indulge in the only uncomplicated pleasure she had: music. It would seem that because she couldn’t make friends easily, music assumed an ever more important role in her life.

  ‘Susan was what you would call a loner,’ said Gerard. ‘She was happiest on her own, playing her records and losing herself in music. She didn’t really interact with other children. She was seen as different because she didn’t have the same interests as kids her age. As a teenager she was never into make-up or boys. She was easily upset. She’d take nasty comments literally, so found it hard to make friends or develop relationships outside the family. Eventually she retreated into her own world. Music became her thing.’

  All this puts her outbursts as an adult into context: Susan had simply never learned to cope with the more brutal aspects of the outside world. A sensitive child, she grew into a sensitive woman, who never acquired the outer carapace that most people develop to help them deal with the world. And there was also her crippling shyness to cope with. Susan was aware that she was different from most people, but she didn’t know how to deal with that fact. In addition, she didn’t possess the social know-how necessary when it comes to interacting with others, and so her isolation continued as she moved into her teens.

  Like a lot of girls at the time, the teenage Susan fell for the charms of toothsome Donny Osmond (who she would later meet), who was beyond doubt the biggest male heartthrob in Britain in the early Seventies. And so, for the first time, Susan began to associate love with music, and as a result her passion for singing grew greater still.

  ‘When she was a girl, she was obsessed with Donny Osmond,’ Gerard recalled. ‘His posters were all over her walls. She would lock herself in her room and play the records over and over again, singing along as loud as possible. It used to drive me mad when I would hear it start up the hundredth time. But our mum would say, “Leave her alone, it’s all she’s got.” Looking back now, I realize that was how she honed her skills, as she’d stand in front of the mirror in her bedroom for hours singing the songs until she’d achieved perfection.’

  Another of Susan’s favourites was one of the smash hits of the era, Grease, and she would sing those songs, too. As an adult, Susan knew that her teenage infatuation with Donny, and her obsession with his music, provided her with something the rest of life could not.

  ‘It was a complete emotional release,’ she said. ‘I had a slight disability . . . and I had to find my abilities and concentrate on that instead. Singing was the one thing that I was good at. Music was my escape, and my brother bought me lots of LPs. I was daft about the Osmonds at the time. I used to go up to my bedroom and play records. I could be who I wanted to be. I used to imagine myself singing to an audience. It was my safe haven. Even at thirteen, I would see people singing on the TV and wanted to be in that position and entertain people.’

  But as Susan was beginning to harbour the dream she would only realize in later life, school was not providing a great deal of help. Some of the teachers were sympathetic, encouraging her to get involved in the school’s dramatic productions, but many were not. One of the worst and least talked about aspects of child bullying is that it isn’t uncommon for a teacher to join in. Once a pack of animals - for that is what bullies are - senses weakness, the herd mentality kicks in, so instead of being encouraged to pursue the obvious talent she possessed, Susan found herself on the receiving end of brutality instead.

  ‘I was often left behind at school because of one thing or another,’ Susan explained as an adult, sounding remarkably equable about the treatment she’d received. ‘I’m just a wee bit slower at picking things up than other people, so you get left behind in a system that just wants to rush on. That was what I felt was happening to me. And this feels like a good way of making up for that. I don’t think the resources were there for me back then at school. Teachers have more specialized training now. There was discipline for the sake of discipline back then, and you are looking at someone who would get the belt every day. “Will you shut up, Susan!” Whack! But the majority of my childhood was quite happy, until I started getting bullied. There’s nothing worse than another person having power over you by bullying you and you not knowing how to get rid of that thing.’

  She was right: these days she’d have been sent to a special needs school, where she’d be taught by teachers who’d been properly trained to look after someone with her problems. As it was, a combination of beating and bullying was no way to bring out the artiste in anyone. In fact it had quite the opposite effect, causing Susan to retreat even deeper into her shell. The wonder is that she ever managed to get out of it, for when Susan finally set out to achieve her destiny, she showed a determination and energy she wouldn’t have been credited with in those early days. All that, though, was still some way off.

  As Susan grew up, despite her crush on Donny, no real-life boyfriend emerged, although she was to have a very brief romance later, of which more anon. Her parents were concerned that someone might take advantage of their child, and so potential suitors were held at bay.

  ‘My parents didn’t want me to have boyfriends so I’ve never been on a date,’ Susan said more recently. ‘I suppose I’ve accepted it’s never going to happen. The only thing I really do regret is not having children. I love kids and would like to have been a mum.’

  Looking at pictures of the young Susan, it’s entirely possible it might have happened had she met the right man. Susan may have had wild, frizzy hair, but when she combed it she was a very pretty girl. It was her stultifying shyness that really put paid to any chance of romance, that and the fact that she would never have defied her parents.

  And so Susan moved towards young womanhood with no romance on the cards, and not a great deal else either.

