Saturday 22 November 2008

Nice guy, cruel business

Louis Walsh
You may giggle disbelievingly and hold your face up for the metaphorical shower of pixie dust. Or you may cast a cold eye on a shabby, modern Colosseum: a brutal arena where the gladiators are desperate binmen, histrionic shop assistants, love rats, recovering addicts and the occasional mugger; where the emperors are the judges and the baying mob is, um, still the baying mob, whose breezy thumbs-up or down (or mobile phone vote) signals either a temporary reprieve or the mother of all public savagings.

For the modern gladiators, there is the pre-show "boot camp" (two or three in a room, with mentors who fly in daily from their uptown palazzos) before the nanosecond flaring in the Roman sun, or studio lights. A piquant vision of what might be theirs is offered by the weekly apparition of a god or goddess, whose words they will treasure and analyse unto the eighth generation, whose robe they may even touch.

Whoa there. Touch the robe? Mariah Carey's robe? The Mariah Carey? Are you completely insane? Listen, people, Mariah is a real-live diva, the biggest star on earth, according to X Factor guru Simon Cowell. She turns 40 next March (or not, depending on the website consulted), but all those years spent warbling and sliding interminably up and down innumerable octaves for such classics as Touch My Body have earned her 150 million album sales and barely credible diva credentials.

The sight of Mariah arriving for a soundcheck is unforgettable. For it is just you and I, dear reader, who have that privilege, along with Amy Winehouse's 13-year-old goddaughter - not counting Mariah's buzzing apiary of flouncy make-up artists, hairdressers, stylists, PR women, bodyguards, driver, record company executives, three backing singers, half a dozen band members and her new husband (busy with camera), all with their own "people" and their people's people backstage.

Dressed in a short, belted, glitter-trimmed evening coat, accessorised with 6in stiletto boots, the famously top-heavy body progresses so slowly, so tentatively towards the stage that one's heart contracts - clearly, she has been in some terrible accident and left virtually blind. Her lovely face remains fixed on the insuperable four or five steps ahead while one long, slender arm reaches unseeingly to her left, where someone's gentle hand is magically present to guide her onwards.

With pitiful deliberation, they mount the steps together and suddenly Hero (her latest wobbly single) makes perfect sense. After an aeon, she reaches centre-stage, picks up her special, glittery little microphone and finally launches into that endless lip-trembling intro.

We, meanwhile, have our own Louis Walsh sitting behind us to interpret. Without him, we and Amy Winehouse's goddaughter would not be here to witness Mariah's Calvary. Her people had demanded a "closed set" for the soundcheck, but Louis has whispered briefly in someone's ear and we're free to stay. Now that's what we call power.

But tell us, Louis, what ails poor Mariah? "Ah, did you never hear the famous story when the MTV awards were staged in Ireland and there was a stairs and the famous line came back, 'Mariah doesn't do stairs'?" Mmmh. So no visual impairment then? "Well, I don't do mornings, so that's fine," he says in sunny Louis style.

When the overawed X Factor contestants finally get to join Mariah to rehearse a ferociously angsty version of Hero, she stands aloof, while it takes three sets of intensive negotiations (too close, way too close, keep right back) before their correct distance from the diva is established. When the poor contestants pitched up at the Dorchester Hotel the day before for a kind word, she kept them waiting for three or four hours, which is probably why they still look tear-struck as she is filmed slo-o-owly descending the stairs to spout such inanities as "I really liked Daniel".

Louis shrugs forgivingly. "It's the people around her building her up into this diva," he says. Inside this Wembley bubble, however, the yawning abyss between star and wannabe is wretchedly exposed. Mariah has her own gold-coloured trailer a few feet from the studio door. The contestants share the bog-standard canteen with the rest of us. So there is the bizarre sight of oddly familiar, spangly, hair-tugging boys and girls floating around, oddly well-trained to kiss strangers on both cheeks and say "sooo nice to meet you, thank you sooo much for coming down tonight", while everyone around them is munching on their fish and chips. For regular X Factor viewers, it smacks of that quintessentially British dream where the Queen suddenly turns up for tea.

Meanwhile, Louis has given us the tour of his hip, capacious suite in the Mayfair Hotel, before settling into a gleaming Mercedes for the 45-minute journey to the studios. His nerves are on show and he talks compulsively, while Harold, the cool driver who has seen it all, mentions household names that he wouldn't have in his car because they'd only trash it.

Walsh's most endearing trait is that, deep inside, he remains the star-struck fan looking in, rather than the undoubted celebrity he has become in Britain. "You have no idea how big this whole thing is," he says repeatedly, leaving you to wonder if the boy from Kiltimagh is still getting used to the "idea" of the "whole thing" himself. Even though he gets a cool million euro a season for being a judge ("I think we're absolutely overpaid, but it is the biggest show on TV and we're obviously delivering"), it is abundantly clear that this gig is not about the money.

