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Stats To Remember:
* The second favourite tends
to win; not the favourite
* Those who are prominent
to start with often lose
popularity as viewers get
bored with opinionated or
divisive personalities
* Good natured, easy-going
campmates tend to make finals
* Need to do at least one
trial well to pick up support
* Older stars do well
in the voting
* No imported star has yet won
* It’s harder for women to win
(9 male, 4 female winners
so far)
* There has yet to be a
non-white winner

X Factor Notes:

Final show: 14th December
Stats To Remember:

* Male soloists most likely
to win (six out of ten; twice
as many as female wins)
* Early favourites rarely win
(Janet Devlin, Ella Henderson,
Danyl Johnson, Diana Vickers)
* Age and racial background
are not major vote factors
* Producers can use format
change and PR to effect
change – acts that are
unfairly treated can get a
spike in votes (Katie Waissel,
but Mary Byrne lost to Cher
Lloyd thanks to format change)
* From this week, whoever is
leading the voting tends to
go on and win
* Favourites can end up in the
sing-off and still go on to win
(like James Arthur – it can
prompt people to vote)

If there’s anything that is sure to soothe even the most chapped, frost bitten hands this coming winter, it has to be a gig. A steamy, 50 degree atmosphere lathered with lashings of lager and Jack Daniels; there’s nothing better! With so many events coming up in the next few months, you’d be forgiven for burying your head in the sand or, failing that, hiring a P.A., but thankfully we’ve selected a wonderful, audibly-pleasing selection of acts and events for you to sink your musical teeth in to.

Stromae, Hammersmith Apollo

Hailing from Belgium, house producer Stromae has been rocking the electro dance circuit for a few years now, and will be playing at the Apollo on the 9th of December. Hip-hop laced beats, mixed up with a healthy sprinkling of funky piano licks and edgy guitar riffs; don’t forget your fanny pack!

Queen & Adam Lambert, O2

A product of the relatively recent partnership between the historically excellent rock gods and the up-and-coming US singer-songwriter, this January’s O2 show is going to be a stunner. For fans that are feeling lucky, MrSmithCasino are currently launching a competition related to the show, the winner of which will win an all-expenses paid trip to London and VIP tickets to the event; just have a go on MrSmithCasino‘s excellent array of slots to be in with a chance of winning!

Death From Above 1979, UK Tour

Throughout February the eminent Canadian duo, bursting with energy and verve thanks to their already-classic recent album release, will be thrashing it up on some of the UK’s most well regarded stages. A pungent mix of punk-rock and dance-punk, the pair recently reformed after being apart since 2006 and boy are they making up for all that spent time!

South Coast Jazz Festival 2015, Shoreham-By-Sea

Jazz fans will have cause to celebrate this coming January as a host of huge names in the Jazz world come together to pluck, toot and sing in an event that promises to showcase the best of both classic and modern jazz. Liane Carroll, Ian Show, Bobby Wellins and Joe Stilgoe are at the top of the bill, guaranteeing punters a positively toe-tapping time!

Alt-J, The O2

The Mercury Award-winning trio have been wowing critics and audiences for a fair few years now, their dozy, flickering sound providing sleek listening whether you’re on the walk to work or in the midst of a buzzing crowd. Set to perform on the 24th of January at the expansive O2, this gig looks set to be a big deal.

Buy Christmas Dinner for someone homeless

Five of our favourite indie tunesmiths from Scandinavia

Postiljonen

Supreme was one of our favourite singles of last year and, although it was definitely the stand-out track, the album was pretty bloody lovely too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGGozJjtbOQ

Heart Sick Groans

Heart Sick Groans’ first EP was a masterpiece of English-as-Second-Language indie. With cute, fun lyrics and a shuffly, guitar-led beat which stopped just short of sounding like twee folk, songs like A Bossa Nova With This Casanova could have killed on the right movie soundtrack. We haven’t heard anything from their new EP Black Hair Typography but we’ll be first in line to pick up a copy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFDr3uQ2edE

Iamamiwhoami

Theyarearetheywhoarethey? Well, they are singer-songwriter Jonna Lee and music producer Claes Björklund, and together they’ve formed the extremely-annoying-to-say iamamiwhoami. These two aren’t your usual let’s-bang-out-a-couple-of-tunes-now-and-again pop act though, they’ve gone the whole multimedia-artist(e) route, with a bunch of weirdo concept videos that follow an overarching ‘storyline’ to accompany their music. It’s all very ethereal and spooky, but it’s also all very good. It’s certainly not music to pop on at your next house party, but if you’re crying in your bedroom and staring out the window while it’s raining outside, then it’s the perfect soundtrack.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRazgMj_cfE

Martin Garrix

He’s not done anything in 2014 which has touched the brilliance or success of Animals, but he’s getting heavily tipped for the top in the States. Not least because he’s part of the Scooter Braun stable – joining Bieber and Ariana Grande. We have to remember Garrix’s tender years, though, as he doesn’t yet seem to have been able to move on up to the ranks of the real superstar DJs, as this piece on a recent LA gig in Billboard  suggests. Perhaps we should give him some leeway and a few years to learn the skills he needs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCYcHz2k5x0

Billie Van

LIPA (Paul McCartney’s performing arts academy in Liverpool) has an inexplicable magic touch with Norwegians. Christian from A1, Kate Havnevik and now Billie Van (pictured above) all cut their teeth there and all have become mighty fine pop stars. Billie’s album <em>1, 2, 3, 4 Radio Star</em> is littered with catchy pop tunes – and How Can It Be So Hard? sounds like an early (i.e. ‘good’) Cardigans track.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihb56shcgv0

Have you heard the latest Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars track? If not, holy shit. You should rectify that immediately. Uptown Funk couldn’t be any more of a banger if it was a dynamite stick wrapped in sausage casing. It’s like an unreleased Prince song that Michael Jackson could have worked wonders with. It is an absolutely belting pop single.

