We all know that she’s the very Schamazing former Pussycat Doll, X Factor-presenting global megastar. But did you know that she was a goth and toured with the Foo Fighters? Did you know that she has the highest Scrabble-scoring name in pop? And did you know that she turned down the most omnipresent pop song of our times? Come, let Michael Cragg reintroduce you to the one and only NICOLE SCHERZINGER(!).

As the clock creeps slowly towards 4pm in an east London photo studio Nicole Scherzinger, sporting a white dressing gown and matching towel slippers, practically drags herself over to a quiet corner for a chat. The photoshoot was supposed to be done and dusted by 2pm but some problems with eye makeup (too heavy), the shoes (she can barely walk in them) and the fact that Nicole looks like she’s about to slip into the deepest of sleeps at any moment mean things are running slightly behind schedule. “Is that beer?” she asks, bending down to look inside the mini-bar, her face practically pressed against the glass. “Do you want one?” asks a besuited man who may or may not be her driver. “Fuck yeah” she exclaims. In the end she plumps for a mini bottle of red wine, which she decants into two glasses, one for her and one for me. This is nice, I offer. But Nicole seems distracted.

Earlier, during the various setups for the photoshoot, she commandeered the stereo playing Frank Ocean’s Thinkin’ ‘Bout You on a loop, before switching to heartbreak anthems by the likes of Lianne Le Havas and Michael Kiwanuka. In fact, she’s so distracted that the first handful of questions are answered while flicking mindlessly through an old copy of Esquire (“she’s so pretty” she offers of the cover star after I’ve asked her the admittedly not too taxing ‘How has being born in Hawaii defined you?’ Answer, in case you’re interested, is basically it’s made her “more of a nature girl”). One could speculate that perhaps she’s missing a certain someone special, but we’re not here for love life updates, but to instead try and get to know that most elusive of creatures; the American megastar.

As we mentioned, Nicole Prescovia Elikolani Valiente Scherzinger (amazing) was born in Hawaii, Her surname (German for “jokester”, which seems appropriate) is her stepfather’s, who she and her mum went to live with in Kentucky after her real father moved out when she was a baby. The first album she remembers listening to was Whitney Houston’s self-titled debut. “She’s the reason I wanted to become a singer,” she explains, magazine now closed. “Then I started to love Paula Abdul because she sang and danced. I liked Paula because she was ethnic and I didn’t know what I was really either so I related to her. She’s a lot of different nationalities in one, she’s a little melting point.” It was during seventh grade that Nicole moved from singing along to Whitney in her bedroom to actually letting other people hear her perform. “I did a showcase of different songs and I was the understudy for this guy and I sang [starts singing the full verse and chorus of Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye] and I was always the understudy. I was way too shy,” she says, somewhat unbelievably. “[Excitedly] The guy didn’t show up last minute so I went on and I sang and people stood up and I was like ‘oh they like me’. That’s when I realised it was my thing. It just felt like I knew I loved it, but I didn’t know people loved me and when they liked it it just clicked.”

You can probably tell where this is going; girl band auditions, Pussycat Dolls, The X Factor (both the US and UK versions), solo albums etc. In fact, Nicole’s next move was to get into Dead Can Dance, become a goth and tour America with the Foo Fighters. Back in 1999 Travis Meeks of the band Days Of The New (their Wikipedia page describes them as “post-grunge”) was looking for a backing singer to help out on what would be their second album. “I was coming out of musical theatre and he was like ‘do you know any Dead Can Dance?’ I was like ‘what?’,” Nicole explains as a hair stylist furiously yanks at her weave. “So he played it for me and that’s when I was introduced to [Dead Can Dance singer] Lisa Gerrard. Lisa Gerrard did the soundtrack to Gladiator and she chants a lot. I went in my car and just studied the sound he was looking for and then I went in the studio and they just played these chords and I immediately started chanting. So from then I’d have to drive back for three hours to college, do my school stuff and then drive back and record the album. We toured with Foo Fighters, we toured with the biggest bands out there.”

The unlikely collaboration only lasted a year and Nicole ended up taking a part-time job at a Lancome make-up counter. During that time her mum saw an advert for the first series of the US version of Popstars, looking to start a new girlband. Surprisingly, Nicole wasn’t too keen: “I was so theatre at the time I was like ‘I am not going to be a Spice Girl’. That is just not me. I mean I’m a Spice Girls fan now, but at the time I only wore black and I was goth. I would have been Goth Spice. Ethnic Chanting Spice, that’s who I thought I was.” At her mum’s insistence she auditioned and turned up with an entire showreel of stuff she’d made. “I brought my little package that I’d put together with my pictures and I’d made my own home music video,” she explains. “I was on it. I gave them my package and I sang [Whitney’s I Will Always Love You, naturally] for them and the rest is history. That brought me to Los Angeles.”

