Читать книгу Simon Cowell - The Man Who Changed the World - David Nolan - Страница 11

If money had been an issue for Simon Cowell, then the £80 cash and the set of kitchen utensils he won on TV’s Sale of the Century show in 1990 must surely have come in handy. Cowell’s appearance on the show – it had moved to satellite TV by this stage and original host Nicholas Parsons was long gone – is now a favourite of Before They Were Famous-style television clip shows. Fellow contestant Barbara Humphreys recalled, ‘Watching the video now I remember thinking Simon was quite posh and handsome. He had a good sense of humour, but I would never have put him down as a future superstar.’

Apart from the distraction of his teeth being a normal, non-radioactive shade of white, the main surprise when viewing the clip today is how well he comes across as a contestant. Described as a ‘record company director from London who’s a keen go-kart racer’, he is charming and self-deprecating; he takes it seriously (but not too seriously) and deserves to win. Unfortunately, some other people in his immediate circle were meanwhile not doing quite as well.

As a quintessential eighties artist, Sinitta would discover that the new decade was not so kind in UK chart terms. ‘Hitchin’ a Ride’ was her first release of the nineties and it managed to get only to Number 24. Follow-up ‘Love and Affection’ only managed Number 62. The party decade was over and Simon Cowell would need other ways to keep the hits – and the cash – coming.

By 1989 Simon Cowell had been poached from his job at Fanfare to become one of the ‘biggest arseholes in the music business’ – an A&R man. His new employer was BMG. The company had been distributing Fanfare’s records and was a major player compared with Simon’s tiny indie. There was a catch to the job though: Simon would not only have to discover new talent, he would also have to guarantee they sold records – a lot of records. If his acts failed to hit minimum sales targets, he’d be out.

At the time, house music was king. The thunderous beats and simple melodies were everywhere – and, as with punk, Simon just didn’t get it. Anything too dancy and up-tempo seemed to baffle him. When he was offered the chance to sign a five-man act from the Mecca of the new dance vibe, Manchester, he passed. ‘I was shown a picture by the manager Nigel Martin-Smith and I remember saying at the time, “I’ll sign them if you dump the fat one” … Gary Barlow. He was overweight at the time with a weird haircut. Obviously I made a huge mistake.’

The signings he did make were hardly great leaps of the imagination; at the risk of sounding a little harsh, some might have been said to have been a little past their sell-by dates. It looked as if Cowell was playing it safe.

At the age of 18 Sonia Evans had gone to Number 1 in the UK with her debut single ‘You’ll Never Stop Me From Loving You’, a classic slice of Stock Aitken Waterman disco cheese complete with budget video. The song made her the youngest female to hit the top spot since Mary Hopkin (‘Those Were the Days’) in 1968. Tiny, red-haired and bubbly to the point of being annoying, Sonia had famously attracted Pete Waterman’s attention by hanging around outside his recording studio and singing at him – but by the start of the nineties she had left the SAW camp and would never again make the Top 10 as a solo artist. Despite this, Cowell signed her and sent her down the cover-version route with a rendering of Heatwave’s 1977 disco hit ‘Boogie Nights’. It just made the Top 30. Next was ‘Better the Devil You Know’ – not a patch on the SAW Kylie Minogue song of the same name – as it was the UK entry in the 1993 Eurovision Song Contest. With that much TV exposure, Cowell reasoned the song couldn’t fail. Sonia came second in the competition and managed to get to 15 in the UK charts. Good – but not great.

Next there was Curiosity. Formally known as Curiosity Killed the Cat, they had been the hippest thing in town with their jazzy brand of pop funk and their loose-limbed pin-up lead singer Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot. Their early singles were finger-snapping fun with an arty edge – they even managed to get pop art giant Andy Warhol to appear in the video for their debut ‘Misfit’. Sadly, all that was in 1986. By start of the 1990s they’d been dropped by Mercury records after diminishing sales returns. So it was a surprise to see them back three years later with a slimmed-down name signed by Simon to RCA. At first, things went well with a cover of Johnny Bristol’s hit ‘Hang On In There Baby’ going Top Three and spending a healthy 10 weeks in the UK charts. But the two follow-ups fared badly – ‘I Need Your Lovin” just managed a Top 50 place and ‘Gimme the Sunshine’ barely scraped the Top 75.

