Tulisa Contostavlos is the most remarkable new star in the country today. She was an eleven-year-old schoolgirl when her Uncle Byron offered her £20 to be the singer in a new band with son Dappy and his friend Fazer. She held out for £50 and started on a rollercoaster ride to fame that led to her becoming an 'overnight' sensation on The X Factor. Tulisa is the first biography of a girl determined to leave behind a life in which underage sex, smoking weed, drinking cider and bullying were the norm. Her love of music and an unswerving desire to make money, buy a house of her own and drive a sports car provided her with the incentive to escape. The UK's leading celebrity biographer, Sean Smith, has discovered that behind the tough exterior and dazzling smile is a funny, loyal and sensitive young woman. He has travelled to the leafy streets of fashionable Belsize Park in North West London to uncover the truth about her upbringing, her relationship with her musician father, who left home when she was nine, and the mother who abandoned a singing career because of ongoing mental health problems, and whom Tulisa says she loves 'with all my heart.' He tells the story of N-Dubz and their mentor 'Uncle B', who tragically died on the threshold of their success. They rose to become one of the most popular bands in the UK without ever capturing a mainstream audience, but their American adventure ended in disappointment. Tulisa describes her failed love affairs, her mercurial relationship with controversial cousin Dappy, her bond with sometime boyfriend Fazer and a cast of characters including Chipmunk, Tinchy Stryder and Mr Hudson, who make up the urban music scene she embraced. The book relives her X Factor triumph as mentor to the winners Little Mix, her feud with fellow judge Kelly Rowland, her fashion triumphs and disasters and her brave response to the online release of a sex tape. Tulisa is the gripping and inspirational story of how a lonely and bullied young girl transformed herself into 'The Female Boss' - a role model for a generation.

In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.

Tulisa Contostavlos is one of the most talented and high-profile recording artists working in the UK today. She has three platinum N-Dubz albums, four MOBO awards, a groundbreaking drama series, two documentaries, a MIND award and an X Factor judge's win under her belt. Not bad for a girl who's not yet twenty-four. But this is not just a tale of glittering success. Tulisa grew up on a tough London estate and left school with no qualifications as she struggled to cope with deep-seated emotional problems while caring for her mother alone. She has seen first hand what drugs, alcohol, gang culture and violent relationships can do to young people, but she has come through it all to become the confident, inspiring artist she is today. After taking her little muffins Little Mix to the winning spot of the X Factor at the end of 2011, and with her long-awaited solo album being released later this year, the future is bright for Tulisa. Told in her own words, this is her story.

Tulisa Contostavlos has one of the most fascinating and shocking life-stories in showbusiness. Her childhood included harrowing episodes of self-harm, bullying, witchcraft, drug abuse and suicide attempts. Then there has been the ever-present challenge of her mother's mental disorder which Tulisa - as the only child in a single-parent family - had to face alone. How did she rise from such a troubled and dangerous childhood to become first an edgy urban artist and then the much-loved people's princess of Saturday night television? This book, written by leading celebrity biographer Chas Newkey-Burden, tells her eventful and inspirational story for the first time. It uncovers the rich showbusiness heritage of her ancestors and then follows her through her childhood, unflinchingly examining the horrors she faced. It then traces how music became her salvation, thanks to the loving mentorship of Uncle B - the man who formed N-Dubz. The book then follows this never satisfied, always ambitious young woman as she moved into the mainstream and became the nation's sweetheart on The X Factor. The reader is taken behind the scenes to discover the reality of her successful first series on the show, as she guided Little Mix to victory.With a fine cast of supporting characters including Dappy, Fazer, Gary Barlow and Simon Cowell, this is a colourful, entertaining, insightful and shocking portrait of one of Britain's most popular female celebrities.

A controversial and touching novel that has been years in the making. If The Catcher in The Rye, had a threesome with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and A Long Way Down, this book would be their illegitimate love-child! Harry Chen is living life in the fast lane; part-time entrepreneur, part-time alcoholic, successful nightclub manager and in love with his gorgeous fiance. For the popular, charismatic young man who has it all, life is good. As his world turns; booze flowing and tongues loosening, dark secrets and disturbing truths are revealed. His circumstances dictate that darkness must prevail. In a quick-paced whirlwind of love, betrayal, hate and vengeance, Harry soon discovers that all good things must come to an end.

I Could Be So Good For You is a unique portrait of north London's working class from the 1950s to the 21st century, and how it lived, struggled, survived and sometimes thrived. I Could Be So Good For You tackles head-on the pernicious and implicitly racist fiction that London, most especially north London, has no "real" working class in comparison to a more "authentic" working class in a place called "the North". In doing so it offers a history and a portrait of north London's working class from the 1950s to the 21st century, based on a wide and original range of sources including personal memoirs, autobiographies, collected oral histories and new interviews conducted by the author. The result is an important social history and a rich panorama of working-class life — its struggles, work, celebrations, events, triumphs, tragedies and the occasional nice little earner. For good or ill, from the start of post-war affluence in the 1950s to the economic crash of 2008, north London's working class had a life experience like almost no other part of the British working class, one not just of poverty, racism and exploitation, but also of bold new housing schemes in the heart of the city, of great opportunity and diversity and enjoyment. Its about time to tell that story.

This book offers a major exploration of the social and cultural importance of popular music to contemporary celebrations of Britishness. Rather than providing a history of popular music or an itemization of indigenous musical qualities, it exposes the influential cultural and nationalist rhetoric around popular music and the dissemination of that rhetoric in various forms. Since the 1960s, popular music has surpassed literature to become the dominant signifier of modern British culture and identity. This position has been enforced in popular culture, literature, news and music media, political rhetoric -- and in much popular music itself, which has become increasingly self-conscious about the expectation that music both articulate and manifest the inherent values and identity of the modern nation. This study examines the implications of such practices and the various social and cultural values they construct and enforce. It identifies two dominant, conflicting constructions around popular music: music as the voice of an indigenous English ‘folk’, and music as the voice of a re-emergent British Empire. These constructions are not only contradictory but also exclusive, prescribing a social and musical identity for the nation that ignores its greater creative, national, and cultural diversity. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive critique of an extremely powerful discourse in England that today informs dominant formulations of English and British national identity, history, and culture.