All filler, no singing to speak of

Adelaide. Oh Adelaide Adelaide Adelaide. You wacky wacky town, you! You build me up with your patented looney tunes and wacky hijinks and you raise me high with Your People’s inability to read a fucking room.

Let’s open with Julie, shall we? Julie has quite a pronounced lisp. That doesn’t mean she can’t sing, though, no, it’s her complete lack of tone and profound inability to hit any of the actual notes in the song she’s bellowing that means she can’t sing. (And whilst she’s quite upset that the judges are harsh on her, she still gets a hug from Mathieson, so don’t feel too sorry for her, in point of fact, you may envy her a little. Humiliation on a national scale but also a hug from Mathieson? Tempting . . .) Let’s follow on from Julie with a flock of truly astoundingly deluded individuals whose vocal cords you would quite cheerfully stomp on in the largest and spikiest Gene Simmons from Kiss boots you could find – like Eliza who FLAT OUT SCREAMS the Four Non Blondes song What’s Going On and who calls the judges snide. Or Bianca who trills All Saints song Never Ever and has the kind of sweet semi maybe possibly decent-ish voice where if you were driving a really long distance with her and you were sort of jacked up on coffee, red bull and sugar, you might tell her Stockholm Syndrome Style that she doesn’t have a bad voice, but THAT’S WHERE IT ALL STARTS, PEOPLE. The friends who smile at their friends whilst they’re badly singing along to Kelly Clarkson in the car, who drunkenly encourage karaoke performances, the parents who tell little Alice and Jack that YES, you have the voice of an angel, my sweet, because no one wants to tell their kids that they sound like banshees sent from hell to DEVOUR OUR SOULS.
It.
Must.
Stop.

Really, it must, because next up is pizza maker Adam who has his own fanclub and two guitars for some unknown reason and who lets them drag his friends into his audition. He might actually be able to sing, who knows, but everyone else is singing along with him and he gets completely drowned out, then he does this ridiculous original that feels like he just made it up on the spot and he has this terrible look in his eyes about halfway through and if you pause the tape just so, you can see the point where he realises it ain’t gonna happen. Then Marcia gets her Pointy Finger out when he tries to backchat her about coming across as superficial or something, I don’t know, all I know is Mother Hines sounds like she needs a nap and it is too soon in the season for fatigue to be hitting you Marcia.

There’s a montage of criers interspersed with the judges throwing their arms in the air and their heads on the table in despair and then cutiepie Bree who chooses a shitful song to sing and provokes The Fight between Holden and Marcia (who says shit and arse and forget you . . . when you know she wanted to use a naughty word – use it Marcia, use your words!) who threatens to take off her shoe and thump Mark with it and I missed the next few minutes because I was too busy loudly advocating any and all violence against Holden with a shoe, especially if its one of those really pointy heeled ones, you know the ones where if you were fighting a vampire and didn't have a stake you could TOTALLY use your shoe? That kind. It’s nowhere near the smackdown we were promised. There isn’t any blood or anything. Ripped off.

Channel Ten? I don’t give a fuck about James Cameron and his search for some guy’s tomb, where the hell is my Torchwood, you motherfuckers . . .

There are too many idiots who don’t know what song they want to sing – dude, you slept overnight in line to NOT know what you’re going to do – seriously? It at least leads to some very cute Mathieson schtick, belting out a Whitney Houston song, praying in church for someone good . . . Fosse making a rude remark about James on his knees that I will gloss over for the greater good.

Chris sings Alicica Keyes’ What Comes Around and what doesn’t come around for him is a ticket to Sydney, we are 20 mins in and are yet to see anyone decent, aren’t you GLAD you’re watching the audition shows??!! (But it does give Dicko the opportunity to bust out with the old favourite ‘delusions of adequacy’, ahhh, still funny.)

Huzzah – Sarah Lloyde, who is soulful and builds her song quite nicely (if a touch RickiLee-ishly for me) and who auditioned back in 2005 and looks like she made Top 100 but not the semi’s. She’s done the smart thing, she gave herself a couple of years, she’s done the hard work getting her voice up to scratch and she’s come back older, wiser and better. Then we see a flurry of singers who made it through but once again get to hear not a skerrit of their effing singing. Badly played show, badly played.

