PSINT2

As Nicki Chapman warned the five victors who emerged from Popstars, celebrity melts fast. �I told them: This will be your year. You will be successful and famous. Anything after will be a bonus.� The fact that their single and album both reached number one does not guarantee longevity for a made-on TV band derided by Bill Wyman as �five plumpish boys and girls who were miming.� Hear'say, Gone Tomorrow remains the most likely outcome. For Nicki, one of the three judges who winnowed 3000 hopefuls down to three girls and two boys, no such butterfly lifespan applies. At 34, she is a
music industry high- flyer and, as creative director of the 19 management empire, is second in command to Simon Fuller, who discovered the Spice Girls and established their fame. When they
sacked him, 16 months after their first hit, the group's first call was to Chapman, then running her own PR company. �Will you look after us, Nicki?� they asked, and she, out of loyalty to Fuller, her friend and now her boss, said no. �I turned down the biggest band in the world,� she says, as if to emphasise both her sense of honour and her clout. She allegedly dropped her former client Billie Piper, because she could not tolerate Chris Evans's interference in his new wife's career. Whatever the truth of the rift, there seems to be no lingering rancour. Although Nick knew nothing about
their plans to marry in Las Vegas, the wedding did not surprise her. �I'm really pleased
for her. I think they're very much in love,� she says, with what sounds like genuine warmth.
I expect Chapman to have a bulldozer temperament, wishbone hips and a homing instinct as acute as a homing pigeon's for London's trendy Met Bar, but she is very much girl-next-door. Doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, has never done drugs nor harboured any vice more shocking than chocaholism. �I am a big girl,� she says. �My trousers are a size 16, but don't put that. I do have a very clean, healthy life.� She has a perfect complexion, blonde hair and spaniel eyes that belie an ambition on which you could hone knives.
If her Hear'say proteges are delighted by fame, then Nicki, made a familiar face by the television series, is probably hardly less euphoric at being offered a slice of the stardom that she has disbursed to major acts Annie Lennox, Robbie Williams, Take That, Kylie Minogue and Charlotte Church. Despite this, she was nervous when she phoned home from Hong Kong to ask her husband, Dave Shackleton, who also works in the music industry, how the first episode of Popstars had been received. �He said: It's going mad here. It's amazing. I think you might get recognised, Nick.� It was such a shock when it exploded, but great, of course. I'm very proud of the show.� Others have claimed the series cynically milked the naivety and ambition of children for its own ends. Naturally, Nicki, whose manner (nice, if pushy) provided a foil to her sneering fellow judge, Nigel Lythgoe, denies such exploitation. �It wasn't like that, and anyway, if you're destroyed by Nicki Chapman telling you you're not right for her band, you're probably not tough enough for the industry.�
Her final line-up, of Kym, Myleene, Suzanne, Noel and Danny, had scant idea, she says of what celebrity would entail. �With no apprenticeship, they were getting the sort of attention the Spice Girls got at the height of their fame. They were pretty grounded still, but obviously more wary. Mostly they have retreated back into their families.� Nicki offered what advice she could and then also retreated, unwilling to become a mother hen figure. �I tell everyone I don't want to be their best friend. I don't want to drink with them at the Met Bar. I've never been buddy-buddy with my artists. I've got my
own life.�
She started out as the younger and less bright daughter of a photocopier salesman and a stay-at-home mother from Herne Bay in Kent. After her elder sister, Shelley, went to university, Nicki spent a year in Australia, returning home for what she thought would be a brief stay before she emigrated. Instead she found her parents in the throes of a divorce. �I was just gob-smacked. They'd been married for 25 years and they had grown apart. I planned to live in Australia after I'd helped them sell and pack up the family house. I never did.� Instead at 21, she went to work first for a photocopier firm in London, then at MCA as a record plugger, and finally at RCA, where she met the enigmatic
Simon Fuller. When she set up a PR agency, Brilliant, with a partner Nick Godwyn, she looked
after Fuller's illustrious stable of clients, including the Spice Girls. Three months ago, she
wound up her promotion company and joined forces with a man she regards as an
inspiration and mentor. It seems a partnership of dreams. As one of the most hermatic
figures in the music industry, Fuller shuns publicity. These days, Nicki is both his deputy
and his mouthpiece. Long after the Spice Girls abandoned Fuller, she remains outraged about the treatment they meted out to their creator. �They never gave Simon an explanation, and they owed him one. I was there when it (the severance deal rumoured to be worth �20 million) was sewn up.
