‘Being the daughter of immigrants has freed me’
Racism, playground spats and trolling – Myleene Klass tells Rosa Silverman why she’s a true survivor
It’s a curious business, the television talent show: casually crushing the dreams of most of those involved, it also generates overnight superstars. Many fade as quickly as they appear (Sam Bailey, anyone? James Arthur? Nope, I’m not sure either). But a few burn brightly for years.
Myleene Klass is one such survivor. When the group Hear’Say imploded in 2002, the year after its creation by the ITV show Popstars, she dusted herself off and strode on. Thirteen years later she’s still a household name. Today she fronts an episode of the BBC One series Blitz Cities, which sees her return to Norfolk, where she grew up in Gorleston, a small seaside town near Great Yarmouth, to learn about the bombing of the area during the Baedeker Raids of 1942. So called because of the Germans’ aim to bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide, the assault saw 679 bombs rain on historic Norwich. But it’s a slice of local history Klass says she was never taught at school. “They take you to London to find out about the Blitz. No one told this child about the Baedeker Raids having an impact on Norfolk!” she exclaims. “Locally, they said the reason was that they wanted to forget it.”
The 75th anniversary of the Blitz has brought a fresh wave of remembrance, however, and in the programme, Klass ventures down into the subterranean tunnels that remain, palimpsest-like, under the independent Norwich School three quarters of a century after they sheltered pupils from the German attacks. It’s the latest in a long line of projects the former reality star and single mother of two has taken on.
We’ve met in the pokey basement of her PR’s Soho office. Strikingly beautiful at 37, she’s immaculately turned out in modish black leather jacket and black biker boots. But she’s at pains to point out how insufficient are looks when it comes to surviving the slings and arrows of what she calls “this industry”. As a pop singer, accomplished classical pianist, radio host with a long-running Classic FM show, television presenter, charity campaigner, children’s clothes designer with her own range at Mothercare, model for Littlewoods, and actress, among other things (she’s said to be worth £11 million in total) I’m not sure which industry she’s referring to.
“Many people mocked me for being jack of all trades, master of none,” she says. “But that’s what saved me. Why should I be categorised into one box? It’s because I have other levels to me that I’m still [here]. If I was just a white bikini I’d be gone. More fool them if they think that’s who I am.”
Klass talks as someone who has taken her fair share of mean-spirited criticism – hence the straw man “they”. Although the house she grew up in with her parents, brother and sister looks smart and sizeable, and she learnt the piano from a young age like any good middle-class child (her father came from six generations of classical musicians), she describes a rougharound-the-edges upbringing. “My dad would be away at sea for six weeks to three months so he taught me how to reignite the gas boiler when I was just a kid,” she says. “He taught me how to carve the turkey at Christmas; he taught me how to fuse the plugs and change the light bulbs. Once, he taught me how to change a tyre.”
As she’s half-Filipino (her mother came here in the Sixties, responding to a call for Filipino nurses to work for the NHS, while her father was an Austrian refugee who came here after the Second World War), I wonder if she’s suffered any racism.
“Oh God, yeah, of course. I see it a lot,” she says. The trolls who attack her online are among the culprits. “But there’s loads more Asians anyway. If I call on my Asian army, there’s millions of us!” she jokes. At least, I think she’s joking.
She’s grown a thick skin and the insults bounce off her. “It’s so freeing not having to please everybody,” she insists. “Not having to think, ‘if I do this, what will she say, what will she think? Will they write my bum looks big in this?’ I know what my hands are capable of, I can play my sonatas and whether you like them or not they make me the funds I need to pay the school fees; they mean I can support my children. As the daughter of immigrants, it frees you.”
How does the daughter of immigrants see the migrant crisis? She is characteristically fired up: “There’s no way a child should be found lying on a beach in the 21st century. That could be our children. It’s a geographical situation – it’s just wherever fate designated for you to be born and live,” she says. The Twitter activists mobilised during last week’s surge of support for the refugees have been derided by some, but as Klass sees it, it’s social media users who are making the difference.
“While everybody’s busy making sweeping statements and writing down their thoughts, it’s actually an underground movement of people on social media, real people, that are trying to help,” she says.
Yet after tearing into former Labour leader Ed Miliband over his plans for a mansion tax on ITV’s
The Agenda last year, she is not minded to stick her neck out about politics right now. “I don’t know the answers to how to solve the country’s questions,” she admits.
Not that she’s afraid to speak up when the situation demands it. Witness the epic birthday presents row this year, when Klass made headlines for calling out some
‘I have other levels to me. If I was just a white bikini I’d be gone’
of the mothers at her daughter Ava’s school for requesting contributions to excessively generous gifts for their children. Going public was the right thing to do, if not the “nice” response, she says now.
“The nice thing would have been, I suppose, for me to put the money in the bag. But how is that nice years down the line for the children that are used to getting presents worth £250? That’s ludicrous. I wouldn’t want my friends to give me a present to the value of £250. I’m living in the real world – I’m a working single mum. I don’t care what people think. I know what I think.”
Ava, eight, and Hero, four, live with their mother in Highgate, north London, and loom large in her list of priorities. Their father, celebrity bodyguard Graham Quinn, walked out in 2012, six months after Klass married him. The girls, she insists, still have “no idea” of the extent of her fame and she’s anxious to protect their innocence as far as possible. They are not allowed mobile phones and are banned from the internet.
“It’s not like I think if I build my ivory tower and keep them up there they’ll be OK,” she says. “I think of it more as a lifestyle. So things like Diet Coke – I won’t allow the word ‘diet’ in my house. It’s got no positive connotations whatsoever. Everything’s down to have you lost weight and if you have, success must equal skinniness or skinniness must equal success, and I want them to know that cerebral mass equals success. Hard work equals success; talent.”
The latter is something their mother has in abundance. But, as she says, there are plenty of talented people who never make it. The secret to her success is more intangible: a capacity for self-reinvention coupled with a business mind and a pulled-myself-upby-my-bootstraps mentality (“I’ve worked extremely hard, I’m selfmade,” she stresses.) In short, she has something of Madonna about her, albeit a lower-key, more down-toearth variety. So can we imagine Klass still being in the limelight in, say, 20 years’ time? It’s not impossible, I’ll wager. “I’m made of strong stuff,” she says. “I’m like kryptonite. Underestimate me at your own peril.”
Blitz Cities is on BBC One at 9.15am every day this week