Free Tulisa - The Biography by Chas Newkey-Burden Page B

version of the single alone managed to get them to No 24 in the charts.
    With the increased profile the album had given them, Tulisa and her band mates branched out. In 2009, she and N-Dubz contributed to a fundraising song for the charity War Child. It is a small but effective organisation that works hard on behalf of children whose families, communities and schools have been torn apart by war. They contributed to the song ‘I Got Soul’ – a reworked version of The Killers’ ‘All These Things That I’ve Done’. For the recording they put together a one-off band called Young Soul Rebels, which included Tinchy Stryder and Pixie Lott. ‘We know lots of the acts taking part like Tinchy and Pixie, so it was a great vibe recording the song,’ said Tulisa at the recording. For Tulisa this was a cause she had never previously thought about. As such, she felt pleased to have been given the chance to learn about it and make an effort at contributing to the support of such vulnerable children. Having been a child in need herself in a different scenario she has a special warmth for the plight of all kids who are hard done by. ‘It’s an issue that hasn’t been looked at enough,’ she said. ‘And you know, even until I found out about this event, I didn’t really know that much about it, and that’s saying something you know,’ she told BBC Newsbeat . ‘And the fact that I’m only finding out now is not really good enough. So that was every reason for me to get involved.’ The band then encountered a sense of how it feels to be No 1 when Tinchy Stryder’s song of that name reached the top spot in April 2009. ‘Wouldn’t You’ was released by N-Dubz as the final single to be lifted from Uncle B .
    Another way that Tulisa spread her profile was by joining social networking websites. Acts such as Justin Bieber and Lily Allen have swelled their fame and fan base this way. Tulisa was to have a love/hate relationship with such online marketing. Later in her career she would build up a fearsome following on Twitter, but her first experiences with social networking were not happy ones. ‘I’m not [on Facebook]… I was, but Facebook themselves deleted me, because they thought I was a fake version of myself,’ she told the Sunday Mirror . She added that some of her Facebook interactions had been nothing short of farcical. ‘There are about 60 fake Facebook pages of me. I’ve actually had arguments with myself on there,’ she said. ‘I’ll message them saying, ”Look, I know you’re not me because I’m Tulisa”. And they’ll reply, ”No, you’re not, I’m Tulisa.”’
    One aspect of online presence that many celebrities have struggled with is the way that stories – often untrue – can take on a whole life of their own in the Wild West atmosphere that pervades the internet. In comparison to the way things can erupt over Twitter, the old-fashioned media can sometimes seem quaint and tame in comparison. When Tulisa made some light-hearted quips about how the infidelity of men might lead her to considering some same-sex relationships, she saw this trend in action. It all started with some observations about the often wayward behaviour of men after a man in her life had cheated on her. ‘They all cheat, but most of them get away with it,’ she said. ‘I’m jealous because I know men. I think there are five per cent of men that stay faithful, but there’s another 95 per cent out there that are absolute animals. Because I know that nearly all men cheat, it makes me hard to trust them and I would quite happily pay a bird to go and shag my man, record it, and if they gave me evidence I would pay them a grand.’
    As online chatterers cast this joke as some sort of official coming-out moment, Tulisa looked with shock and amusement. ‘People might think it’s weird, but I was right, wasn’t I? He was cheating.’ She added: ‘If I was going to get married, the first thing I’d do would be to send out a