Читать книгу James Arthur, My Story: The Official X Factor Winner’s Book - Arthur James - Страница 12

I was born James Andrew Arthur in Redcar, Middlesbrough, on 2 March 1988. My parents, Shirley and Neil, split up when I was very young and I stayed in Redcar with my mum. I was a normal little boy who liked running around with my mates, playing and getting into trouble.

If I am being honest I don’t think I was the easiest child to look after. I was very naughty and I think people around me thought I suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder because of the way I acted. I don’t know if I actually had ADHD because I was never tested, but let’s just say that I was quite ‘spirited’. I was always messing about and getting told off. It was nothing really bad, just the usual kids’ stuff.

I first started singing when I was about six. I’d literally sing along to whatever my mum was playing on her CD player and people always said I was really good. I was more into running about like a headless chicken at that time, so I certainly didn’t think about singing as a career. I didn’t think about anything as a career – I was all about having fun and scoring goals.

Both of my parents were massively into music when I was growing up. My mum always played a lot of Michael Jackson and David Bowie, and when I was with my dad I’d hear loads of heavy metal like Black Sabbath, AC/DC and Led Zeppelin. My music upbringing was pretty eclectic in terms of the variety of what I listened to. That’s given me an appreciation of all kinds of music, so I’m really grateful to my parents for that.

I don’t think it will come as a massive shock to anyone to hear that I wasn’t the greatest at school. I really liked P.E. because I got to play games, and I was pretty good at English. I always picked up language quite well, so I loved creative writing. I’d often write little stories and I had a good imagination. I was terrible at maths, though. I used to daydream my way through the lessons and I couldn’t get the hang of it at all. I didn’t see the point in trying to do something I wasn’t good at. I’ve always been a bit like that. I only like doing things I can do really well in.

I’ve got one brother, Neil, who’s 34, and four sisters: Sian, who’s 26, Charlotte, 18, Jasmine, 18, and Neve, who’s 12, and they’re all lovely. Because Neve is still quite young I didn’t live with her for very long before I left home, but we’re incredibly close. Sian and I were either thick as thieves or fighting like cat and dog when we were younger. We used to conjure up little plans together all the time. When we were left alone with a babysitter we used to make fake sick, using things we found in the bathroom. We’d pretend one of us was ill so we could go downstairs and watch TV instead of going to bed.

When I was about four or five we were bouncing around on the sofa in our living room and I fell off and crashed into a glass-topped table. I cut my eye on the corner of the table and I got rushed to hospital. It turned out I had severed some of my nerves, and as a result I got a lazy eye. I had it corrected, but even to this day I’ve got a complex about my eye turning in when I’m talking to people. I find it hard to keep eye contact because I’m so self-conscious about it. That’s one of my earliest memories, and it’s quite a dramatic one.

From a really young age I was best friends with a boy called Michael Dawson, and we’re still best mates now. Two other friends called Callum and Dean lived on my street, and I used to play with them all the time too. We were lucky because we had a park directly opposite our house, and we were always in there mucking about. When I make friends I tend to stick with them, and I’m very loyal.

My mum remarried when I was nine, and we all moved to Bahrain because her new husband got a job out there. It was a complete contrast to the life I was living before in every way, but it was great being exposed to something so different at such a young age. I especially liked school as all the kids in my class were from all over the world, so I experienced a lot of different cultures. In Bahrain we had a much grander lifestyle than the one I had been used to, so it was a bit of a culture shock at first.

None of my mates sang or performed when I was growing up, and I didn’t really tell anyone that I did it on the quiet. When I first realised that I wanted to be a singer I kept it to myself, and it wasn’t until I moved to Bahrain that I even took part in a school performance.

When I was about 12 or 13 they gave me the part of the undertaker in the musical Oliver! I also played the General in The Pirates of Penzance. I won the Performance of the Year award from my school for my role as the General. All my family and friends said how good I was in the role. At the time I just thought they were being nice because I was young, and I didn’t realise I had any proper talent. Whenever I was in plays it was because my teachers used to encourage me to get involved, and they really pushed me, otherwise I’m not sure I would have bothered.

I had a lot more confidence back then, so I just used to dive in without thinking. I was a bit of a loudmouth, I didn’t take any crap from anybody, and I was pretty laid-back and happy.

We stayed in Bahrain for a few years and I had an amazing time. We came back down to earth with a bit of a bump when my mum and my stepdad got divorced and all the family decided to move back to England. I guess it was a rags-to-riches, then back-to-rags kind of tale. It was once we moved back to Redcar that things began to go a bit wrong.

I started going to a local school which was quite rough. Singing and dancing weren’t really the done thing. I probably would have got my head shoved down the toilet if I’d got up on stage and started singing and dancing. I stopped having anything to do with singing and I became the class clown instead!

I found it hard coming back to the same place I’d previously lived after being away for a few years. A lot had changed, and although I was able to go back to being mates with the guys I knew before, life had moved on and I didn’t feel like I fitted in any more. I felt like a real outsider. I was never the guy that the girls fancied or the clever one that people looked up to, so I created this character for myself – as the joker who didn’t care about anything.

