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I'll never get over the way Simon Cowell treated me. If I'd been Liam Payne's age it might have finished me: Steve Brookstein breaks silence on truth of what happened after he won X Factor - and the 'vindictive' final blow
Wembley, it certainly wasn't. It also wasn't clear whether the patrons of The Courtyard pub in Morpeth had any idea of the identity of the crooner entertaining them on a Sunday evening last month.
Because while next week marks 20 years since Brookstein, now 56, won the reality TV show – securing a £1million record deal in front of ten million ITV viewers – it's apparent the experience of finding fame through Cowell is one that deeply affected him. He tells me he is only now over the trauma of being humiliated onscreen by X Factor judges Sharon Osbourne and Louis Walsh, who dubbed him 'a fake' and a 'pub singer', and then branded a national loser after being brutally dropped by Cowell's record label within a year. Indeed, on December 11, the actual date of the anniversary, Brookstein – who is happily married to his wife of 18 years, jazz singer Eileen Hunter, and has two teenage children – will be singing in a west London coffee shop.
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