N-Dubz singer Tulisa Contostavlos has said the popular hip hop group “never would never have worked” if she and her bandmates had been middle class.
The 37-year-old rose to fame after joining her cousin Dappy’s group with their mutual friend Fazer while she was living in a council flat in Camden in the 2000s.
Hits including “I Need You”, “Ouch” and “Playing with Fire” earned the band five Mobo awards but they were still looked down upon by some due to their rebellious behaviour and the classism in the industry.
Contostavlos told the i that she used to try to use the classism to her advantage: “I always used to make a joke with my friends, ‘Well, cool, I’m a chav, but I’m the most famous chav in the industry,’” she said.
“I remember when we’d go to do interviews with certain types of people on certain TV shows, there was this undercover sniggering at us chavs, like it was a joke. But we were tough kids and we revelled in it.”
The singer said there would “100 per cent” have been a different perception of her if she had been from a different background. “But if I was middle class, N-Dubz would never have worked. We had our fan base. We knew who we appealed to,” she reflected.
“We just also had a lot of haters. But if you don’t stir the pot, you can never really achieve anything great, so I’d rather be the person that is really loved on one end and hated at the same time, than middle of the road, not really standing for much.”
N-Dubz went on to record four platinum-certified albums, secure 13 top 40 singles, and three Urban Music Awards. Contostavlos became a judge on The X Factor in 2011, coaching Little Mix to become the only girl group to ever win the competition.
She released her debut solo album the following year, which contained the UK number one single “Young” and top 20 singles “Live It Up” and “Sight of You”.
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The singer returned to the spotlight last year when she appeared as a contestant on the 24th series of I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! It followed a hiatus from public life after numerous health battles.
She was also the subject of a sting operation in 2013, when undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood, known as the “Fake Sheikh”, approached her, posing as a film producer. He met Contostavlos at hotels and restaurants, claiming she had promised to procure cocaine for him in exchange for a lead movie role.
This led to her arrest and charge for being concerned in the supply of a class A drug, which she denied. The trial collapsed in 2014 after a judge ruled it was likely Mahmood had manipulated evidence and lied under oath. He was jailed for 15 months for conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
In August this year, the singer published her book, Judgement, telling her account of how the sting ocurred.
