Tulisa confirms N-Dubz will tour again in 2027

By Rod Minchin, PA

N-Dubz singer Tulisa Contostavlos has said the hip-hop group plan to tour again in 2027.

Contostavlos, 37, rose to fame as the vocalist for the band, which had hits with songs including I Need You, Girls and Number 1, featuring Tinchy Stryder.

Three years ago, after an 11-year hiatus, she returned to the award-winning trio with cousin Dappy and their friend Fazer, for a reunion tour, which sold out in minutes.

Speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Contostavlos said there will be more shows in 2027.

Asked if N-Dubz were planning more music, she replied: “There will be another round in 2027.

“I needed this year and some time off. We are nearly in 2026, and it’s the next year.”

The former X Factor judge was speaking at an event about her new book, Judgement, in which she talks about the high price of fame, more than a decade after her life was upended by a tabloid cocaine sting.

In 2013 undercover reporter “Fake Sheikh” Mazher Mahmood posed as a film producer and claimed the singer had said she would procure cocaine for him when he offered her a lead role in a film.

It led to the Camden-born singer being charged with being concerned in the supply of a class A drug, which she denied.

Her highly publicised trial collapsed the following year after a judge ruled it was likely that Mahmood had manipulated evidence and then lied under oath.

He was jailed for 15 months for conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

In the book Contostavlos gives her account of the newspaper sting, the trial and its aftermath.

She wrote her experiences in a diary during the trial, which she has held on to for nearly 12 years, and said she has enough material from that time to write a follow-up.

Contostavlos said she believed she had been targeted because she was a judge on The X Factor.

“I think the position that I was in, being on X Factor, it was a very high and powerful position in the commercial world of fame,” she said.

“I don’t think there was anyone as kind of open about their humble beginnings around as I was that had got to that point before.

“I was probably like the most famous, as they deemed it, ‘chav’, in England. I was in a place that was way too big for my boots and ideas above my station, and I was cocky with it as well.

“I was very confident, I wasn’t playing the game, and I annoyed a lot of people along the way.

“When I say that, when you come into this industry you come across very powerful and pervy older men that want you to play the game in certain areas.

“When someone like myself comes along, they might expect me to be grateful for my position and that I should be playing the game more than anyone.

“Instead, I would tell them to go and f*** themselves and acting in a way that was incorrect.

“There were a lot of people that wanted to take me, I think, in the words of the people involved at the time, we needed to take her down a peg or two.”

She said X Factor creator Simon Cowell was “great” at the time of the trial and afterwards invited her back on to the show as a guest judge.

“He even invited me up to Barbados with him and Lauren for a holiday. They were great and she’s amazing too,” she added.

Although Contostavlos was a judge on X Factor and appeared on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! last year, she said she would never do Strictly.

“Not a chance, not a chance. The only dancing I’m doing is to Beyonce after a half a bottle of rose,” she said.

“And with my trainers on, I just got two left feet, not my jazz.”