Did you know it takes three years for a new Christmas song to embed itself in people’s minds?” asks Rebecca Ferguson. “That’s what my publishers told me.” It’s why the 38-year-old singer and former X Factor star is “not making a big fuss, just yet” about the release of her gorgeous new single.
I doubt it’ll take three years for “Christmas Will Find You” to sink into the nation’s hearts. It took about three minutes to melt mine. Co-written with Eg White – who also collaborated on Ferguson’s debut single “Nothing’s Real But Love” back in 2011 – it’s a heartbreakingly direct song for those moments “when you’re broken in late December”. Across steadily consoling verses, Ferguson’s gently grazed voice addresses the financial pressures and the pain of divided families. Each line settles softly, like snow, before soaring into a chorus that runs: “When you’re so far from Happy Christmas/ Don’t start/ When you’re sure you’ve missed it/ It’ll find you, might be two in the morning/ But it’ll find you…”
“I absolutely love Christmas,” says Ferguson over the phone from her home near Liverpool. Her own tree has been up since early November. “But I wanted to write a song that expresses all the sadness and hardship people feel at this time of year. It’s so tough for people who’ve been bereaved, people who are going through breakups…” She sighs. “And that’s on top of the struggles that go on all the time in families. The arguments about whose house you spend the day in. Who has a bigger house, who has a bigger table, whose husband or wife doesn’t like you…”
Ferguson knows all about complicated families. Although she fought hard against being sold as a “sob story” when she appeared on The X Factor in 2010, as a single mum working as a legal secretary, she didn’t have it easy. Her Jamaican father and English mother split when she was three, and her mother suffered from severe depression meaning little Becky and her younger brother spent some time in foster care, where she was abused at the age of eight. “We didn’t have a pot to pee in,” she recalls. “But I remember one really magical Christmas, when I was about six and my brother was three, my mum had been given a bin bag full of toys from a charity called Cash for Kids. I can still remember all those brightly coloured toys spread out all over the living room floor.”
Five years later, it was a far bleaker situation. “I don’t know if the gas had been cut off, or the oven was broken, but I do remember knowing there would be no Christmas dinner that year,” she says. “We lived in a little village called Woolton, where John Lennon also grew up, and every Christmas the locals would gather and sing around the Christmas tree in the square and Santa would come and hand out presents. I remember being sat there, aged 11, gazing out the window at all that fun going on, while we had nothing, and thinking: ‘Does life get any grimmer?’” Today, she laughs in her soft scouse. “I’m making it sound like a bloody scene from Oliver Twist now! It wasn’t all as bad as that!”
Ferguson was the kind of kid who was always singing. “I’d get noticed for my voice. I was an angel in the school nativity – but then I was always being told not to be so loud,” she laughs. Ferguson attended a stage school from the age of 15 but her plan to become a pop star was temporarily shelved when she became pregnant, giving birth to daughter Lily May (now 20) at 17. Lily May’s younger brother, Karl, arrived shortly afterwards. She got a job in a clothes shop to support them.
“I was making £20 a day and trying so hard to save up for this toy car, a red Lamborghini for the kids. I wore myself to the bone to get that under the tree,” recalls Ferguson. It was only when her then-sister-in-law rocked up with a bag of budget toys that she realised “you don’t need a big pile of stuff – just good company and a few bits from Poundland”.
When Ferguson appeared on The X Factor – the same year as the lads from One Direction, later dating Zayn Malik – she wowed the nation with her husky soul and was signed to Simon Cowell’s record label, SyCo. When her 2011 debut album, Heaven, went platinum and won critical acclaim across the board, it looked as though all her Christmases had come at once. But behind the shiny scenes, Ferguson was having a terrible time. In 2012, she announced that she was planning to take her management team to court for pushing her to work until she collapsed. They responded by threatening to sue her for breach of contract; the case was settled out of court.
Later in 2021, she posted on Twitter about those years, and without naming names, claimed that she was “forced into a contract despite running away from the solicitor and insisting I did not want to sign”. She also alleged that her food intake and sleep schedule was controlled, limiting her to three hours of rest a night.
