Rebecca Ferguson was a runner up on The X Factor in 2010 but she may be the best thing to ever come out of the show. Alan Corr talks to her about success after years of struggle
When she walked out on to The X Factor stage in 2010, Rebecca Ferguson didn’t quite look like a ready-made star. She was young, she was beautiful and she did have a very good back story – pregnant at 17, then again at 19, and left with no money and little hope. It was only when she sang her measured cover of Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come that Cowell and co’s jaws really dropped.
Ferguson made it to the final with ease and ended up second to Matt Cardle. However, it was to work in her favour: X Factor runners up often have longer careers than the actual winners and the 25-year-old from Liverpool begins 2012 with a critically-acclaimed album, the wistfully-titled Heaven, while Cardle may be wondering just where his career has gone.
Right now Ferguson is much in demand and when I finally catch up with her, she’s on her mobile standing in a train station somewhere in London. In person (or at least on the phone) she’s a bubbly twenty something with a ready laugh. Why anybody who is serious about a career in music would enter X Factor is a good question but Ferguson seems like the real deal and while Heaven features a lot of torch songs it also beats with a social conscience.
“Life can be very heavy at the moment, the state that we’re in at the minute and how we’re so consumed with money and all these things that we think are going to complete us make us happy,” she says. “By chasing them we’re forgetting about family and that people who you love is what’s real. I didn’t realise that until everything went really badly for me and my life changed. Then I realised that the things that made me happy were my kids and my family.”
Ferguson grew up in a one-parent working class household with three brothers and two sisters. Music was her passion and at 14 she got a job in a clothes shop to pay for singing lessons. Performing Arts College followed, but then at 17, everything changed when she became pregnant with her first child Lillie, followed by Karl two years later.
“People would say to me, ‘Well your life’s ruined now!’ For a while I started to believe it, but you don’t have to get rid of your dreams just because you have kids. They’ve just pushed me to succeed, to want to do better for them. And for me.”
So she began the rounds of tv talent shows. There were failed attempts in 2005 and 2006 on X Factor, a rejection from Britain's Got Talent in 2009 and she was turned away from P Diddy's Starmaker in 2007. What kept her going? “I think it was just something that wouldn’t go away,” she says. “It was a dream I’d had since I was really young. Every time I tried to ignore it and preoccupy myself with other things it just coming back and it was just something in me and I just knew that it was what I was meant to be doing.”
After those struggles, it’s no wonder she’s poured her heart into the songs on Heaven. The soaring Shoulder is Shoulder is an honest portrayal of the realities of love containing the rather perverse lines “I get a kick when you worry that you’re just no good for me, I get weak watching you plea.”
So just how autobiographical are her lyrics? “I’d say very, yeah, to be honest. It’s very true to what I’ve been through,” she says. “Some of the songs aren’t completely me and I’ve been inspired by people around me. That lyric you mentioned was one that I was scared to put down. I thought should we really put that in? But I thought for a while and it is an honest lyric. I find people connecting with that song because it’s honest.
"The song for me is about a dysfunctional relationship and it’s two people who are madly in love with each other but haven’t got a clue how to love and are hurting each other rather than loving each other. It’s a song based on things I’ve watched going on around me.”
She did have a short relationship with Zayn Malik of fellow X Factor contestants One Direction but right now she’s single. “I’m not in love but I’m enjoying meeting people but I haven’t found the one yet. I’m just looking and if the right person comes along, great!”
Heaven, produced by Eg White, a man who seems to specialise in bespoke retro soul, is a strange thing from an X Factor wannabe – an album of quality and passion and one that has won Ferguson some very important fans indeed.
Adele is among them. “I haven’t met her yet but she sent me a nice note when I was on X Factor but I’d love to meet her and thank her because she’s been really lovely and supportive,” Ferguson says. “She’s said such lovely things about me. She even admitted she voted for me 80 times when I was on the show! She means every word she sings, which I love. That’s something I hope people will think with me too.”
Heaven is out now