It was Top 10 or nothing for Simon Cowell – he was in effect breaking the terms of his BMG deal. It must have really rubbed him up the wrong way to see the middling successes he was having, just as the band he rejected with the fat lead singer – Take That – were conquering all before them. Simon had to sell records at all costs. His ‘new’ acts weren’t delivering, so he had to change tactics to survive. He needed something new and the wait was getting frustrating. Cowell recalled this period in an interview with journalist Ariel Leve in 2005. ‘A man named Mike McCormack [RCA executive] sat with me and said, “Let me give you a piece of advice. You are the musical equivalent of Gary Lineker. What you do is stand by the goal. When the right thing comes along, nod it in the back of the net. Something’s going to come along.” He trusted me, and it helped to clear my mind. Then you realise that the reason things had gone badly before wasn’t the people I was working with: it was my fault. I just wasn’t getting it together. I stopped blaming everyone else.’

He drew on everything he’d learnt so far – from Elvis and Colonel Tom Parker to Sinitta’s success on MTV with her cheap and cheerful videos – and found a link. It wasn’t the trendy music press or the radio DJs who sold records: it was television. Being at the cutting edge didn’t matter so long as your act was seen on the small screen. The new talent he began scouting for wouldn’t be found in a dingy club or a music venue – it was right there in his living room already. ‘From about the age of 30 I was fascinated with the influence television had on people,’ he recalled in an interview with Fox News. ‘Most of my peers were signing worthy rock acts, tortured artists, alternative groups, and I was just interested in volume – that’s all I was interested in. And I realised that television was having an amazing, enormous influence on people and I started to sign things like the wrestlers from the World Wrestling Federation.’

Wrestling had come a long way since the 1970s, when it was a staple of the schedule on as part of ITV’s World of Sport on Saturday afternoons. The grunt-and-groan game and its UK stars such as Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks had given way to their bigger, brasher and brighter American counterparts courtesy of the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). As the US version took off in Britain, thanks to exposure on satellite TV, the wrestling stars began selling out the kind of British arenas that many music stars could only dream of. Cowell reasoned that, if fans were willing to shell out for a ticket, a T-shirt and a novelty foam hand, there was no reason why they wouldn’t go one further and buy a record too. He was right, but it was hardly a new idea. In truth, the WWF had been releasing albums in the US since the mid-eighties. The Wrestling Album, released in 1985, featured the introduction music used by stars such as Hulk Hogan and Rowdy Roddy Piper. What Cowell did was adapt the idea for the UK market. ‘I remember when I went to my immediate boss and told her that we were going to sign the WWF wrestlers,’ Cowell would later explain to Rolling Stone magazine. ‘She just paled and said, “Who on earth is going to buy records from wrestlers?” She honestly thought I was just a freak. But my attitude was simple: I don’t care what we’re selling, as long as we’re selling records.’

That’s exactly what Cowell started to do. He sold records – lots of records – but without the need for airplay or glowing reviews. It didn’t go down well with the critics or the snootier side of BMG, but that hardly gave him sleepless nights. ‘We sold a million, million and a half records,’ he later told America’s 60 Minutes show when recalling his success with the WWF. ‘I couldn’t care less – it’s a business. I’m sure a three-star Michelin chef is looking at the people who are making McDonald’s hamburgers and saying, “These people are terrible.” But I’d rather be McDonald’s than the three-star Michelin chef. Genuinely I would.’

The next act in his sights were TV puppets Zig and Zag from the planet Zog. The furry stars of Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast were twins from outer space with bizarre growths on the tops of their heads and heavy Irish accents – Simon would come across something along very similar lines years later on The X Factor.

