When she was in her early 20s, Nicki Chapman worked as a television assistant at a record label. Her job was to help promote the bands on the label’s roster by booking them on 1980s staples such as Top of the Pops or Surprise Surprise
. She was passionate about music and good at her job. But there was a problem: the industry was a boys’ club and the boys wanted it to stay that way. At one point she was told, “You’re never going to make it in this world, Nicki”, after failing to laugh obediently at a man’s joke.
As she gleefully points out in this easily digestible behind-the-scenes memoir, that prediction didn’t come true. Chapman, born in Herne Bay, a quiet seaside town in Kent, quickly made a name for herself in the big city, moving to London and up the music industry ranks. She worked with a who’s who of UK pop talent, from Take That to Annie Lennox, the Spice Girls to Amy Winehouse. She later became a TV star in her own right as a judge on entrepreneur and artist manager Simon Fuller’s prototype TV talent show Popstars and its follow-up Pop Idol. And while fellow panellists Nigel Lythgoe, Simon Cowell and Pete Waterman morphed into pantomime villains, Chapman was compassionate and nurturing. (She has since gone on to host TV’s most soothing balm, Escape to the Country.)
To use the kind of well-worn phrase redolent of Pop Idol and its ilk, Chapman’s journey to mainstream success has been a rollercoaster. So Tell Me What You Want features plenty of amusing anecdotes – Bobby Brown going awol in search of the perfect burger before his performance on Top of the Pops; Chapman getting stuck in a service lift with I Think We’re Alone Now singer Tiffany; the Spice Girls using Chapman’s red gingham bikini to tie up the male lead in their Say You’ll Be There video. Less amusingly, she recalls the time she opened some fan mail for Kim Wilde only to find the correspondent had included a sachet of his semen.
Things get darker still as Chapman writes about being locked in a male colleague’s flat after what he thinks is a date doesn’t pan out the way he’d hoped. Later she’ll have it written into her contract that she can’t be left alone with two unnamed producers after separate uncomfortable interactions with them. Her account of being pinned up against the wall and grabbed by the throat by one manager is made more chilling by the fact it’s mentioned almost in passing.
Occasionally, Chapman’s narrative focus goes askew. We get a lot of detail about the furnishings in her new house, for example, but not enough on, say, the wild ride Hear’Say must have had after winning Popstars. Things aren’t helped by the fact the book is written exclusively in the present tense, almost like a diary. Some key moments are quickly passed over, or in some instances viewed with a hindsight that feels disingenuous. When Chapman talks about the likes of Robbie Williams or Billie Piper being too young and too overworked and their mental health suffering as a result – conversations that have only really started to be had in the last few years – it jars with the book’s perceived “present”.
It’s odd, too, that the narrative ends just as Will Young wins Pop Idol in 2002. Rather than take us behind the scenes of what happened next – Young and his rival Gareth Gates selling millions of records; Young coming out as gay in a world of widespread tabloid homophobia; Pop Idol, for good or ill, kickstarting the next two decades or so of TV talent shows – we’re left in suspended animation, like a contestant without a record deal. But you can’t help but marvel at what Chapman achieved. Her tenacity leaps off the page, especially in the early chapters as she tries to avoid drowning in a sea of male entitlement. There’s a great passage where she overhears her boss on the phone blaming her for a mistake she didn’t make. Rather than accept it, she tells him to fuck off. And as for the man who told Chapman she’d never make it? He later calls her to ask for a job at the PR company she co-owns. “Did I employ him?” she writes. “Did I hell!”
• So Tell Me What You Want: My Story of Making It in the Mad, Bad and Fab Pop Music Industry by Nicki Chapman is published by Little, Brown (£22). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