Things weren’t that great at home and I was arguing with my family a lot. That meant not always paying attention and basically being quite disruptive at school. I used to walk into some classes and get chucked out before I’d even had a chance to sit down. Teachers would say things like, ‘I can’t deal with you – you’re doing my head in. Get out!’

I spent a lot of time tapping on desks and winding the teachers up. If I was asked to stop I’d do it even louder and put on some stupid accent. I secretly had it in my head by that point that I was going to be a professional singer, so I felt like school didn’t matter any more.

I was really into soul and post-hardcore heavy rock music, and Nirvana were my heroes! I was also really into rappers like Eminem, because he used to sing about having a rubbish life, which I felt like I did at the time. I suppose if you were to sum up my musical tastes from when I was 14, you could say I was mainly into angry music.

In the same way as I did at school, I caused trouble at home, so my mum kicked me out quite regularly – and I can’t say I blame her; I was unbearable to live with. She couldn’t really cope with me and I ended up in foster care for my last year of school. That was actually my decision to a certain extent. I couldn’t bear the rows at home and I hated seeing how much my behaviour hurt my mum, but I didn’t seem to be able to stop myself. I was angry about everything and so I lashed out verbally. I wanted to get away from everything, and so when foster care was offered I took it. I didn’t feel like I wanted to be around my mum, and she was finding me hard to handle, so it seemed like the right decision all round.

Even though I was in touch with my dad I didn’t go round to see him that often, so I didn’t really have a male role model during those years. I think that was part of my problem. I suppose I sometimes took on the male role in the house myself, because much of the time it was all women, and I found that quite a lot of pressure.

I was in foster care for about two years in total, until I was 17. I didn’t want any of my friends at school to know that I was living in foster care, so I kept it a secret from them. If we were walking home and my mates asked me where I was going I’d lie and say I was going to stay with my auntie or something. I didn’t want anyone to know the truth. It was really awkward.

When I was about 15 I decided that I wanted to learn guitar and start taking music a bit more seriously. My mum’s boyfriend at the time bought me a charity shop guitar for Christmas and that was it for me. I think it cost about £40 or £50, so it wasn’t the world’s greatest guitar, but I loved it. I don’t have it any more and I’ve got no idea where it’s ended up but I’m keeping an eye out on eBay!

I taught myself to play and started writing songs about girls and heartbreak and all the kinds of things you go through when you’re a teenager. That coincided with me having my first proper girlfriend. I was madly in love with her – or I thought I was at that age. We dated for around a year and that was my first serious relationship. I’d had other girlfriends before but that was more about sending Valentine’s cards and holding hands than anything else. I always loved women when I was growing up. I even used to flirt with my mum’s friends, and I’m still the same now.

When I was young and confused by what was going on in my life, music was a coping mechanism for me. It was my escape when everything else around me was rubbish. It was my own little made-up world that I could go into. It was also a way to channel all my emotions and express how I was feeling when I didn’t feel like I could do it in everyday life.

I came up with a lot of melodies. Thinking back, I’d always been humming little melodies to myself and singing tunes even when I was a kid, so it was a natural progression to put words to them. My voice wasn’t great back then, to be honest. I used to listen to albums by the bands I loved and the lead singers had husky voices, so I was always trying to emulate them. That’s when I started experimenting with how my voice sounds and finding out where I felt comfortable musically.

As I got more confident I slowly started to tell my friends about my singing, and surprisingly they were really interested in it all. They used to come round to my house and listen to me playing for hours. They were always saying that my lyrics were great and they encouraged me to carry on writing. I’ve written literally hundreds of songs now. I’m not sure how many of them will see the light of day, but hopefully one day some of them will end up on an album.

It wasn’t until I left school that I really started focusing on music as a possible career. At school I was too busy messing about to think too far into the future, but once I had the space to decide what I wanted to do, music was really the only thing I felt passionate about.

I took all of my GCSE exams and I did okay. I got a B in English, and that was the most important subject to me, so I was really happy with that. I honestly can’t remember now how many passes I got in total, but I know it wasn’t many because I didn’t put much effort in. I truanted quite a lot back then, and I was caught smoking in town a few times when I should have been in lessons.

After school I went to do a music course at a local college, where I learnt about the theory side of things, and we would get put into bands with other people on the course, which was a good introduction to making music with other people.

It was a two-year course, but I dropped out after a year because I felt the tutors didn’t really care whether I did my work, or if I was going to make something of myself. Half the time the tutors wouldn’t turn up to lessons, and sometimes I couldn’t afford to pay the travel costs just to get in there, so all in all it was a bit of a disaster.

I decided that I would be better off doing things on my own, so I carried on writing and singing in my own time. I was about 16 when I formed my first band with some other local lads. We were called Traceless and we played quite a few gigs together. We supported Bromheads Jacket – they were quite big at the time – and I think we were pretty good. I remember playing a place called the Ku Bar in Stockton, and that was really special to me because I knew that the Arctic Monkeys had played it the week before. We made a name for ourselves around the local area and built up a good reputation, but we never really had the money to travel and take it further. We made it as far as Glasgow for one gig, which was great because I’ve got family there, so I got to see them. We really wanted to do gigs all around the country, but small gigs don’t pay enough for you to be able to afford a car to travel in, let alone somewhere to stay the night.