The video’s out too now – take a look. Great, isn’t it? You can just imagine this one going down a storm at Christmas parties. From the crappiest office booze-up to the coolest nightclubs, it’s the sort of track that would get even the most exhausted reveller back up onto the dancefloor for one last four-minute freak out.

But you’re unlikely to hear Uptown Funk at any Christmas parties this year – at least not in the UK. Why? Because unless the DJ is willing to stream it from YouTube (or unless they’ve taped it off the radio), they have no way to play it. The song isn’t released in the UK until January 11th. Two months’ time.

If you live in the States, you’ll have no problem. You can download the song right now and play it to your heart’s content. It was released on November 10th there. You’ve had a week and change to bust a move to it. In the UK though, we’re having to wait.

This is happening a lot with big singles at the moment. Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda. Gwen Stefani’s Baby Don’t Lie. They’re released onto the internet, they gain a bit of traction on social media, and then… nothing. They don’t get properly released in the UK for ages.

What the hell, music business? What possible reason could there be for this? Are the record labels being deliberately withholding? Is there some sort of clever gameplan at play here? Or they just being unthinkably stupid?

1) They’re trying to generate a buzz, getting everyone excited for the release so that it gets to number one.

Ah, ‘buzz’. Often chased and rarely caught, industry people can become so obsessed by the highly-sought after quality of ‘buzz’, that they forget the primary purpose of it is to actually help sell records – something you can only do when the record has been, y’know… released.

The release dates for Uptown Funk and Baby Don’t Lie are particularly interesting because they are both chalked in for January 11th 2015 – completely missing the balls-out spendfest that is Christmas. January is famously a dry month for retail, what with all the post-holiday belt-tightening, so it seems like a weird time to release a single if you want it to sell. Why would they deliberately avoid the pre-Christmas sales opportunity?

Well, it’s true that you can get to the top of the charts in January by selling relatively few records (because no-one is buying anything) but if that’s their plan, it could very easily backfire. Not only are Ronson and Stefani going head to head – which will result in at least one loser – leaving a two month lag between the song’s premiere and its release in the UK iTunes store is exactly what cost Nicki Minaj a very easy number one.

Anaconda was all anyone could talk about when it first hit YouTube. People loved the Sir Mix-A-Lot sample; the video was being discussed and dissected by every pop culture commentator worth their salt; it broke online streaming records with 19.6 million plays in 24 hours. But by the time it was finally released here, nearly eight weeks later, people had either had their fill of the track, or they had ripped a copy off YouTube for lack of any legitimate channel through which to purchase it.

It still reached number three, so it wasn’t a complete washout, but if it had been available to buy from the UK iTunes store when everyone was clamouring to watch the video, she’d have easily scored her first solo number one.

So much for ‘buzz’ then…

2) It’s a tactical delay, so that they aren’t competing with a charity single for the top spot.

Around Christmastime, the UK charts become absolutely sodden with charity singles. Listening to the Top 40 in November and December is like trying to walk down a street lined with chuggers. It’s awful. This year alone we’ve had the Band Aid ebola remix, the BBC cover of God Only Knows, Children In Need’s kiddie choir version of Wake Me Up, the Peace Collective’s remake of All Together Now. There’s the single from the John Lewis ad, the single from the Waitrose ad, we’ll get the X Factor winner doing something or other and there’s still more.

You don’t want to go up against a charity single in the charts for two good reasons. One is that charity singles sell by the ton because people feel duty bound to buy them (even if they are lazy, patronising pieces of shit – Geldof…). The other is that you look like a colossal twat if you end up keeping those singles off number one, as if you feel your pop career is more important than injured veterans or children with leukaemia.

No other market gets flooded to quite the same extent with charity singles as the UK one (you can count on one hand the number of charity singles that America has produced since We Are The World in 1985) so that might be why Ronson, Mars and Stefani have all chosen to wait until it clears in January.

But that still doesn’t explain why Minaj did it in August and October though.

3) They’re releasing the singles later so that they’re eligible for the 2015 BRIT Awards.

God, could you imagine? That would be the bleakest fucking reason if it were in any way true.

No, as most of the acts doing this are American, the only awards they would be eligible for are the Best International Male/Female/Group awards (which don’t specify any particular single). Mark Ronson – being British – is the only one who’d be in with a shout for a Best Single nomination but the BRITs’ weirdly flexible 16 month eligibility period would accommodate either a November or a January release.

So thankfully we can discount the idea that the international music market is bowing to the whim of people like James Corden and Ant and Dec.

4) The label doesn’t care about the single. This is just a taster for the album. That’s what they’re wanting to sell.

A slightly more sensible theory – one that does seem fairly plausible on the face of it – but it doesn’t hold up to a great deal of scrutiny.

As Beyoncé and David Bowie both proved last year, playing a teaser PR game is completely unnecessary when you’ve got yourself name. Overnight they dropped unannounced records and let the wagging tongues of the internet do their press and public relations for them – to wild success.

And while the artists who are currently keeping the UK at arm’s length aren’t quite Beyoncés or Bowies, they’re hardly underground artists. They are proven multi-platinum selling performers. So if someone like Aphex Twin can drop a secret album on the deep web and everyone still manages to find out about it, you can be sure that anything Gwen Stefani chooses to release won’t disappear without a trace.

Besides, Daft Punk have kind of ruined the album teaser trailer for everybody with the gargantuan prickteasing they did for Random Access Memories – hyping it up for months and months and months with a namedrop here, a snatch of audio there, the occasional glimpse of video. It was a juggernaut campaign for what ended up being a fairly average album, and it undoubtedly worked for them. But what actually ended up selling the most?

To date, the album Random Access Memories has sold about 2.8 million copies worldwide. The single Get Lucky has sold 9.3 million. If their relentless advertising worked for anything, it worked for the single.

