CHER Lloyd’s parents have spoken exclusively to your Worcester News about her stratospheric rise to fame.
Darren and Dinah Lloyd, who live in Malvern Link, left this morning for London to watch their oldest daughter perform live in front of millions of people on tonight’s X Factor.
It will be the culmination of months of auditions and Cher’s chance to show people that she is not, in her dad’s words, “a one-trick pony”.
Cher, aged 17, is the favourite to win the popular ITV show after wowing judges with her unique style and attitude – although her parents are still getting used to seeing their daughter in the papers.
Mrs Lloyd said: “It’s just amazing the hits she has had on YouTube. When we see her in the paper, we think, ‘We know that girl in the paper, we live with her’.”
Mr Lloyd said: “They’re saying now that she can break America.”
All this is just months after she was a runner-up in local competition Text Factor at Sin Bar, New Street, Worcester.
However, Cher almost didn’t enter and only submitted her X Factor application form at the last minute – and even then, she had a crisis of confidence.
Cher turned to her mum after six hours waiting to do her Birmingham audition and said: “There are thousands of people here. I don’t think I’m going to get through”.
But Mrs Lloyd – who admits she was petrified before her daughter began singing Soulja Boy’s Turn My Swag On – convinced her to go ahead. Mrs Lloyd said: “She thought she would not get anywhere.”
But she did – and it meant the family having to keep a huge secret for many months, and then going through the stress of seeing their daughter come down with tonsillitis during her audition at judge Cheryl Cole’s home.
Mrs Lloyd said her throat infection had been so bad that she was unable to tell them the good news that she was through to the final 12.
She said: “I couldn’t hear her when she called. When she told me, I just burst into tears and we just went hysterical.”
Cher herself has reassured fans that she is no longer suffering from tonsillitis, and is ready to show X Factor fans that she’s got what it takes. The teenager promised viewers they would see a different side of her tonight and that she was now “completely tip-top”.
She said: “It is very unfortunate that I was ill at that time but there is nothing I can do about it now.
“Hopefully, come Saturday, people will think, ‘Oh, actually, she has picked herself up’ and that is what I’m going to do because I’m a fighter.
“Off stage, I’m very, very nervous but as soon as I step on, that is it and I click.”
And she laughed off claims she was just a copy of her mentor Cheryl Cole, saying: “I don’t have to try to be different to her because I’m my own person and I dress how I want to dress.”
Meanwhile her family – who were speaking at their local pub the Express Inn in Quest Hills Road, Malvern Link, yesterday – has called for the community to get behind Cher and get voting.
Mrs Lloyd said: “This has been her dream for a long time. It would be amazing if people from her hometown got behind her to help make that dream come true.”
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