Two months ago, I sat in a Chelsea hotel suite with opera star Katherine Jenkins and during a lengthy interview for GQ magazine, the following exchange
took place:
Q. ‘Have you ever taken any drugs?
A. (shakes head).
Q. ‘Woah...was that a hesitation there?’
A. ‘No! I’ve never taken drugs.’
Katherine blushed slightly as she said this and looked rather flustered. Which I put down to the fact that, according to my extensive research, nobody had ever actually asked her this question before and she was just a bit taken aback.
It seemed, frankly, impossible to imagine Katherine being a drug abuser.
I was mistaken.
On Wednesday night, I was sitting down to watch Arsenal play Spurs in a Dubai hotel bar – I’m filming an ITV documentary on the Middle Eastern playground – when my phone rang.
‘Piers, it’s Katherine Jenkins. I need to tell you something that’s been bothering me.’
For the next hour, the beautiful young singer poured her heart out to me about how she had regularly taken cocaine, Ecstasy and cannabis.
And she was searingly honest about why she finally stopped.
‘I could have ended up messing it all up, and that would have just been a tragic waste of the opportunity I was given,’ she told me.
Katherine, 28, is, genuinely, one of the nicest people I’ve met in the often self-obsessed music industry: a sweet, polite, touchingly naive, unaffected girl from Neath in South Wales, who just happens to have one of the greatest mezzo-soprano voices in the world.
Last week, she signed a stunning £6million record deal with American label Warner Music and is flying to Los Angeles in the New Year for a few months to try her luck cracking the United States.
So, with things going so extraordinarily well professionally, confessing to her secret drugs shame past is not a decision she has taken lightly.
‘It’s not something I ever wanted to talk about publicly,’ she said, ‘because taking drugs is the biggest regret of my life. But I’ve always tried to be honest about my life and I’ve had sleepless nights since that GQ interview appeared, because I knew I’d lied to you.’
Her voice sounded trembly. ‘Are you OK?’ I asked.
‘Yes. But I’m very, very nervous about admitting what I did, and I know some people may be shocked. But I will feel relief, too, that it is finally out there and I can get on with my life without worrying that one day it may all come back to haunt me.’
Katherine told me she didn’t even know what drugs looked like when she first went to live in London in 1997 to study at the Royal Academy of Music. She was in her late teens, fresh-faced and woefully uneducated as to the sleazy ways of clubland life in the capital.
‘I was very naive about things like drugs,’ she said. ‘There was nothing like that around where I grew up. I never saw a drug or even knew what they looked like.
‘But when I started going out in London, I slowly became aware that when I went to parties, or went clubbing, a lot of people were taking drugs. I didn’t know what was going on to start with, because I’d never seen anyone take drugs. And I was quite shocked initially when I finally realised what they were doing. A lot of people I was around at the time were taking drugs openly when we went out together, and
I resisted for a long time but after a while I just joined in.’
Katherine’s first narcotic experience came at a friend’s house after a hard night on the town.
She recalled: ‘We’d all been drinking and when we got back to my friend’s house, I was offered cocaine by someone. Having said no so many times before, curiosity just got the better of me and I said yes. I thought it would be fun, because everyone else seemed to be having a good time after taking cocaine.
‘It wasn’t what I thought it would be like,’ she said. ‘I thought it would have some massive, dramatic effect on me but it didn’t. It made me feel powerful though and I felt like I had so much energy. I became really talkative too – even more than usual, if you can believe that!’
Katherine laughed, a little nervously, at her attempt to bring a bit of levity to the conversation. I could tell she was hating every second of having to do this, but at the same time knowing in her heart that it was better in the long run to come clean now.
‘I tried one line of cocaine that first time. I’m not going to blame anyone else for giving it to me, or even say who it was. I take responsibility for my own actions and always will. I took cocaine a handful of times more after that, maybe five or six. It was usually in private at friends’ houses, though I did once take it in the loo of a London club.’
How much did she take?
‘I’d take up to three lines a night, a bit of a lightweight compared to some of them!’
At which point, she half-laughed again. I felt sorry for her – this was not an interview Katherine ever thought she’d be giving and she was trying to deal with it in the same cheery way she deals with normal interviews, while knowing that the subject matter was as far from cheery as you can get.
It didn’t take long for the drugs to reveal their ugly side.
Katherine said: ‘The truth about drugs like cocaine is that after a while you see what it does to people around you and it’s not pretty, is it?’
Katherine’s career hadn’t kicked off properly at the time, leaving her doing the odd gig and spending the rest of the time teaching others to sing – and partying.
‘I was young and silly and never really thought about the consequences,’ she admitted.
‘I did not know I’d ever become famous, and I was at an age where you don’t care about the future much, do you?
‘I just liked going out with friends, getting drunk on too many Malibus and Cokes, and then someone would usually produce some drugs and occasionally I would take some.
‘I was hanging around with a bad crowd. Coming from where I come from, it tends to take me a while to see the bad in people. I was very trusting, and keen to please. I never really enjoyed taking drugs, it just made me fit in better. But I normally like to be in control of everything and I look back on that time and think, “What was that about?”
Did guilt set in?
‘Yes, I felt very guilty when I was doing it. I worried about what my family would think if they found out. I wasn’t happy with the situation, and I didn’t really understand the consequences of what I was doing because I had never been around, or involved with, drugs before in any way. It was all new to me.’
Following the highs of the parties, there always came the inevitable sickening lows afterwards.
‘After taking cocaine, I felt absolutely terrible. It was like the worst hangover in the world times ten, times a hundred. And I’d not be in a good mental place afterwards either. I’d feel depressed and paranoid, it was awful. And I was shocked that something could affect me in such a massive way like that. I’d feel horrible for at least a day, sometimes longer.’