I also did some solo gigs around the same time that I got paid for, which kept me in food and clothes. It also meant that I could just about get by living on my own from the age of 17, so I moved out of foster care and into a little flat.

The first place I lived in didn’t work out – I got kicked out for partying too much – so I started staying with my friends or back with my parents until I managed to find somewhere new. There were a few times when I found myself with nowhere to live, but I was too embarrassed to tell people, so I ended up sleeping rough. It was something I had to do to survive, so I just got on with it. I feel like a lot of my younger years were about survival. It wasn’t fun and I wouldn’t ever want to do it again, but sometimes you have no choice and you have to do what you can to get by. As long as I had somewhere to lay my head down I didn’t care.

At my lowest point I would look at pictures of my sisters and want to be around them so badly. It was really hard not being able to see them as much as I wanted to, but equally I knew I’d brought a lot of it on myself.

I stayed in touch with my family to some degree all of the time I was living away from home. I still went back to my mum’s house, and stayed on occasion, but I always felt very disconnected from them. I felt like the black sheep of the family and as if I’d really let them down. They did try to reach out and help me but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to accept it. I felt like I could do everything on my own and that I was a real grown-up supporting myself.

I remember always feeling I had to prove myself to my family, so whenever I saw them I would tell them I’d got so-and-so coming up and that this amazing thing was happening with my music. Then when it didn’t work out I would feel so embarrassed I didn’t even want to go and see them, but I’d have no choice other than to go home with my tail between my legs and ask them to help me out with money. They didn’t really have any money themselves, so I hated doing that, and I only ever did it if things got really desperate.

When Traceless split up I joined another band called Heroes and Hand Grenades, and we later changed our name to Save Arcade. We were actually really good and very successful locally, but for various reasons we eventually split up.

A few of us stayed together and formed another band called The Emerald Sky. We only got a few gigs as a band but I ended up getting more and more as a solo artist. If I managed to do a few gigs a month earning £150 a night by playing a series of covers, that would see me through financially. I’d built up a good reputation around the local area. The more people heard me and liked me, the more gigs I did, and eventually I was able to start performing my own tracks as well as covers.

A guy called Rich, who had a recording studio nearby, heard some of my music and he loved it, so he let me do recordings for free. That meant I had CDs to sell at my gigs. He suggested that I create The James Arthur Band, which is what I went on to do. That was more of a soulful, hip-hoppy band and it was more the kind of sound I wanted to do. He offered to try and get me some gigs and it all took off.

He knew I had some sort of gift and he wanted to help me out, so he put my music out on the internet for me and promoted it. We recorded a couple of EPs and we were really hoping to get some kind of record deal. It never quite came off, and I always felt like I was heading in the right direction but not really getting where I wanted to be. It was so frustrating.

Apart from playing music I didn’t really have any jobs I enjoyed when I was growing up. For a while I worked in a call centre, which I hated, then in an office, writing CVs for people, and I was always good at selling things. They were all dead-end jobs and just a way to get by really.

The thing with singing is that it’s so hard to break into. If I wanted to get a job in a call centre I would see the ad, apply and then hopefully get the job, but there’s nowhere you can actually apply for a job as a singer, so I did get a bit disheartened. In the back of my mind I did always feel that one day I was just going to walk into somewhere and magically someone would give me a break and I’d become famous, so I tried not to let it get me down. I felt I had a talent and I could go somewhere, so it was frustrating when things didn’t work out like that straight away.

When I turned 23 I reached a point where everything seemed to be going wrong in my life and I knew that I had to go back to the root of my problems and try and fix everything. I’d had strained relationships with my parents for some time, but I was getting older and I really didn’t want it to be like that any more. I needed to ask them some questions – and to apologise.

It took a lot of sitting down and talking but we got there in the end, and getting everything out made me feel more secure and stable. I found out stuff about my childhood that I hadn’t known, and I got the chance to ask about my parents’ break-up and all the things I had wondered about for so long. It helped to release all of the feelings I’d kept inside me for so long. Once I understood everything it made it a lot easier to deal with.

It’s amazing how good it can feel saying sorry to someone. I apologised for the way I’d acted at different points over the years and it felt amazing. It also gives you the chance to put an end to a chapter of your life you’re not happy with and move on.

Before I applied for The X Factor I was spending a lot of time in bed feeling low. I was happy that everything was back on track with my family, but music-wise things felt a bit hopeless. I didn’t think I was ever going to get anywhere, even though I was working really hard. People kept telling me I was going to be a massive success, but you need that break to get your foot in the door.

I kept getting texts from friends saying, ‘The X Factor is coming. If you don’t enter we’re going to fall out with you,’ and they really got me thinking. I had never imagined trying out for the show because I didn’t feel like I would fit the criteria. I didn’t think I had the right sound or look. I thought it was all about being clean cut and having a cheery sound, and that just wasn’t me. The more I thought about it, though, the more I thought, ‘Come on, what have I got to lose?’