Britain, 1961. The decade that was to change the world was getting underway, and as the 1960s progressed, all the old certainties were torn down, rocking the establishment and ripping apart and rebuilding the foundations of society. It was the decade that would usher in Swinging London, riots in Paris, flower power and the summer of love; and it would produce revolutionary new musical talents, such as The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cream, the Velvet Underground, the New Faces and many more.
Above all, though, it offered opportunity. Britain’s rigid class system came tumbling down, and for the first time ever it became fashionable to be working class. Luminaries of the era included working-class Londoners Michael Caine, Roger Moore, Terence Stamp, Twiggy and David Bailey. All of them came from humble backgrounds, and all of them became globally famous icons of the decade they came to represent.
Far away from London, in the small Scottish mining village of Blackburn, this revolution was passing by almost unnoticed. There, life went on much as it had done for decades, with hard work and bringing up your family as priorities. Blackburn was a small, traditional community, a world away from the bright lights and big city that its most famous daughter was one day going to experience: life could be hard, but you didn’t complain, you got on with it.
That, then, was the background against which Susan was brought up. It was to be many years before she, too, would prosper in the new modern Britain, and by the time she did so, Britain would have gone through yet another revolution, the digital revolution. It was this digital revolution – and the birth of the internet and websites such as YouTube – that were to play a huge and pivotal role in her success. To Susan, who at the time she was discovered did not own a computer, this whole phenomenon was new. It wouldn’t be long before she adapted, though.
Back in 1961, the Boyles were already a large family when it was announced that another surprise addition was on the way. Indeed, the Boyle family, first generation immigrants from County Donegal in Ireland, was almost complete. Patrick, a miner who went on to become a store man at the British Leyland factory in Bathgate, and who was also a World War II veteran, to say nothing of being an amateur singer in his spare time, and his wife Bridget, a shorthand typist, were getting ready for the birth of their tenth child.
On 1 April 1961, Susan Magdalane Boyle arrived, the youngest of four brothers and six sisters. A surprise child, she was the youngest by six years. Bridget was forty-seven by now, and unfortunately there were problems during the birth. The baby was briefly deprived of oxygen during labour, and this led to problems that would affect the child – Susan – throughout her life.
Susan knew from the word go what had happened to her, and she was also aware, at the beginning at least, that not a great deal was expected of her.
‘When I was a baby they didn’t really give me much scope because they told my parents not to expect too much of me and just play things by ear because I had a slight disability,’ she told the Sunday Express. Despite this, though, Susan was a much-loved child and grew up the apple of her parents’, and particularly her mother’s, eye.
At home, life was happy. The family was packed into the house where Susan lives to this day, which became a place full of children shrieking and hollering, rough and tumbling. At home, Susan wasn’t treated any differently from anyone else, and the shyness that crippled her out of doors was nowhere to be seen.
‘I was a cheeky little girl at home,’ Susan told the Sunday Times. ‘You had to fight your corner in a family the size of ours.’ But outside it was a different matter. Susan’s learning difficulties set her apart from the other children, and, as so often happens in cases like this, she was bullied. It did not make for an easy life.
‘I was born with a disability and that made me a target for bullies,’ she told the Sunday Mirror. ‘I was called names because of my fuzzy hair and because I struggled in class.
‘I told the teachers but, because it was more verbal than physical, I could never prove anything. But words often hurt more than cuts and bruises and the scars are still there. I still see the kids I went to school with, because we all live in the same area. They’re all grown up with children of their own. But look at me now – I’ve got the last laugh.’
She had indeed, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with at the time. If anything, it made Susan’s problems worse, because, as she later related as an adult, it caused anger to build up inside her, an anger that had nowhere to go. Those occasions when she lashed out in public as an adult can be directly attributed to the problems she endured as a child, when there was no one to help or defend her. Once away from her family, who were extremely protective, Susan was forced to fend for herself. No one in authority helped her, if indeed they even realized what was going on. And so the anger kept growing, becoming increasingly internalized. No wonder it burst out in the end.
Susan’s talent for singing emerged early on. Her father, Patrick, had sung on wartime radio, so there was clearly an aptitude for singing in the family.
‘We’re all singers in our family, but I think we get our voices from him,’ Susan said. ‘I joke that my mum knew I had a good pair of lungs when I used to bawl as a baby. But it was really when I was about twelve and I started singing in school productions and in the choir. The teachers said I had a talent, but I was too young to know.’
Singing also started to provide a refuge from other elements of life, and it played an increasingly big role in her life when she moved into her teens.
Susan’s singing had begun several years earlier, before she started to take part in school productions, but although she was a member of some choirs, Susan tended to fade into the background when she sang with them. A child as shy as Susan was always going to find it difficult to step into the limelight, and so it proved to be.
‘I’ve sung since I was about nine,’ she told the American magazine TV Guide. ‘I’d do theatrical stuff and join choirs. I was picked for a solo once, but choirs for me were about hiding behind other people. They were about taking comfort in letting other people take the lead. I was quite shy back then. Hard to believe after everything that’s happened this year, I know! But I was. By the time you get to my age, you lose that shyness.’
Susan’s brother Gerard, who was six years her senior and the closest to her in age, said much the same. ‘My father sang in working men’s clubs and so did I,’ he told the Sunday Mirror. ‘We’re a very musical family and would all have a sing-song at weddings and family occasions. But Susan was so shy she’d take a back seat. It was only when she was about ten she sang at a family wedding and we realized she had a real talent. After that we couldn’t stop her.’ In private, that is. To the outside world Susan remained very much the bashful little girl.
It wasn’t just Susan who was singing, though; the whole family was at it. As Susan recalled to TV Guide, ‘Oh, we were quite a squad, all with different abilities, but all very musical,’ she said. ‘My brother Joe was a songwriter, too. My dad used to sing. My mother sung and played piano. I have two sisters that are very good singers. We were a wee bit like the Von Trapps! There were guitars sitting about the house, and a piano, and we’d all experiment with them. We loved the Beatles in the Sixties. I was just a wee lassie and we’d sit and watch Top of the Pops and wait for them and the Rolling Stones to come on. My dad hated that programme, so he used to turn it down. I used to turn it up just for devilment.’
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 Miserables 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 opportunity 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.
What is really unbelievable is that with so little encouragement, other than from her mother, Susan had the drive and ambition to battle on. Much has been made of her learning difficulties, but what really stands out is her determination and self-belief. Simon Cowell might have been the man to finally put her on the global map, but it was Susan herself who embarked on the journey.
But before she got there, there was to be even more pain and heartbreak.