He drinks very little and is implacably opposed to drugs of all kinds. His office is a one-woman operation on Appian Way in Dublin. The Four Seasons in Ballsbridge is already his canteen (with his own very particular chair at a particular dining table) and he drives a black Maserati (with white interior). His properties include an apartment in Chelsea and another on Miami's South Beach, plus two on Dublin's southside, as well as a house. His art collection includes a slew of Warhols, Banksys and Le Brocquys. His holidays in Palm Beach are taken in three-week tranches three times a year.

The helicopter that lands in his sister's field in Co Mayo is not his but his brother Joseph's, he wants to point out. Joseph is proprietor of Walsh Flooring, working "really, really hard" laying wooden floors in Manhattan. "He's the flash one in the family," Louis says. A second brother, Frank, who is a tax advisor with Grant Thornton, manages Louis's money. Another brother, Eamon, is in the Garda Traffic Corps. Sarah, a sister, is a nurse in Castlebar. "They've all got real jobs except me," he says, grinning.

He has a "handful of friends" and they're not in the music business. "I don't know very many really good people. People always want something, whether it's tickets for X Factor, or they want to meet Westlife, or they want to know what Simon Cowell's really like. There's a price to be paid for everything - fame brings bad things."

Yet, in typically contradictory style, he has chosen to take on The X Factor, which has boosted his fame immeasurably in these islands and has him in a twist every week. "It's totally stressful. I want to do anything to save my act and myself. I don't want to be seen to be bad at my job," he says with his trademark boyish shrug.

His obsessive devotion to The X Factor can be gauged by his reaction to his peremptory sacking last year. ITV decided it wanted a "younger, edgier" show, so one evening while Louis was in Stockholm, he got the call. "That was the worst thing that ever happened to me - ever, ever, ever," he says. "Most people, when asked, say cancer, heart attacks, families. Nooo. For me, that was the worst thing. I was too devastated to cry. I had a panic attack. It was like I'd been run down by a train, it was so public. I asked myself, am I over the hill, what did I not do, maybe I should never have got the job. I totally questioned everything about myself."

"Am I over the hill? I probably am, in years. I know it's stupid. It's only a TV show and that's all it is at the end of the day, and we're not saving lives or curing cancer, but... I love it. I know it might seem like a really fake lifestyle to everybody, but I love doing it. I do know exactly what it is: it's just an escape from everyday life for people. We show them the good, the bad and the ugly side of the music business."

But when he was suddenly re-hired before his inexplicable replacement had uttered a public word, suspicions were raised that the sacking was all a PR stunt. He denies it. Who knows? "It's our job to keep the show in the news," he once said in relation to his fattist comments on RTÉ's Celebrity You're a Star. Remember that we are talking here to a world-class master of hype.

"What I am is a pop manager. It's all about the songs," he insists, and yet his clients, uniquely, have regularly diced with death and devastation, and always when a tour or new album was in the offing. So, to name but a few Westlife incidents, not only was Kian nearly savaged by a lion in South Africa but he almost plunged to his death in Belfast; Shane nearly drowned in a freak wave in Miami; Mark was threatened with blindness from camera bulbs popping, and Bryan with deafness if he ever got on a plane again.

The "best one ever", though, says Louis, grinning, was the one about the band's plane crash-landing in Australia. This went down a treat with the showbiz reporters but for one teeny problem: "I just forgot to tell the parents. And the plane was a bit rattly." Right.

It's called promotion, Louis beams, citing a notice on the great Paul McGuinness's office wall: "A terrible thing happens if you don't promote. Nothing." So the X Factor death threats, the water-throwing, the innuendo about who fancies/despises who, the firing and re-hiring... you'd be right to be sceptical.

But he remains "best friends" with Simon Cowell, the owner of the franchise, who presumably sent the messenger. Perhaps it's because nothing surprises him in a business full of fakes and shysters. Perhaps he believes the advice he gives to aspiring performers: if you want loyalty in this business, get a dog. As we talk, he compulsively answers calls, often without checking the identity of the callers. Some are hip and famous, including a top BBC presenter and an industry legend looking for X Factor tickets next week (he gets 20 seats for each show and more than 100 requests). But most are tabloid journalists, to whom he obviously enjoys nattering.

"If I wasn't doing this, I'd probably be doing PR. Everyone has my number," he says happily, while agreeing with the caller that contestant A is "yeah, fantastic", he says, while mischievously mouthing a vigorous, wide-eyed "hopeless" in my direction. The impression that he has a tendency to blurt out hideous truths is not quite accurate. "They tape everything," he remarks, confirming that he does indeed know where and how to draw the line in interviews.

