From ladette to lady: Zoë Ball on why giving up the party lifestyle saved her marriage
She was the original ‘ladette’, famed for her wild lifestyle and drunken antics, but now presenter Zoё Ball gets her kicks by going to bed before 9pm and watching repeats of Inspector Morse. So how’s she coping back on the summer festival circuit? These days, she tells Judith Woods, it’s more fluffy robes and room service than mud and mayhem
'The first few years of my marriage to Norman were just one long party. But we lost sight of each other in the melee,' says Zoë
How cool is Zoë Ball? So cool that she was a poster girl for the ladette movement in the 1990s, bagged the nation’s hippest DJ Norman Cook (aka Fatboy Slim), was photographed on her wedding day in 1999 in a groovy Stetson swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniels, had a baby (Woody), then an affair, went off the rails a bit, went back on them again, had another baby (Nelly), and is now so joyfully teetotal that she makes me feel sneakily envious.
As she strides into the YOU photo shoot looking about eight feet tall in Comptoir des Cotonniers teal skinnies and cork-wedged moccasins, she fizzes with the sort of clear-eyed energy that, once you pass 40, only comes with being tucked up in bed by 9pm with tea, toast, hubbie and a repeat of Inspector Morse. Really. But the way she tells it, it sounds so, well, cool. ‘Oooh, we love our early nights, we do,’ says Zoë, 40, who presents the Saturday 6am show on Radio 2 and is fronting this summer’s music festival coverage on Sky Arts. Whether she can stay awake late enough for the headline acts is a moot point, however.
‘There’s nothing like settling down under the covers with a snack to watch telly, get lots of sleep and, best of all, enjoy the fact that there’ll be no hangover in the morning. Heaven!’ she says.
‘I used to be queen of the all-nighter, now I start shouting at the telly if I see a film scheduled to
start at 11.20pm – that’s a ridiculous time to begin anything. I adore dramas and whodunnits, but Norm draws the line at Midsomer Murders.’
It’s something of a relief that Norm retains a scintilla of street cred, given that he is still one of the most sought-after DJs on the planet and is about to work in South America for three weeks while
Zoë holds the fort – a to-die-for beach-front art-deco house in Hove, East Sussex. In the old days, the wild days (actually a decade, more or less), when everyone was invited to join the revelry, she would have jetted off with him and an entourage of friends. No longer.
From left: Zoë in Florida with son Woody in January; with Norman at their wedding in 1999
From left: With friend and fellow DJ Sara Cox in 2001; With dad Johnny
Leaving hospital with baby Nelly, January 2010
‘Not drinking [they both turned teetotal in 2009] has made our lives much calmer. Woody is ten now and says he misses all the comings and goings and excitement,’ says Zoë with a chuckle. ‘We used to have major fancy-dress parties – Norm has a fetish for dressing up as a bumble bee and we have
three cupboards crammed with costumes – but at New Year it was our children and their friends who got dressed up, which is how it should be.’
Life on the wagon has given Zoë considerably more than a clear head at breakfast. Her daughter Nelly, now 15 months old, she describes as a ‘little gift of sobriety’, whose unexpected arrival coincided with cleaning up her proverbial act. Having tried for eight years to have a sibling for Woody without success, they considered adoption, but felt (damningly but no doubt correctly) that they might not be considered suitable. Then they talked about but decided against IVF.
‘We’d only just got sober, which is no easy thing, and going through fertility treatment would have been horribly stressful. When we went on holiday I found myself thinking “three is great”. Then I discovered that I was pregnant three months after giving up alcohol and I was really scared that it would ruin what we had, what we were rebuilding, but I feel so amazed and blessed to have this beautiful little person. She’s generally chilled, although a bit minxy too – she gets a real gleam in her eye when she’s up to mischief.
‘But the thing that has completely blown me away is the huge difference between boys and girls – it’s absolutely innate. Woody is into Lego and Star Wars. Nelly is already obsessed with shoes and clothes and hair clips, and she’s so nurturing – anything that stays still long enough will be put to bed with a tea towel as a blanket,’ she says.
So far so blissful on the domestic front, and Zoë repeatedly emphasises that in all things, family comes first. But happily her presenting career is once again on an upward trajectory after a meteoric rise (the children’s show Live & Kicking, the ultimate glittering prize of being the first female Radio 1 breakfast-show presenter) stuttered to a premature halt when she pretty much crashed and burned after she had Woody, abruptly giving up her day job and moving to the South Coast in 2000. Marital problems soon surfaced, and in 2003 Zoë had an affair with DJ Dan Peppe and left Norman.
‘Our first few years of marriage were insane but brilliant – we’ve got enough distance from it
all to be able to acknowledge and appreciate what a great time we had, and we wouldn’t change that. It was one long party and we were constantly surrounded by loads of people. But we lost sight of each other in the melee. I was working in London, Norm was abroad, and we let go of each other. You’ve got to make time and make an effort for any relationship to work.’
After Zoë left, Norman showed his mettle by speaking publicly of his love for her and laying his pride on the line by asking his wife to come home. ‘Norm was so strong and wise,’ says Zoë quietly. ‘Not only is he a fabulous dad – so funny and silly – he is a steadfast person. One of the first things that made me fall in love with him was the fact that he didn’t need me, that he was content and didn’t crave support or affirmation. He stood on his own two feet and made his own decisions.’
