The best of bungling, bouncy Susan Boyle
I’VE JUST watched the YouTube video again of the frumpy middleaged woman in the awful gold dress with black stockings and ridiculous high-heeled white shoes, her untrimmed hair in a frizz, standing on the stage at Britain’s Got Talent in 2009.
The audience is sniggering. The judges are rolling their eyes. Then she starts to sing and the auditorium erupts.
It was Susan Boyle, aged 47, from Blackburn, a small village in Scotland.
Today she is known around the world, with three platinum albums to her name and a musical in the pipeline based on her life story.
Told simply, in her own voice, it’s quite a story. The youngest of eight children, she was considered borderline mentally dis- abled and bullied at school. Never able to hold down a paid job, she stayed at home with her ageing parents.
The one thing she could do was sing. She sang in the pub, at the Working Man’s Club, she tried talent shows and then, after her mother’s death, took the plunge on Britain’s Got Talent.
It added poignancy to the YouTube video to know that on that day she left home at dawn in the pouring rain, got lost and took six buses to the venue only to be told her name was not on the list. She waited all day until she finally got in front of the judges at 7.30pm.
The next day, she woke to find the press beating down her door. Her cat, Pebbles, went under the bed and Susan wished she could too.
Coping with sudden fame was a challenge she could do without. At times it was only her strong Christian faith that got her through.
She was feted from America to Japan. She met people she had always admired from afar, including her girlhood crush, Donny Osmond. She sang with her heroine Elaine Paige.
It’s been quite a journey for the woman from a poor working class home in West Lothian, Scotland.
Susan emerges as a likeable, often feisty, and occasionally temperamental character who remains unimpressed by fame and fortune, content with her little house in her home village – a slightly bigger house now because she needs room for a piano.
The book takes her through the first 18 months, ending with her first platinum album. Since then there have been two more and her popularity continues to grow.
There are a number of pictures of Susan in performance and with her family. Published by Random House Struik; costs R235