5 January 2006
We’ve had chart-toppers foisted on us by Hollywood movies, Australian soaps, Irish radio comedy skits and Scandinavian ringtones: why get het up about a popular prime-time British TV singing competition turbo-charging a mainstream pop single to number one? Loads of people did get het up about The X Factor, though – perhaps because it had a ready-made pantomime villain with proven awful taste in retrograde schmaltz like Robson & Jerome, perhaps also because it put the unappetising pop-industry sausage maker on full view for all to see. Still, I wonder what those people thought record companies were doing for the other 51 weeks of the year, the experimental arcana being unfairly stymied at number two in the Christmas charts, and if Westlife were actually five plucky self-made underdogs selling CD-Rs outside a train station. All this is to say that I have no strong feelings about the TV show and I’ll be taking these X Factor singles and singers on their merits.
On the face of it, The X Factor songbook’s chart-topping success in Ireland looks like another instance of British TV overwhelming the Irish pop-cultural marketplace. However, we’ll see enough of Irish interest through the coming chart-years. Also, what were these X Factor winning singles but the Irish boyband ballad writ large? Do we bear some national moral culpability here, or congratulate ourselves on successfully trolling the Brits? Again, this will all become clearer as we go on.
Shayne Ward provides some Irish interest, since he’s from an Irish family. And ‘That’s My Goal’ certainly sticks to the Westlife template: a more mature boyband lad singing a romantic R&B-lite ballad about lifelong commitment. The song isn’t particularly interesting or memorable – again, so far so Westlife. Perhaps in view of this, for the next few years the winner’s song will more often be a cover version. Still, it’s glossily produced, and Ward sounds the part: I’ll damn him with the faint praise of being a better Westlife, though a better song wouldn’t have gone amiss. We’ve had worse at number one before this, and worse again to come.
One other salient point: 2006 is the year that Orson’s ‘No Tomorrow’ with sales of only 17,694 became the lowest-selling UK number one in history, Smash Hits ceased publication, and Top Of The Pops was cancelled. And still, only a couple of months earlier Shayne Ward’s ‘That’s My Goal’ in its first week of UK release—albeit Christmas week 2005—was selling over 100,000 copies a day, and the 2006 X Factor winner will post similar numbers. So, this doesn’t look like an X Factor-shaped problem, but what was going on with the whole UK chart pop ecosystem, and what effect would it have on Ireland? Maybe our upcoming 2006 Irish number ones will tell us more.
