Charlotte Church: 'The press desperately tried to make me a figure of sin'

Charlotte Church was born Charlotte Maria Reed in Cardiff in 1986. She found fame at a very young age, singing Andrew-Lloyd Webber’s Pie Jesu over the phone on This Morning before appearing on ITV’s Big Big Talent Show. After signing to Sony, Church released her debut album Voice of an Angel in 1998, selling millions worldwide. She also performed before Pope John Paul II, Prince Charles, Queen Elizabeth II and Bill Clinton.

In 2005 she began to move away from her classical career into pop music, with her album Tissues and Issues before releasing Back to Scratch in 2010. Church has two children with her former partner, Welsh rugby international Gavin Henson, and another with her husband Jonathan Powell, whom she married in 2017.

Following her appearance at the Leveson Inquiry in 2012 Church has regularly spoken out over political issues, including voicing her opposition to austerity and supporting Jeremy Corbyn, Welsh nationalism and Palestine. She owns a retreat in Wales. Now she is joining the cast of the very first series of The Celebrity Traitors on BBC One, which she describes as “much more of a psychological process than I had imagined.”

In her Letter to My Younger Self, Charlotte Church looks back at her early career, her troubled relationship with the press and her pivot into activism.

As a teenager my life was pretty tumultuous. At 16, I had fallen madly in love with a boy my parents deeply disapproved of, and it was a real tussle for freedom and control. I’d started being naughty and smoking and sneaking out with the girls, so I remember it being a very exciting time of discovery and exploration. But I also remember it being deeply troubling. 

I was all about my friendship group at 16. It was all about the girls. We helped each other through and talked loads of shit and had a ball and cried a lot and were a bit mental. There was a group of about eight girls and nobody would fuck with us. We were such a pack. I’m so grateful to those girls. I was really famous at the time, and they helped me navigate it. I felt protected by that sisterhood. But in other ways, you let the devil in through the front door, you know? 

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I had an absolute case of the know-it-alls. I was quite insufferable in ways. It’s so strong in adolescence that feeling of, ‘Fuck you, none of you know anything and I know everything about my own life and what it is to live.’ I had a lot of that going on.

I left home at 16, which is quite young, but I left home into a very cushty situation because I’d earned money at that point. When I first moved out, I moved into my boyfriend’s dad’s house. That was dodge. Then I got my own apartment and, to be honest, I was fucking living it large. I had a penthouse in Cardiff, all the girls basically lived with me. My friend Kyla taught me to cook spaghetti bolognese, I taught myself chicken caesar salad, so that’s basically all we ever ate, when we ate at home, which wasn’t often.

This is embarrassing, but I was very keen on cleaning, constantly fucking hoovering, which I still do. But for some reason, the washing machine just evaded me. So I had a room full of dirty clothes. I would just buy new ones rather than wash them until one of my friends was like, “You’ve got amazing clothes, at least wash them so we can wear them.” So it was real polarities. Joy and fun and freedom and excess and dancing and discovery, but also real angst. 

By the time I was 16, I was also tired. I’d been working my socks off since I was 12, traveling a lot, just working and working. I was desperate for my own agency, my own autonomy, my own way. I just wanted to be allowed to forge the path myself. And I really wasn’t happy releasing a best of album or doing an autobiography – I was like, what is this shit? I wasn’t very nurtured as an artist or a creative. I very much at that stage felt like an asset, like a commercialised piece of real estate. It’s taken me a long time to rehabilitate that creative artist part of me. 

I was split about what I wanted to do. The people managing my career all wanted me to do different things. Some wanted me to go more into classical crossover, some people, including my parents, wanted me to go into opera, and all I wanted to do was sing R&B. That was the music I adored, people like Jill Scott, D’Angelo, Donell Jones and Erykah Badu. I also did a film around that time [I’ll Be There, with Craig Ferguson and Jemma Redgrave], so acting could have been a thing, and I was doing my GCSEs and thinking maybe I could be the first in my family to go to university. So there were lots of pathways open, but I was uncertain about what I wanted to do.

At that time the press intrusion was insane. There was all sorts of dark stuff going on with the media taking over the narrative. I know a lot of teenagers feel like things are unfair, but the sense of injustice I felt was so keen, it felt like a knife to the skin, reading these terrible things on the daily. Phone hacking was going on, but we didn’t know about it yet. Stories were in the paper all the time, and lots of things were blown up, misconstrued, made seedy when they really weren’t.