Last SA’n of the day is barmaid Holly Weiner from Mildura who has an alternative, grungy voice with a nice little husky twang. She gets slightly shouty to rise over her guitar playing (Marcia calls it projection) and Dicko doesn’t LOVE her but she gets herself a golden ticket, and rightly so, she is the best we’ve seen all day. She joins 11 other Mystery Contestants.

Hometown, Perth is up next and can I just say, Andrew G? Your new haircut is divine.

Not divine? Ben who marches in with attitude and caterwauls the Fremantle Dockers team song as loud as he can. I want to join the Dockers just so I can rescind my membership purely on the strength of this guy and the hurt he does to my delicate ears. I feel they’d understand and wholeheartedly support me in this endeavour.

Man, WAAPA needs to keep an eye on their Musical Theatre students because the amount of MT geeks who wail Phantom of the Opera at the judges, dude, NO ONE deserves that level of pain, not even Sandilands. And Zarni, who came with a dossier of inspirational quotes – I might have liked your chutzpah if you hadn’t then chosen to slaughter As Long As You’re Mine from Wicked, not that I heard most of it because I immediately curled into the foetal position and my piteous whimpering drowned you out. Mostly.

Lana Krost played Les Miserables Cosette and rips out the very sad song that Cosette sings that I may have done myself a couple of times. (She may sing it slightly better than I do.) She’s cute, she has a good stage voice but her nervous disposition signposts that she’ll get eaten alive at the Seymour Centre.

Woeful singer after woeful singer gets the Dicko Smackdown, a one liner here, a zinger there, a deprecating putdown to the left and a mean upper punch to the right – to the point where Sandilands calls him out for not having any tact when he is making young Jovan practically blub in front of them.

SANDILANDS. TACT. END OF THE WORLD.

So off Dicko slouches to Bunbury where I assume he sampled some of the samples available at the lovely wineries in that region (I cast no stones) and then brought back some singers to audition in Perth, including our first RnB singer of the competition, Andrew Morton. Then Shamara-lea Hassett who plonks herself down on the floor. Her song and her guitar playing is restrained and quite lovely. She loses some points for crying but then I may have also gotten a little teary as well, so I’m giving her those points back and we shall never speak of this again.

Chad Woods has just about the best country voice I think I’ve heard in this competition and also makes it on to Fossie’s Hottie Watchlist. I just think if we can get him to Klancie up his wardrobe, put him in a dress slit down to his navel then he just might be on to something . . .

Cookie Sidebar : Red has just called me whilst reading this to inform me that in fact, no he wasn't great and that her husband whimpered and cringed whilst Chad was singing. There may have been the odd 'f' word also. I bow to Cookie's greater countrynwestern knowledge whilst still maintaining that little ol' Tallulahbelle kinda loved it . . .

Kalgoorlie is the residence of Tafadzwa Chirobo and I immediately tell him he needs to agree to an Aussie shortening of his name because ain’t no one slowly texting Tafadzwa – I can’t even tell you long it takes to type – to Idol. G calls him Taf, as shall I. Taf sings a lovely tune that wouldn’t sound at all out of place as the backing track to a Paul Simon song but his voice is lovely and souful and he is deservedly through.

Jeremy Harris is an okay singer and gets through – Dicko says he looks like he’s enjoying the smell of his own farts when he sings . . . oooookay . . . I actually got a ‘praise jesus’ vibe from him but maybe there was an olfactory cue that we weren’t in on during Jeremy’s audition.

22 make it through from WA including our final Perth auditionee (don’t hurt yourself gasping in surprise) Mustard. Yes. Mustard. As in ‘keen as’. Ladies and gentlemen, this season’s Mutto is in the house. He’s actually endearingly Aussie and admits to being so nervous that he’s overcompensating trying to hide it so I cut him some slack, but honestly – after three months of Travis on BB, I am ockered right the hell out. I can take two ‘I loves youse all’ but that’s it Mustard. Thin ice, my friend. I loves youse all, god, I worry for the Youth of Today, I really do . . .

Next Sunday, Melbourne.
Monday, Sydney and then god willing, straight on until dawn and we’ll hit the Seymour Centre the Sunday after that . . .