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Last year, she went to Westminster with former Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac to call out misogyny and bullying in the music industry before the women and equalities Commons select committee. She told parliament: “Staff were told to ignore calls from my children. Security staff were told to infiltrate and purposefully ruin my romantic relationships.”
It didn’t take long for Ferguson to transform from the doe-eyed, heavy-lashed ingenue who first appeared on The X Factor to a savvy critic of the darker side of fame. Unlike some of the younger contestants who appeared on the talent show that year, she’d trained as a legal secretary and possessed the sort of authority that comes with parenthood. She knew when to push back. When Donald Trump invited Ferguson to sing at his 2017 inauguration, she said she’d only do it if she were allowed to sing Billie Holiday’s indelible protest song “Strange Fruit”. Trump didn’t get back to her.
Although she doesn’t want to discuss the death of former 1D member Liam Payne today, Ferguson did try reaching out to him in the week before his fatal fall from a hotel balcony in October. She still recalls the “young, innocent” boy who she first met at Euston station, to share a taxi to The X Factor studio. Ferguson toured with 1D in those early years, giving her an understanding of the pressure they were under – and how hard it must have been for Payne to have been dropped by his record label earlier this year.
The powerful testimony Ferguson gave to parliament led to the Misogyny in Music report, published in January this year. The report found that women are underrepresented in key roles across the industry, that sexual harassment and abuse are common, and that many women do not report incidents out of fear that doing so will have a detrimental impact on their careers. They also worry they won’t be believed in the first place.
In April, the Conservative government rejected recommendations suggested by the report. Regardless, Ferguson tells me she’s been “empowered” by speaking up. “I’m not just talking about my career,” she says. “I feel the experience changed me on a personal level. I feel I’ve grown in confidence by speaking the truth. I’ve grown as a woman.” She becomes fiery as we discuss the current headlines swirling around TV presenter Gregg Wallace, who said it was only “middle-class women of a certain age” who called out his allegedly inappropriate behaviour in the MasterChef studio.
“When people speak out in showbiz, they do get blackballed,” she says. “If you’re a young runner, a camera girl and you witness something wrong, you know they can just get rid of you, pay you off.” Ferguson exhales, sounding exasperated. “That’s what I’ve been trying to call out all this time. The people who are supposed to be looking after showbiz workers really haven’t done their jobs. So, I want those young runners, all those people to be made aware that it is a crime to blackball somebody. Nobody tells you that it’s a criminal act to tell somebody: ‘If you speak up, you’ll never work again.’ If we saw people getting arrested for that crime, then there would be a huge culture shift.”
It’s good to hear Ferguson clearly laying down her boundaries. It’s great to hear her making the honest music she released on Heaven II (2023), and enjoying her life at last. Two years ago, she married her partner of eight years, sports agent Jonny Hughes. He’s been a hands-on stepdad to her three older children and their son, who turns two in February. “He’s at that age where he’s just starting to understand what Christmas is,” says Ferguson, “so it’s really lovely.”
After all those years of other people controlling her career, Ferguson has flourished under her own steam. She received an MBE in November and was recently invited to cover some of John Lennon’s hits by the late Beatle’s estate.
Today Ferguson is “most proud” of the fact that she’s independently booked her own festive gig at Liverpool’s M&S Arena on 14 December. “I’m in charge at last,” she says; I can hear her smiling down the line. “I love doing shows but not the gruelling back-to-back slog of touring,” she says. “The only winners in that game are the agents because the costs are so high for the artists. Did you see Kate Nash has started selling pictures of her bum on OnlyFans [follow the tag #ButtsForTourBuses] to subsidise her live shows? I think she’s brilliant. It’s the industry, not herself, that she’s exposing there!”
Those attending Ferguson’s December gig can expect to hear some of her favourite Christmas songs and carols. “I love ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, which I sang for the Pope at a concert in Rome some years ago,” she says. “And all the songs from Christmas films like Home Alone and White Christmas.”
As for her own festive release, she really does believe what she is singing: that the magic will land unexpectedly. “I know mums are often stressed out in the daytime. There’s so much to do,” she says. “Then you get those tingly moments, often in the middle of the night, when everything is quiet, and you see the lights on the tree and you just… you just feel it.”
‘Christmas Will Find You’ is out now
