X-Factor! Bring On The Trumpets!

Voice Over Man – does a lot of work for all channels, like E4, you probably recognise his voice, eh? – shouts over Carmina Burana that lots of people auditioned, and here we are at the live shows. All the contestants have had make-overs, but I’ll deal with those as and when. Anyway, first up in this most exciting of live shows are Girl Band, which is an oddly damp squib: they are one of the acts I am least excited by. But wait a mo! They are singing Venus, off the advert by Bananarama. Voice Over Man shouts insanely at the end of the VT, yelling their name. After the performance – which is pretty good, actually, if not sounding a tiny bit like the original – Simon berates them for going with an “obvious” song. Still, claps all round, nearly. 

Oh! Austin Drage is next! I wonder which un-obvious song Simon has chosen for him? Sting. He chose motherfudging Sting. Every Breath You Take, to be exact. Will he cry? No. Instead he’ll whimper and sound a bit nervous, only opening his voice up towards the end of the performance. It’s pretty meh, all told, unlike his makeover, which is pure Teen-emo, all black fringes and done-up-to-the-collar black shirts and black jeans. But the performance… Well, look, the judges all seemed to like it, and that’s fine. But it really wasn’t much cop, not in the grand scale of things. It’s only a couple of weeks till they’ve got him singing Fall Out Boy, I should imagine, which can only be good for him. Well, Fall Out Boy or Bon Jovi/Bryan Adams. They’re all ROCK in Simon Cowell’s world, right?

The VT for Daniel Evans is surprisingly jolly: they fail to mention his dead wife at all, which is nice for them. I hate that people are made to ’special cases’ on this show when all they want to do is sing. Sad face. Anyway, he’s going to sing I Want To Know What Love Is, which he does really oddly. Faintly.   Slightly tunelessly.  Not very well at all-y. Simon pulls a face. It’s very very very cabaret, old son. When he’s done, Louis says he doesn’t like it, but he does like his “new teeth and earring.” Simon calls it “utterly irrelevant, like somebody singing in a pub.” He’s not wrong. Louis likens him to Ricky Gervais, but he doesn’t pronounce the final syllable of the show: he pronounces it French. Careful, Lou: Cheryl don’t speak French, remember? (Sorry.) When Dermot calls him on it, he pronounces it French again. Hm.

Alexandra Burke sings in restaurants, you know. I hate restaurant singers. I hate any form of restaurant entertainment, actually: I once went to a Greek restaurant for my birthday and was forced to dance with this horrific Greek belly dancer. It was awful. Anyway, she’s singing one of the best songs ever written, Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody. She sings it really well because she doesn’t copy Whitney, which is the secret when covering that particular crack-fiend diva. She’s superb. Really, it’s a different class to the other acts thus far this evening, just a great performance all round. Surely destined for the finals, even at this early stage. Surely?

JLS appear now and tell us about their normal lives. They leave out the fact that one of them was in a boyband and supported Blue on tour – but then, if I’d been anywhere near Duncan and his syphilis I wouldn’t tell anyone either. According to Simon they have the “hardest song in the world to sing.” And that song is I’ll Make Love To You by Boys To Men. I can think of harder. The theme from Carmina Burana, for one. Good performance, though, if a tiny bit obvious. (I sound like Simon now.) When they finish the song, the crowd erupts in a flood of hormonal lava. Louis claps like he’s their collective Nan. Cheryl loves them (shocker) and says that it’s one of her favourite songs of all time (double shocker). They get good reviews all round, apart from their slightly dodgy tuning. Oh, and their name? Jack the Lad Swing, apparently. That makes even less sense.

Simon introduces Scott Bruton as being a “very very nervous young guy.” You can almost smell how much he didn’t want Scott to get through, eh?  Sinita must be terribly persuasive. Scott Bruton sounds ridiculous when shouted by Voice Over Man. Scott is singing a hyperactive version of… Hang on. I don’t know this song. It’s awful. It features “I say yeh yeh!” as the chorus.  It’s  dreadful. He’s barely singing, more speaking in time, and when he does sing it’s horrendous and weak and pained. Oh, hang on: the song is Yeh Yeh by Georgie Fame. Yeh yeh, my thoughts exactly. Still, nobody can accuse Simon of picking an obvious song, can they? “That’s the most hideous song ever on X-Factor,” Louis says. “Sack your mentor,” shouts Dannii. “That was the biggest Blue-coat song going,” says Cheryl. “I agree with them, Scott: I got this wrong,” says Simon. Scott looks like a kicked puppy. Very noble, Simon. Wait! He’s about to cry! Hang on! HE’S CRYING! Poor Scott. Send him home. 

During the ad break, the X-Factor competition does that thing where you have to ‘guess’ the word that they’ve honked out. They show a clip of Leon – remember him? from last year? he won? (I know, I thought that was Leona too! But that was two years back!) – anyway, they show Leon, and he’s still shocking. What were you playing at, last year’s viewing public? There’s also an advert for Boyzone’s greatest hits, which apparently features a B-Sides cd. I cannot fathom the quality contained therein.

