To look at Sammy-Jo, a successful singer and drummer, you would never guess the dark past that lies behind her beautiful confident exterior. Sammy-Jo tells us about her childhood of obesity and bullying.
"As a teen I absolutely hated school. At 5ft 8 I weighed 16 stone and I got bullied almost daily. I’d be walking down the corridor past a group of lads and they’d shout out things like ‘fat cow’. I remember once, when I was about 14, I was in the gym and had left my shoes in the changing room. When I went to put them on at the end of class, somebody had written ‘Wide Load’ on the backs of them in tippex. It wouldn’t rub off, so I had to walk all the way home from school.
I was mortified. I wasn’t always overweight. Ironically it wasn’t until I started school that I started to plump up. I loved school dinners, whilst other children avoided them, I’d eat burgers, custard, puddings, fish fingers. I loved it all. The more weight I gained the more I ate to comfort myself. It was a vicious circle. To make things worse, school blazers came in woollen or polyester. I was a size 20 and couldn’t get a woollen blazer in my size, so I had to have a polyester one from an outsized shop.
As the bullying became unbearable, I started to bunk off. I’d go to the local town and sit in a café and eat chips and smoke. I started smoking because I so desperately wanted to be cool. I was only about 13 or 14 but it was my way of controlling things. I had a couple of friends, but my gang were the overweight gang of friends. We banded together and were bullied together. When the bullying first started I used to cry. But after a while I’d say "I know, and?" I felt more empowered saying that than crying and I actually started to get quite mouthy.
At 15 years old, I’d been bullied for 4 years straight and had had enough. I needed something to escape to and it came in the form of music. Mum took me to Joy Reynolds school which was a room in an old Cathedral church on Tuesdays for half an hour every week to learn to sing. I absolutely loved it. It was something fun to do having had such a miserable day at school. I eagerly looked forward to my Tuesdays and began to get really good at singing.
One day, the place was really empty and I saw a drum kit standing on its own in a deserted room. I sneaked in and started to play. The minute I pounded out the first beat on the drums I fell in love. It felt so natural to hold the drumsticks in my hands. Before long I had mastered several beats. I begged and begged my mum to get me a drum kit, but like most mums, the idea of having a drumming teen in the house didn’t appeal. The answer was always a stern ‘No’.
It became obvious that music was my passion and my parents asked me if it was something I wanted to do as a profession. Because school was such a negative experience for me, I kept my music separate from it. I didn’t study music in school and didn’t do very well in my GCSEs. Music was all I was interested in.
When it came to work experience I took the opportunity to spend 3 weeks at Darnall Music Factory in Sheffield. For the first time, I started comparing myself with the likes of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. They were all thin. There was nobody like me in the world I wanted to be in. I was 15 years old at the time. One day my mum told me I needed to lose weight and I cried and cried. I had never confided in somebody about the years of bullying and it all came flooding out. From that point, my mum decided to help me lose weight. We started with me giving up pop. I was drinking five or six cans a day, so cutting it out altogether made a huge difference straight away.
At that time, we moved into a new house which happened to have a swimming pool and I found that I loved swimming. I’d come home and swim every night, without knowing it, the pounds started to drop off me, I was getting thinner. When I reached a size 14 and hit a brick wall. I’d done so well and now I wasn’t losing anymore. My mum was brilliant, she really took control and stopped me eating things I shouldn’t.
I remember auditioning for popstars the rivals. I didn’t even get through to sing in front of Simon Cowell and Gerry Haliwell simply because of my weight. It was so disheartening, but it spurred me on even more to lose the weight. I really upped the exercise, I started running every day as well as swimming and I ate healthier. I was really starting to have the body I’d always dreamed of. It wasn’t easy, but it was sheer determination and my passion for music that got me slim in the end.
At sixteen I went away to the Christine Holmes Performing arts school in Penrith. It wasn’t what I had expected, so we got our money back and my dad suggested I just audition for things myself. Him and my mum sponsored me and I started my own business.
One Christmas my parents asked me to pop upstairs for dad’s slippers and when I opened the door to my bedroom, there was a shiny new drum kit there waiting for me. I showed my parents what I could do and they were really impressed. With practice I’d taught myself a fair bit and my parents decided to find me a proper teacher. Luckily my old Singing teacher Jack Lewis could play the drums as well so he would come to the house and give me one to one tuition once a week.
By the age of about 19 I had slimmed down to a size 12. I met an A&R guy who told me "You can’t do singing and drumming, you’ll have to choose". I was annoyed about being put in a corner, so I dropped the A&R guy and went ahead and did drumming and singing together anyway. Years of being bullied had made me determined. I did it and it became my USP. I set myself up in my room and practiced singing and drumming at the same time. It actually came really naturally.
At that point I decided to get myself a backing band and invite all the A&R people to a show case. I rehearsed for three weekends on the trot and spent about £2000 getting the night together. On the night just one person turned up. He is now my manager. He suggested we went to America. I was really scared but excited. I wrote some tracks and chose producers in Nashville and Norway. I wanted the best ones and it didn’t matter to me that they were miles apart. It was at the Austin Festival in Nashville that I met Chris, he only lived 40 miles from where I lived back home, which seemed really bizarre. We really hit it off and he’s now the lead guitarist in my band. He already knew Lee from back home and he joined the band too.
Everything seemed to slot into place so naturally. We even thought of the name for the band on the way home on the plane from Sheffield being such a cold city and us feeling like Eskimos. Since then we’ve gone from strength to strength. Single was released on 12th Feb and I’m really hoping loads of people will buy it!"
To look at Sammy-Jo, a successful singer and drummer, you would never guess the dark past that lies behind her beautiful confident exterior. Sammy-Jo tells us about her childhood of obesity and bullying.
"As a teen I absolutely hated school. At 5ft 8 I weighed 16 stone and I got bullied almost daily. I’d be walking down the corridor past a group of lads and they’d shout out things like ‘fat cow’. I remember once, when I was about 14, I was in the gym and had left my shoes in the changing room. When I went to put them on at the end of class, somebody had written ‘Wide Load’ on the backs of them in tippex. It wouldn’t rub off, so I had to walk all the way home from school.
I was mortified. I wasn’t always overweight. Ironically it wasn’t until I started school that I started to plump up. I loved school dinners, whilst other children avoided them, I’d eat burgers, custard, puddings, fish fingers. I loved it all. The more weight I gained the more I ate to comfort myself. It was a vicious circle. To make things worse, school blazers came in woollen or polyester. I was a size 20 and couldn’t get a woollen blazer in my size, so I had to have a polyester one from an outsized shop.
As the bullying became unbearable, I started to bunk off. I’d go to the local town and sit in a café and eat chips and smoke. I started smoking because I so desperately wanted to be cool. I was only about 13 or 14 but it was my way of controlling things. I had a couple of friends, but my gang were the overweight gang of friends. We banded together and were bullied together. When the bullying first started I used to cry. But after a while I’d say "I know, and?" I felt more empowered saying that than crying and I actually started to get quite mouthy.
At 15 years old, I’d been bullied for 4 years straight and had had enough. I needed something to escape to and it came in the form of music. Mum took me to Joy Reynolds school which was a room in an old Cathedral church on Tuesdays for half an hour every week to learn to sing. I absolutely loved it. It was something fun to do having had such a miserable day at school. I eagerly looked forward to my Tuesdays and began to get really good at singing.