Fearne Cotton - The Biography. Nigel Goodall
– ‘the Graffiti’ dress – as she and her guests made their way to the Groucho Club in London to continue celebrations. The tabloid press were quick to notice, however, that Allen’s then boyfriend, DJ Seb Chew, and her best friend, TV presenter and actress Miquita Oliver, were not present at either the launch or the after-party.
From what was noted at the party, it seemed Allen shared the same close rapport as Fearne did with her own dad. Mick, who she calls ‘Mr Brightside’, was not quite so impulsive a character as her mother – ‘He’s never raised his voice, shouted or got angry with me. He’s just the calmest, nicest man on earth.’ While she was growing up, he was a graphic designer, but he also worked as a signwriter for large music events such as Live Aid, and according to Fearne, he yielded to no one in his love for classic rock bands such as Led Zeppelin, The Who and The Doors – unlike her mother, Lynn, who had a penchant for Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound productions, Stax and Motown. Indeed, if Fearne’s mother inspired her to be spontaneous and impulsive, then it was her father who balanced his daughter’s impetuous diet with music and art. In those days, years before digital downloads liberated listeners from the tyranny of instant and forgettable hits, Fearne was brought up on vinyl. It was as if this was her education rather than anything she was later to learn in school.
‘I was about four when I first started to get into records. My dad would put on Led Zeppelin IV and play “Stairway To Heaven” over and over. I was fascinated by this gorgeous sound coming off a piece of plastic.’ In 2007, she met Zeppelin’s guitarist Jimmy Page: ‘I met him at a gallery opening and I was a blithering wreck, saying, “I love you, I’ve got every album you’ve ever made!” I knew I had to stop or he’d think I was a loon. We ended up having a good chat, though.’
As Rolling Stone magazine noted, it wasn’t just Led Zeppelin’s thunderous volume, sledgehammer beat and edge-of-mayhem arrangements that made them the most influential and successful heavy-metal pioneer band, it was their finesse. Like the band’s ancestors, The Yardbirds, they used a guitar style that drew heavily on the Blues with their early repertoire taking remakes of songs by Howlin’ Wolf, Albert King and Willie Dixon, who later, incidentally, won a sizeable settlement from the band in a suit in which he alleged copyright infringement. But Jimmy Page blessed the group with a unique understanding of the guitar, and the recording studio, as electronic instruments, and of rock, as sculptural sound. Like Jimi Hendrix, Page had a reason for every bit of distortion, feedback, reverberation and out-and-out noise that he incorporated. Few of their many imitators can make the same claim and this may have been one of the reasons why Fearne loved them as much as her father did.
All the same, it wasn’t until she was about seven or eight years old that her parents trusted her enough with their record player: ‘After that, there was no stopping me! Whole weekends would be spent going through their collection, discovering all kinds of amazing stuff. When I was nine and getting pocket money I could afford my own records.
‘I remember heading down the shops with 50p in my pocket, wondering which record would take my fancy. I happened to find a copy of the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” in a second-hand shop. It was scratched to bits but I loved it beyond words. Growing up, there were certain things that for me encapsulated the romance of pop music. If you loved it, you’d read about your favourite bands in Smash Hits or NME, save up your money to buy their records and wait all week to see them on TOTP.’
And of course the other fascination was the vinyl itself, she continues: ‘Nothing beats the smell of fresh vinyl in the morning. It’s still unbeatable as a musical format. CDs are functional but essentially unlovable and there’s no magic involved in downloading a song. Playing vinyl is a beautiful ritual. What can compare to the feeling of carefully removing a treasured record from its sleeve, placing it on the deck and hearing that reassuring crackle as the needle hits the groove?
‘People say “Yes, but records get scratched.” I love the scratches. Some of my favourite records have scratches and those scratches become part of the listening experience. I’m not completely opposed to the iPod – I’ve got one and it’s handy for the car. If I could play vinyl when I’m driving, I would. But flipping the records over would be a bit difficult when I’m tearing down the M1!’
When the Mail on Sunday’s Live magazine caught up with Fearne for an August 2007 feature, she had just got back from camping with friends in Cornwall. On the second day, she confessed, ‘I was craving for my fix of vinyl. So we went to a car-boot sale and picked up a load of bargains: original Elvis, Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton albums for 50p. Then I managed to find a portable, battery-powered record player going cheap in a second-hand store. We were all set up for the week – endless barbecues and music being played as it should be played. Idyllic!’
Equally blissful were the family holidays to Lulworth Cove in Dorset with her parents and her younger brother Jamie, who was born two years after her: ‘We went so regularly that it became our second home and I made loads of friends there, who have stuck by me through the years despite my glitzy career. When I was fifteen, I got my first showbiz job; I found that I needed my Lulworth breaks more than ever. I was a big girl by then and went by myself for summer holidays and at Christmas and Easter.’
To this day, Lulworth Cove is still her favourite beach: ‘There’s a little ledge that sticks out from one of the cliff faces and hangs over the bay. My friends and I discovered it one cold Easter morning as we were walking towards the beach, so we perched ourselves down and started chatting. I think it used to be part of a wartime bunker and it became my special secret place. If I’m down there with a friend, we’ll go and sit on the ledge and have a long talk. It’s a great place to put other thoughts aside and just catch up.
‘I haven’t had enough time to visit the cove as much as I’d like to recently because I’ve been so busy filming and getting by on five or six hours sleep a night. But I still aim to visit at least once a year and whenever I do manage to tear myself away and drive down to Dorset in my Mini Cooper, it feels like I’m going home.
‘For my 21st birthday I took eight friends to the cove. My mobile is unable to pick up a signal there, which is brilliant because it means there’s nothing to do but chat and look at the fantastic view over the Channel. In the summer, the sea is really clear and the cove is as peaceful as it always was. Although I’m a coffee fiend – I got the habit after spending so much time in America [filming and travelling across the country during a road trip of a lifetime] – I love going to the teashops just inland from Lulworth, near Corfe Castle. They sell scones and have old-fashioned jars of sweets; it’s like going back in time. In fact, everything about Lulworth reminds me of revisiting my childhood.’
Unlike some of the journalists to whom she has related anecdotes about her early life, Fearne balks at the stories that she was some sort of flower child, as some writers have tried to make her out to be. It was only after she became famous that she was tagged as having a hippie childhood, as if she had been raised on dandelion tea in a yurt pitched at Stonehenge. But that just isn’t true, she says: ‘I was born in a bungalow, we upgraded to a semi and it was just a normal suburban life. We went on camping holidays in our rubbish car and it was all very bog standard.’
True, her parents may have been slightly unconventional and the world in which they circulated may have not been typically ordinary, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are hippies. Nor does it make Fearne one, even though her mother has been variously described as a ‘professional dog-walker’ and a ‘Tarot-reading mystic’, who predicted Fearne would have three children before she turned thirty, and her father taught her to paint and encouraged her to love artists such as Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne and Jenny Saville, famous for her portraits of curvaceous women. Lynn and Mick Cotton are probably only considered unconventional because they are passionate about what they do.
As Fearne explains, ‘People always say that I make my mum out to be some kind of nutter but she’s really just a very normal and interesting character. She’s always meditating and practising alternative remedies and she got me into reiki [the Japanese healing technique], and she’s very interested in spiritual things and guardian angels. She got me into meditating. She always told me to