This is a trend we’re seeing across both the US and the UK’s charts. Single sales are eclipsing album sales by a phenomenal factor.

Consider this. Aside from the Frozen soundtrack (released in 2013, and still selling by the boatload) the only album to have surpassed a million in sales in the States this year is Taylor Swift’s 1989. Beyoncé’s album hasn’t. Katy Perry’s album hasn’t. Coldplay’s album hasn’t. They’re all stalling in the six-figures.

This problem isn’t exclusive to 2014 either. Album sales – both digital and physical – in the US have been in fairly steady decline since 2007, now selling about half the amount they used to (and most of those were probably Adele’s).

If you look at singles though, the opposite is happening. Increasing numbers are passing the million mark – many passing the multi-million mark.

In fact, aside from a few staples like White Christmas, I Will Always Love You and Candle In The Wind, pretty much every single to have sold more than six million copies has been released in the last five years (and Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ only managed it after the Glee bump of 2009).

The man who neatly sums up the entire situation? Pharrell. He has featured on three of the biggest-selling singles of all time – all of which were released in the last two years (Get Lucky – 9.3m; Happy – 10m; Blurred Lines – 14.3m). That’s nearly 25 million single sales, yet his album has only shifted 500,000 copies in the States.

The same thing is happening in the UK. 20% of all of the singles to sell a million-plus copies were released in, or after, 2009. This isn’t because singles are getting quantitatively better. It’s because people – thanks to the ease (and price) of digital purchasing – are buying more and more singles.

Obviously, record companies still want people to buy albums. They’re worth eight to ten times more than any individual single purchase. But the idea that a company would throw a single away just to lure people into to purchasing an album appears to run at odds with every scrap of evidence about the way our purchasing patterns are moving.

People are buying singles. Or at least they will, if only they’re allowed to.

5) It’s for the advertising money. The record labels want people to play it on YouTube so they get more money.

The lump sum vs installment argument. Is it better for an artist to take a larger fixed rate per single sold, and enjoy one or two big windfall payments in the first few weeks of the single’s release – then nothing else? Or is it better to gamble and hope that your song is catchy enough that lots of people play it on YouTube over a prolonged period – and you take in a steadier stream of smaller payments over a series of months and years?

The answer is different for different acts. For some, there is a definite merit to the long-term YouTube ad revenue model over traditional single sales.

Take Rebecca Black, for example. Three years ago, her song Friday was a massive internet hit – largely because (and we don’t think we’re being unfair in saying this) it was total wank. People couldn’t share it fast enough on social media, telling people to check out this horror show. Within days, Rebecca Black was a viral superstar.

Although the current view count for the official video for Friday appears to sit around the 73 million mark, it initially racked up about 167 million views before Black pulled it off YouTube (nominally because of a legal complication, but presumably partly out of embarrassment too).

In total then it has clocked nearly 240 million views. What does that sort of view count pay out at? Well, although figures fluctuate depending on your viewers’ engagement with the pre-roll ads, Forbes has estimated that advertisers will pay a rather nicely rounded average of $1 per 1,000 views. That means Friday’s 240 million views have a cash value of $240,000.

(Of course, YouTube will take a cut of this sum, as will the record label and writers – so Rebecca Black won’t see anything like that amount personally – but let’s just concentrate on gross figures as these sorts of cuts and percentages apply across all of the various platforms.)

$240,000 might not seem like very much for a huge hit song, but given that it was recorded and the video shot as part of a $2,000 package, YouTube alone has made the whole thing an incredibly profitable endeavour. And $240,000 is certainly a lot more than the song ever made her in digital download sales. (Black had first week figures of 37,000 downloads – which falls a long way short of raking in the same sort of money.)

Artists can walk away with much more than a quarter-million dollars too. Psy’s Gangnan Style amassed an absolutely massive 2 billion views on YouTube. 2,000,000,000. From the YouTube advertising revenue that generated he was estimated to have earned $2m.

Which, by anyone’s calculations, is pretty amazing going, right? But then when you consider the song went on to sell nearly 12 million copies globally (bringing in ~$7.2 million after Apple take their hosting/delivery fee) you see that, while YouTube money is certainly not to be sniffed at, it is really no substitute for a good set of sales.

And this is where this argument starts to fall apart, because for streaming plays to earn an artist the equivalent of one paid-for single, someone would have to view the track roughly 700 times on YouTube. That is over 40 straight hours of listening to Baby Don’t Lie; 52 straight hours of listening to Uptown Funk; and 56 straight hours of listening to Anaconda.

Or it’s one click in iTunes.

There is no good reason why a record company would prioritise ad revenue from YouTube views over actual cash-for-track transactions. More importantly though, there is also no good reason why the two releases (or, to use the twattish parlance of accountants, the two ‘revenue streams’) can’t happily coexist. You can have the single on sale for the fans who want to buy it, and you can have the video up on YouTube for the freeloaders – both earning you money at the same time.

So if the idea is to try to somehow wring a bit of extra streaming money out of the UK audience before eventually giving us the single, it’s an extraordinarily backward plan. And if the record industry really don’t know how easy it is to rip an MP3 from YouTube, then someone should tell them. Because the answer to this whole problem sure as hell isn’t Theory #6.

6) Britain doesn’t do piracy. It’s the one place that can be trusted with a high-quality YouTube version for a few months.

The figures surrounding piracy are confusing, but they are not so confusing that they could support this sort of statement.

In an Ofcom study conducted from May 2012 to May 2013, it was shown that roughly a quarter of all ‘content’ downloaded from the internet infringed copyright laws. Of that quarter, one quarter was illegally accessed music. If that is accurate, then it means that roughly 6.25% of UK internet usage is dedicated to pirating music.

The study also showed that piracy is a minority interest, with only about 17% of internet users infringing copyright (another 2012 study by Musicmetric had the figure at 15%) and a very small percentage of those account for disproportionately huge amounts of the pirated material that is downloaded.