Cocaine was not the only drug with which she experimented.
‘I also tried Ecstasy and MDMA, which is the powder form of Ecstasy. That had a totally different effect, a really massive one. I took half a pill the first time, and it made me feel excited, passionate, in love with everyone and everything, and really happy, very very happy. I took Ecstasy pills after that four or five times, and MDMA too. But afterwards that made me feel worse than cocaine. I didn’t want to live the next day, it made me feel so depressed. It was horrible, just horrible.’
On other nights, she tried cannabis.
‘I never smoked it, I just used to eat these cakes with cannabis in them. I did that seven or eight times. I can’t remember the exact number. It seems so long ago now. It just made me feel relaxed and sleepy. And slightly out of control again.’
Just when her life seemed to be spiralling out of control in a booze and drug-fuelled haze, Katherine got the break that would change her life for ever, and perhaps even save it.
At the age of 23, in 2003, she was offered a six-album deal by Universal Records worth over £1million.
It was one of the biggest contracts ever signed by a new classical music star in Britain and pitted Katherine directly against Charlotte Church as the new queen of the mass-market aria.
But lurking behind the tearful smiles on that astonishing day was the long, dark cloud of Katherine’s other, secret life. And she took an instant decision.
‘I knew in that moment that I had to stop taking drugs,’ she said.
‘I’d been given this amazing opportunity and I just couldn’t let myself mess it all up for the sake of cocaine or Ecstasy.’
Katherine resolved to quit the partying and braced herself for a meeting with the one person whose opinion she valued above all others – her mother.
Katherine said: ‘We have a great relationship, and I wanted to be honest with her. I went back home to Wales, sat her down and told her about the drugs. And she was shocked and asked me why I’d done it and wanted to make sure I wasn’t still taking them. I said I wasn’t, and wished I never had, and would never, ever take them again.
‘And then she just gave me a disapproving look that said it all – it was like, ‘KATHERINE!’
Her mother was the only relative that Katherine confided in. Her father had died a few years before.
‘I didn’t tell anyone else in the family because I have young cousins and didn’t want them to be influenced by what I’d done. But I will tell them about this before it comes out. And I will tell them that I regret it massively. I would want anyone thinking twice about trying drugs to read this and think, “God, I don’t want to go through that.” Because I wish I hadn’t. I feel so ashamed. Drugs are dangerous and destroy lives.’
In her worst nightmares, Katherine looks at images of another gifted young singer and sees the way her life might have gone if her music deal hadn’t happened.
She said: ‘Look at Amy Winehouse. She’s an amazing talent but she is in such a bad way, it’s such a shame. I could have ended up like her. It’s possible. I don’t think I’d ever have got that bad, but who knows with drugs?
‘They’re frightening. And that’s why I feel so lucky to have stopped when I did. I was never comfortable with it and I was so fortunate that my record deal came when it did and made me realise that I might ruin everything by staying in this disgusting situation.
‘Drugs just disgust me now. I have nothing to do with them. And I have no family or friends who have anything to do with them either. I just stopped seeing anyone who used drugs. I’m so anti, it’s unbelievable!’
She must, I suggested, come across some narcotic-enhanced individuals on her travels in the music industry.
‘I do see people in the business under the influence of drugs occasionally, of course I do. You just don’t get much of it at the Classical Brits...’
I laughed. ‘I don’t think we’ve had a cocaine, Ecstasy and cannabis scandal rocking the classical music world before. How do you think they will react?’
Katherine gasped with a mixture of unsuppressed horror and just the merest hint of hilarity.
‘Oh goodness me...I don’t want to cause a stir, I just want to be honest.’
And I believed her, on both counts.
I was curious as to what really prompted Katherine’s mea culpa. After all, it’s not every day a major star rings me to confess all about their drug-taking. Sadly.
She said: ‘I didn’t like the fact that I lied to you in that GQ interview. I felt really bad about it. It’s always better to be honest about your life, and I hadn’t been. Now, if I can help other people by being honest about it and saying how terrible drugs made me feel, then that is hopefully one good thing that can come out of it.
‘I do feel really nervous about this coming out though and I don’t want to cause distress to my friends and family. I’m worried about how people will react, especially my fans. I want them to know that this was something I did a very long time ago, and that I live my life very differently now and I am very dedicated to what I do.
‘I hardly even drink any more. This was a very silly period in my life, and I hope nobody is hurt or upset by it.
‘I haven’t taken drugs for well over five years and I wish I never had. I really do.’
Katherine’s boyfriend, Welsh TV presenter Gethin Jones, is totally behind her confession.
‘He has been very supportive. He thinks I am doing the right thing.’
As we finished our extraordinary conversation, I congratulated Katherine on setting the record straight. It’s always, always the best policy for any celebrity to correct lies they have perpetrated to the media.
‘How bad will it be for me next week?’ she asked.
‘Well put it this way,’ I replied, ‘probably not half as bad as Jonathan Ross or John McCain’s week is going to be.’
And Katherine laughed again, in that delightfully natural way that has, together with her regular trips to perform for British troops abroad, made her the modern day Vera Lynn.
She never cried during the interview, never shirked a question, and never asked for any sympathy. She just said what she wanted to say, and that was that.
And while you may not admire her drug-taking, it’s hard not to admire the courage it took to talk about it in such a frank and self-condemnatory way.
Later, I dug out the tape of our GQ interview and chuckled at the following exchange:
Q. ‘Is there a devil hiding inside you, Saint Katherine?’
A. ‘That’s for me to know, and you to find out, Piers...’
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