Format has changed.
As . . . you can probably see.
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Right.
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Carry on.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
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 . . .
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 . . .
Monday, August 06, 2007
Heeeeeee's baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack
And the world shivered.
In its bed, in its backyard, at the shop, in its car, in the jungles of deepest darkest Africa, in the desert plains of Egypt. Volcanoes shuddered to a stop, mid spew of molten lava. Hysterical news reports flooded in, of children ice skating on the Atlantic, of Middle Eastern snowball fights, of lions with snowy manes, of gazelles skiing through the veldt and of giraffe popsicles.
And the world shivered.
And the Dark Lord emerged from Below, his red horns covered in pristine white snow, icicles forming in his neat goatee, his hooves clicking on the frozen tundra, clothed in a large pea green duffle coat with gloves and a kicky Doctor Who style scarf that muffled his voice as he bellowed furiously to the skies . . .
“Dicko, you BASTARD, I was in the middle of Harry Potter and now the pages have FROZEN TOGETHER.”
For lo! It was true. He hath returned.
Having spent the last month of BB trying to convince us that the local Idol franchise had something to do with Jennifer Hudson strapping on her Big Girl’s Voice and getting to be air bussed (ye olde worde for ye kisse) by George Clooney at the Kodak Theatre, Idol 2007 opens with an American Movie Monologue, astounding only in its ability to not be funny. Except for the line about there being One Vegan – that totally cracked me up because I flashed back to that one episode of Ready Steady Cook when Mathieson beat out G and proceeded to serenade him with the Homer Simpson inspired ‘you don’t win friends with salad’. Trust me, it was hilARious.
I suspect I can hear people falling off their lounges all over Australia when the Montage of Past Winners actually acknowledges the black sheep of Idol, Poor Poor Casey. Of course it is brief, brisk and immediately followed by multiple shots of the Young Divas (edited for misuse of the possessive apostrophe - thankyou Fosse) with an almost apologetic tone that they dared remind us of the Season Two winner when talking about the impact of Idol. Which, apparently is saving the Australian Music Industry. Right. (Sorry Missy, sorry John Butler – you long fingernailed guitar playing god weird haired hippy freak – and back to splitsville please Crowded House, Idol has the Aria charts under control, we don’t need ANY of you . . . )
What we need apparently is SIX episodes of auditions. SIX. Honestly, if we could just ignore the famewhores (who would STOP turning up and wasting the judges time if we all JUST IGNORED THEM) and pay attention to the actual singers who audition we’d have two, count it TWO, audition shows, we’d actually get to see some of the talented buggers who turn up and make it to the top 100 instead of getting to the Seymour Centre and barely recognising a third of them and as an added bonus, I would not get tired typing fingers. It would be a win all round!
Instead we get Elke, first singer of the day, she’s – honestly – she’s Luna Lovegood. She’s a drag queen Jewel and she isn’t so much singing as waving a shaky murmured vibrato at the song and hoping to hit some of the notes. She kinda fails. It’s two thirds of the way through the song before Fosse even recognises it, at which point we get our first visible Fosse-recoil of the season – huzzah! Mark is horribly passive aggressive at her, and his fun at pretending he liked it goes so far as to actually convince the poor deluded soul that if he had been the only judge she would have got through. Nice work Holden.
Then we are subjected to Tanya, who chews apart a Kelly Clarkson song in a most painful manner, as the blood pouring from my ears can attest and who then starts in on the most horridly woeful original song, so bad that Mark literally has to walk away from the Judges desk, he is laughing so hard. Kyle brutally rips the cord from her keyboards, saving us all from going mad, but sadly too late to save Tanya’s own sanity. Off to therapy, love, there you go . . .
It is 23mins in before we meet the fabulous Brianna Carpenter, who is a gorgeous cross between Ms Chanel Cole (style wise) and Lisa Mitchell (vocally). You know. When we all thought Lisa might amount to something. Her original song is freaking delightful and they actually show the whole thing. She is resoundingly adored by the judges but I refuse to fall in love with her. No. No, I refuse. I will not be disappointed again by a fantastic first audition. Because then we get to the second week of the Top Twelve and you know, she’ll have stopped bringing me flowers, she won’t return my calls, I’ll see her flirting with another blogger, maybe even *gasp* hear about her singing a Mariah Carey song and my heart will just be broken into a thousand tiny pieces and I WON’T HAVE THAT DONE TO ME AGAIN. I will NOT be the Idol equivalent of your crazy spinster aunt who comes to Christmas dinner and tells you that men can’t be trusted and you should always look to see if they have a faint tan line around their ring finger because it means they’re married and just took their wedding ring off five minutes before they came into that speed dating session to try and get someone into bed and you’ll be left alone - except for your eighteen cats - despising yourself. I may, in fact, have issues . . .