If the figures seem small, that’s because – relatively speaking – they are. But when you’re dealing with a multi-billion pound industry like the music business, even the smallest of percentages can amount to huge sums.

The BPI estimates that piracy still costs the music industry about £200 million a year. You’d think a hole that size is one you’d want to plug up pretty sharpish. Which is what makes actions like this all the more peculiar.

If you’re dangling an amazing pop song in front of people and giving them no legal way to purchase and own a copy, what do you think they’re going to do? Wait patiently for months until you suddenly give them the green light? Or will they use a simple, free and web-based piece of software to lift the audio track from a video and download it to their computer as a 192KB/s MP3?

Weirdest yet, the music industry knows this. They’ve known it for ages. That’s why they stopped sending threatening but ultimately toothless letters to the worst perpetrators. That’s why government-backed plans to curtail the internet access of those pirating the most material were shelved. The music industry quickly learned that they were best served focusing their energies on creating cheaper, easier and legal methods by which you download or stream music.

It’s easy to think that the music business if full of idiots who don’t know what they’re doing (especially when you see U2 releasing an album like it was a software virus; or you see Usher giving away his music in the bottom of a box of Honey Nut Cheerios) but we’re sympathetic to their plight, even if we don’t sound it. The ground has been shifting under their feet for the best part of 15 years now. The effects of MP3 technology and peer-to-peer sharing took them by surprise and online piracy spread on the web like a cold through a commune. They’ve had a hell of a battle to try to get it under control and they’re actually doing a pretty good job of it now.

So what the fuck reason do they have for not giving us proper, legal access to new singles? Why are they keeping British pop fans in the dark for months at a time when there’s such corking tunes out there that people want to buy?

We asked some people in the music business if they could shed any light on this mystery. One insider told us: “It’s because the artist is not here to promote the track, so the label wants to make the single release coincide with a UK visit. Never underestimate how old school majors are.”

But according to others, it might not strictly be the labels’ choice. Someone else told us: “Some UK radio stations insist on having the song “exclusively” on radio (i.e. not for sale) in return for adding it to their playlist. [UK labels] believe that releasing a song on the day it goes to radio means that it will chart badly. So they hold it back for 6-8 weeks so that radio plays will build demand and then, when the song is finally released, it makes a very high new entry. They don’t seem to care about the number of customers who download the song illegally in the 6-8 week period when it cannot be bought.”

Another said: “I’ve heard something about labels having to wait for certain exclusivity deals to end with Spotify before they can put the songs on sale.’

The fact that there is no unified answer on why this is happening, even from the people whose job it is to decide upon these things, is curious. It would suggest that this is actually an imaginary problem that high-paid execs have whipped into existence, and one that has quickly gone from ‘let’s try something out’ to ‘this is just how the business works now’.

It’s bafflingly counter-intuitive and, if it continues, will mark a big backwards step for musicians and performers (who will get put over the barrel even further by more and more business people); and a huge heave forward for marketing consultants, brand managers and PR representatives (which no-one really needs).

So, as music fans, if we can just make our voices heard for a quick second:

NO-ONE GIVES A FUCK ABOUT YOUR FUCKING PR CAMPAIGN. RELEASE THE RECORDS AND WE SHALL BUY IT. THIS IS NOT FIFTY SHADES OF GREY, WE ARE NOT ENJOYING THIS TORMENT. STOP DICKING US ABOUT AND LET US HAVE UPTOWN FUNK.

Thanks.

Poor Steve Brookstein. The first crowned winner of The X Factor hasn’t been remembered so much for his victory as he has for being one of the greatest casualties of Simon Cowell’s singing shows. Like a doctor who has spent their entire career trying to make a name for themselves, only to find that name becoming synonymous with a disgusting, disfiguring or disturbing condition – so he has unfortunately found his place in popular culture. But Steve Brookstein does have a fantastic story to tell, and Getting Over The X is his attempt to tell it.

It’s ripe ground for a scintillating read too. Simon Cowell, The X Factor and reality TV have been the unholy trinity that has framed popular culture over the last decade. Dictating what we watch, what we listen to, who we read about – the show has had a pre-eminent place in modern mainstream culture. And yet the real story of the last ten years has largely gone untold. Cowell (with the help of long-time henchman Max Clifford) has exhibited a Putinesque hold over the British media. No-one has wanted to displease the Dark Lord (or his lawyers, Carter-Ruck) and dared to speak out of turn.

Now, ten years after its launch – with barely anyone still interested in the show and with Max Clifford safely behind bars – Steve Brookstein has finally broken cover and decided that the moment has arrived for him to tell his side of the story. So is this the explosive tell-all that the world has been waiting for?

Erm. Kind of.

If you’re wanting a quick-and-easy “Needless to say, I had the last laugh…”-type biography, then Getting Over The X is a solid example of the genre. He namedrops celebrities like Fiona Phillips, Will Mellor and Jane McDonald throughout. He talks about a low-level beef he has with “the broadcaster Chris Tarrant”. He singles out the venue management skills of The Stables in Milton Keynes for particular praise. A significant plot point revolves around whether or not he will be able to attend the premiere of The Dukes Of Hazzard reboot (and we all remember where we were that night…).

He can barely go ten minutes without reminding you that he won six million votes in the final of The X Factor (mentioned six times). Or that he once had to turn down a support slot for Lionel Richie (nine times). Or that Louis Walsh once said he looked a bit like Fred West (four times – and we’d completely forgotten about that until he mentioned it).

There’s plenty of cheap chuckles to be had, if cheap chuckles are your MO. But what if you’re in the market for a searing exposé of the whole X Factor sham? A book that is finally going to blow the lid clean off Simon Cowell’s sordid little show? Well, if that’s what you’re after, you’re half in luck.

Actually, maybe a third in luck. It’s probably closer to a third.

