photo from Steve Brookstein's Facebook page

It has been a while since I bothered to watch The X-Factor, there was once a time when it was must-see viewing but for the last few years I haven’t been able to summon up the interest. I know that people run the show down as being bad for music, and they are right; the show has as much to do with music as Celebrity Juice has to do with comedy, but to not watch it for that reason is to miss the point completely. The X-Factor is not a music programme, it is a comedy light entertainment show, little more that a pantomime with Simon Cowell as the baddie to be booed and hissed, Dermot O’Leary as the cheeky Buttons character who likes to hug everyone and end every sentence with an excitable growl, and Louie Walsh as the dame. In Victorian times, people used to visit mental institutions for entertainment, but they didn’t have ITV back then. The prize for reaching the end of the series is the privilege of having Simon Cowell running your life for a year or two, squeezing every last bit of your Warhol-allocation, and then dropping you like a stone when you step out of line by suggesting something maverick like writing your own song.

I hadn’t watched the first series of The X-Factor at all, so I wasn’t fully aware of whom Steve Brookstein was. Obviously I knew that he had won, I saw him interviewed on The Frank Skinner Show shortly afterwards, but I assumed he was one of the comedy characters that you get on The X-Factor. Wrongly, I lumped him in with Chico, Jedward (although we have all forgotten how we kind of liked Jedward in the beginning), Wagner, and Katie Waissel. His name has become synonymous with the sad X-Factor loser, forever destined to walk the streets telling people about how he won the first series of The X-Factor and offering to sing a song for the price of a cup of tea like an ITV version of Whycliffe, (Nottingham reference) and people will point and ask each other if that’s that bloke who was on that thing.

The only real bit of information I had was that he released a cover version of the Phil Collins song ‘Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now)’ before disappearing off the face of the earth. What actually happened was that he broke rank and told Simon Cowell to go and fuck himself. This is obviously against the rules of The X-Factor and Brookstein was no doubt told that he would never work again; I can only assume that this is what happened to Matt Cardigan, another winner who has vanished.

People getting in touch with me to point me in the direction of their music is something that happens all the time, after all it does form part of my job so that isn’t unusual. Slightly more unusual is when a former X-Factor winner tweets me to point me in the direction of their music, so unusual in fact, that it has never happened before. Until yesterday; I received a tweet from Steve Brookstein with a link to his Soundcloud page.

I took a listen. Not only did I listen, I listened to another song after it and eventually listened to all the songs on there. This is where first impressions aren’t always reliable; Brookstein is a talented singer and musician who did the right thing in breaking free from Cowell. Okay so he isn’t selling out the big rooms like Wand Erection do, but he is doing things on his own terms and for that I take my hat off to him.

===

My daily blog can be delivered straight to your Kindle for 99p a month (link)

Listen to The Sunday Alternative here

All donations received via the PayPal button above will be used to fund creative projects such as podcasts, short films, documentaries, comedy sketches and a whole lot more. You are under no obligation of course, but thanks in advance if you do drop something in the pot.