There was a lot of shame being thrown towards me. The press was desperately trying to make me a figure of sin and push this fallen angel narrative. I knew it wasn’t right. The core of me knew that this was a fucking travesty. That sense of burning, fiery, ‘fuck you’ kept me protected. If I had let that shame in or internalised it, my life could have gone in a very different way. 

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My dad had been a great influence when I was younger. He had a street philosophy that worked for me. He was existential and philosophical and was also talking from the perspective of hard-won, working-class grit. But by 16, I had a difficult relationship with my parents. And it’s partly because they were scared shitless. I’ve got great compassion for them nowadays, and that’s taken me a while because at the time I was so determined to forge my own path. My life had been closely controlled. They tried to give me freedom, but I was a high-profile person and there was lots of weird shit going on. I had stalkers, there were a couple of kidnap plots, so, bless them, it was a pretty awful time for them.

Having a working-class upbringing shapes us for the rest of our lives. I’m still close to my roots, although I’m in a different socio-economic category and I’ve basically given all my money away. It’s complicated having money, it changes the playing field. What I feel most privileged about are the experiences I’ve had, with lots of echelons of society. From the tippy top with extraordinarily wealthy and powerful people all the way to living down the docks around people living with drug addiction. I’ve had an embodied, lived insight of the human experience, which has fed my compassion for people. Because whichever part of society you’re from, rage feels the same. Sadness feels the same. Grief feels the same. Joy feels the same. Lust feels the same, you know? 

Narcissists are an absolute nightmare. That’s what I would whisper in my younger self’s ear about relationships. Narcissists are an absolute fucking nightmare and you can’t fix them. So stop trying and you’ll be fine.

I wouldn’t give much advice to my younger self, because it’s hard for me not to see it as divine timing. Maybe the only thing, if I could lend my brain to her, would be around the press. I’d want to show her how it literally means fuck all. Because I was in such a heightened state about how awful it was. That shaming is happening to people en masse nowadays. There’s so much bigotry I think you have to become shameless. The image I’m getting is, my brain is hilarious, you have to make yourself like this slippery fish. When they throw shit at you, you’re the most fabulous fucking slipperiest fish ever. 

Shaming is the worst and it’s happening to our children through social media now. There is a concerted effort to make everybody as polarised, as disconnected, as outraged, as shame-filled and repressed as possible. And that’s the other thing you have to realise. This situation is being constructed. When you see the wider picture, you get fucking fuming about it.

From my career, my younger self would have loved The Charlotte Church Show [Channel 4, 2006-08]. And more than anything, she’d have loved that I’ve followed my intuition throughout my life. I’ve really done it my way. And that’s all she ever wanted. Even though that has been a difficult path at times, because it takes courage to stand in your ethics and outside of what is allowed for somebody like me.

I’ve got goosebumps thinking about how my younger self would feel about my activism. She would be really proud. At 16, I had such fucking attitude. She would be saying, ‘Bitch, you are fucking amazing!’ She would be full of sass telling me how proud she is that I’m still full of sass.

From my career, my younger self would have loved The Charlotte Church Show [Channel 4, 2006-08]. But she would have loved it all. And more than anything, she’d have loved that I’ve followed my intuition throughout my life. I’ve really done it my way. And that’s all she ever wanted. Even though that has been a difficult path at times, because it takes courage to stand in your ethics and outside of what is allowed for somebody like me, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I feel so good about this being my present. The Dreaming retreat is about restoring people’s connections to themselves, to joy, to emotions in a world that is disconnected in every which way you can imagine. It re-sensitises people’s hearts and gives them back a bit of mischief and life force. In the morning people might be crying their eyes out or grieving, but by the afternoon they’re dancing and having a ball on the land with ten people they just met who are now best friends for life. It also really connects people back to the power of music.

I am so proud of my younger self. I think she is fierce and fabulous. And I’m so proud that she manages herself and her relationships, not always with the maximum amount of grace, but with heart and soul. And she managed to stay compassionate through that really difficult time.

Find out more about Charlotte Church’s retreat, The Dreaming. The Celebrity Traitors is on BBC One from 7 October.

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