The coolest popstar on Earth

For me, it’s Nicola Roberts. (I try to come up with a less bombastic title next time, I promise.) I’m male and heterosexual, so I have to start with this: she’s incredibly beautiful. Now with that out of the way, we can concentrate on what makes her so cool.

When I got to know Girls Aloud, she almost instantly became my favourite from the group. It wasn’t her looks, not even her talent that appealed to me. (I only found out later that she’s the best looking one, also the best singer and songwriter among them.) Come to think of it, in the early years of the band you could barely hear her sing on the well known songs, she didn’t have the most screen time in the promotional and live videos to say the least, and she stayed mostly quiet during interviews, so there wasn’t much to notice. But there was just something wonderfully unusual about her. No, not the red hair.

Then I started to notice small things, like when they had to play football on telly, she often scored. When they had to guess, she won. And I have 2 particular favourite TV moments of her, where I have to go into details.

1)   They appeared in a video as mechanics working in a garage (the song, “Long Hot Summer” was intended for a car-themed movie which didn’t happen after all), and the interviewer asked them to identify a car part, expecting them to say something like “how would we know?” She doesn’t only know the answer (which is quite cool in itself), when Sarah says she used to have a job delivering car parts, she adds a killer comment of “you should’ve known what it was then”. 
2)   Cheryl tells a story about dropping her phone into a toilet, and Nicola helping her out, rescuing the important object right out of her wee. Again, impressed already, but when Cheryl says she wouldn’t have done it for her, the nonchalant way she adds “I know” is just unbeatable.

I always liked how unpretentious she was, how she only took part if she wanted to, and refused to act all smiley and happy, when she wasn’t. I liked it even more that when she faced a problem, she tried to solve it, rather than waiting for someone else to do something about it. She didn’t have proper make up for her complexion, so she created one. She was concerned about tanning, so she made a TV documentary about the dangers and helped producing a bill to ban under 18s from using sun-bed. Lest we forget about music, I especially liked that when she got the opportunity to make her own solo album, she didn’t try to please an audience or a record company, she wrote about subjects she wanted to, and made the kind of music she liked, not the kind that would fit in with what was on the charts at the time.

Happy birthday, Miss Roberts!