What a Saturday that was for Strictly Come Dancing! They could have renamed it Strictly They Shoot Horses. First its host, Bruce Forsyth, is invalided out with the flu. Then Olympic athlete Jade Johnson “pops” her knee in rehearsal and appears only in tear-drenched interview format. Bruce’s stand-in, Ronnie Corbett, nearly falls down the stairs. Finally, actress Laila Rouass hurts her leg and has to be carried by her dance partner towards the less-than-infinite mercy of the judges. Our thoughts extend to all in the Strictly sanatorium, of course, but what about the real star of the show, the singer-turned-dancer-turned-judge who, for a giddy week, was branded both the most hated and the blandest woman on television? How is she doing?
Actually, Alesha Dixon is not doing that brilliantly — not, at least, on Friday evening, which is when we meet in the tasteful London hotel room that she is occupying between a singing gig at Shepherds Bush Empire on Thursday and Strictly Come Limping on Saturday. I guess at her mood when she greets me at the door with “Where have you been?”
As Arlene Phillips, the Strictly panellist whom she would later controversially replace, said, Dixon is a gorgeous gazelle. She is dressed in an embellished black top and leggings, her slenderness and height emphasised by having her hair up. But she looks unamused. I want to tell her that I have been gossiping with her Glaswegian manager about yet another disaster about to befall Strictly, the stealing of one of its singing guests by wicked X Factor, but I judge it best politely to ask what ails her.
She has just got back from recording Jonathan Ross’s radio show, she explains, and is unhappy with her singing. Wossy told listeners that she had a cold but not that she had lain awake until 6am going through the previous night’s concert in which which she had almost broken down in tears in front of her family and friends. “It was,” she says, “really uncomfortable for me because I had no control over it. The crowd was really lovely and supportive. I didn’t tell them I had a cold. I said it was the curse of being a woman, that when you are feeling emotional, it is hard to hide it.”
The song that got to her was Can I Begin. About an unhappy love affair, it opens with “As much as I appear OK” and makes it clear that she isn’t. For those who know Dixon for the jaunty R&B of her former girl band Mis-teeq or last year’s outrageously sexist The Boy Does Nothing (“Does he wash up? Never wash up/ Does he clean up? No, he never cleans up . . .”) her singing the blues may be a surprise. For those who devoured the tabloid columns devoted to her nasty divorce from So Solid Crew’s notorious MC Harvey, it will be less of one.
“It was,” she sums up, “just one of those days.” But generally, I offer, life is rather good, isn’t it? Last year’s platinum-selling album, The Alesha Show, is about to be released with extra songs. Her new single, To Love Again, co-written by Gary Barlow, looks like another hit. “Oh yes,” she agrees, “everything going on at the moment is so positive and I couldn’t be more lucky.”
To Love Again is what PRs call a talking-point. It is three years since Harvey announced, 18 months into their marriage, that he was leaving Dixon for the singer Javine Hylton. Now Hylton, who, having had his daughter, is also separated from him, calls Harvey “a serial womaniser with a big problem”. The refrain of To Love Again acknowledges that Dixon has been torn apart. It is, she says, a truthful song about entertaining the possibility of trusting someone else.
Her first reaction must have been anger? “Definitely anger and confusion. It takes you to a place you never felt was humanly possible. Being the rational sort of person I am, I can identify when I am not in a good place and do my best to get out of that as quickly as possible. For my own sanity.”
Did she seek help? “I did it on my own. I know myself.” Harvey, I say, voiced concern in a tabloid interview that she might harm herself. “No. No,” she replies, shocked. “Nobody is worth that.”
She has not had a proper boyfriend since. Partly that is down to working long hours but it is also because she thinks it important to “heal” from one relationship before going into another. Would she say that she is 100 per cent healed? “120 per cent,” she replies without a pause.
It was particularly unfortunate that, after a couple of dead-on-arrival singles, Dixon’s solo recording contract with Polydor was terminated just after the bust-up. “I feel completely lost because the two things I felt more deeply about than anything were gone within two weeks of each other.” Yet, desperate though she was, she also sensed that something greater would come from it. “Ever since I was a little girl I have had a vision of where I am going, what I am about and where I am going to get to.”
Whether the vision spotted that the next year she would win Strictly Come Dancing, who knows, but there is no doubt that, allied to her slightly terrifying sense of self, the BBC One show saved her career. The excitably Italian Bruno Tonioli enthused from the judging panel that she had the “seducing power of Salome”. Two summers later, however, when, she was appointed a Strictly judge in place of the 66-year-old choreographer Phillips, the press turned and cried ageism — a charge that Dixon, who was 31, would turn on its head by claiming that people are ageist against the young (ageism is certainly an odd complaint to level against a show that employs Corbett, 78, as understudy to Forsyth, 81).