Zoë returned home, but the heavy-duty socialising that had driven them apart continued. By then she had become ‘that woman at the party who buttonholes people and drones on, repeating herself and shouting a bit too loud’. It was not the self-image she wanted. ‘I was a binger. Nothing at all and then I’d drink anything and go crackers and not know when to stop or when to go home,’ she says. On New Year’s Day in 2009, after the mother of all house parties at her home, she found herself surveying the wreckage, sobbing, alone, scared that she was destroying herself. Although she fights shy of using the term ‘alcoholic’, preferring ‘a mess’, it’s not an unreasonable inference.
‘There is nothing I love more than watching bands in the open air, under the stars’
‘I found an amazing therapist who helped me to stop drinking and Norm followed a few months later. It was hard, very hard, and even now when I’m on holiday and I see a waiter pass by with a tray of margaritas, it almost kills me. But I’ve reached the point where I can be around friends having a drink, even in my house, and it’s fine. I won’t even have one because I’m too much of an all-or-nothing person.’
Zoë may not share her mathematician-father Johnny’s flair for numbers and science, but she has, arguably, inherited something much more precious – his likability gene. There’s an openness, a guilelessness about her that invariably makes people warm to her. Boasting to Radio 1 listeners that she hadn’t been to bed wasn’t big and wasn’t clever, but she was mercifully free of the attitude and mouthiness that made many of her ladette peers grate on the nerves.
She’s still friends with Sara Cox and Mel Sykes, both now mothers too. But get-togethers involve barbecues on the beach and hearty games of rounders rather than partying. The home bar
has been torn out and replaced with a gym and when guests come to stay Zoë jokes that there
will be basket weaving at 9am followed by group therapy at noon.
After a TV comeback on Strictly Come Dancing in 2005 (she came a creditable third) and presenting jobs on Strictly Dance Fever, Soapstar Superstar and Grease is the Word, Zoë’s transition to Radio 2 in May 2009 was where she truly rediscovered her métier. ‘I call my listeners the Barking Larkers, because who else would be up at 6am on Saturday?’ she says fondly. ‘There are mums with babies, truckers, farmers and for some reason a lot of air hostesses. I also stand in for Ken Bruce and Dermot O’Leary. I’m like a supply teacher,’ she adds, with typical self-effacement. ‘It’s a wonderful place to work, except maybe when Jeremy Vine suddenly asks my opinion on the Libyan crisis on air and I haven’t a clue what to say. We’ve listened to Radio 2 in our house for years; my son sings the jingles and he was really upset when Terry Wogan left – he’s a ten-year-old Tog, one of Terry’s Old Geezers.’
Hopefully Zoë’s summer of festivals (‘my absolute dream job’) will expose Woody to a more contemporary music scene. ‘There is nothing I love more than watching bands in the open air, under the stars in some of Britain’s most beautiful countryside. I’ve had some of my happiest moments in fields. I was at the Isle of Wight with Kasabian, Pulp and the Foo Fighters, doing interviews live, which is always jittery and fun. I’m covering Latitude in Suffolk next month, which will feature the English National Ballet, stand-ups and acts such as Paolo Nutini, KT Tunstall and Echo and the Bunnymen.’ This weekend, of course, there’s Glastonbury, scene of a great many personal highlights, not least a smitten slow dance in 1999 with her then new beau Norm, to the sounds of Al Green and thousands of cheering onlookers.
‘I remember once spending two days on top of an island of hay bales in a sea of mud with a load of people as it chucked down. Believe it or not, it was magical. This time I’ll be cheating by staying off site, padding about in a white fluffy robe and ordering room service.’
Age does have its privileges, then, but Zoë concedes that while hitting 40 (celebrated with nonalcoholic cocktails at Claridge’s) is liberating in that she feels the pressure to perform is off,
the milestone has brought its own challenges. Fashion in particular is now something of a minefield. ‘I’ve had that moment in Topshop, when I was holding something up against me asking my friend what she thought, and then turned round to see a 12-year-old doing the same, and the realisation hit that I should really be somewhere else. My mum’s in her 60s and she says it just gets worse. I feel I’m too old for Miss Selfridge – whenever I feel tempted I say to myself, “The clue is in the name, Zoë.” But nor am I ready for M&S, so I always end up in Whistles.’
Keeping in shape is more of a struggle too – when the paparazzi took some particularly unflattering snaps of her derrière she reacted with humour, apologising on her Radio 2 show for eating all the pies and then recklessly inflicting the resultant cellulite on the world. These days she has a personal trainer who puts her through ‘sheer hell’ up to three times a week, as well as visits to her local gym, which has a large male clientele, something that would fill most women over the age of 35 with horror. Not tomboy Zoë.
‘It does make me work that little bit harder, and they say things like, “Go on, Zoë, you’re looking
all right,” which cheers me up. If I don’t work out, I can feel myself getting flabby, but being on television is a major motivator. I do yoga, I eat well – it’s nice to feel healthy. Norm’s the same. God, we sound like 60-year-olds, but, hey, we all turn into our parents eventually, pottering about, embarrassing our children, and you can’t fight it.’ It’s a sentiment that ought to be depressing, but oddly Zoë Ball manages to make it sound – yes, you’ve guessed it – the ultimate in cool.
Zoë is presenting Sky Arts’ music festival coverage throughout the summer, continuing with Latitude Festival on 14 July, from 9.30pm on Sky Arts 1. For more details visit sky.com/arts
