It’s telling that “Cheryl” now has no surname, artistically at least. Born Tweedy, she then became Cole after marrying the England footballer Ashley Cole, then Fernandez-Versini from a brief marriage to a French restaurateur. The beginning and end of the marriages – and a subsequent relationship, now over, with One Direction’s Liam Payne, with whom she has a son – have been played out and pored over with relish on the front pages of the tabloids.
Her uneasy love life has been so high profile it came to overshadow the fact that she was, for a long time, one of the most successful female pop stars the UK has ever had: the first British woman to have five solo No 1’s to her name; the