Phillips has since accepted a role on the BBC’s forthcoming So You Think You Can Dance but the two have not spoken. “Eight weeks ago I was concerned for Arlene. I didn’t feel guilty because I was offered a job and it was an amazing opportunity, but I was concerned for her as a woman and as somebody who knows what it is like to have doors shut. I was hoping that she would be OK because I have a lot of respect for her. And she was dignified, as I knew she would be.”
Arlene said recently that the sacking had “never stopped being painful”. Dixon understands: Strictly is like a family and it must be hard to lose it. “But I am sure we will run into each other someday and have a chat about it.”
Although Dixon is now enjoying the show, her cause was not helped by a wishy-washy debut. Strictly’s producers assured her that they were happy but the weekend papers smelt blood and when she read them, she cried. “That week was so intense and I was so scared. Then the fighter in me came out and I thought, ‘All I can do is be myself’.”
Herself includes a propensity to speak non-standard English, particularly when conjugating the verb “to be”. On Saturday, for instance, she told a contestant: “You was bringing the funness to the jive.” Viewers’ complaints amuse her, as she feels that she has no difficulty in getting her meaning across: “That’s more funny than me getting the word wrong.” Anyhow, she has found her voice. Two Saturdays ago she told Craig Kelly: “I can’t believe I endured that. You are not as good as you think you are.” The Corrie actor duly left the show, his self-esteem shredded. “People thought I was going to be soft and a walkover. They don’t know me.”
If they did, they would realise that Dixon’s confidence, although it may be friable in moments of emotion, is a highly forged and crafted thing, spiky enough for her to ignore her father’s advice to study at Loughborough to be a PE teacher on account of the racism in the music industry (there is a bias against black acts, she agrees, but her success has also proved him wrong); strong enough for her to spend four years persevering with Sabrina Washington in Mis-teeq without a record contract; resilient enough to recover from her twin divorces from Harvey and Polydor.
She was brought up modestly in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, in a home that lacked a phone or, for much of the time, a television. Her clothes were often borrowed from friends. Her father, Melvin, is Jamaican, an electrical engineer; her mother, Beverly, is white, a painter, “a hippy” who told her daughter that the racists she would meet in white Welwyn were to be pitied for their ignorance. Her parents split when she was 4. They were, she says, so different — he strong and ambitious, she soft-natured and spiritual — that she cannot imagine them ever together. She saw plenty of each as her extended family of half-sublings and step-siblings grew.
“But I still felt a little like an only child. I could go to my sister and talk about dad or I could go to my brother and talk about mum but there was no one I could talk to who could relate to both mum and dad. It is weird! But it is a very dysfunctional family. Maybe that’s what has helped me.”
It sounds hard. “I wouldn’t say it was hard, but when I was growing up I was jealous of what I call the ‘2.4 family’. I wanted to have mum and dad, brother and sister, whereas I had stepdads and a stepmum and a brother here and a brother there. I felt I bit like I had no control. When people asked me about my family when I was a little girl, I used to get quite embarrassed. I had to sketch out a family tree and explain how I was related to people.
“I never had control over family and I think that is why, in my own world, I control everything now. I am not dependent on people. But that is fine — it has made me the driven sort of person I am. I am always fighting for something better, while knowing that I am very grateful and blessed.”
Her former Mis-teeq partner in rhyme, Sabrina Washington, entered ITV’s celebrity Jungle last night and Dixon will be voting for her. Sabrina is, she points out, like all the Mis-teeq girls, very competitive. But who will win Strictly? “I don’t know but my money is on Ricky Whittle making it to the final.” But how good a judge of men is she? “I don’t know the answer to that question,” she admits. I advise her to go for someone nice. “I am going to try,” she says, although the answer I was looking for was “I will”. And children? She hopes so. “Women are good at multi-tasking.”
As I leave I am emboldened, by the fact that her mood has brightened during the interview, to revisit the gossip about the rivalry between and Strictly and The X Factor. Were she approached, I joke, would she swap to the dark side? She looks me in the eye and says a firm: “No comment.” Poor old Strictly. Could there be, as Irving Berlin wrote, (yet more) trouble ahead?
Alesha Dixon’s new single To Love Again is out now. Her album The Alesha Show — Encore is released on November 23
Your Comments
Order By: