Susan Boyle’s voice coach worried over her future

As more details of Susan Boyle's singing history come to light, a former voice coach to the  surprise star of Britain's Got Talent has warned that Boyle risks losing her fragile voice if the hype around her continues to grow.

Fred O'Neil is said to have spotted the 47-year-old church volunteer's talent in the mid-1990s and coached her for almost six years. "I feel great about [her success]," he told the Independent. "I just feel I ought to defend her. I want to see her go about this with some space to breathe a bit and grow.
 
"As a singer she always had a lovely, calm, beautiful rounded voice. It is a very good instrument. But I am concerned about her being surrounded by all these PR people that she will not be given the time to sing.”

O'Neil believes she has not had any further voice coaching since 2002. He warned: "She is like an athlete – she has to keep using her voice to keep it. If she wants to keep on singing big show songs she has to keep on practising. It is very different from singing for a couple of minutes on Britain's Got Talent."
 
O'Neil's comments come after Scotland's Daily Record unearthed a 1999 charity CD on which Boyle sings a typically soaring version of Cry Me a River. Only 1,000 copies of the CD were ever pressed and the recording was partly funded by the Whitburn Community Council in Boyle's hometown of West Lothian. Though the CD was exceptionally low-key, pundits have said that it demonstrates that Boyle is not a one-trick pony.
 
It has also emerged that Simon Cowell, the chief judge and brains behind Britain's Got Talent, knew the Scottish spinster was going to be a global sensation some time before she appeared on TV earlier this month.

PR guru Max Clifford claims that the Britain's Got Talent production staff realised they had found something special as soon as they saw Boyle at an October 2008 audition in Glasgow. "People had their cards marked," Clifford says. "There was no question people were on to her. Simon [Cowell] was talking to me about her weeks ago. He said you have got to see the first episode. As soon as I saw it I could see it had all the ingredients." ·