There were two interesting things about Marty Stein, my art director in the mid-60’s – or at any rate two I’m talking about here.
First, he was the fastest guy ever at churning out grease-pencil roughs.
This was useful because in those days it helped if you could draw. If you could draw fast, even better. Marty could churn out layouts faster than I could have ideas. Nether of us was much good, to be honest, but there you are.
Second, back home in New York he once had Andy Warhol working for him, drawing shoes.
You will recall that Warhol said that one day everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. This is pretty much how long most of the successful contestants on the X factor last. I should tell you, by the way, that I don’t really like the X factor and American Idol and all those shows, but they do exercise a grisly fascination, rather like those quiz shows where people answer trick questions like, “What is your first name?”
Take, for instance the man above grinning like a hyena – a Brazilian called Wagner. I caught sight (and unfortunately sound) of him by accident the other night, and was struck by his resemblance to the more serious looking man below, an excellent comedian called Bill Bailey.
Good luck to Wagner, but he does to music what Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans. I listened to him in disbelief. Any similarity between the noise he was making and the tune it was based on was extremely distant.
The question is, why did none of the judges mention this? Are they all deaf?
To be fair to him though, he was bloody hilarious. Mr. Bailey must look to his laurels.
Interesting re Wagner. 50 something year old Brazillian, called Wagner- one wonders what his old man did in the war and where he went afterwards.
And to be fair to the judges, bar his mentor Louis, they do all think he's a total tool. The reason for him still being on there is another ill-judged Facebook campaign as per last Christmas.
There are some genuinely talented people on X Factor this year – if you regard good pop singers as talented – I do. I think it's more the format people object to. Those that do though are often the worst sort of music snobs and probably have as many shit records in their collections as the next man. That said, the Sky version 'Must Be The Music' was a lot better in as much that all the contestants had to perform their own stuff. I predict we'll hear a lot more from the winner of that one – a wee Scottish lassie called Emma Gillespie who performs as Emma's Imagination. You heard it here first …