My 10-year affair with Beyoncé, the teenage control freak

She is one of the biggest superstars on the planet: a £500 million pop powerhouse who is known around the world by just her Christian name,
counts Barack and Michelle Obama as friends and was personally chosen by the President to perform at his inauguration.
At 34, Beyoncé is at the top of her game. Meticulously packaged, groomed and marketed, she slavishly controls her public image – so it was a rare glimpse of the real woman behind the impenetrable mask when last week she snapped ‘Stop it’ at an assistant fussing in an attempt to stop her falling out of her pink couture outfit at a glittering charity event in New York.
But for one man, the outburst came as no surprise. Her first love, Lyndall Locke, who dated the singer for a decade from when she was a 12-year-old wannabe until they split when she toured the world with Destiny’s Child, said she had always been fixated on the pursuit of fame – and the ‘simple girl from Houston’ rapidly became a ‘control freak’.
She was focused and knew what she wanted,’ he says. ‘She’d started singing when she was five and her parents supported her. There was a Beyoncé train on the fast track to fame and you were either on it or off it. Some people fell off the train and others jumped.’
Although her marriage to fellow music star Jay Z has made her part of the most influential couples in the world, Beyoncé still describes herself as ‘just a simple girl from Houston’. However, according to Lyndall, now a chef who runs his own catering business, the truth is rather more complex. In an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, he reveals the true scope of the machine that has propelled her to stardom – a campaign orchestrated by her father, Mathew Knowles, who gave up his job and invested his life savings to making her a success, driving them to bankruptcy in the process.
Mathew ‘Big Mac’ Knowles was the mastermind of ‘Project Beyoncé’, as it was known in the family. ‘Let me tell you, there was no messing with Big Mac. He gave me the third degree about who I was and what my intentions were,’ says Lyndall. ‘He gave me the talk about “not messing anything up.” ’ Lyndall says he understood this to mean not to get Beyoncé pregnant. ‘We shared our first kiss at a Brian McKnight concert when Bey was 13. She was a little southern belle. She was an awesome kisser. We would hang out and do normal boyfriend-girlfriend things, although I was never allowed to stay over.’dailymail