Qld is a parade of the tanned and pretty. Tanned, pretty and thoroughly untalented. Hot chick after hot chick who bellow, shrill and screech at the four judges to the point where I want to send them aspirin. And earplugs.
Then Jordan Paris (who immediately strikes me as another Fuck I Hate James) comes in wearing a bright red suit that is frighteningly colour co-ordinated with his fake tan. He’s a tall, skinny Oompa Loompa. He sings some hymn and doesn’t have a bad voice, but it feels infinitely more suited to playing Joseph whilst wearing a jacket made of many colours. He gets four ayes. I give him an oy. I just want to exfoliate him back to a normal colour.
We get a brisk montage of guitar playing fellas who make it through and then Angela who came prepared with a little booklet of stuff she downloaded from the Idol Official Site, who sings kinda badly, who refuses to take no for an answer and who is obviously drunk. Right? Then Dylan Yeandle who has auditioned three previous times and who comes in with a cheeky grin, a guitar and a song about Yummy Mummies. A dreadful song. They put him through and he has the barefaced cheek to stand in front of a poster of My Boy Irish and extol his own virtues. He needs to move . . . away . . . from the Irish . . .
Famewhores : Ravel Lee has seen Borat too many times, but he can Cossack dance really well and is actually one of the few entertaining fame whores of the day. Spanish speaking Angel is terribly earnest whilst torturing Killing Me Softly – which, it’s a cheap shot, but he is – and who gets the words wrong, even though he’s reading them. Thomas Chen tries to rap. I got nothing.
Hayden Andrews is this years Bobby Flynn, he has an endearing lilt that slides into a lovely upper register and reminds me of a singer from the 70’s whose name escapes me. He’s in. They zap through some guitar playing chicks pausing briefly to completely shit on Cleo Holloman for being too pretty. Fosse’s calls a Hottie Watch on Tim Florea who plays an awesome guitar and sings okay and who Dicko calls out for having commitment issues. Huh. I should totally date him.
Our first traditional Last Auditionee Of The Day Who Will Totally Surprise You Completely By Getting Through, Not; is Cheray Doughty, the impish daughter of Ray Burton who co-wrote “I Am Woman” with Helen Reddy. Awww, her dad rules and she has a great voice too! Good for her, she IS woman, hear her roar! (I promise to limit myself to just one more I Am Woman joke if she makes it to the semi finals . . . scouts honour.)
We take off to the Top End and some patented G & Mathieson silliness, oh G & Mathieson silliness, how I missed thee . . . crocodiles. Beer. Beards. Drag queens. The NT tourism board thanks you Idol.
John Coulhan wants to pull a Daughtry, bring fame to his band through his appearance on Idol. I have no problem with that. He has a lovely pub rock voice with shades of Tyrone Noonan. He’s brought his own guitarist, he obviously got the memo about needing a guitar to get through to the top 150,000. His original is not bad, if a little repetitive around the chorus but I can totally close my eyes and hear it on Fox. He’s golden.
Kate Miller is another repeat offender and sings a Sarah Maclachlan song. I am indifferent to her and the whole process until Dicko remarks that he doesn’t like that she is deferring to the note – which I TOTALLY get and love him for saying – and then Holden gets involved, prattling about how he doesn’t know what the hell Dicko is talking about and does anyone in the room, does the general public and I’m screaming at the tv that yes, I do and shut the fuck up Holden to the point where Brand New Housemate, Able pokes his head out of bedroom to see who the hell I’m screaming at, discovers it’s the TELEVISION and worriedly looks at Fosse. Fosse sighs like a long suffering man stuck living with a demented harpy and explains I have a mental illness and think they can hear me. I tell him to shut up, take a deep breath and continue yelling at Holden who continues to ignore me. Good times . . .
Our final contestant is Jasmine Anderson who can’t dress worth a damn, but who has a fantastic voice. Kyle makes her sing three different songs and she nails every damn one. Girl really knows what suits her voice, she hits Gabrielle, Xtina and that band that isn’t Creed or Hinder but who sounds like them (and seriously, the first person to sing that god awful Hinder song about cheating on your girlfriend because this other chick has the lips of an angel? Top of the shitlist.) Jasmine is one of only three who make it through from the NT.
And we’re done. For show one that is, five to go until we get to the good stuff. Tonight is WA & SA (ahhh, Adelaide, where the crazies come out to play) and Marcia. Smacking. Holden. Down.
