| Unless you live in Bradford, you won't have heard of Gareth Gates until just over a year ago, if then. He was the one with the stammer who didn't win Pop Idol. He was beaten by Will Young but it didn't seem to matter because he went on to have three number one singles, to win Record of the Year, release an album, sign �1m worth of sponsorship deals with Pepsi and Wella and write his autobiography - pretty good going for a boy of 18. And now he is singing this year's Comic Relief record, 'Spirit in the Sky', which almost certainly means another number one. But eek! what am I doing interviewing an 18-year-old squeaky-clean committed Christian who says 'Oh sugar' when he means 'Oh shit' and regards Cliff Richard as his role model? His 'people' said they knew I would be sympathetic. What do they take me for? Bambi's mother? Moreover, they sent me pages of notes beforehand about how to interview a stammerer - maintain eye contact at all times, don't finish his sentences, don't talk across him. I also read Gareth's autobiography, Right from the Start (�9.99, Virgin Books), which has a whole chapter of, ooh, dozens of words about his stammer. And I watched a video of Pop Idol which showed that agonising first moment when he couldn't say his name. So I was all geared for this big disability number... and then I met him for the first time. He was making the video for his Comic Relief single, with Richard Curtis directing, in a studio in Perivale. It was on a big Bollywood set with, for some reason, the cast of The Kumars at No 42 and the dancers from Bombay Dreams. Richard Curtis tried unsuccessfully to explain the 'concept' to me, but anyway it looked gorgeous. Gareth was dancing round onstage lip-synching the song and making fairly convincing attempts to wiggle his hips like Elvis. The PR introduced me to a huge man who I thought must be Gareth's bodyguard but turned out to be his stammering coach, Terry Cardwell, who told me he is an accountant and a 'recovering stammerer' who takes the day off work when possible to accompany Gareth and remind him of his breathing techniques. Eventually the music stopped, the cameramen went into confab, and Gareth came running towards me, followed by an ITV crew who are making a profile of him. 'Hi, Lynn,' he said, kissing me on both cheeks - rather a presumptuous greeting, I thought, from an 18-year-old boy who is supposed to be shy. But anyway, he seemed nice enough as he chattered away about the set, the dancers, the 'concept' and what Comic Relief means to him, talking literally nonstop till he was called back to film again. I turned to Terry accusingly - 'He hasn't got a stammer at all.' 'Well,' said Terry, 'he was on a high, so he could do it. But he was cheating, he wasn't breathing properly.' Hmmm. At this point, some typically dark, cynical thoughts occurred to me. It was Gareth Gates's stammer that first got him noticed on Pop Idol and seemed to win the hearts of the judges. How difficult would it be to feign a stammer for the purposes of attention-getting? Not difficult at all, I imagine, if you could remember to keep it up. And, of course, once you were a successful pop star and had a bodyguard, you could always call him your stammering coach - he didn't even have to stammer himself. Excited by this theory, I set out a couple of days later to interview Gareth at the Cobden Club. Again, he came into the room, kissed me, babbled away. No sign of Terry this time, so I thought: 'Oh good, he's dropped the charade.' We chatted about the video and he told me about a Comic Relief project he'd visited, called Body and Soul, for young people affected by Aids. Gareth said it was the first time he'd heard anyone say 'I'm HIV positive' and it reduced him to tears. So much for the stammer, I was thinking, as I lobbed him another easy question about how his driving lessons were coming along. He and Jade from Big Brother and Paul O'Grady (Lily Savage) are all having driving lessons for Comic Relief and will take their tests and get the results on Red Nose Day. Gareth is definitely the favourite - Jade hasn't even passed her theory test yet, and Paul O'Grady has no very apparent desire to drive, but Gareth is keen as mustard, and looking forward to buying a car. So when's your test? I asked, and suddenly it started - a strange grunting uh-uh-uh noise, more like a seizure than an attempt at speech. His whole face froze, his fingers tightened into claws, time seemed to stop. I had no idea where to look or what to do, I even thought of throwing a glass of water over him to 'bring him round'. Anyway, after what seemed like hours of uh-uh-uh, he produced a sheaf of blank paper from his parka and started writing, and as he wrote the words he said in a great rush - 'Taking the test tomorrow. I don't know whether I'll pass or not.' From then on, throughout the interview, he kept the paper in front of him and wrote down words whenever his stammer kicked in. He rarely wrote more than one or two words at a time, but the act of writing seemed to free him to speak, and he explained, 'What helps is if the person knows what I want to say, so then I'm able to say it all of a sudden, which is really weird.' Of course, he said, it was 'cheating' really, but without writing things down we'd be there all night. So his stammer is certainly real, and worse than any stammer I have ever encountered. He explains in his book that it is probably hereditary - his father had a stammer but grew out of it at 21, and his middle sister, Charlotte, 11, has a stammer, though his other two sisters, Jessica, nine, and Nicola, 17, don't. Before going on Pop Idol, he went on a four-day McGuire stammer-curing course and by the end was able to talk to strangers in the street, and ring up hotels. But since then, he's had no time to practise, so now he is back to where he started. But at least he knows there is a technique that does work and he will go back on the course when he has time. 'My speech is really important to me, but the thing is at the moment it can't be more important than my singing. Until I'm an established name all over the world, my speech won't be more important than my music. But maybe there'll come a time when I'll say, "Right, now I can stop and concentrate on my speech." Or maybe I'll be like my father and just grow out of it.' |