The king of pop

WILL.I.AM is the new king of pop.

The Black Eyed Peas frontman has sold an estimated 30 million records, worked with some of the biggest superstars in music and provided Cheryl Cole with a shoulder to sob on when her marriage fell apart.

Above all, he’s that rare pop star who is impossible to pin down. Raised in rough and tumble east Los Angeles, the artist who signs his cheques Williams James Adams has that unusual knack of surprising you just when you think you’ve got him pinned down. One minute he’s hip swivelling his way through a saucy dance routine with BEP singer Fergie (this, lest we forget, is the chap who wrote that swooning paean of feminine beauty, My Humps). The next he’s campaigning on behalf of Barack Obama, or exchanging fist-bumps with close chum Bono.

Last year, he became a tabloid fixture on account of his friendship with Cole. If rumours are to be believed, the 35-year-old was hopelessly besotted with the sometime Girl Aloud, going so far as to name her the person he’d most like to share a fish supper with (dizzying praise you’ll agree).

“Cheryl Cole is the most beautiful woman in the world,” he was moved to declare at another point (we hope Nadine Coyle was out of earshot at the time). A few months later, he whisked her off to LA to work on her second album, Messy Little Raindrops.

Of all his friendships, however, the one that has attracted the most attention is that with Michael Jackson. In the summer of 2006 he and Jackson worked on material together at Grouse Lodge studio, Westmeath, where Jackson and his family were living in semi-exile. “I spent a lot of time with Michael Jackson in Dublin,” Will.i.am declared at Black Eye Peas’ O2, Dublin show last spring. “Out of all the places he’d been to, he loved Ireland most of all.”