  Susan’s brothers and sisters were all much older than her, and so they began to move away from the little house in Blackburn, in one case emigrating to Australia, while Susan stayed on with her parents. She left school aged seventeen with few qualifications, and went on to take her one and only job, as a trainee chef in the kitchen of a West Lothian college. It didn’t last long. ‘It was a six-month contract and then it stopped,’ she said. She also enrolled in various government training schemes, but none of them came to anything. In all honesty, no one expected Susan to have a career: as the unmarried daughter, she was expected to stay at home and look after her parents. Nor did Susan question this. To this day she classifies herself as the ‘wee wifey with a mop’.

  But although Susan went unnoticed, her voice did not. Part of the powerful appeal of her story is that, in middle age, she appeared to spring out of nowhere with an astonishing gift, but in actual fact there was more to it than that. Susan had begun going to musicals in Edinburgh, which is where she first saw Les M
iserables at the Playhouse. It was a show she fell in love with straight away - ‘It took my breath away,’ she said - and would go on to provide her with a massive opportunity in the form of her audition song ‘I Dreamed A Dream’ in the years to come.

  Aware of Susan’s formidable gifts, her mother Bridget encouraged her to participate in local talent shows, and Susan attended Edinburgh Acting School, although at this point a career on the stage would have seemed too far-fetched even to contemplate. She was also still needed at home, though, and Susan eventually gave up and returned to Blackburn to care for her parents.

  At least she had made an appearance on the Edinburgh Fringe, and in addition a seed had been planted in her mind. Susan began to perform at local venues and on family occasions, so much so that by the time she made it on to Britain’s Got Talent, she was quite well known locally for the beauty of her voice. The nation may have been staggered by what it heard on BGT, but West Lothian wasn’t.

  Susan was also taking lessons with a voice coach, Fred O’Neil, a relationship that continues to this day, although there was a gap of several years when Susan stopped singing after her mother died.

  Most of the travelling that Susan did before she became famous entailed trips to France and Ireland, and singing was a part of those trips, too. Susan and her family often went to Mayo’s Knock Shrine in Ireland, where she sang at the basilica in the Marian Shrine, as a member of the annual Legion of Mary pilgrimage from Our Lady of Lourdes, Susan’s local church in Blackburn.

  Everyone in Mayo was as astounded by her voice as her friends back home, and they were just as thrilled by her later success. They knew from first hand how the judges felt when they first heard her sing.

  ‘When I watched the judges’ faces, it reminded me of what I was like when I first saw Susan singing,’ said her parish priest Father Basil Clark. ‘I was absolutely blown away by the quality of the singing and by that fantastic voice. Anyone who sees her for the first time behaves the same way. I have never heard her sing badly, though she might lose the words if the stress gets too much. When she gets up to sing it can either be wonderful or you can get the unpredictable eccentric behaviour, but it is to do with the fact that she has learning difficulties. In a sense, there is a beautiful voice trapped in this damaged body. It is an absolute contrast. There she was on television, acting very peculiarly, and the audience was expecting peculiar things to happen and then the voice of an angel comes out - and that’s Susan.’

  At some stage in all this - Susan didn’t specify dates - Susan had her one and only relationship to date. It didn’t go very far physically, but for a brief while it seemed that it might turn serious as an engagement was discussed. In the wake of her audition for Britain’s Got Talent, Susan had seemed a little embarrassed about her throwaway line about never having been kissed, saying that she had only been joking, and it is true that she had had a very gentle introduction into the world of romance. It wasn’t to last, though.

  ‘I had a boyfriend, John,’ she told the Daily Mirror. ‘He asked me to marry him after seven weeks. We went to visit his mum and she started telling me what our kitchen was going to be like when we got married! Even what fridge we could have, although we’d only ever had a peck on the cheek! He got cold feet. It made me sad, in a way. It makes you feel unattractive. You feel that life is passing you by. But I thought, Maybe there’s something for me later. I was always optimistic.’

  Poor Susan. In truth, little was running smoothly for her back then. But by this time the exceptional quality of her voice meant that she was beginning to consider a career as a professional singer, despite all the setbacks she’d encountered in her life to date. The question was, how would she achieve this?

  From a background like Susan’s, there are few obvious routes into the world of showbusiness, especially when you don’t conform to the norm of what a person should look like. As Susan got older, she was starting to neglect her appearance, for the simple reason that she didn’t care about it and couldn’t see why anyone else should. Even her family affectionately called her Worzel Gummidge, and while this might not have mattered when she was young and pretty, as Susan got older it began to take its toll.

  ‘She has never been bothered about her appearance, ’ said Gerard. ‘She doesn’t wear make-up or fancy clothes. It’s not that she doesn’t care, she just doesn’t see why other people should care how she looks. When me or my sisters see her we always say, “Och Susan, you could have put a comb through your hair.” But she can’t see what the problem is.’

  It was a laudable attitude, but one that was to hold her back, because in this shallow, superficial world of ours, people judge you on what they see, and nowhere more so than in showbusiness. Susan was at least a little aware of that, because in 1995, at the age of thirty-three, she made her first real attempt at a breakthrough when she auditioned for Michael Barrymore’s show My Kind of People. She looked considerably smarter than she did in her audition for Britain’s Got Talent, wearing a bright pink cardigan and with her hair tightly pulled back.

  Difficult as it is to remember now, in 1995, Michael Barrymore was one of the most popular entertainers in the country. That was actually the year he came out and split from his wife Cheryl, an event that precipitated the subsequent decline of his career. At the time, however, one of the hallmarks of his show was the rapport he had with his audience and the people who appeared on the show. He would clown around and tease them, which is the only explanation for the way he behaved towards Susan Boyle.

  As mentioned earlier in the book, a video exists of this encounter, which took place at the Olympia Shopping Centre in East Kilbride. The short clip - only a minute and a half long - has been posted online, and the camera is mainly directed towards Barrymore, who is clowning around in the background, rather than on Susan herself. She is singing ‘I Don’t Know How To Love Him’ from Jesus Christ Superstar, and the clarity and purity of her voice comes across well, though Barrymore doesn’t appear to notice.

  He is seen talking and gesticulating in the background, before lying down on the ground and pushing himself towards Susan in an attempt to look up her skirt. Seemingly unruffled, Susan attempts to kick him away before bending down to sing to him. Barrymore doesn’t initially engage, but as they both stand up, he leans into the microphone to sing the last few words with her, before grabbing the startled woman and embracing her. It’s a clip that, if nothing else, proves that Susan had, in fact, been kissed.

  At the time, that was the end of that. Susan didn’t make it on to the show, and the incident would have been totally forgotten about had she not gone on to achieve global fame fourteen years later. The moment she became a sensation, however, the clip was posted on YouTube and Barrymore got the belated rubbishing he deserved.

  ‘Typical Barrymore,’ read one typical post. ‘I remember this show and I remember if anyone had any talent at all he started to mess. He hated to be upstaged and to be shown as the talentless hack he truly is. Well look who’s laughing now.’

  ‘What an arse!’ said another. ‘Trying to steal the show away from the real talent of Susan in such a vulgar way.’

  One correspondent pointed out that after an experience like that, Susan was doubly brave to risk humiliation again: ‘How much courage did it take for her to appear on Britain’s Got Talent?’ read the post. ‘When you consider this experience, I think a great deal of courage, indeed.’

  Susan herself was dismissive of the episode in the wake of her appearance on Britain’s Got Talent. ‘I did My Kind of People for fun,’ she said. ‘I also sang locally, but things had quietened down.’

  The producers of My Kind of People certainly missed a trick, for in hindsight, one of the great mysteries about Susan was that it took so long for anyone to discover her. She was becoming increasingly well known in her immediate neighbourhood, and everyone who saw her sing was awestruck. In addition to singing in karaoke competitions in the pub, she sang in church, at family occasions and when any other oppor
tunity arose. It would seem the only reason her talent remained hidden was that Susan didn’t fit the conventional view of what and who a singer should be.

  A few years later, there was another chance for her to be discovered when a charity record on which she sang was made. Susan’s life at this stage seems to be a never-ending stream of people missing what was right under their nose, namely Susan’s amazing voice, for even when they did hear it, they didn’t realize its commercial appeal, although admittedly in this case at least someone tried to market her formidable talent. Sadly, though, it didn’t go any further at this point.

  The Millennium Celebration disc was a compilation CD for charity, recorded in 1999 at Whitburn Academy where, coincidentally, X Factor winner Leon Jackson had been a pupil. The idea had come from Eddie Anderson, a local newspaper editor, and funds had been forthcoming from Whitburn Community Council. They then held auditions, as Eddie was looking for previously undiscovered artists to take part.

  Susan duly auditioned and knocked everyone out. ‘I was amazed when she sang,’ said Eddie in the wake of her triumph on Britain’s Got Talent. ‘It was probably the same reaction as everyone had last Saturday. Susan was exactly the same then as she is now. She has a fabulous and unique talent.’

  Susan recorded ‘Cry Me A River’ for the CD, of which only 1,000 copies were made, making it something of a collector’s item today. Amazingly, despite the number of people who now knew what an extraordinary voice she had, it was to be a full decade before she finally got her big break. There was a lot of dark muttering to the effect that the makers of Britain’s Got Talent knew exactly what they were doing when they put Susan on the stage, but the fact is that, with almost no encouragement, Susan had put herself forward for years before anyone paid any attention to what she could do. One endeavour after another came to nothing, with no one taking her seriously, and to make matters worse, Susan had to put up with the loutish antics of people like Michael Barrymore.