This is how the book plays out.

Part One: The X-perience

Part of what makes Steve Brookstein’s tale so noteworthy is that he suffered his misfortune back in late 2004, a far-off time when people were actually watching The X Factor. (To put those famed six million votes into context, the total was bettered only by Joe McElderry’s 6.1m votes in 2009; and last year’s winner, Sam Bailey, won by scoring just one million.)

Steve was an incredibly popular contestant, The X Factor was a hot new show and the promised prize was a million-pound record contract with Simon Cowell’s new Sony-backed record label, Syco. After years of hard graft, this success was supposed to finally put soul singer Steve on the path to fame and fortune – but it didn’t work out. Despite a number one single and album, less than nine months after taking the throne on primetime TV, Steve had been dropped from the label and was out on his ear.

It wasn’t hard to see the invisible hand of Cowell behind some of the stories appearing in the tabloids shortly afterwards, labelling him difficult and unpopular. Max Clifford also dropped him a handy call to let him know that if Steve ever talked to the press, Clifford would see to it that he was buried. Tabloid journalists who were praising him in victory, now used him as both punchline and punchbag.

All of this has left Steve, entirely understandably, with a rather unpleasant taste in his mouth. So much so that even a decade later he is still stewing about it.

One of Steve’s express concerns in writing this book was that he felt he might be providing the journalists who have been ridiculing him for years with a trove of quotes that they could take out of context and use to humiliate him further. We would hate to be accused of pulling such a cheap trick, so we want to make sure that we put any quotes we do use in their fullest possible context.

Like this one, for example.

The thing that appears to rankle most in Steve’s mind about his time on The X Factor (aside from the time that Louis Walsh said he looked a bit like Fred West) is when Sharon Osbourne took him to task for trying to sing a soul song “like a black man”.

Rather than ignore it, or brush Sharon’s comments off as being inappropriate, Steve chooses to address the decade-old incident head on. And what does he have to say on the matter?

“The truth is I probably do have black blood in me. My dad’s side are fairly dark. My aunt, who is only three years older than me, was called ‘Paki’ as we grew up. My family tree was certainly diverse. My grandfather was from St Helena, and it wouldn’t surprise me if some of that Chinese slave trade had got mixed in.”

When he’s not defending himself against the slights he suffered, there is actually some genuinely interesting insight into the weird world of Simon Cowell. Particularly illuminating is one scene that takes place in Cowell’s dressing room, minutes before the live final. Cowell summons Steve into his room, whereupon he shows him his idea of pre-show relaxation.

We wouldn’t want to spoil one of best selling-points that Steve has by giving this away. Heaven knows he’s been screwed out of enough money already (and he more than deserves his payday for this book – so you will have to buy it yourself to find out what takes place exactly) but it involves Simon Cowell sat smoking in a chair while a topless Sinitta does his strange, semi-sexual bidding.

Salacious titbits like that are always a joy to read, but even Steve’s insights into the seemingly mundane administrative details involved in putting a show like The X Factor together – the sorts of emails and letters and phone calls that go between producers and talent and contestants – are surprisingly enlightening.

At the risk of sound too pseudy, the whole X Factor story becomes positively Kafka-esque at points. In the blink of an eye, Steve becomes completely devoid of any agency and finds himself being pushed around by powers far beyond his control; his every word twisted, manipulated to be used against him. One day he gets hit by one of Sharon Osbourne’s staff; the next day it appears in the tabloids that he was the one doing the hitting. It paints a nightmarish portrait of pop contest popularity and shows quite plainly how cold, calculated and utterly devoid of soul it all is.

But Steve’s motivation in writing this book isn’t to show people the real workings of The X Factor – no matter how many times he might insist that it is. His real motivation is to show you how hard done by he was. And this is where things start to get a little bit tricky because, sadly, before we reach the halfway point, Steve’s story has deteriorated into little more than an exercise in axe-grinding.

It’s easy to see how this would happen. The temptation to stick the boot into the recently-jailed Max Clifford, the recently-jailed Andy Coulson and the guilty-but-spared-from-jail Dan Evans (all of whom he singles out as having made his life particularly miserable) must have been immense, and it would be a very callous person indeed to say that Steve Brookstein wasn’t entitled to take a strip out of each of them.

It all sets a very tedious precedent, however, and soon Steve starts taking (what feels like) every single person who has ever wronged him to task. He has a lot to say about journalists, tabloid conspiracies and “fixed media narratives” (a phrase he uses even more frequently than Russell Brand) and you’ll be goddamned if you think you’re getting out before he’s said his piece.

Part Two: X Wounds

One thing Steve does comprehensively demonstrate in this book is the level of help and support that your usual ex-X Factor star gets. And the answer is: absolutely none. One minute your every move is co-ordinated by a huge team of producers and runners who make all your decisions for you, feed you lines for the press, bundle you into the backs of cars. Then, suddenly, they’ve gone. There is no-one supporting you. You are left to fend for yourself.

It must be difficult not to take any of that personally, but Steve has more difficulty than most. To him everything is personal. Every single little thing. Even when it isn’t.

At one point Steve talks about how he’s surprised to see one journalist who had previously been kind about him (Clemmie Moodie: currently of the Mirror, then of the Mail) turn in a “hatchet job”. He then goes on to quote her article at length, but what’s striking about it isn’t how vicious it is, more that it’s actually rather even-handed and sympathetic – especially by the Mail‘s standards.

Moodie describes his set as being ‘entertaining’, she praises his ‘self-penned songs’, she insinuates that the crowd were pleased to see him. She also, critically, appears to blame Simon Cowell for the fact that Steve isn’t selling out stadium gigs. Still, Steve pisses and shits everywhere because she refers to him fleetingly as a ‘pub singer’.

