demanding they just come out and tell her. Dappy told her to sit down and prepare for some bad news. He then said: ‘Are you ready for this? B’s dead.’ Tulisa’s body went immediately into shock. She felt her heart rate soar as the news sunk in. Her last memory was a fear that she was going to have a heart attack. Then she remembers falling and someone holding her as she sank to the ground. She eventually came to and became hysterical. She cried floods of tears and made the sort of loud wailing noise that is only ever made by someone in the immediate stages of grief.
‘I couldn’t stop it,’ she recalled in Against All Odds . ‘They took me out on to a patch of grass outside and I kept crying hysterically.’ After a while she composed herself and faced the obvious reality that while she had lost an uncle and a mentor, her band-mate Dappy had lost something even more intensely precious – a father. So she hugged him and offered her condolences. At the time, she remembered later, Dappy was absolutely cold with grief. There was no crying or outward signs of grieving; instead he was ‘numb’, she said. They got a lift home and sat in silence in the back seat of the car. It was a beautiful spring evening and they were sitting in the back of a convertible car with the roof down. What should have been an almost idyllic experience was instead laced with tragedy. They held hands and dealt silently with their emotions.
The following day the band was booked to perform a live show. Initially, they felt they were unable to fulfil the booking. However, with Fazer taking the lead in this, the band decided that they would honour the commitment. B had worked so hard to get them where they were. Surely pressing on with their career was the only way to honour him. Indeed, as Fazer reminded Tulisa and Dappy, B had seemingly died while waiting to see the band’s video on television. When they took to the stage their emotions were raw. His supportive presence from the wings was a stark omission. At the end of the show they were pleased to have honoured not just the booking, but the memory of their father and uncle. Then the sense of grief came flooding over them once more.
For Tulisa, grief was not the only challenging emotion. She almost felt a sense of responsibility, bordering on guilt. Even though the two had settled their differences before he died, she still felt that the pressures of working for the band had made him ill, and ultimately claimed his life. She wrote in Against All Odds : ‘All the stress and pressure that came from getting us to where we were pretty much killed him, so he died for our success.’ Strong words and a sentiment echoed by Fazer in the song ‘Papa’, where he sings: ‘It’s like you sacrificed your life, for the love of success and a life full of stress.’ He repeated the sentiment in the same book as Tulisa. Dappy was hardest hit, of course. He too felt that B’s death had been caused in part by his efforts on their behalf. ‘Obviously, we never had much money and he spent it all and got unhealthy, just smoking and the stress of thinking, “Am I going to get them to the top?”’ said Dappy. He was left feeling very alone in the world. ‘He guided me for 18 years,’ he said a few years later. ‘He was my dad and my best friend, that’s why I called him B, never Dad. When he died I was lost.’ All three band members continue to this day to be guided and motivated in their lives by their memories of their hero.
The band needed to face these horrific emotions together. The loss of B made them closer and tighter as people and as a band. Remarkably, even in death, B was firing them onwards and fuelling their energy and ambition. An early watershed moment in the post-B era came when they won a MOBO award. It was in the Best UK Newcomer category, which had been voted for by viewers of the ITV local news programme London Tonight . They were up against Tinchy Stryder, Mutya Buena, Sadie
‘I couldn’t stop it,’ she recalled in Against All Odds . ‘They took me out on to a patch of grass outside and I kept crying hysterically.’ After a while she composed herself and faced the obvious reality that while she had lost an uncle and a mentor, her band-mate Dappy had lost something even more intensely precious – a father. So she hugged him and offered her condolences. At the time, she remembered later, Dappy was absolutely cold with grief. There was no crying or outward signs of grieving; instead he was ‘numb’, she said. They got a lift home and sat in silence in the back seat of the car. It was a beautiful spring evening and they were sitting in the back of a convertible car with the roof down. What should have been an almost idyllic experience was instead laced with tragedy. They held hands and dealt silently with their emotions.
The following day the band was booked to perform a live show. Initially, they felt they were unable to fulfil the booking. However, with Fazer taking the lead in this, the band decided that they would honour the commitment. B had worked so hard to get them where they were. Surely pressing on with their career was the only way to honour him. Indeed, as Fazer reminded Tulisa and Dappy, B had seemingly died while waiting to see the band’s video on television. When they took to the stage their emotions were raw. His supportive presence from the wings was a stark omission. At the end of the show they were pleased to have honoured not just the booking, but the memory of their father and uncle. Then the sense of grief came flooding over them once more.
For Tulisa, grief was not the only challenging emotion. She almost felt a sense of responsibility, bordering on guilt. Even though the two had settled their differences before he died, she still felt that the pressures of working for the band had made him ill, and ultimately claimed his life. She wrote in Against All Odds : ‘All the stress and pressure that came from getting us to where we were pretty much killed him, so he died for our success.’ Strong words and a sentiment echoed by Fazer in the song ‘Papa’, where he sings: ‘It’s like you sacrificed your life, for the love of success and a life full of stress.’ He repeated the sentiment in the same book as Tulisa. Dappy was hardest hit, of course. He too felt that B’s death had been caused in part by his efforts on their behalf. ‘Obviously, we never had much money and he spent it all and got unhealthy, just smoking and the stress of thinking, “Am I going to get them to the top?”’ said Dappy. He was left feeling very alone in the world. ‘He guided me for 18 years,’ he said a few years later. ‘He was my dad and my best friend, that’s why I called him B, never Dad. When he died I was lost.’ All three band members continue to this day to be guided and motivated in their lives by their memories of their hero.
The band needed to face these horrific emotions together. The loss of B made them closer and tighter as people and as a band. Remarkably, even in death, B was firing them onwards and fuelling their energy and ambition. An early watershed moment in the post-B era came when they won a MOBO award. It was in the Best UK Newcomer category, which had been voted for by viewers of the ITV local news programme London Tonight . They were up against Tinchy Stryder, Mutya Buena, Sadie
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