Bankrupted by our boobs! It's a cautionary tale for every pop wannabe - the Cheeky Girls tell JAN MOIR how they spent £100,000 on nine breast operations

Oh, the Cheeky Girls are absolutely tiny, like a pair of baby ravens in high heels.



As they flutter in and out of the photo studio to smoke cigarettes, their blue-black hair falling onto their wishbone shoulders, you can see that some of the size six dresses provided today by the stylist are too big, and have been pinned at the back.



At the front however, it is a different story. At the front, the body-con dresses cling to the prominent Cheeky curves — the matching, much-prized size 32C-cup bazooms that are the result of multiple Cheeky breast enhancement operations... and a lot of Cheeky pain.



Cheeky Girls: Monica, left, and Gabriela, right, Irimia in their new look

In total, twins Gabriela and Monica Irimia, originally from the city of Cluj-Napoca in Transylvania, Romania, have undergone nine breast operations and spent over £100,000 in the process.

And they only did so, they say, because of pressure from their former record company, Telstar.

‘The thing was, we only had nipples. No cleavage, nothing whatsoever,’ says Monica. ‘The way our back is now was like our front, no joke. We were not even the size of a walnut,’ says Gabriela.



‘Not even the size of a cherry!’ cries Monica. ‘And we were not looking sexy enough for them.’

‘So basically, we bankrupted ourselves for our boobs,’ says Gabriela.



Their ever-present mother Margit, who is also their manager, nods in agreement. ‘That is exactly what happened,’ she says.



To be honest, what actually happened to the Cheeky Girls should serve as a cautionary tale for every little girl who dreams of being on a TV talent show and becoming a pop star. This is one dream that turned into a total nightmare, with health, financial and emotional repercussions that affect Gabriela and Monica to this day.



Propelled into stardom back in 2002 by their ambitious mother, it started out so well for the pancake-chested Cheeky act, who found fame on the show Popstars: The Rivals. Then it all went horribly wrong.



Twin peaks: Monica and Gabriela in their Pop Stars: The Rivals days in 2002

During the brief years of their success, they lived a kind of Cheeky Hell. In the grip of deep anorexia, the twins secretly starved themselves to 6½st apiece, causing permanent damage including arthritis in their spines and knees, ruined digestive systems and kidney stones.



‘I would have a small scale and weigh everything I ate. So in the morning I would eat exactly 30g of cereal with skimmed milk, not one flake more,’ recalls Monica.



Alone in their central London flat, or in a hotel when touring, they became so frightened of food that they never went to parties because ‘there would be canapes there’. Then their multiple boob jobs went wonky and the hits dried up.



Their mother Margit, with all the showbusiness savvy of the Hungarian midwife she once was, wasted no time in expertly steering their career straight onto the rocks.



Today, she still grumbles about the bookings agency that, yes, did get the twins a lot of work, but whom she sacked because they charged ‘too much commission’.



It comes as no surprise to learn that Gabriela and Monica were declared bankrupt in 2009, owing £60,000 in unpaid tax to the Inland Revenue. Margit huffily claims that this happened when they were ‘out of the country’.



She also says that the blame lies with the collapse of Telstar Records in 2004, claiming the company owed the Cheeky Girls £2 million.



So no money and no fun — could things get any worse? Yes. In 2008, Gabriela became engaged to Lembit Opik, then a rising star in the Lib Dem party.



It soon ended after his proposal, because Lembit went all neurotic on the core issue of their relationship. How very Lib Dem of him!



Perhaps the only consolation was that, ultimately, the Cheeky Girls lasted longer than he did. In the end, he became so obsessive that Gabriela had to hide from his telephone calls.



‘Not a very nice thing to do,’ she says, ‘but he wanted to stay on the phone for three hours, maybe more. I would speak for three minutes and the rest was him.



‘I would fall asleep on the kitchen table with the telephone to my ear at four o’clock in the morning. So tired!

‘I couldn’t handle it any more. It was way too much. He got out of control with his behaviour towards me.’



When she became unknowingly pregnant with his child and miscarried at two months, she didn’t even tell him. ‘We were splitting up at the time,’ she says.



Luckily, midwife mum was on hand. ‘I knew what was happening to Gabby because the exact same thing once happened to me,’ she says. (Is it only me, or is it getting claustrophobic in here?)



Meanwhile, Margit says she was quite happy at the prospect of having Opik as a son-in-law, even though he was 17 years older than her daughter.



‘He was young up here,’ says Margit, tapping her head. ‘So they matched from that point of view.’

Can it really be 11 years since The Cheeky Girls first stormed the charts with their unforgettable hit, Touch My Bum — a song written by their mother? Indeedy it is.



Regrettable outfits: The twins wore their signatures skimpy outfits as their pop career took off

Gabriela and Monica wore equally unforgettable silver shorts when they appeared on Popstars: The Rivals. As they wiggled their bottoms and croaked through lyrics such as ‘come and smile, don’t be shy, touch my bum, this is life’ judges Pete Waterman and Louis Walsh could only look on in horror.