(The gig in question, it’s worth noting, took place in The Bedford Arms in Balham. Which, lest we be taken to task for stripping this out of context, Steve says “is a credible music venue. The likes of Paolo Nutini have appeared on their bill.” It is a credible music venue. It is also a credible zumba studio. It is also a pub.)

Here’s the problem. After seeing him lay out what he considers to be hatchet job, it suddenly becomes much harder to take many of his other grievances seriously – however legitimate they may actually be.

Life as an ex-pop star is obviously pretty hard, particularly when you were only in the pop star phase itself for a few months. Your sense of importance in the grand scheme of things could easily become a little exaggerated. Especially in your own head. Steve starts to think that he may have had his phone hacked, so he calls up the Metropolitan Police to ask if they could find out for him. They do. The police investigate the matter and tell him that he hasn’t had his phone hacked.

Steve simply refuses to believe this. He can’t see how the police could have possibly crosschecked the number he gave them with Glenn Mulcaire’s notes in just five short hours, and it doesn’t seem credible to him that – given the amount of negative press he’d had in his career – that he wouldn’t be close to the top of any NOTW journalists’ hacking lists.

Then he starts in trying to tie his lot to the Leveson Inquiry. Something that Charlotte Church had said when giving evidence (about Rupert Murdoch offering to pay her £100,000 to sing at his wedding) inspired a journalist to write a feature about the going rates of pop stars. At the bottom of the list was Steve, priced £2.50. Steve’s reaction to this joke?

“At the height of the biggest investigation into the British press, which dragged in royals and the Prime Minister, yet another article was written by the British press ridiculing me. They either didn’t see the irony or weren’t taking any notice.”

As soon as you hear the creeping voice of the conspiracy theorist coming to the forefront, it becomes impossible not to hear his whole story in that voice – something that isn’t helped by him having an alternate explanation or excuse for absolutely everything that happened.

The reason he wasn’t a successful estate agent in 1988? He joined the business just as the property bubble popped.

The reason he didn’t make it big after coming second in The Big Big Talent Show on ITV in 1997? Princess Diana died and hogged all the headlines.

Hurricanes, flooding and famine – they all have to shoulder some responsibility in his downfall. They stopped managers from calling him back, they caused recordings to be delayed, they meant his single was released later than was ideal.

It’s a real shame that Steve gets so distracted with so much of this, because it gradually turns what could have been an great insider’s look at the cruel machinations of reality TV into a petty, point-scoring whinge.

Even an essentially well-meaning tribute to a friend who died in a tragic accident (Clive Scott – a man with whom Steve was writing and recording in 2009) includes the line “This was going to put back recording which was just my luck.” There is no doubt Steve felt great affection for Clive. It’s just that his habit of making absolutely every incident about him and his career can make for some seriously uncomfortable reading.

Postscript

Writing an autobiography can be a cathartic process. It allows the subject a chance to vent, to rage, to say all the things they’ve had to keep pent up for years, to tackle all those thoughts that have been preying on their mind. They can speak as freely and fiercely as they like, and do so without filters. It is a tremendously thrilling thing to do.

But editing an autobiography needs to be done when calmer heads prevail. A time to say “Does the reader really need to be reminded of my deep and abiding love for the Luther Vandross song Dance With My Father a seventh time?” or “Will my audience care as much about this complaint I once made to the PCC as I do?”

And those calmer heads should say “No. They won’t. Why don’t you tell a fun story about your time on the Madness musical Our House instead? Maybe one which doesn’t end with you unnecessarily threatening to knock someone’s fucking lights out?”

And that’s the most frustrating part of the whole thing. Not that Steve continually drops hints that he is a fuseless little scrapper who would fight a moving train if he thought it had looked at him funny, but that he is sitting on a wealth of material that would be fascinating to read. A wealth of material that is still unpublished as he decided to squander that opportunity in favour of writing a hundred pages of solipsistic scab-picking.

We would be deeply intrigued to read a honest account of what an ex-X Factor contestant has to do after the show has spat them out. Written in the right way (and Steve and his ghostwriter Tony are capable of writing very well together when they’re on track) this would have made for an excellent second half. Just as Steve has been the first person to write a contrasting account of what was really happening backstage at The X Factor, so too could he have been the first to write frankly about what happens when you’re stuck in the difficult and unenviable position of feeling like you’ve been shafted out of a million-pound record deal, left in contractual limbo, and you still have rent to make.

If he ever does write that book, then we will be the first to hand over our cash to read it.

He probably will brush us off, claim we’re part of the shadowy media cabal, pushing our fixed agenda, taking our orders from the prison cell of Max Clifford – and that is entirely his prerogative. He’s wrong, but he is obviously entitled to think it.

Truthfully though, we really aren’t looking to stick the boot into him. He’s been through more than enough already, and it really is hard not to feel any sympathy for Steve as he explains what it was like to be involved in that first series of The X Factor. Hopefuls who enter the show nowadays might at least have a rough idea of what to expect, but back in Brookstein’s era this was all uncharted territory. He was a guinea pig, and there are guinea pigs at Huntingdon Life Sciences who have happier experiences than he did.

But if he showed just a touch of humility and wasn’t such a spiky little radge about every last thing, it would be a lot easier to extend him much more.

Ultimately, what this book teaches us is that Simon Cowell and the Syco machine is a lot like razor wire. If you work with it, and don’t put up any fight, you can get yourself out relatively unscathed. But the more you struggle with it, the deeper it wedges itself under the skin and the harder it becomes to extract yourself without leaving a horrible, bloody mess.

All we can hope is that, having written his book and settled his scores, Steve will finally be able to stop struggling.

You can buy Getting Over The X here

Everyone – regardless of age, class, gender or political leaning – has a columnist that they love to hate. Someone whose every dunderheaded thought makes you want to smash the closest thing to hand. Someone who couldn’t write a logical sentence if you traced it out in pencil for them first. Someone whose words you wouldn’t even use to line a hamster cage.

