Page 104 of Going Solo

It’s the latest evidence the scandal-plagued recovering drug addict is struggling to get back on the straight and narrow, despite his publicity machine pumping out a stream of positive stories.

As the European leg of Kennedy’s tour gets under way, his controversial lifestyle has seen the former pop wunderkind tumble from the charts—and his old bandmates take number one with their new single, “Earthquake Woman”…

U.S. media giant YMC outbids Sentinel Group for Pure Network

A bid by the Sentinel Group (owners of this newspaper) to buy the Pure Network, owners of PureFM and TalkUK, has been gazumped by an offer from U.S.-based ultraconservative media group Ypsilanti Media Corporation (YMC).

The offer, understood to be in excess of £200 million, is not subject to foreign ownership of media laws, despite TalkUK being one of the most influential talkback radio networks in the country. The laws apply only to newspapers.

Representatives of YMC declined to comment on the offer and what it would mean for the format of either radio network if the deal was approved by Pure’s board. However, in the U.S., YMC runs a string of hard-right-leaning talkback and Christian rock music radio stations, leading to criticism by media commentators that YMC is trying to buy power and influence in the U.K.’s democracy.

PartFour

EIGHT MONTHS LATER

PRESS RELEASE

WebFlix exclusive behind-the-scenes documentary reveals the real Cole Kennedy

For Immediate Release

Think you know Cole Kennedy’s story? Think again.

A new fly-on-the-wall documentary produced by Cuckoo’s Nest Films for WebFlix, “A Fire Inside Me: The Real Cole Kennedy Story,” reveals the man behind the headlines—and fans will be shocked by what they discover.

Cuckoo’s Nest followed Kennedy for the first year after he left the Go Tos, the “Make Me a Pop Star” sausage-factory boy band that made him a household name. The documentary covers recording “The Flame,” his sell-out debut solo global tour, controversy, scandal, heartbreak and solving the mystery that has haunted him his whole life—the truth about his birth family.

Cuckoo’s Nest executive producer Valerie Lee said viewers will get to follow Kennedy on an emotional visit to New Zealand, where he meets his birth mother for the first time, and to Istanbul, where he meets his birth grandmother. She said viewers will go backstage with Kennedy on the Flame Tour and get exclusive access to some of the pop star’s most private thoughts and moments in what was “undoubtedly one of the most momentous years of his life.”

“Fans will also learn the truth about the experience of pop stardom from someone who spent a decade inside the machine. I think viewers will be surprised how much of a sweatshop pop really is. The truth is nothing short of scandalous,” Lee said.

“A Fire Inside Me” drops on 16 April. Running time: 180 minutes (3 × 60-minute episodes).

ChapterForty-Three

AFriday morning found Tarneesha, Nick, and me sitting around the table in our production office, planning the last ever episode ofPop Review. Well, Neesh and Nick and were planning it while I watched Instagram videos of Cole rehearsing for that night’s big gig—the first of his three final shows at Wembley Stadium.

Tarneesha threw a highlighter at my head. It glanced off my temple and hit the wall.

“Isaidwe’ve got Jocasta Rose as our final guest in the two thirty-five slot.”

“Good, I like Jocasta,” I said, not taking my eyes off my phone.

Instead of using a backing track, a live philharmonic orchestra would be joining Cole onstage for the stadium shows. It must have cost a bomb. But, even on Instagram, the sound was incredible.

“We’ve got her for twenty-five minutes, so I’ll make a couple of packages—one looking back at her early career and one about the last couple of years,” Tarneesha said.

Nick tapped his finger on the desk. “What if we made the second one clips from her interviews in the studio over the years? Not just with this deaf bawbag, but with Raluca as well?”

“Sounds great,” Tarneesha said. “What do you think, Tobes?”

I was only vaguely aware of this conversation going on. I’d scrolled to another video. Cole was in a costume I hadn’t seen before. Apparently, he’d switched up his outfits for his stadium shows. He wore black leather boots, black leather trousers that looked remarkably like they were designed for Turkish oil wrestling, and a billowing puffy shirt laced up with rope in the front. He looked like a pirate. A sexy pirate. Stunning.

“This is a song about hope,” Cole said on the video, and my heart twinged. Great balls of orange-and-golden flame burst high into the air, swirling into the sky in boiling mushroom clouds. The orchestra struck up the opening notes of “The Flame.” I was shaking like Aunty Cheryl that time she tried to cure her hangover with two unmarked white well-they-look-like-paracetamol-to-me tablets she found on the pavement outside Sticky Vicky’s in Benidorm.

“Tobes!” A pocket calculator glanced off the side of my head.

“Ouch!” I checked my face for blood. “Where did you even get that from, babes?”

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