The group, Eden’s Crush, only lasted a year, but finally Nicole was in the right place geographically to actually start turning this dream into some sort of reality. Unbeknownst to her in a club on the Sunset Strip, Gwen Stefani was performing with a burlesque dance troupe called the Pussycat Dolls watched by her friend and Interscope label boss Jimmy Iovine. Seeing the potential in having a singer front a group of dancers, he decided to, as Nicole puts it, “shave it down, take some of these dancers and audition singers and make it a group”. The newly formed group of six (later becoming a five-piece), went on to score a massive global number one single with their Cee-Lo Green-penned debut Don’t Cha, before racking up a further seven UK Top 10 singles in just three years. In 2008 Entertainment Weekly referred to the group as “a brand, not a band”, which Nicole’s not interpreting as a negative thing to be honest: “I think it’s great that a band can become a brand in such a short amount of time you know. That’s where the business is at these days. It means something when you can be a brand and put your thumb print on it.”   In fact, it’s this kind of honesty that sets her apart from the media trained robots that pepper the pop industry. I ask her about her ill-fated attempt at a solo career after the first Pussycat Dolls album (the first few singles performed so badly in America that songs mooted for it were turned into Pussycat Dolls songs for their second album, Doll Domination). “I was jumping the gun. It was just like the day I showed up to my Popstars audition being like ‘here’s my package, I’m ready for a solo deal’ and I had to wait,” she says matter of factly. “I was like ‘hm, I can either really struggle to build this or I can put this album [Doll Domination] out and be on tour with my girls in a couple of months’. So I was just being smart, business-wise.” But cracks were beginning to show in the band and the whole thing came to a head with the release of Jai Ho! (You Are My Destiny), which was credited to The Pussycat Dolls feat Nicole Scherzinger. Less than a year later the band had split. “I was put in there for a role to fill and I sacrificed everything for the Dolls,” she says. “What can be frustrating in the end is just not being credited for your work. That’s all. I think anybody would be frustrated or come to a point in their lives where they’ve put so much into it and they’re not being credited or at least not being respected by even the people they’re with.” In a recent interview with VH1 she took things a little further, claiming to have sung 95% of the vocals on the band’s two albums. I ask her about why she chose to reveal it and on the one hand she’s sorry it happened, but on the other she’s only sort of sorry she gave such a low figure. “I didn’t want VH1 to air the bit where I said how much of the records I did because…Well, I actually did more of the record than that. I think I was frustrated at the time because I was living something else to what people thought.”

What other people think troubles her more than you’d perhaps imagine. I ask her what she thinks people’s biggest misconception of her is. She thinks for a minute. “I’m just like them,” she offers, slowly. “I have the same fears, the same insecurities, the same goofiness, the same sense of humour, the same realness. They’ve put me in a different category and they think that I look at myself like that – they’ve put me on a platform and they think that I look at myself on a platform, but I don’t.” But being on a pedestal is what being a pop star is all about, surely? “But I’m realer than that. I’ve experienced so much in my life that it’s put things into perspective. I really care for humans. I think one of the biggest things coming out of the X Factor that was a compliment to me was when people said she cared about her contestants first as people rather than the show first and the people after. I have a very spiritual side to me. When you strip it down I’m just a heart and soul girl that comes from a home town just like you.”

While this seems a little ‘Jenny From The Block’ disingenuous, there’s a definite side to Nicole that seems to negate the diva image built up around her. Firstly, as most of us saw on the UK X Factor, Nicole is properly batshit crazy when she wants to be (she refers to Rylan Clarke as a “spicegasm” twice in the interview with no explanation). A particular highlight of the last series involved a strange monologue about Coco Pops that was meant in someway to offer advice to Nan-loving cruise ship crooner, Christopher Maloney. “It was to Christopher Baloney, it went on for a long half hour, it was a whole tangent and at the end everyone was silent and didn’t know what the hell I’d just said. Even me, I don’t think I relayed it right,” she offers with a giggle. “In America being vanilla and being Corn Flake is being flat, no soul, bland. I was trying to find a more creative way of telling him he had no soul.” There have also been missed opportunities – she was originally offered Fergie’s place in the Black Eyed Peas but was contracted to Eden’s Crush so couldn’t leave – and, hilariously, she’s missed out on some of pop’s biggest hits due to her own, well, laziness basically. “I passed on We Found Love,” she says to my obvious bemusement. “I’ve got the demo of that song and I was busy at the time and they’d sent me a few dance tracks and I wasn’t able to get to them and I was like ‘oh there’s so much dance and I want to take a break from it’. That was my fault. I slept on it.” She also turned down Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy and a little ditty by Lady Gaga called Just Dance, which was originally offered to the Pussycat Dolls.   She also wants it known that while many have used the exposure from a judging role on The X Factor to launch albums, she decided to wait to unleash her forthcoming second album until later this year. “I’m not a diva for the limelight. I’m heart and soul and hard work. When I did The X Factor I set aside my things. I’d finished my album with will.i.am in September and I put everything aside for my contestants. Hopefully people see that or else I would have been like ‘I don’t really care about the contestants, I need the show. And here you go, November, here’s my new album’. Hopefully people see the proof is in the pudding.”

The first proof of the so-far-untitled pudding is Boomerang, a zesty, will.i.am-produced synth-lead ode to coming back from adversity. Would it be fair to read Boomerang as a metaphor for your career so far, I ask. “I look at it like that too you know. It’s really hard. This business is a hustle and it’s a constant grind. It’s the cooler way of saying I’m resilient. It’s about ‘oh man, can I do this?’ And it’s about saying I’m a boomerang – the harder you throw me out the harder I’m coming back and that really is me,” she explains. So have you ever thrown a boomerang, Nicole? “Yeah. I don’t know where it went. It never came back.”

Source: Notion Magazine