Some strange craving for symmetry compels us to want our heroes to rise and to fall. A simple rags-to-riches story may catch the eye at first. But ultimately the words “lived happily ever after” are not only unbelievable (does anyone live happily ever after?) but boring as well. What truly grips — in literature, films and reality, too — is a life that swoops up and down like a roller-coaster. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune not only reveal character. They also define it.
Which is why, seven months after that heartstopping moment when she opened her mouth on Britain’s Got Talent and silenced the cackles of the nation, Susan Boyle still holds us enthralled. Had the bulky 48-year-old merely won the damn thing, basked in her 15 minutes of unexpected fame, enjoyed her windfall while it lasted, then settled back into domesticity in West Lothian, that would have been the end of the story.
But she did something far more alarming and interesting. She didn’t win — and she didn’t cope well with not winning. Or perhaps it was the huge build-up of publicity and pressure over the previous weeks that pushed this unkempt, unworldly and seemingly unprotected Scottish spinster into what she describes as an “emotional breakdown” and a week in the Priory, the private psychiatric clinic.
I don’t suggest that any of that was planned or contrived. Some repellently unprincipled types enter (and indeed run) TV talent shows — but I don’t think SuBo is one of them. Indeed, her glorious unsophistication was one of her most riveting features. Even so, the Priory episode kept her story spinning in the tabloids. It made me want to turn the page to see what happened next.
And it appears that there are millions like me. How else to explain the reaction to her first album, which doesn’t even hit the shops until Monday week? It has already notched up the largest pre-order of CDs in the history of Amazon.com — outranking U2, Coldplay and Bruce Springsteen. And one bookmaker is offering odds of 9-4 that a track from the album (presumed to be her cover of the old Rolling Stones number Wild Horses) will be the Christmas No 1 — making Boyle the clear favourite over the posthumous Michael Jackson (4-1) and Leona Lewis (6-1).
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Is that really credible? Well, I’ve had a sneak preview of the album. It contains too many soupily arranged hymns and gooey gospel numbers for my taste — though the likes of Amazing Grace, Silent Night and How Great Thou Art will doubtless tug at the heartstrings of the Bible Belt in America, where Boyle is now touring. But Wild Horses is wonderfully sung: the full-bodied Boyle tone softened into a pleading whisper, then toughened into thrilling affirmation; the vocal embellishments as assured as anything from the great dames of Motown. I Dreamed a Dream is far more pungently characterised than the full-belt version she delivered on that famous night last April. And Cry Me a River is so hauntingly personal a testament, apparently so coloured by years of bitter experience and unhealed wounds, that I found myself playing it again and again.
On tracks such as that there is more than a hint of Billie Holiday and Judy Garland, and I’m not talking about vocal quality now. I mean the very rare ability to project a personal despair or loneliness (in Boyle’s case, an impoverished council-estate upbringing and the experience of being continually bullied and reviled) into a song in such a way as to touch multitudes who are themselves going through dark days.
If Boyle can do that consistently, who knows what she could achieve? In his fascinating study, Charisma in Politics, Religion and the Media, David Aberbach draws fascinating parallels between the troubled early lives of leaders such as Churchill, Hitler and Roosevelt and those of entertainers such as Charlie Chaplin, John Lennon and Marilyn Monroe, who also exerted a quasi-mystical hold on mass audiences. Aberbach argues that traumatic disappointment or tragedy in childhood pushes such figures into seeking compensatory control of the public domain, and gives them a special, almost telepathic, power to “reach out”, in psychological terms, to millions of people who feel similarly scarred, vulnerable, abandoned or distressed.
“I belong to the public and to the world,” Monroe declared, “because I have never belonged to anyone else.” Another iconic “victim” — Diana, Princess of Wales — famously declared that she wanted to be “the princess of people’s hearts”.
This is the dangerous territory into which Boyle has stepped. It’s dangerous because what’s needed to keep the story going and the fans gripped — basically a non-stop dripfeed of anguish and turbulence — is not what’s good for the person concerned. As many commentators observed, there was a nasty touch of the Victorian freak show about the way in which Boyle was discovered and exploited in the first place. Here’s this frumpish, middle-aged country bumpkin — and she can sing like an angel! It was cruel, but it was also a unique selling point.
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Yet the cover of her new CD shows her scrubbed and shaped, manicured and made over, into a vision of assured glamour, posing in evening gown and a cute new haircut beside a grand piano. She looks a completely different person. You can’t imagine this self-possessed career woman needing the Priory now. Well, good for her! But what will this startling transformation do for her appeal?