I don’t know if you’re going to be strong enough to deal with the monster that the industry can be,” The X Factor mentor Nicole Scherzinger told her 24-year-old charge James Arthur in 2012. It did seem unlikely. Throughout that ninth series, Arthur was the saddest man you’ve ever seen. He didn’t want to go back to the bedsit he couldn’t afford, he just wanted to perform raspy but technically pristine pop-rock versions of anything from Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” to LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It” to live and televised audiences. Even when he won the show, and was piled on by his fellow contestants to joyfully celebrate with him, only the tiniest of smiles escaped.
But the morose, shy singer did have the strength to endure more than Scherzinger and viewers expected – specifically the many controversies in which he embroiled himself. When I meet the 37-year-old at a hotel restaurant in Soho, he approaches in a trucker hat and huge jacket that cocoon and enlarge him, making him seem taller than his 6ft 3in. Once he's seated, Arthur’s cornflower blue doll’s eyes rarely make comfortable contact with mine. “I’m a very, very sensitive person I think. But I was tough. I am tough. I’m resilient, I think is the word for me,” the “Say You Won’t Let Go” singer tells me.
Arthur gravitated towards Pisces as a name for his new tortured emo-rap-meets-pop-rock album because he relates to the astrological sign, he says. He felt it explained him; just as when he received his ADHD diagnosis a few years ago. He’s “caught between reality and fantasy” (very Piscean), he notes, although also “a fighter, ready to scrap” (not very Piscean at all, in fact). “I’m a bit of a loner or sort of an independent thinker,” he adds, in his broad North East accent. It probably comes from “abandonment issues. I’ve always felt that way. It’s just that I have quite extreme feelings.”
Arthur’s life growing up on the North Yorkshire coast was fragmented. After his parents separated, Arthur was “bats*** poor”, living in a two-bedroom house shared with his mother and two siblings. His mother’s new partner – whom she met when Arthur was nine – got a job offer in Bahrain, so they all moved there. “Working-class Redcar is a lot different to the Middle East,” he stresses. “I got ripped at school. People were like, ‘Oh, you’re moving to the desert and you’re going to be friends with camels.’” It turned out to be a revelatory and nurturing experience.
The class sizes were small at his expat school and he benefited from the extra attention. When his mother got divorced after a couple of years and Arthur and his family had to return to the UK, he felt alienated from his peers, possessed of a different worldview. “I’d lived in a place where it was predominantly white people, and they were all pretty chavvy. Whenever I saw any form of racism that really affected me. I had Black friends or brown friends and I’d been around a lot of Muslim people. In the North East, the attitudes towards those people was really bad. And so I ended up getting in a few scraps because of that.” He describes the school he returned to in the UK as rough. His family was poor again. It felt like “coming back down to earth with a thud”.
Though his Middle Eastern adventure was beneficial, he thinks it was a catalyst for everything difficult that came afterwards, so many of his problems in life, even his striving for fame, “because maybe I got a taste of what a better life could be like”. He tells me this as a fancy oat latte in a glass beaker inside a silver goblet is presented to him by a waitress. He hesitates over how to drink it, nudging at it self-consciously, like Paddington Bear might. Then he offers me the biscuit that comes with it, because he’s on a diet. “I’m overweight, yeah… BMI is not where it should be,” he mutters, as he drops two sugar cubes into his coffee, stirs, then adds, “…he says, while putting two sugars in his coffee.” We both laugh.
Shortly after returning to the UK, his mother had a nervous breakdown. Arthur couldn’t settle amid that chaos and ended up going into foster care. It was terrifying, he says, though it provided stability through a daily routine and being forced to go to school, after he had frequently played truant. “It was mostly badly behaved boys who were in there and they would come and go and it was that kind of prison mentality where you’ve got to prove how tough you are.”
He took as much in his stride as he could. “Something happens to your self-worth or self-esteem when you think, ‘Oh, my own parents don’t want me.’ And then you feel like you have to prove yourself.” That is what drove him to pursue success, he laughs bitterly. It’s why he pressed the self-destruct button once he got the validation, too, because he realised the validation was empty.
By the time he applied for The X Factor, he was living in that bedsit, unable to pay for it. He’d had a few possible ins for a music career, namely Richard Rashman, who managed pop-rock bands like The Vamps and Busted, apparently telling him he could be the “next big thing”. What held him back, Arthur says, was money: he couldn’t make music videos or pay for proper producers. “X Factor is or was for people like me – that’s the only chance you’ve got. I truly felt like there was no other way I was gonna get in unless I was, by some miracle, spotted at an open-mic night in Saltburn-by-the-Sea.”
As long as he can remember, he’s been able to do vocal acrobatics; he could mimic any trilling or warbling vocal lines he heard a singer do. An obsession with working on his craft was born from a desperation to get his parents’ approval. “Particularly my mum, because she was always quite unpredictable. I didn’t know whether she was going to hate me one day or love me the next. So I was like, ‘Right, if I can do this then…’” he trails off, presumably before he can say she’d love him. She could be “over the top with her praise for me”, he says. “She’d be like ‘You are the best in the f***ing world, you’re a prodigy’ and all that. I suppose that’s where people’s delusions start. Even if I wasn’t good to begin with, my mum’s encouragement, and my desperation for her not to be mad at me, was why I grafted at it.”