Then there were the Mighty Morph’n Power Rangers, stars of the martial-arts TV show that had taken the country by storm. His desire to sign these acts would cause major friction with colleagues at BMG. ‘I was hard done by,’ he revealed in an interview with The Times. ‘The records weren’t selling the way I wanted, I had a small team around me who would have agreed with basically anything I said, and it got to a point where I walked out and went to see the chairman of the company. I told him, “I’m going to leave.”’

Simon was transferred to sister label RCA and took Zig and Zag and the Power Rangers with him. By December 1994 Cowell had both acts nestled in the UK Top Three and an extremely smug look on his face. He didn’t care what colleagues or critics thought – he’d delivered. ‘I’m only ashamed or embarrassed if I spend my money, or my company’s money, on something which is a flop,’ he would reflect in an interview with the Mirror. ‘How could I possibly be ashamed of making a record which 500,000 have enjoyed?’

Simon had developed a method he maintains to this day: knowing what the public want before they do and giving it to them. ‘I realised that the record was just an extension of the other merchandise available and it became my specialist area, really,’ he revealed on America’s Fox News. ‘And even though I knew at the time these weren’t long-term artists, obviously – but I thought, It’s a learning curve, and I always used to call that period target practice. And I always believed that there was something bigger down the line from this.’

There was devastating news in the offing for the Cowell family at this time. In 1995 Simon’s beloved mum Julie was diagnosed with breast cancer. The family rallied round but after surgery to remove the malignant lump, she refused to let her husband or her sons accompany her to hospital as she endured six weeks of radiotherapy. ‘I had to do it alone,’ she later told the Daily Mail. ‘My boys would come and see me, and mostly I could say hand on heart that I was fine. But I didn’t want to risk them seeing me at a low moment because it would have worried them. As a mother, your first role is to protect your children. On the day I got the all-clear, Simon sent me a bunch of flowers so big that I couldn’t get them through the door.’

Despite a further scare, when there were fears that the cancer had spread to her lung, the formidable Julie Cowell would make a full recovery.

Away from the strains and stresses of the real world, Simon’s next TV-related success would make his previous forays into the worlds of furry aliens and Lycra-clad martial artists seem pretty small beer. It would also make them seem positively credible in the eyes of his critics. Actors Robson Green and Jerome Flynn were familiar small-screen faces, thanks to their roles as Fusilier Dave Tucker and Sergeant Paddy Garvey in the ITV army series Soldier Soldier. During one episode the pair were seen to take a swipe at ‘Unchained Melody’. The song had been around since the mid-1950s but it had been the 1965 version by The Righteous Brothers that had made the tune a standard.

Simon believed that the pair could have a hit if they released their version, but the actors weren’t interested. So he resorted to a tried-and-tested technique: harassment. ‘It got to the point where Robson’s lawyer phoned me and said, “If you harass my client any more we are going to take a restraining order against you,”’ he said on TV’s This Is Your Life. ‘I thought, Sod it, I’ll start on the mother and eventually his mother persuaded them to make the record. And they sold seven or eight million albums in two years – it was fantastic.’

‘Unchained Melody’ went to Number 1 in May 1995 and spent 17 weeks in the chart. It would be Simon’s first Number 1 and the first of three in a row for Robson and Jerome. Despite the damning reviews and the way the two actors would look at each other while singing, the money started flooding in. There would be another advantage for Robson Green of working with Simon: he got to meet Cowell’s personal assistant Vanya Seager. A former model and Bond girl – she had a bit part in For Your Eyes Only – Vanya was a dark-haired beauty in the Jackie St Clair mould. She and Green are now married but at the time they kept their relationship a secret from Cowell, with Green adopting a variety of fake voices to phone her at the RCA offices. ‘Simon was devastated when I nicked her,’ Green later confessed to the Mirror. ‘He’s never forgiven me.’