A columnist who, time and time again, manages to be so consistently wrong about every single matter they turn their attention to – and does so with such flair, passion and complete lack of shame – that they would actually be kind of inspirational if they just weren’t so fucking wrong all the time.

They’re nothing new, of course. Annoying columnists have always existed. But now – because of the freedom of digital journalism and the rise of social media – you are only ever one click away from their moronic outpourings. Once upon a time, you would have to go out and actively purchase a newspaper you didn’t enjoy (or didn’t endorse) in order to read this stuff, but no longer. It’s everywhere. It’s free. And it’s almost impossible to resist.

The kicker is that you know you’re only increasing their web traffic by reading it. You know the writer is more likely to be hired again because you’re engaging with it. And, worst of all, you’re not even sure that it wasn’t deliberately commissioned precisely to invoke this sort of reaction in the first place.

So why (oh why, oh why) do we keep falling for it?

Controversy and Conversation

Before the internet, the success of a story would be measured by the resulting sales and subscription spikes. Now it is measured in clicks, shares and likes. How many people posted the article on their Facebook feed? How many people tweeted about it? Did anyone +1 it into the soundless void of Google+?

More and more, editors are placing greater stock in the ‘social engagement’ of their stories – which is to say the amount of discussion that stories generate, either in the comments section of the website or across other platforms.

One way it’s claimed that editors chase this sort of social engagement is to commission consciously controversial pieces. But how well does controversy translate into this sort of traction?

A research study conducted into this very matter has shown that, in terms of people’s preparedness to engage with controversial material, controversy works along an inverse-U shape. Write something uncontroversial and people might read it but they won’t feel compelled to discuss it. Write something offensively controversial and people might read it but they won’t feel comfortable discussing it.

Somewhere in between the two points though is a sweet spot. An amount of controversy enough to pique the interest of people into paying attention and cause them to comment.

This inverted-U shape does neatly accommodate some flagship examples of well-known hate-read columnists – past and present (Frankie Boyle has since retired from column writing, to make space for Katie Hopkins’ massive gob) – though it is important to note that this shape does not reflect the reading figures for any individual columnist; just the level of engagement they inspire.

There are a hell of a lot of outliers though. Rod Liddle and Jeremy Clarkson write pieces designed to court this middle ground of controversy, but people rarely bite.

Why? Well, partly it’s because they’re stuck behind one of Rupert Murdoch’s paywalls (and people aren’t prepared to pay to become indignant). It’s also partly because crusty, white, middle-aged men with disproportionately high pay-packets are constantly wanging on about something they haven’t got the first fucking clue about. It is the very lifeblood on which opinion-editorial has existed for so long – the background noise against which other pieces stand out. As such, we find it much easier to tune that sort of thing out.

This inverted-U also doesn’t account for at least one genuinely controversial column which created huge amounts of chatter – A.A. Gill’s infamous baboon killing.

[It too sits behind a paywall, so if you aren’t prepared to pay to find out what it was about: A.A. Gill derailed one of his restaurant reviews to talk about the time he shot, and killed, a baboon for fun. Bad enough on its own, but Gill claimed he had no excuse for doing it other than trying to get a feeling for what it might be like to kill a man. It horrified a huge number of people – not least Masterchef host John Torode, whose restaurant Gill was supposed to be reviewing.]

While our inverted-U might not give us a watertight explanation for how columnists enrage us, it does suggest why columnists will at least try.

So if controversy doesn’t give us the whole picture, what else is at play?

Clickbaiting (v.)

The word ‘clickbait’ was added to the dictionary a few months ago. It’s an excellent word that perfectly describes a rather modern media trope. It refers to web content which is tailor-made to lure you in with the promise of something that will improve your mind, enrich your soul and give your life purpose, and then ends up being a rather pedestrian and shallow observation.

The headline is the bait, and you click through to the trap. You expect to be delighted, and you end up disappointed.

Aggravating columns are often called out as being clickbait, but this isn’t quite what happens when we hate-read. The pieces we hate-read don’t promise us anything rewarding in the first place. If anything, it’s exactly the opposite. We click on them knowing full well that they’ll make our piss boil.

But they can still be accurately described as ‘clickbait’ if you’re using the word ‘bait’ as a verb, meaning ‘to taunt, annoy or provoke’. It’s not so much clickbait; it’s clickbaiting.

Samantha Brick executed the seminal clickbaiting with her masterwork “‘There Are Downsides To Being This Pretty’ Why Women Hate Me For Being Beautiful”.

The whole article can be summed up in six words: “I’m pretty and bitches are jealous”

To date, the article has attracted over 5,700 comments.

What she’s saying here isn’t particularly controversial. She isn’t saying she’s genetically superior. She isn’t saying ugly people should be sterilized. The reason it raised so many heckles isn’t because it offended people’s sensibilities, it offended people. Directly. It was a shot across the bows to practically every single female reader. You hate me – and you’re either beautiful and you understand my point, or you don’t understand my point, which must mean you’re butters.

The piece was a global sensation.

A similar thing happened a few months earlier with Liz Jones’s infamous spunk-stealing article.

She whipped up quite the furore with it. Not because she admitted to taking her husband’s used condoms to try to inseminate herself in private (people expect Liz Jones to pull weird shit like that) but because she very heavily implied that the majority of women in their 30s and 40s would do exactly the same thing. To add insult to injury, she then warned men to be very careful where they leave their sperm.

Naturally, Liz Jones was then hauled onto the couch of every daytime TV show to defend her position, while everybody called in to register their outrage.

Goading people appears to be a much more effective method for reader engagement than plain old controversy. Where we might choose to let someone’s shitty opinion slide, we don’t find it so easily to do the same when they serve up a slight on our character. We jump to defend ourselves.

The two needn’t be mutually exclusive though. Richard Dawkins, for example. His ability at baiting people is practically unparalleled. He can start a week-long shitstorm with little more than a tweet.