That approval-seeking morphed into anxiety when he was on X Factor. His dad was a rock fan, shaping Arthur’s aspirations to sing with raw grit like Kurt Cobain (a fellow Piscean) and the energetic range of The Who’s Roger Daltrey (also Pisces). Once on the show, he quickly realised that his participation in a pop music singing competition was not really that rock’n’roll. He challenged the show’s producers to give him heavier songs, constantly paranoid that he was blowing his shot at being a “credible rock star”. Halfway through the show, he realised he might have a chance of winning and his determination kicked in, at first from fear of being branded a loser. He thought, “I’ll forever just be a guy that just failed on the X Factor.”
Why should he be embarrassed of being on X Factor, he thinks now. “I don’t think it’s actually possible to win a show like that and to expect that doors aren’t going to be closed for you, because there is a snobbery attached to it,” he says. “People’s views are that it’s a shortcut – actually, when you look at the music industry, it’s not people who went on X Factor, it’s people who come from rich families or nepotism or whatever. The whole landscape, 90 per cent of it, it’s ‘Oh, I heard her dad owns McVitie’s,’ or ‘he knows f***ing this [person].’ Working-class people aren’t doing so well in the landscape of things. I used to feel ashamed of it but I’ve managed to avoid being manipulated or controlled by those things.” What does he mean? “I’ve never had to lick arse, basically. I got here on merit; I got here by going through the Squid Game of music. That’s how I see it.”
It didn’t take long after he’d won the show to run into problems of his own making, from criticising his promotion team online, to calling other male X Factor winners “puppets”. This escalated in late 2013 when he used a homophobic slur in a diss track aimed at Mickey Worthless, a Croydon battle rapper, and compared him to the Taliban. LGBT celebrities like Matt Lucas and campaigners such as Frankie Boyle responded with indignation, as did the wider queer community. Arthur apologised at the time and left Twitter but the backlash continued. iTunes had to offer refunds for his album due to so many complaints from customers. By the next mini-controversy (another rap battle lyric) Arthur was dropped from Simon Cowell’s label, Syco. Arthur is apologetic about this, 12 years later, and says he was just showing off, trying to live up to the rock star image he so desperately wanted to embody.
“I’d grown up with Eminem and thinking that that was OK; it wasn’t. And so I’ve paid the price for it,” he says of the homophobic slur in particular. “It’s really sad for me to see that there’s still people today that I made feel alienated or [who] maybe think I’m homophobic. It’s heartbreaking. I think maybe that’s why some doors have been closed for me for sure.”
He believes that some people’s unwillingness to forgive may come from the same classism that judged X Factor contestants. “I thought, maybe 10 years on, that I might get invited on The Graham Norton Show, for example,” he says. “I know there’s probably gay people in positions of power that might be like, ‘No, he’s an awful t***.’” He thinks he’s done enough to deserve his opportunities. He’s the fourth biggest male singer-songwriter in the UK, he says (later when I email his team to ask where this metric is coming from they aren’t able to get an answer). “I don’t feel I get treated that way. I’m a pretty level-headed person, quite a humble person I think. But I’ve got to the point where I feel ignored.”
This feeling of having been abandoned by an industry that was supposed to love him was cemented by his commercial success last year, when he had a No 1 album and played Wembley and The O2 in the same week. Why doesn’t the entertainment business and media respect those accomplishments, he wonders, suggesting that it could be down to that troubled early period.
Our conversation drifts to Liam Payne, the One Direction star and X Factor alumnus who died last year in tragic drug-fuelled circumstances. “When I first came off X-Factor, he heard that I was struggling and he requested to meet me because he had similar problems when he first came off the show,” Arthur remembers. “He was really kind to me and anytime I’ve seen him over the years, he’s always been quite concerned with my wellbeing.”
Becoming a father to two-year-old Emily is what has transformed him into a more stable person. “All you have to worry about is making sure that she doesn’t end up with [abandonment issues],” he says. Would he have another child? “I’m so obsessed with my daughter that I don’t know if I could love anything else more. Maybe when she’s not a baby, I might get that itch to bring up a baby again. But I don’t know. I would never want her to feel like there’s anything more important…”
Many of these complicated feelings are communicated on Pisces, his deep crooning now autotuned and reticent, as he purposefully refuses to give Middle England the full soaring James Arthur vocals they know and love. “You left your antidepressants on the dresser/ It’s a freezing cold reminder of all of the pressure,” he bemoans on “Cruel”, a song clearly inspired by The 1975. Then he warns on muted Eighties-inspired rock jam “ADHD”: “I’m a walking red flag.” It’s not his usual pop – there’s even a Nickelback interpolation – but it’s reflective of the type of music he actually loves to listen to, he explains.
“I think that it’s really credible and tasteful and all the things that I would be impressed with as a music fan,” he says, and pointedly adds, “And that I would think deserves flowers.”
Whenever I think about Pisces as an astrological sign, I remember that their fate is either to be the victim who seeks salvation, or to be the one doing the saving, often through their artistic creations. As our interview peters out because he’s off to spend time with his daughter, I wonder if he has read about that, and relates to either destiny.
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