Sound like fun? It’s a date.
In its bed, in its backyard, at the shop, in its car, in the jungles of deepest darkest Africa, in the desert plains of Egypt. Volcanoes shuddered to a stop, mid spew of molten lava. Hysterical news reports flooded in, of children ice skating on the Atlantic, of Middle Eastern snowball fights, of lions with snowy manes, of gazelles skiing through the veldt and of giraffe popsicles.
And the world shivered.
And the Dark Lord emerged from Below, his red horns covered in pristine white snow, icicles forming in his neat goatee, his hooves clicking on the frozen tundra, clothed in a large pea green duffle coat with gloves and a kicky Doctor Who style scarf that muffled his voice as he bellowed furiously to the skies . . .
“Dicko, you BASTARD, I was in the middle of Harry Potter and now the pages have FROZEN TOGETHER.”
For lo! It was true. He hath returned.
Having spent the last month of BB trying to convince us that the local Idol franchise had something to do with Jennifer Hudson strapping on her Big Girl’s Voice and getting to be air bussed (ye olde worde for ye kisse) by George Clooney at the Kodak Theatre, Idol 2007 opens with an American Movie Monologue, astounding only in its ability to not be funny. Except for the line about there being One Vegan – that totally cracked me up because I flashed back to that one episode of Ready Steady Cook when Mathieson beat out G and proceeded to serenade him with the Homer Simpson inspired ‘you don’t win friends with salad’. Trust me, it was hilARious.
I suspect I can hear people falling off their lounges all over Australia when the Montage of Past Winners actually acknowledges the black sheep of Idol, Poor Poor Casey. Of course it is brief, brisk and immediately followed by multiple shots of the Young Divas (edited for misuse of the possessive apostrophe - thankyou Fosse) with an almost apologetic tone that they dared remind us of the Season Two winner when talking about the impact of Idol. Which, apparently is saving the Australian Music Industry. Right. (Sorry Missy, sorry John Butler – you long fingernailed guitar playing god weird haired hippy freak – and back to splitsville please Crowded House, Idol has the Aria charts under control, we don’t need ANY of you . . . )
What we need apparently is SIX episodes of auditions. SIX. Honestly, if we could just ignore the famewhores (who would STOP turning up and wasting the judges time if we all JUST IGNORED THEM) and pay attention to the actual singers who audition we’d have two, count it TWO, audition shows, we’d actually get to see some of the talented buggers who turn up and make it to the top 100 instead of getting to the Seymour Centre and barely recognising a third of them and as an added bonus, I would not get tired typing fingers. It would be a win all round!
Instead we get Elke, first singer of the day, she’s – honestly – she’s Luna Lovegood. She’s a drag queen Jewel and she isn’t so much singing as waving a shaky murmured vibrato at the song and hoping to hit some of the notes. She kinda fails. It’s two thirds of the way through the song before Fosse even recognises it, at which point we get our first visible Fosse-recoil of the season – huzzah! Mark is horribly passive aggressive at her, and his fun at pretending he liked it goes so far as to actually convince the poor deluded soul that if he had been the only judge she would have got through. Nice work Holden.
Then we are subjected to Tanya, who chews apart a Kelly Clarkson song in a most painful manner, as the blood pouring from my ears can attest and who then starts in on the most horridly woeful original song, so bad that Mark literally has to walk away from the Judges desk, he is laughing so hard. Kyle brutally rips the cord from her keyboards, saving us all from going mad, but sadly too late to save Tanya’s own sanity. Off to therapy, love, there you go . . .
It is 23mins in before we meet the fabulous Brianna Carpenter, who is a gorgeous cross between Ms Chanel Cole (style wise) and Lisa Mitchell (vocally). You know. When we all thought Lisa might amount to something. Her original song is freaking delightful and they actually show the whole thing. She is resoundingly adored by the judges but I refuse to fall in love with her. No. No, I refuse. I will not be disappointed again by a fantastic first audition. Because then we get to the second week of the Top Twelve and you know, she’ll have stopped bringing me flowers, she won’t return my calls, I’ll see her flirting with another blogger, maybe even *gasp* hear about her singing a Mariah Carey song and my heart will just be broken into a thousand tiny pieces and I WON’T HAVE THAT DONE TO ME AGAIN. I will NOT be the Idol equivalent of your crazy spinster aunt who comes to Christmas dinner and tells you that men can’t be trusted and you should always look to see if they have a faint tan line around their ring finger because it means they’re married and just took their wedding ring off five minutes before they came into that speed dating session to try and get someone into bed and you’ll be left alone - except for your eighteen cats - despising yourself. I may, in fact, have issues . . .
Qld is a parade of the tanned and pretty. Tanned, pretty and thoroughly untalented. Hot chick after hot chick who bellow, shrill and screech at the four judges to the point where I want to send them aspirin. And earplugs.
Then Jordan Paris (who immediately strikes me as another Fuck I Hate James) comes in wearing a bright red suit that is frighteningly colour co-ordinated with his fake tan. He’s a tall, skinny Oompa Loompa. He sings some hymn and doesn’t have a bad voice, but it feels infinitely more suited to playing Joseph whilst wearing a jacket made of many colours. He gets four ayes. I give him an oy. I just want to exfoliate him back to a normal colour.
We get a brisk montage of guitar playing fellas who make it through and then Angela who came prepared with a little booklet of stuff she downloaded from the Idol Official Site, who sings kinda badly, who refuses to take no for an answer and who is obviously drunk. Right? Then Dylan Yeandle who has auditioned three previous times and who comes in with a cheeky grin, a guitar and a song about Yummy Mummies. A dreadful song. They put him through and he has the barefaced cheek to stand in front of a poster of My Boy Irish and extol his own virtues. He needs to move . . . away . . . from the Irish . . .
Famewhores : Ravel Lee has seen Borat too many times, but he can Cossack dance really well and is actually one of the few entertaining fame whores of the day. Spanish speaking Angel is terribly earnest whilst torturing Killing Me Softly – which, it’s a cheap shot, but he is – and who gets the words wrong, even though he’s reading them. Thomas Chen tries to rap. I got nothing.
Hayden Andrews is this years Bobby Flynn, he has an endearing lilt that slides into a lovely upper register and reminds me of a singer from the 70’s whose name escapes me. He’s in. They zap through some guitar playing chicks pausing briefly to completely shit on Cleo Holloman for being too pretty. Fosse’s calls a Hottie Watch on Tim Florea who plays an awesome guitar and sings okay and who Dicko calls out for having commitment issues. Huh. I should totally date him.
Our first traditional Last Auditionee Of The Day Who Will Totally Surprise You Completely By Getting Through, Not; is Cheray Doughty, the impish daughter of Ray Burton who co-wrote “I Am Woman” with Helen Reddy. Awww, her dad rules and she has a great voice too! Good for her, she IS woman, hear her roar! (I promise to limit myself to just one more I Am Woman joke if she makes it to the semi finals . . . scouts honour.)
We take off to the Top End and some patented G & Mathieson silliness, oh G & Mathieson silliness, how I missed thee . . . crocodiles. Beer. Beards. Drag queens. The NT tourism board thanks you Idol.
John Coulhan wants to pull a Daughtry, bring fame to his band through his appearance on Idol. I have no problem with that. He has a lovely pub rock voice with shades of Tyrone Noonan. He’s brought his own guitarist, he obviously got the memo about needing a guitar to get through to the top 150,000. His original is not bad, if a little repetitive around the chorus but I can totally close my eyes and hear it on Fox. He’s golden.
Kate Miller is another repeat offender and sings a Sarah Maclachlan song. I am indifferent to her and the whole process until Dicko remarks that he doesn’t like that she is deferring to the note – which I TOTALLY get and love him for saying – and then Holden gets involved, prattling about how he doesn’t know what the hell Dicko is talking about and does anyone in the room, does the general public and I’m screaming at the tv that yes, I do and shut the fuck up Holden to the point where Brand New Housemate, Able pokes his head out of bedroom to see who the hell I’m screaming at, discovers it’s the TELEVISION and worriedly looks at Fosse. Fosse sighs like a long suffering man stuck living with a demented harpy and explains I have a mental illness and think they can hear me. I tell him to shut up, take a deep breath and continue yelling at Holden who continues to ignore me. Good times . . .
Our final contestant is Jasmine Anderson who can’t dress worth a damn, but who has a fantastic voice. Kyle makes her sing three different songs and she nails every damn one. Girl really knows what suits her voice, she hits Gabrielle, Xtina and that band that isn’t Creed or Hinder but who sounds like them (and seriously, the first person to sing that god awful Hinder song about cheating on your girlfriend because this other chick has the lips of an angel? Top of the shitlist.) Jasmine is one of only three who make it through from the NT.
And we’re done. For show one that is, five to go until we get to the good stuff. Tonight is WA & SA (ahhh, Adelaide, where the crazies come out to play) and Marcia. Smacking. Holden. Down.
Sound like fun? It’s a date.
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