It’s true to say not everyone fell for Robson and Jerome’s charms. When the pair appeared on Top of the Pops, one audience member went to the trouble of wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Robson and Jerome are a Load of Old Bollocks’ emblazoned across it. Manchester rockers Oasis also failed to sign up to the singing actors’ fan club – they were furious when Robson and Jerome’s second single, ‘I Believe’, kept their song ‘Wonderwall’ from the top slot in November. The Gallaghers could rest easy though, because after two albums Robson and Jerome called it a day – despite having a £3 million cheque wafted under their noses to make a third. Their success was one of the more baffling musical stories of the nineties – compilations albums of their greatest hits still sell well, but to critics the two actors became a byword for all that was wrong with the music industry.

It’s also true that not every actor who thought he had musical talent was necessarily right. Simon signed Baywatch star David Hasselhoff on the basis that he was the biggest thing on the box and he was selling shedloads of records in Germany. Hasselhoff had managed an almost accidental Number 1 when his song ‘Looking for Freedom’ struck a chord with German record buyers as an unlikely anthem for the destruction of the Berlin Wall. Sadly, Simon didn’t take into account the fickleness of the viewing public and the dubious musical tastes of German record buyers – the Hoff’s 1993 single ‘If I Could Only Say Goodbye’ got to only 35 in the charts in the UK. Despite being alarmed by Hasselhoff’s eccentric behaviour – he once pulled out a ghetto blaster in a restaurant and sang a song at full tilt into Simon’s face to prove his talent – Cowell clearly developed a soft spot for him. ‘He’s larger than life and he’s unpredictable, very emotional and funny,’ Cowell said in an interview with US website Monsters and Critics. ‘There’s only one David Hasselhoff. I adore him.’

That’s more than can be said for another actor who caught Cowell’s eye around this time: Eddie Murphy. The Beverly Hills Cop star was in Cowell’s sights after he heard Murphy was keen to make a music album. Action star Bruce Willis had done good business in the UK charts, so why not Murphy? The answer became obvious when Cowell went to the US to listen to some tracks the actor had already recorded. They were, in Cowell’s opinion, ‘crap’. Unfortunately, the Cowell directness that the world knows today wasn’t fully formed at this stage and Simon didn’t have the nerve to tell Murphy what he really thought of the tracks. ‘I flew to the east coast to his huge house, and I was very intimidated,’ Simon would later tell the Sun. ‘I thought it would be just the two of us and a hi-fi. But I ended up in a recording studio with about 20 nodders – a nodder is someone who gets paid to agree with the person paying him. Eddie started to play some songs – which I hated – and I just didn’t know what to say. Now I’d find it a lot easier. I would just say – I hate it.’

Simon diplomatically offered to bring Murphy to the UK and record some fresh material – until he got his calculator out. He cancelled the deal when he realised that shipping Murphy and his entourage of nodders would set him back half a million quid before the star had even opened his mouth.

A far better investment was the 25 grand that Simon spent putting together boy band Five – or 5ive, as they were originally known. He commissioned the group after a gaffe even bigger than missing out on Take That, and that was letting the Spice Girls slip through his fingers. Cowell was one of several BMG A&R men circling the group. He claims he was on the trail of the five-piece girl band even before Simon Fuller, the man who eventually became their manager and later Simon’s collaborator on Pop Idol. Cowell was a day late making his offer – their debut single ‘Wannabe’ came charging out of the gates three months later in June 1996.