Rachel Hylton is up next. You were told that she was trouble, riiiight? Anyway, she’s now got hair just like Rihanna. I didn’t know that she still had three kids in care. She’s singing a song that she claims is out of her comfort zone: Robyn’s With Every Heartbeat. Great song, AWFUL choice for Rachel. It sounds dreadfully Eurobeat here.  Simon and Louis look utterly mystified.  Cheryl calls Rachel better “than that track”. Simon calls the song “hideous.” Hm. He calls it “a cheap piece of rubbish,” which is a little unfair, although that version was quite shocking. Anyway, onto the most important thing: Rachel looks like a fatter, more-lesbiany Gabrielle in her suit. Bad look.

Diana Vickers next. “She’s like a little doll,” says Cheryl. She’s already looking a bit cleaner than she used to, which is good. Her lips have got some colour in them, making her look less like a 19th Century urchin. She’s singing With Or Without You. It’s acoustic and very quiet and very witchy. She’s being Stevie Nicks! Which is fine. She has a nice singing voice, and it’s a good performance, though I find her hands very distracting as they wave around like she’s on invisible-fire. (Was that a title of a U2 song as well? It might have been. That was unintentional.) She finishes, and it’s good, but a bit over-the-top and affected. Simon calls her the “singing version of marmite,” which is more than fair. He likes that she stands out and takes a risk. Bravo: couldn’t agree more. “You are special,” says Cheryl, and, let’s face it, she certainly looked it at times. She wasn’t wearing shoes, Dermot points out. She’ll get dirty feet like that, if they aren’t filthy already.

Right, time for Bad Lashes. Now, I hope this lot are good: for some reason I quite like them. A lot of it was their song choice last round, but that can only carry them so far. Tonight they are singing It Must Have Been Love. Good song. They perform it pretty well, actually. About the same standards as Girl Band. No, wait: It’s better. They’ve got a really good singer in there, somewhere, who keeps popping up in the mass-sung choruses. It all falls a bit at the end, but it was pretty good. Quietest cheer of the night so far, mind you. Hmmm. Cheryl “wouldn’t have chose that song,” she says, displaying fabulous Northern grammar, “I would have had you be a bit more indie,” which is totally right. Give them an Arctic Monkeys (or similar) song to sing girl-group style, and they’ll be great, I reckon. They could be the new Kenickie! God, I loved Kenickie.

Now it’s time for Ughan Eoghan Quigg. He’s at the stage in school where they choose their career, apparently. I must have missed that lesson. He’s singing Imagine! Did anyone watch American Idol last year? This is Simon trying to give us a British David Archuleta. This is horrific. I HATE this song when it gets turned into shmaltzy love song territory. Lennon wouldn’t hated this, I tells you! This is worse than when it was Idol, actually: it’s weak and slightly bland, as I’ve been arguing that this jobber is for weeks. Reedy, that’s the word. Reedy. All the judges think it was incredible. What’s wrong with them? Seriously? Are they deaf? Of just deafened by the sound of ringing cash registers? Simon says he’s proud of his little protege: I think he will try to adopt him, away from the war-torn third world of Narrrn Ireland.

Here’s Ruth Lorenzo. Will she sing in Spanish? I predict that Dannii will have given her a Gloria Estefan song to sing. Oh no! I’m wrong! She’s singing Take My Breath Away. In Spanish. Oh, for cluck’s sake. I wish she’d just sing in English. Oh! Now she is! She’s singing it quite well, but she’ll never win. Not a chance in hell. Cut to: Simon, perving at her a bit. She walks to the very front of the stage and they turn a wind machine on, blowing her hair back. I don’t know. It’s all a bit weddingy. “You definitely made an impression on me, Rachel,” says Simon, referring to his erection, and getting her name wrong in the process. “Sorry, I can’t even speak,” he says. “Louis doesn’t get you because you’re a real woman,” he says, and Louis protests (too much). “Oh, you fancy her?” asks Louis. “Absolutely!” says Simon. Maybe Terri will let him ‘do’ her? She seems like she would, if he asked nicely. Apparently she’ll be doing rock next week, according to Dannii. “NO NO NO!” yells Simon. Yeh yeh, says I. 

Last but not least, Laura (slightly off) White! She doesn’t look 17, does she? She’s looking less dirty as well. I can only assume that the girls’ stylist has banned that awful pale lipstick. She’s singing Falling, the over-played Alicia Keys song. The first note is horrendous. From there is gets better, just being a bit over-sung instead. It’s good, but over-sung. And she’s not good with high notes. Actually, this is generally quite dreadful, veering from bad R&B to sub-Bee Gees, and then ending very oversung indeed. But who cares what Big Bother thinks? This is all about the judges and the people at home, right? And Louis loves it, loves it (although he does think there’s “three or four amazing girls in your category,” a category of three), as does Dannii, and Simon. “Outstanding,” he calls it. Were they listening to something else? This happens, though, where things sound worse on telly than live. They’ll watch this back and question their judgement, I reckon. Remember Leon? Anyway, who cares, right? She’s never going home today. Not a chance. 

So, there’s your twelve. Who would you put your money on? Here at Big Bother we don’t really care. We only watch it for Simon, Louis, Dermot and Cheryl.