Look at this little one-two combo. Dawkins not only makes sweeping pronouncements about paedophila and rape (generally considered to be ‘hot button’ issues) he also implies that anyone who disagrees with these statements is stupid. It is boss-level trolling. And even though an otherwise outwardly-sensible person should see that there is no winning an argument with him, they continue to lash out.

Or take that self-appointed slaughterer of sacred cows, Katie Hopkins – a woman with so much bovine blood on her hands she looks like an abattoir’s Employee Of The Month.

She has taken the art of riling people to whole new worlds. She’s so determined to piss off the overweight that she has gone to the trouble of putting on four stone in order to lose the weight again to prove how easy it is. Assimilation tactics. She’s like those vets who put on panda suits in order to examine the baby panda cubs. Only incredibly, incredibly cruel.

It would be very easy to ignore these maniacs if only you had the resolve. In fact, Twitter – their preferred medium – actually gives you the option to block them if you want. A button that will stop you from seeing anything they say if only you could go ahead and push it. And yet there are hundreds of thousands of people who check in with the latest Dawkins/Hopkins outrage daily, with no other intention or purpose other than to make themselves absolutely furious.

So now we know what it involves, we know how it works and we know why it’s encouraged in certain quarters, but the burning question still remains: why do we do this to ourselves?

Is it straight-up masochism? Or is it something else?

When Two Tribes Go To War

There isn’t a single action we take as humans which isn’t pored over by scientists and psychologists and social anthropologists. So surely that means there is a solid scientific or psychological principle behind this self-inflicted torture we put ourselves through?

Experiments conducted recently at the University of Virginia showed that we have a predilection for exactly this sort of behaviour. Volunteers for this study were left alone in a bare laboratory with nothing to do and were asked just to sit and think for 15 minutes. Predictably, most people found this hugely unenjoyable.

Certain subjects were given another option though. The only other thing they were allowed to do was to administer themselves a mild electric shock. Nothing medically dangerous, but nothing particularly pleasant either. A proper jolt.

And guess what? Rather than sit alone with their thoughts, the study found that a significant number of people (men in particular) would rather electrocute themselves than sit in peace and quiet. One guy administered himself 190 shocks in the 15 minutes he was left alone. That’s roughly one shock every five seconds. (His data was left out of the study.)

It seems that when the two options facing you are boredom and physical discomfort, a lot of people are prepared to go for physical discomfort, just to give themselves something to do.

However, this isn’t an entirely accurate equivalent. The study might explain why we’re happy to flick through a shitty magazine in a doctor’s waiting room rather than sit and tap our thighs, but it doesn’t explain why we actively seek out things to annoy us when we have equally simple access to things that delight us.

So why do we choose to do it when we have other options? Psychologist Alan Redman – who has a background in the study of our social behaviours – gave us a compelling explanation.

“What social psychology does is try to explain how we behave in groups, which – as social animals – is where we are most of the time. A lot of research in this decade done into online behaviour illustrates a lot of these social psychological processes at work.

“A good term to hang this all on is that of ‘self-concept’. ‘Self-concept’ is how we see ourselves; our sense of personal identity. One of the big ways in which we develop our sense of self is through the groups of which we are members. As a human being, you are a member of a lot of different groups – at work, with friends, in a family, the team you support, the bands you like, your particular fashion. All of these are helping you to develop and maintain your sense of self.

“When you’re online and you see a bit of clickbait, if it’s something which will help you reinforce your sense of self it’s likely you’ll click through. This might be a columnist offering up a view that you are actually firmly opposed to, and you read it because – as much as it’s making you angry – you do feel better about yourself because you think ‘That’s not me’.

“It makes you feel more certain about yourself and your group membership.”

If this is true, then what we’re doing is less like torture and more like a workout. We are strengthening ourselves. Improving our resolve. Galvanising our position. Alan continues:

“What makes you feel very, very certain and secure in your sense of self and your group’s identity is how clearly it’s defined in relation to another group’s identity. So, paradoxically, the more frequently and strongly you see the other group’s opinions being expressed, the stronger you feel about your own group’s rightness, size and status. You think ‘Not only are we right, but look at those idiots’.”

Something that compounds this particular state of mind is what is known to psychologists as an ‘attribution error’ – specifically the attribution error of false consensus. In short, humans have a tendency to mistakenly believe that their opinions and values and views are largely shared by most.

“Left and right[-wing politics] is a good example of this,” Alan says. “It’s kind of a 50/50 split, but each group will think it’s got the majority – certainly the moral majority – of any argument.“

So if you read a piece by Rod Liddle and think “Wow, this guy is a nutjob! This piece must have been meticulously and consciously constructed to annoy absolutely everybody!” then that is a perfectly natural response. However, it’s entirely likely that you are discounting the sizeable number of people who will read the very same piece and thought “Yeah. Sounds about right.”

Conversely, at the other end of the spectrum, you might be the sort of person who finds Owen Jones to be a bleeding heart crybaby who needs to have an angry wank about Thatcher to get it all out of his system – but there are thousands and thousands of people who agree with every word he says.

This idea of false consensus may hold the final piece of the puzzle as to the real reason that hate-reading exists.

We are so good at blinding ourselves to the possibility of other people having sincerely-held opinions which differ to ours that, rather than concede they exist, we instead explain them away by thinking they are deliberately antagonising us.

It’s a very egocentric way of reacting to someone’s opinion, but then we are incredibly egocentric creatures. When we take this knowledge in conjunction with the evidence that we are drawn to unpleasant stimuli despite our better judgment, and our innate desire to carve out a well-established identity for ourselves, often by pitting ourselves against adversaries, it becomes clear why we think we’re being trolled by writers and editors and pundits.

To many, it makes more sense that a columnist would troll the entire nation for kicks than it does for the same columnist to sincerely think that fat people are lazy and repellant. But ‘many’ doesn’t always equal ