Rejection affects us all in different ways. But pen-pointing pop manager Louis Walsh, whose X Factor relationship status is now “not exactly sacked but equally not invited back”, has developed an extreme response to getting his Q4 Saturday and Sunday nights back. He’s gone rogue.
Anyone who’s spent more than 90 seconds with Walsh will know that his conversations are peppered with “you can’t print this but…” gossip nuggets, and over the past month he’s amped up the indiscretion and carved out a new role as the ultimate pop troll. Having left, then rejoined The X Factor once before, Walsh now promises he’s “flat-out left, I’m not going back to the show, absolutely gone”. So he’s in full-on bridge-burning mode.
Not for Walsh the quiet dignity of walking away from one job and diligently, quietly beginning work on a new one – in this case the international launch of his new boyband, HomeTown, who showcased in London this week. Not for Walsh any sense of reverence for the mystical powers of the non-disclosure agreement. In short, one should never underestimate the chattiness of a former X Factor judge with a boyband to promote.
To Now magazine, then, where on the topic of the Simon Cowell wedding Simon Cowell hasn’t even announced yet, Walsh declares: “Simon’s wedding will be camp! It will be fucking camp!” To the Daily Star, where Walsh cheerily rides roughshod over The X Factor’s carefully constructed PR roadmap by apparently confirming Nick Grimshaw’s addition to the judging panel. And to the Daily Mail, where Walsh opines: “I think viewers are right when they say X Factor isn’t quite what it used to be.”
Most triumphantly of all, let’s head to Radio 1’s Newsbeat where, with classic Walshean logic, Louis has tunnelled deep into the heart of the problem with TV singing shows, noting that they’re “not what they used to be – they have too much singing in them”. What next? A meditation on the crisis facing The X Factor’s judging panel: that it’s just too judgey? The observation that Britain’s highest-rated show (that isn’t one of the other ones) is a bit too on the “televisual” side?
We may scoff, but when you think about it Walsh could use his newly rediscovered spare time assembling a taskforce to solve all the world’s problems. Surely it must be a matter of time before he storms to the defence of Fifa officials, telling a packed courtroom: “The only crime here is that there’s just been too much football.” But as Walsh’s promotional rampage continues, it’s his ongoing love-hate-mainly-hate relationship with former co-judge Cheryl Fernandez-Versini that most intrigues. For the genesis of this epic battle we must cast our minds back to the heady days of 2002, when Cheryl was still Tweedy and Louis Walsh looked like an old Louis Walsh.
Having mentored Girls Aloud on Popstars: The Rivals, Louis became the band’s manager by default. In politer times, Cheryl would describe Walsh’s management style as “hands off”, which was a nice way of saying that, according to reports, he only called them twice in two years but collected his cut anyway, while leaving the actual management of the band to Girls Aloud’s label – which ended up having to appoint a new manager.
Fast-forward to 2015 and there is, quite clearly, little love lost between Walsh and Fernandez-Versini. “She’s irrelevant these days,” Louis demurely noted in a Heat magazine interview. Another bon mot: “Cheryl wasn’t great last year, she’s sometimes lazy and lacks energy.” And another: “I’d rather have Mel B on the panel.”
Fernandez-Versini, meanwhile, has fallen for the trolling. “I am beginning to wonder if Louis has some kind of an obsession with me,” she tweeted at one point. “This is the same man asking me what he should say to contestants on our way to the stage bc ‘he doesn’t know’.”
Cheryl may do well to remember George Bernard Shaw’s wise words on this topic: “I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it, then the pig wheels out five piglets singing a ballad.”
But this particular piggy has another trick up its sleeve: Walsh is writing a book. The mind boggles at the pettiness of some of the scores that might be settled in this tome, though it’s worth bearing in mind that Simon Cowell recently claimed that he and Walsh will always be friends. So Walsh will perhaps, therefore, sidestep the fate that greeted Tulisa when she left The X Factor, saw Syco’s protective forcefield disappear, and was the subject of an elaborately executed career annihilation by the News of the World.
Let’s conclude by consulting Walsh’s very first literary endeavour – Louis Walsh’s Fast Track to Fame: The A-Z Guide to Superstardom – which in 2007 hopped on a fast track of its own, all the way to Poundland, where Lost in Showbiz purchased a copy. In the final pages, we find Louis offering advice to pop hopefuls who’ve faced bad news. It’s advice he might, perhaps, consider useful the next time he wants to lash out at The X Factor, or Cheryl: “Please learn to take rejection. It’s free.”
