Post by jon2 on Jul 1, 2005 3:37:03 GMT 1
The girl just wants to have fun
Fri 1 Jul 2005
Church at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. Picture: PAANNA SMYTH [/b]
THERE IS something very disturbing about seeing Charlotte Church topless, and it's got nothing to do with her boobs. A photo currently surfing the internet purports to show the former child starlet leaning forward in resplendent seduction. She's pushing her assets into an ample cleavage and staring, ever so enticingly, into the camera.
Three years ago, you wouldn't have hesitated in dismissing it as a cruel hoax. Back then, the angelic prodigy was famed for nothing but her astounding operatic talent, and was the most revered thing to come out of Wales since Tom Jones' underpants.
The uncomfortable thing is that now we're not so sure. Since she came of age, Church has evolved into a booze-guzzling, cad-loving f*g-smoking hag, so the idea of her showing off her "ladies" is not so wildly ridiculous.
Of course, the photo isn't real. Her face has been transposed onto the body of some other curvy, unabashed little minx, but still, for a split second, there is now a shadow of doubt.
This is just one of the reasons why everybody's talking about Church. That's not such a bad thing, given that her first-ever pop single, Crazy Chick, was released this week and the publicity may just help her reach Sunday's coveted No 1 spot.
The song, along with her new sexy image, marks a definitive move away from all that's gone before. It's out with demure dresses and top C warbling, and in with Motown funk and midriffs. The new Aled Jones, she's not.
The kids, they tell me, approve. Performing at last week's Live and Loud concert in Glasgow, she got the biggest cheer of the day, and with 1742 radio plays at the last count, she's getting only marginally less airtime than U2.
On the day, the No 1 spot may well stay with Tupac - being dead, he's got the obvious heart-string advantage - but by consolation there is another accolade for which Church may now qualify. It's not Rear of the Year, although she has won that one before - on the day she turned "legal" no less - and it's not Daughter of the Year ... more of that later.
No, given the rate at which she's filling media consciousness, this latest foray into pop world could see her emerge as the next teen idol. She's appearing on every chat show from Jo Whiley to Nigella Lawson, and has already featured in Heat magazine - that bible of the gossip-hungry masses - twice this month alone.
So far, so successful, but a quick scan of said interviews suggests her burgeoning celebrity status may not be a good thing.
The first Heat article you may well have heard about, for her revelations were nothing short of sensational. In it, she detailed her preferred weekend tipple: port mixed with alcopops, (a genre-defying toxin they call Cheeky Vimto), swiftly followed by ten double vodkas, which is all choked down with Marlboro's best.
For those desperately doing the maths, that amounts to a nightly intake of 23.8 units, two units above that recommended for a woman - per week. If tabloid reports are to be believed - which with their photographic evidence, they can be - such nights are not the exception in Miss Church's social calendar.
For her 19th birthday she went on what appeared to be a 72-hour booze binge, and when she came to Edinburgh in March to watch the Scotland-Wales Six Nations game, she conducted a similarly meticulous study of the city's off-pitch entertainment. "Relaxing" into the wee small hours, she was seen stumbling up the stairs of Rick's bar, an image becoming increasingly familiar in the most accusatory of red tops.
But it's not just the booze. Ever since she turned 16, we've known slightly too much about her sex life, too. First off, there was the lovely Steven Johnson, a chap of which her mother, Maria, thoroughly disapproved. Their affair was played out to the nation, thanks to Maria's assertion that the DJ was a "waster", with as much attention given to their resulting family feud as to Charlotte's discussion of her bedroom antics.
Soon, he was ditched in favour of another Johnson, Kyle, an unemployed council estate kid with a criminal record. Again, the tabloids went into overdrive, snapping the pair as they enjoyed alcohol-fuelled spats, sometimes so loudly that the police were called. Earlier this year, Church kicked him out of her £300,000 luxury apartment, from where he marched straight to a Sunday paper for an exclusive kiss-and-tell.
Now, she's moved into far grander territory, dating Welsh rugby star Gavin Henson. Billed as a cross between Jonny Wilkinson (amazing prowess on the field) and David Beckham (amazing preening off it), Henson is currently in New Zealand with the British Lions. Everyone seems more at ease with this union, except, perhaps British Lions head coach Sir Clive Woodward.
After Church flew out to visit her new beau, Henson was dropped from the test selection. When asked at a press conference if anything happened away from a rugby pitch which could have scuppered his chances, Henson replied, curtly: "That's a stupid question." Well, if the previous blokes are anything to go by, one would assume so.
All this is a far cry from the pale-faced innocence for which we once loved her. Raised an only child in working-class Cardiff by mother Maria and stepfather James Church, a forklift truck driver, Charlotte was always remarkably advanced. Her near-perfect voice was "discovered" when, aged 11, she called Richard And Judy's Talented Kids and sang Pie Jesu down the line. Heralded as Wales' answer to Maria Callas, she was catapulted into the public eye and signed by Sony. Her debut album, Voice Of An Angel, sold 600,000 copies in the UK, reached No 1 in the 1998 Christmas classical charts and No 4 in the pop charts. Within months of turning professional, Church had sung for the Pope, the Queen and Prince Charles, credits which no doubt aided her successful move into the lucrative US market.
Then she grew up. She sacked her manager, replaced him with her mum, but then sacked her too in the midst of the first Johnson debacle.
When she turned 18 and inherited her £5.5 million trust fund, she told the world she'd waste no time in making the most of it. So she's been travelling, partying and lounging around, and now she's decided it's time to go back to work and win again the hearts of the nation.
On paper, hers would not seem an easy task. Those who have gone before her haven't fared well in public opinion; bad girls somehow can't attract the adoration that bad boys can, or not without losing a little dignity in the process. But it may just prove easier than she thinks.
Reading the magazine interviews, her quotes look bad. She did say the US "over-dramatised" 9/11 and has talked candidly about things a lady should never reveal. But watching her, it's a different story.
This bubbly Welsh 19-year-old is frank, she is honest, and all the while, entirely amiable. She is famously well-grounded, and shrugs off negative press attention with none of the defensiveness so common in celebrity circles. When the aforementioned topless photo broke into the public domain, she didn't wax on about invasions of privacy, but simply mourned the fact the real shot hadn't made it instead.
"I sent one to Gavin of me with a bra on, and I would have preferred it if the real photo had gone public - at least I've got a decent pair," she said. "The ones in that fake belonged to someone with massive, nasty, saggy boobs."
It's not press release material, it's just Charlotte, and that's precisely why we like it.
Despite his assertion to the contrary, she is not the next Liam Gallagher, she doesn't go wild in order to make a point or, indeed, to make headlines, but neither does she feign shock if she does.
She admits to drinking, smoking and having sex, and if she feels like calling her ex-boyfriend a runt outside a nightclub because he humiliated her (surely the printed version was just a typo) then she won't let a bouncer with a cameraphone stop her. Show me a 19-year-old who doesn't do all of these things and I'll show you the exception to the rule.
She wants to be normal, and with her boozing, dating and general misbehaving, she is making a valiant effort to be so. It may not be healthy, and it may not be becoming, but it's not like she's approaching Pete Doherty standards. Yet.
The girl you see on stage is exactly the same person you see falling out of a nightclub, and it's the same again when she's talking to the media. There's no PR-speak, no focus-groups, and she won't fit the mould of the stereotype teen idol. She passed on a high-profile acting role because the producer insisted she lose weight. In these times of spin an media manipulation, surely that kind of confidence is worthy of admiration.
All she wants is to have a bit of fun while she's young, rich and single enough to do so. Like her countryman said before her, it's not unusual, you know.
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