'Call My Name' singer Cheryl Cole has opened up about the trouble brought to her family by her older brother, Andrew, after he was sent to prison.

In her new autobiography, entitled 'Cheryl - My Story', the star talks candidly about the day that her brother discovered his father wasn't who he thought he was and how the events following the shocking news changed her family and "devastated" them:

"Is Dad my real dad?” Andrew screamed in my mam’s face. I swear the clock stopped for a second. He said someone told him in the street that my dad wasn’t his real dad. Andrew was going so berserk that he looked like a crazy person. But however mad he looked, this was sounding horribly realistic."

She continued, explaining that he turned to drugs and criminal activities: "Andrew started running away a lot too and began sniffing glue — though I couldn’t tell you exactly when his habit started. I’d lie in bed waiting for him to come home. This wasn’t the first time he’d been in trouble. He was done for thieving at 13, but the bizzies, as we called the police, were always knocking on doors all over our estate."

"When Andrew was 15 he stabbed someone in a fight [...] He got six years and was locked up in a young offenders’ institution to start with as he was too young for adult jail."

Bringing her readers up to the present day, Cheryl added that he was still in prison on her wedding day and she was heartbroken after visiting him there because he refused her help: "I went to see him in prison before the wedding. “Why can’t you stop?” I begged him. “You’re devastating the whole family. Why can’t you just change your ways?”

"He shrugged and looked me in the face. “I’m too far gone.” I left in floods of tears. I had the means to help him now if only he wanted to be helped — but he clearly didn’t. That hurt like hell."