In response Simon paid Chris Herbert – who, with his father Bob had originally brought the five Spice Girls together – to do the same again, but with boys. This tactic would be another one to add to the Cowell arsenal for future reference: If first you miss out on something, create your own version of it. The point of Five was that they were the Spice Girls – but boys. They were even recruited the same way as the Spice Girls were – via an advert in the showbiz newspaper The Stage, which asked for boys with ‘attitude and edge’. Despite their origins in the pages of The Stage, Five did indeed have a harder, streetwise image – a bit of rough compared with some of their softer contemporaries. Their debut single ‘Slam Dunk (Da Funk)’ got to Number 10 in December 1997 – the first of 11 Top Ten singles for the group. They managed three Number 1s among this tally, including the peerless dance floor filler ‘Keep on Movin”. Perhaps they’d have had four if they had recorded a song Simon was hoping to secure for the group: it was called ‘Baby One More Time’ and, despite his offering the song’s writer Max Martin a Mercedes 600SL, the tune went to a new singer called Britney Spears. Martin did eventually write another pop gem for Five, but they refused to record it. It was called ‘Bye Bye Bye’ and *NSYNC made the second-hand song a hit across the world. Five could be a real handful for Simon.

There were no such problems for his other big signing of 1997 – there was barely a cross word from any of this lot. In fact there were barely any identifiable words to be heard at all from the Teletubbies. The preschool sensations were the big TV hit of the year and a single was sure to be a hit – and that’s when the A&R men come out to play. ‘I heard another record label were about to sign the Teletubbies,’ Simon later boasted to the Sun. ‘So I got the BBC in my office and told them I would give them £500,000 in advance. We knew a record like that would make over £2 million.’ ‘Teletubbies Say Eh-Oh’ duly went to Number 1 and stayed in the charts for a tubbie-tastic 32 weeks. It would be the last truly great Simon Cowell kids’ TV hit single.

The Teletubbies and his other musical creations would be constantly used as sticks to beat Cowell with in years to come: why should anyone listen to the musical opinion of the man behind the Teletubbies? His critics would make the mistake of confusing Simon Cowell with a man who cared about their opinion. ‘My definition of credibility,’ he would patiently explain to The Times, ‘is public acceptance. Record sales.’

To push that point home, Simon’s final big deal of the decade would be his biggest. A call from Irish pop manager Louis Walsh in June 1998 persuaded Cowell to fly to Dublin. Walsh – the former manager of Ireland’s triple Eurovision winner Johnny Logan – had been pestering Cowell for years: ‘Louis used to call me over and over and over again,’ Simon said in the documentary In My Life. ‘I had no idea who he was. Three or four times a week my PA would say, “This guy from Ireland’s on the phone, Louis Walsh, will you talk to him?” “No.” But he was the most persistent person I’d ever met in my life.’

Eventually the pair did meet, backstage at a TV show in Dublin in the Robson and Jerome days. Cowell claims Walsh was ‘dribbling with excitement’ at finally coming to face to face with him. Since then Louis had become a genuine player, as he’d put together Boyzone, the so-called ‘Irish Take That’. The group had managed great success through the 1990s but by the end of the decade their star was fading as lead singer Ronan Keating was preparing to go solo. Walsh was looking for something new. He’d spotted an embryonic boy band called IOYOU on the Irish TV show Nationwide and wanted them to audition for Cowell.

Simon walked into the Westbury Hotel in Dublin that day and saw what he later described as ‘one of the worst looking boy bands I have ever seen in my life’. One of the lads – Shane Filan – was not at his best, having taken the decision to get beered up the night before. Shane painted a vivid picture of what happened next in the band’s autobiography Our Story, describing Simon as ‘a man with black hair and really high-waisted black trousers’.

‘He wasn’t famous at all at this stage,’ Shane said. ‘He was just a successful A&R man. His big band of the time was Five, so we knew he would be great to work with. I performed terribly. The rest of the lads were great, but I knew I hadn’t done my job. Simon seemed unimpressed … as I came out of the audition room Louis grabbed me and kinda half hit me.’

Cowell turned them down flat and advised Walsh to get some new members. A second audition was organised with an amended line-up, but Walsh still had faith in the boozy talents of Filan. So he got the singer to dye his hair and get a tan to fool Cowell into thinking Shane had been given the boot. Band member Kian Egan: ‘Shane’s hair was longer and blond as per Louis’s cunning plan and he’d been on a couple of sun beds, so he was browner. As we were just about to start, Simon pointed at Shane and said to Louis – I swear to God – “Who’s the new guy?”’

