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          It’s what drives her, because her whole life has been a miscommunication. She has been misjudged, misunderstood, labelled, bullied.
When she sings that voice is ladled with not only what she’s suffered, but a plea to be liked, to be loved because all her life one way or another she’s been deemed unlovable. More of that later.
She’s sparkly-eyed in her sparkly top. You tell her she looks great. She fights with you. She cannot take a compliment. She still lives in the council house she grew up in an shared where she looked after her parents until they died in Blackburn, West Lothian. She now sleeps under her Donny Osmond blanket in what used to be her mother’s room.
She has another house, half a mile away, that is new and modern and has a marbelled top kitchen. She calls it ‘the posh house’ and that’s what the doormat outside it says. She spends time there but she doesn’t really live there.
‘SuBo is a bit of a tomboy and she lives in the council house. She fights with everybody. Susan Boyle doesn’t fight with anybody. She lives in the posh house and she’s a lady. She rarely gets stressed.’ Then she gives a SuBo chortle that’s both fiery and warm.
‘I’ve got a temper alright. I’m fiery as hell. Do you want the long list of things that make me lose my temper? The number one that makes my blood boil, the one that really puts me overboard is if someone isn’t telling the truth to me and I know about it. I like honesty and I like real communication.’
This maybe comes from a life being protected from what her parents thought would hurt her. She never knew where the reality was. And now she can’t believe her own success. She doesn’t grasp it or understand it.
There are various estimates of her worth between £11 and £18 million. It could be more. She is the fastest selling global female artist and the only artist since The Beatles to have her first two albums go to number one in the US and the UK. The YouTube of her Britain’s Got Talent performance of I Dreamed A Dream has been viewed over 300 million times.
She had been rejected and abandoned all her life. She was an overnight global phenomenon. That was confusing. And when she went on not to win Britain’s Got Talent she panicked that it was all being taken away again, had a meltdown and had to go The Priory for two days.
After a lifetime of 50 years of not believing in herself, unsurprisingly she still finds it a struggle. She thinks it’s all going to go away. ‘It’s scary because how do you maintain your standard. It’s too much to take in. Only this morning I felt overwhelmed, I didn’t know if I’d be here. It’s a lot for me to take in. I haven’t had a lot of happiness.’
As is the case with people who have spent their life longing for something when they get it they don’t know what to do with that longing and agitation. They are as frightened of success as they are of failure.
‘Yes,’ she nods her head in agreement, but a little sad. It’s as if she feels I’m telling her off. I tell her I think it’s deeper than just that. Her whole psyche has been rejected for so long that now she has been accepted she can’t quite believe it’s real.
Her eyes ignite. “You’ve summed it up in one. You are always waiting for someone to come along. You are always waiting for this, and then you think they’re going to forget you.’
I tell her she could never be unforgettable. People everywhere identify with her. Her fans in America wear red scarves because she did as a symbol of solidarity that they too have suffered and would like one day to triumph. People love her. ‘Well they don’t know the real me,’ says Susan gruffly.
But that’s just it. The uniqueness of SuBo is that her whole soul, everything she’s ever felt, confused by, rejected by, or suffered from or longed for is in her voice. She would sing at her local social club, her staunchly Catholic parents fretting that she would be in a room full of drink, and she was never praised for her performance, yet she kept on going. She auditioned for various television shows 12 times until her Britain’s Got Talent moment.
‘You’ll See on my first album is about me getting my own back on people. I’m still doing that. I’m not a vengeful person, honestly I’m not.’
She certainly has a right to enjoy feeling a little smug. She still lives in the same town as her tormentors. She was bullied relentlessly. She was thrown in the nettles, her gym bag hidden so she’d be punished by the teacher, laughed at, mocked until she cried. One girl stubbed out cigarettes on her.
‘She used to try to make me cry and blubber. At school I used to be hyperactive which meant I cried easily. I had a slight disability.’
When she says hyperactive, disability, what does she actually mean? ‘Em, that I was vulnerable. Easily annoyed. And showed my feelings. I was Miss Piggy.’
Isn’t that just being hypersensitive? ‘Yes, but I used to drive my parents mad. And this disability label was put on me, very unfairly. That was going on since I was one-year-old.’
Much has been made of Susan Boyle and her deprivation of oxygen at birth and how that was supposed to have created disabilities. ‘They were not mental, they were physical.’ For so many years, all throughout her childhood, her parents protected her sensitivity by saying it was a disability when in fact her sensitivity and her empathy is a rare quality.
‘I was protected in cotton wool. They thought they were doing the right thing. They called me touchy.’ This is the moment where I want to cry. Touchy is a Scottish and Geordie expression for a person who feels too much. It is a critical word and my Auntie Tiger used to yell at me that I was touchy until I cried. And suddenly like a woman in a red scarf I feel I am Susan Boyle.
She sees a comfort in that. ‘At school I used to faint a lot. And that was another reason I was bullied. It’s something I’ve never talked about. I had epilepsy. People in the public eye don’t have things like that. For all my childhood they would say epilepsy is to do with mental function and that’s what people would say to me. And now I realise it’s not. I was up against all those barriers. It wasn’t easy. My hair is snowy white underneath this,’ she laughs, one of her uncomfortable chortle laughs. She tells me that she’s got false teeth as well. It’s a comfort zone thing for her to put herself down before anyone else does.
She looks much slimmer than she does on TV. Or maybe she’s been on a diet? ‘It’s Spanks.’
If you ask her how her life has changed since her success she says repeatedly, ‘I wouldn’t call it success. I call it luck.’
In many ways she doesn’t want to acknowledge her success because she doesn’t want to acknowledge change. ‘I have insecurity that my friends won’t be my friends after a while. I don’t sleep easily if I think that. That’s why I don’t sleep easily at the posh house. The council house is my mother’s house. She died five years ago and all of her energy is still in that house. It’s my comfort zone. My mother said look after my house and look after my cat Pebbles and that’s what I did.
‘Pebbles is looked after by a lady called Pam in London because of my travelling. That’s the promise I made to my mother and you don’t break promises like that. I feel she’s still there. I’ve actually seen her there. I don’t know how you feel about people coming back?‘ She’s testing the water in case I don’t believe in that kind of stuff. But as soon as I tell her I’ve seen ghosts she continues.
‘She wasn’t troubled. I think she was letting me know she was alright. She wasn’t angry or upset. I wasn’t frightened. There was a lovely smell. Perhaps it was of my mum’s perfume, I’m not sure. I used to think she’d abandoned me when she died. Maybe she was telling me she hadn’t.’
She and her mother had an extremely close relationship. SuBo felt loved possibly for the only time. But her mother was often upset and anxious. She says, ‘She died anxious.’
Her mother had worried how she would cope on her own. She was the baby of the family, the youngest of nine, born when her mother was 47-years-old. Her mother always worried, and that instilled in Susan the feeling that she could not cope on her own. If they were watching the television and Susan would casually remark ‘Do you think I could sing on TV?’ her mother would say ‘Yes, but you’re not ready yet.’
It was two years after she died that Susan passed the audition for Britain’s Got Talent. Perhaps she had been ready for it all her life. A voice like that is a God-given talent. She may be ready for another cat. ‘I’m thinking of getting another cat. If it’s an orange cat I’m going to call it Andy after my manager, and if it’s a black cat with big green eyes I’m going to call it Simon.’
The word Simon makes her give a mini-wiggle as she says ‘Simon is sex on legs.’ She also thought Piers was really handsome. One wonders just how many men she has been exposed to in her life.
Does she still sleep with Donny Osmond every night? ‘You saucy devil. Yes. He is on the bed cover.’ She talks about what a lovely man he is too.
Wouldn’t she like a real boyfriend? ‘I had a boyfriend. All that never being kissed stuff is an absolute lie. He kissed me for God’s sake, he kissed me.
‘My dad didn’t like him. He said he wasn’t right for me. The sensible answer to your question would be I’ll know when the right man comes along. In many ways it was a narrow escape. I was in love with him but he made someone else pregnant soon after. My dad decided that that particular boy was not for me and I was too immature to handle a relationship.’
How old was she? For the first time she looks embarrassed. ‘You’re not going to believe this but I was 25. Maybe people grow up at different rates.’
Maybe your parents were severely over protective? She nods in a way that she sees it and she doesn’t see it. At the same time as being criticised for being immature from the age of 18 she’d been counselling teenagers and other young people who’d suffered from depression and other issues. She was deemed mature enough for that.
‘Yes. It was important for me to prove that I was. I wanted to show people I could do it. I was good at it because I’d been there, I understood pain, and I’m a good listener. I wanted to do a psychology degree.’ She mumbles and looks down. It’s another thing that she felt she failed at.
She’s a warm empathic person and is lonely. ‘In a TV interview I said that maybe someone with one eye and one foot in the grave would be good because I thought that would be the only type of person I could get. I’m not sure if it’s possible for somebody my age to have a long-term relationship. I don’t want to be hurt again, it’s as simple as that.’
But if she could get over that? ‘Boys used to really make fun of me so I would like someone who was kind and someone who was not irresponsible and someone who would treat me like a woman.’
Lots has been written about her living on a monthly allowance of £300 or £500, suggesting that some kind of exploitation is involved. It’s more psychologically alarming than that. ‘I asked to live on an allowance. I think it will keep me grounded.’
I think she has a serious problem accepting success. ‘I worry that it will go away. I don’t want to be going out buying Ferraris. Last week I bought myself a TV. It cost £700. My management are always telling me, “Spend money. Treat yourself.” To me £700 is a lot of money.’
Actually, it’s not. ‘My parents would never have had enough money coming in to buy a £700 TV, so at least it’s a slight change I’ve made there. And I’d like to give some money towards a project locally, a kind of acting school. I’d really like to do that.’
She loves Scotland, although Scotland never loved her. She’s enjoyed trips to America. She took a friend with her recently. ‘On the whole I’ve found Americans very kind.’
In Scotland she’s still living near her two main bullies, although one of them is now a nurse. ‘I like to go shopping locally, although not for designer clothes. I wouldn’t spend my money on that. I do like perfume, Chanel No. 5. That feels classy to me. ‘My biggest problem is I feel lonely. I feel lonely at night. Everybody died and left me by myself. I always had a fear of being alone and now I am alone. It’s a very real fear.
‘There was one period within a few years where everybody died. My dad, my uncle, my sister, then my mum. It’s as if I was working with a few building blocks and those building blocks were all scattered and I had to find them one by one.’
How do you keep hope in your head? ‘Nobody would give me a chance with employment. I’d worked in the kitchens of the college and helping the elderly in the hospital, but only bits and pieces. When I first went for Britain’s Got Talent I had such a feeling of failure and I feel that’s still part of me. It’s hard when that’s been the pattern of your life, people rejecting you and failure. It’s hard for me to believe those patterns have been broken. That’s why I live in the council house. It’s my bubble.’
Her comfort zone is also her torture zone. She feels secure by having the same neighbours shouting at one another. As much as all these things holds her back, these things make her who she is.’
Can she try to believe the pattern is broken and that she is loved, not rejected? ‘I can try, it’s hard. But I’m trying.’
There are so many contradictions in the Susan Boyle psyche. She’s been disappointed and hurt so much she fears it so badly yet within her there is enormous courage and enormous fight.
She still has the gold lace dress that she wore for Britain’s Got Talent. ‘I think I’ve kept it to remind me of where I’ve come from and how far I’ve come.’
These days she doesn’t have to wear the frumpy gold dress or have bad frizzy hair and an uneven skin tone. Why does she want to be reminded of it? ‘I don’t know. Maybe I should get rid of it. Perhaps I could auction it for a charity that’s anti-bullying. In fact I like that idea.’ And she laughs. This time there’s a little triumph.