As the limo pulls in through the studio gates, a shrieking bunch of female fans catches sight of him and chants "Louis, Louis, Louis", which triggers a faint blush. But he gamely walks over to chat to them through the chicken-wire fence.

The real pathos of the show is evident in reception, where Scott from Manchester - a Pontins Bluecoat booted off the show by Louis's casting vote a few weeks before - is waiting. A childlike, nervy 19-year-old, full of positive talk about being "so busy", getting recognised in the street, doing a gig for Carphone Warehouse (an X Factor sponsor) and getting a free phone, he locks on to Louis, who after an awkward pause, invites him to his unglamorous dressing room - about half the size of a small kitchen, with a fruit basket and a bottle of champagne - while making soothing noises: "Great to see you. Sorry I haven't called."

But the only noise that really matters to Scott, obviously, is when Louis says he can do a tour with Shayne Ward (a previous X Factor winner) next year. When Louis leaves, Scott looks momentarily confused, like a sweet, abandoned child. "Oh, he's absolutely brilliant... a great man," he says, before cheering himself up again with the thought of joining our old friend Mariah, for the Hero sing-out later on. "Tonight I can say I performed with Mariah Carey," he says proudly.

The problem for Scott is that the savage circus has moved on. After the audience gets its orders to stay standing during the performances and keep roaring over the judges' comments, the drama tonight will be all about the saving of Daniel (aka "Tragic Dan"), whose musical dedications to his late wife have activated a national sympathy button and have previously triggered a tearful intervention from Louis and the ejection of Laura White. A travesty, plainly, though not of the judges' doing: they voted Daniel out, and it was the public vote that kept him in the running.

Later, British culture secretary Andy Burnham would protest in the House of Commons that the "wonderful and talented" White - a constituent of his - had been "very harshly treated". By the following Wednesday, no fewer than 50,000 people had signed a petition to Ofcom, the UK's media industry regulator, protesting that their call in favour of White was either blocked or their vote misappropriated.

So when Louis says that many in Ireland "have no idea" about the scale of X Factor or its cultural infiltration of the UK, he is undoubtedly right. "It's a reality show, it's a talent show and it's a soap opera, and it's all live and real," he insists, still apparently a tad embarrassed by his teary outburst on Tragic Dan's behalf. He claims he was about to throw him out until the crooner upped and sang a gloopy song, To Where You Are, which stunned Louis with its poignancy.

"It's about singing to someone who's dead. I really like that song and I didn't know he was going to sing it. I wasn't acting. I kept him because of the song and because of his wife, not because he was talented. I'm a human being," he protests, shattering all the righteous rhetoric about X Factor being a "talent" show. Whatever.

As always, there's a suspicion that nothing is quite what it seems. All the rejection, all the gratuitous nastiness that routinely breaks hearts on X Factor is defended by Walsh on the basis that "that's the way the music business is. A reality check. Sometimes, yeah, people are cruel to be cruel and all that. I don't think I'm cruel. I don't think it's in me to be cruel. I think I'm very honest. I think it's the Irishness. We like to tell each other like it is. No matter who you are, we like to say: 'I knew you when you had nothing.' I don't think I'm bad."

"My own knock-back didn't make me more sympathetic, no. Because it's a very tough business. It's totally the survival of the fittest. It really is." It's tough in other ways too. He swears that he only discovered that Stephen Gately was gay two months into Boyzone's awkward conception.

"I had no idea, on my mother's life," he says. "I'd have had second thoughts about it if I had, because it wasn't cool then to have a gay guy in the band. He was absolutely paranoid about it coming out. I remember I put him sitting on Ruby Wax's knees and married him off to Mandy Smith. In the end, he was forced out by the Sun. I didn't know about Mark either. Even his best friends in Sligo didn't know. When he said he liked Mariah Carey and Eurovision, alarm bells went off" - he laughs - "but I didn't say anything." With deadly seriousness, he adds: "I think people are racist and homophobic. They just pretend they're not. It's the way we're brought up."

He greatly prefers dealing with male performers - they're less competitive, he reckons, less inclined to fight among themselves, less obsessed with being skinny, less inclined to run after famous footballers. "Most girls just want to be famous," he claims. "They're not in it for the music. That's the difference."

Back in his little dressing room after the show, where he - uniquely among all the judges - hosts a stream of visitors, and band members drop in for pep talks (which he gives generously, despite the lateness of the hour), there is nothing of the overblown celebrity about him. He is awkwardly trying to change his clothes in a corner until Liam McKenna, a friend who acts as his unpaid PA, asks people to give him privacy.

Then it's back in the limo with Harold and to the Mayfair by 1am. As always, he is home in Ireland by the following evening.

(Irish Times)



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