It was done in 48 hours, which was remarkably quick. He was gutted, completely. We both were. I'd just travelled to 16 countries with them. I had been cynical about them at first, but as soon as I saw them I realised how impressive they were. Then Simon did what he was brilliant at: taking talent and making it grow.�
The schism, according to the rumour, was fuelled by the charge that Fuller was having an affair with Emma Bunton. �There were lots of rumours.� says Nicki. �Only Simon and the girls know the whole story, but I think they wanted to go it alone. They didn't want' anyone else to take the credit, although he never did that.� On the day after the break-up, the girls rang to say they wanted Nicki to look after them. Although they wept, and so did she, she says that her refusal was instant. �I told them that it was the end of the road. Life is sometimes about saying no. I don't want to make out that my partner
and I were martyrs or that we turned down millions. We were just in the right place at the right time, but it still didn't seem right. I loved Victoria, and I liked them all, but now, when I read about them, it's as if we never worked together at all.� However virtuous Nicki was in backing Fuller, she was also shrewd. The job he subsequently offered her gives her a free-ranging role in the web of companies to which Nicki brought Billie Piper, the only act she ever managed. That arrangement foundered a
few weeks ago amid rumours that Nicki had fired her star client in exasperation at the career influence exerted by DJ and media mogul Chris Evans, then Billie's newly acquired
boyfriend. �Our contract expired and we decided mutually that it was a good time to
split,� Nicki says smoothly. But that gloss does not begin to explain the problems afflicting an 18-year-old girl who has deferred making her new single, endured the vicious threats of a stalker who talked about killing Billie and her parents, and appeared in constant danger of veering off the rails. Last year, she collapsed in a night club, and, a few weeks ago, she slumped to the floor of a bar after a drinking session with Evans. Earlier this month, the couple married in Las Vegas, in a ceremony costing �235. The bride wore a sarong and flip-flops, there were no rings, had the budget
service at the Little Church of the West, where Elvis and Priscilla Presley married, took 15
minutes. By comparison, a gambling spree with the couple's best man, Danny Baker, supposedly lasted for hours and cost thousands of pounds. Just after Evans, who is worth about �75 million, met Billie, he presented his future wife, who cannot drive, with a new Ferrari. She instantly rung Nicki for help. �Chris sent it to her in December, on the day after they met. It was filled with red roses and left outside her house. The embarrassing thing was that we didn't know how to move it or how the locks and immobilisers worked. We had to had to ask the garage how to work the security alarm. Billie had rung me and said, �What do I do?� I've never met her and Chris together, but I do talk to her, and I can tell you that she is really happy.� Did Evans interfere with her career? �He never talked to me. We just felt her life had changed after she met Chris. She's extremely happy, she knew where she wanted to go.� This sounds like a tactful admission that the role of managing Billie Piper had
become daunting, if not impossible. At first, Nicki only says, �I try not to get involved in
people's personal lives. We parted amicably. It's a non-story.� And then she adds, honestly. �Look, I'm trying to give you straightforward answers - to give you what I can without letting Billie down. I'm very fond of her, and I want her to be portrayed in the right way. Her record company looks after her as well as it possibly can. She didn't work in January and February last year. �We didn't work her to death. She did start to go to the gym. She did start to eat properly. So she had the capacity to fall off
the rails? �Yes, like any 18-year-old,� she says carefully. One imagines that there could be no worse influence on a fragile teenager than Chris Evans, and there is little sign Nicki disagrees, although all
she can professionally do is to screw up her face, laugh hollowly and say: �no comment.�
Such tact apart, it seems likely that Billie's story already offers hints, to Hear'say and other aspirants to celebrity, of how corrosive fame can be. Nicki's distance from her clients stems, in part, from her scrutiny of lives in danger of unravelling. �Robbie Williams kept me very busy. Lots of late nights and partying and disappearing. He always had security, so if I got really desperate I could call them. I was
with him when he started, briefly, to get quite wild. If there was champagne in the dressing room, it would all go home with Bob. I remember seeing him naked except for trunks and high heels and thinking, �What is going wrong?� But people always know when something is wrong, and that they're letting themselves down, not me. I could always work with someone else. I can work with who I want, and I can make people famous. I am quite hard. I tell people that if they are stars, they can behave like it and have respect for my staff. They will be looking after them when they're going down as well as up. If sometimes traffic-wardenish, Nicki, as counter- balance, is also genuinely sentimental. She cannot mention that Dominic, her mother's new husband, is having treatment for cancer, without dissolving into tears and rushing from the room to find a tissue. She found it almost easier to bear the death of Laurence, her step-brother and the son of her father's wife, Mary, who was killed at
18 in a car crash. �If someone dies, you deal with it,� she says, �But if someone you love is ill, it is a
perpetual worry. My friends and family are so important to me.� She does seem close to her parents, her sister, her three-year-old nephews and to the few other people she regards as central to her life. Her best friend is a policewoman with whom she went to school, and her husband, a music
journalist now working as a vice president of a record label, sounds loyal, down-to-earth and
unimpressed by stardom. �He is my life,� she says �He is very proud of me, as I am of him. We've been together six years and married for two. I'm lucky to have someone who understands and respects me.� For choice, she spends her evenings at home in Chiswick, west London, watching television in her tracksuit. Homely as she may be, Nicki Chapman is not a natural spectator. With
Popstars behind her, she is working on a series called Idols for ITV. This time the quest is for a solo
singer and musician, and the audience will decide the winner. Such changes apart, expect the same formula of tantrums, dramas and scrutiny of ambition. Whether it constitutes entertainment or just exploitation, there's no doubting the success of Nicki's invention of a sub-genre - welcome to the world of Big Sister.