‘Second time I saw them it was a different band,’ Simon said. ‘They’d got some new people in. They just had it. They were confident this time, great song choices … just what the market needed. I instantly got it and I didn’t fool around with him, I said, “Louis I’m going to my lawyers now, we have a deal.”’

Simon signed the band but insisted they change their name to Westside – later to become Westlife when other bands were found already using the name. Simon tied them to a five-album deal. The group – Shane and Kian along with Nicky Byrne, Mark Feehily and Brian McFadden – went to Cowell’s offices in London to put pen to paper. It would be the first of many visits to Cowell’s lair over the years. One thing would tickle them: they couldn’t help but notice that Cowell had a giant mirror behind his desk engraved with the words ‘Yes Simon, you do look terrific’.

Straight away Cowell was impressed by the Westlifers’ work ethic. The Irishmen were ambitious and focused. Westlife really wanted it. ‘They’d watched bands like Five and A1 come and go, so they didn’t want to be like those bands,’ Louis Walsh later told UTV. ‘They wanted to be like Take That and live for ever.’

Their first single was to be the piano-led ballad ‘Swear It Again’, written by proven British hit makers Steve Mac and Wayne Hector. Cowell’s dad Eric loved the track and predicted it would go to the top of the charts. Simon was totally focused on the song, even scrapping a £150,000 video and starting from scratch because he felt it wasn’t perfect. He knew this was his chance to break away from the novelty records and start having some real hits.

Westlife were on the covers of all the glossy pop mags – highly unusual for a band who didn’t even have a record out – and by April 1999 were bracing themselves for a hefty hit. They were in Pete Waterman’s studio putting the finishing touches to their debut album when they got the news they had fulfilled Eric Cowell’s prediction and topped the charts. Simon was on the other side of the world: ‘The day Westlife got to Number 1, I was in America,’ Simon later told the Mirror. ‘I rang my mother to tell her. She sounded odd but I put the phone down and didn’t think too much about it. Then half an hour later my brother Nicholas rang. He said: “Dad died this morning. Mum’s in a state of shock and she said: ‘I didn’t want to tell Simon and ruin his day.’”’

Family friend Father Martin Morgan would later relive the events of that day on ITV’s This Is Your Life. ‘Simon was flying to Boston as Westlife had become Number 1. Eric died. I remember being with the family the next morning and there was a big debate about whether they should spoil Simon’s success by telling him about his father’s death. I persuaded them to ring him. I thought he’d always put family before the business. Certainly he put his father much higher than the business.’

Eric Cowell had died of a heart attack. Simon’s raffish role model was gone. Simon returned to the UK, doing his grieving on the 14-hour flight home. The plane was delayed but he didn’t mind – the longer the flight took the more time he had to compose himself. No one is prepared for the loss of a parent – but Simon Cowell has since admitted that he was particularly ill-equipped. ‘I was living life like in one of those Disney movies, where I genuinely believed nobody was ever going to die,’ he later revealed in an interview with the Daily Mail. ‘When it happened, it was just the worst sense of reality I’ve ever felt in my life. Ever. So, yes, I cried, but I don’t cry easily.’

The decade when Simon really broke through and achieved major success was made possible after his dad had taken his son back under his roof after nearly going bust. Eric Cowell had given Simon a blueprint for the way a life should be led – with fun and a sense of style. Now he was no longer there to show his son the way. Simon took a week off work and retreated from the world of show business. On his return ‘Swear It Again’ was still at Number 1. ‘He had a fantastic ear for music, my dad,’ Simon would later recall. ‘I played him this song and he said, “They’ll go to Number 1.” The horrible irony attached to that … He was my best friend and he gave me so much good advice. I’ll never forget that.’