Alesha Dixon’s last laugh-label axing and Harvey affair to TV fame and true love

A teenage Alesha Dixon was originally planning to train as a PE teacher at Loughborough University before a chance meeting at a London dance studio changed everything.

It was in 1997 that Alesha – who turns 42 today – met fellow singer Sabrina Washington at Dance Attic in Fulham. With Su-Elise Nash they went on to form Mis-Teeq and sell 12 million records worldwide, have seven consecutive top-ten singles and perform at the Queen’s Jubilee.

At the top of her game, in 2004 Alesha was even chosen as the star of N.E.R.D’s video to She Wants To Move and in 2005 she quit the band to go solo.

Her first single, Lipstick, from her Fired Up album went to number 14, but when her follow-up Knockdown limped in at number 45, she was savagely dropped by her record label Polydor – an experience she later told the BBC was “scary and horrible.”

But more heartache was to come when within a matter of weeks her husband of just one year, So Solid Crew star MC Harvey, admitted he’d been having an affair with Popstars: The Rivals’ Javine Hylton.

The pair met starring in West End musical Daddy Cool and were caught when Javine’s ex Karl ‘KG’ Gordon spotted Harvey’s car outside her house and phone Alesha.

Devastated, the singer waited all day for her husband to come home so she could ask him face-to-face – and he didn’t try to deny it.

“He came home that night and I thought smartly, the only way I’m going to get the truth is if I calmly sit down and talk to him because if he came in and I was a raging bull I’d have got nothing out of him,” she told Piers Morgan’s Life Stories in 2014.

“He was really honest because I was really calm. I actually deserve an Oscar for that day that he came home and I asked him if he had an affair. I kept my cool I was really calm.

“Everything happens really slowly and I just remember my mum coming in, I remember telling her and I remember my mum breaking down and I was really cool.”

After two days of emotional talks, Harvey left their marital home in Hertfordshire and realised his future was with Javine. The following year Javine fell pregnant with their daughter Angel, now 12.

Keeping it classy, Alesha refused to start mud-slinging, but she was nonetheless devastated.

“Anyone who knows me knows that my music career and marriage were the most important things. And I lost them within two weeks of each other,” she previously told The Mirror.

“It was the lowest point of my life. I just kept thinking, ’What have I done to deserve this?’ I didn’t see the point in living.”

But not one to go down without a fight, the plucky star decided to take her career in her own hands and signed up for Strictly Come Dancing in 2007 – a move that completely transformed her fortunes.

“One evening a lightbulb went off in my head and the next morning I started making calls, starting to make things happen,” continued the star who went on to win the show and spark a bidding war with record companies – including Polydor – all desperate to sign her.

In the end she went with Asylum records and released platinum album The Alesha Show which spawned hit singles The Boy Does Nothing and Breathe Slow.

Two years later she replaced Arlene Phillips as a judge on Strictly and released her third album, The Entertainer, before joining Britain’s Got Talent in 2012.

An astute businesswoman, Alesha also released her own jewellery line and perfume and endorsed big brands including Ford, Toblerone and LA Fitness.

Thought to be worth around £2.8million, her career continues to go from strength to strength with judging gigs on America’s Got Talent and The Greatest Dancer.

Her personal life is also on fire. She has daughters Azura, seven, and Anaya, one, with dancer Azuka Ononye who she met on tour in 2012.

At first she played hard to get, but when Azuka nursed her through a broken foot, she knew she had found ‘The One’.

“I was kind of playing hard to get for about a year. And then I had the foot operation and I couldn’t walk and he was literally sleeping on the floor looking after me every day,” she told the Jonathan Ross Show.

“I was just looking at him thinking, ‘That is for better or for worse isn’t it.’ I looked a state, he was sleeping on the floor because I was on the couch, I couldn’t even get up the stairs. If he can carry me to the toilet then he’s a keeper.”

As for her unquestionable tenacity in the face of adversity, Alesha believes to key to success is to “never give up”.

“Personally, I never stopped believing in myself,” she told the BBC of the dark times.

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