Waterman later said they were the worst act he’d ever seen. But pop careers have been launched on less.



The Cheekys sold over a million copies of their debut single and had another three Top Ten hits, including (Hooray, Hooray!) It’s A Cheeky Holiday and Have A Cheeky Christmas.



Growing up in Romania, they had studied dance and gymnastics from the age of three, then classical ballet from five until 18.



During their pop career they still trained and exercised and were always disciplined and worked hard. Or ‘punish, punish, punish’ as Gabriela puts it. Today they say they were happy with their bodies until the age of 19, when ‘suddenly we had this pressure all the time to have the boobs’.



They are vague about how this demand manifested itself but admit that no one at their record company directly raised the subject with them.



Yet they felt victimised. The low point came when they made the seaside video to promote Cheeky Holiday in 2003. Telstar hired a bosomy model to run through the surf — while the Cheekys in their carefully padded bras cavorted enviously on the sand.



‘Every time I look at the video — ha! We are the artists and they brought a model for the male audience who would look at that girl and not at us,’ says Gabriela. ‘It was our video, the opportunity of our lives and we were upstaged, because we didn’t have boobs.



So they were bullying us in a way. They were,’ says Monica.



Was that really pressure? Or just how they chose to interpret it? ‘It was pressure on me as a manager,’ interrupts Margit.



Pressure: The girls felt they needed to have implants to look good in their pop videos

‘I told them that the girls get depressed and they replied to me that it was your choice, your girls don’t have boobs.’ So they embarked on a torturous process — let’s call it Operation Cheeky Tits — to get themselves some curves.



In the coming years, the Cheeky Girls would spend over £100,000 on breast augmentation operations. The first ones, carried out in London’s Harley Street, were a disaster.



Monica points to her sister. ‘Hers were the worst. One breast was up and one breast was down and they were facing different directions. She looked like a freak, honestly.’



Her own implants weren’t great, either, she says. ‘Imagine two apples stuck on you, it looked exactly like that. It looked horrible and disgusting.’ In the end, Monica had four operations and Gabriela had five.



Today they are more or less happy with the results, despite the pain and the scar tissue. ‘I’d probably still do it, so what the hell?’ says Gabriela.

Did Lembit ever say anything about her implants? ‘He always said I was beautiful and he never commented on what I had done before. If I do something to my body, it is my decision, no one else’s decision and I don’t agree with either boyfriend, friend or mum having a comment.’

Unhappy: The operations were not a success, leaving the girls with disastrous results that needed changing several times

Hmmm. So much for all that ‘pressure’ from the record company.



After all they have been through, what would they advise young women who are considering having boob jobs to do?



‘Don’t rush into it, do a lot of research and understand that just because a doctor asks for a lot of money for a boob job doesn’t actually mean they are any good. You know, I think it is better to have your boob job done on the NHS.’



To be honest, that’s not quite the answer I was hoping for — and a rather ironic response from someone who didn’t pay her tax bill.



In spite of all this, I have to say I do rather warm to the Cheekys. They are beautiful in the flesh, and oddly innocent — ‘we grew up in a bubble in Romania’ — and also funny and friendly. They have a mutual addiction to the Antiques Roadshow and take a girlish pleasure in all the dresses and shoes they try on today.



They may have been naïve pop plankton, guilelessly sailing into the jaws of the showbiz whale, but they adore their mother, despite everything. ‘We always have a great laugh with Mum,’ they say.

‘They have been terribly damaged,’ says Margit. You have to wonder: why didn’t she do more to stop the rot?



Meanwhile, the girls seem to have recovered from their ordeal. ‘Although being anorexic is like being a smoker, the craving never entirely goes away,’ warns Monica.



Cheeky romance: Lembit Opik MP with his former girlfriend Gabriela, and Monica

After cheerily admitting to never having a boyfriend or a sex life, she is now engaged to 33-year-old building contractor Shaun Taylor (they met in a Starbucks in central London) and plans to marry next year. Gabriela has a Romanian boyfriend she does not want to name. ‘He is not famous, but after having one relationship in the public eye, I don’t want another.’ She no longer keeps in touch with Opik.



Both girls sport glittering diamond solitaires on their ring fingers. ‘They get such a lot of jewellery,’ says Margit, approvingly. So take heed, little girls. That was living the dream, Cheeky style.



Weighing out breakfast cereal flake by miserable flake, too scared to go to parties because of the crisps, despairing of their wonky nipples and ruined knees, punishing themselves every day in the gym, with only a grilled mushroom to dine on (‘they swell up inside you’) and a date with Lembik Opik to look forward to at night time.



They are still working, but only just. What is Margit’s strategic plan for the Cheeky Girls’ future?

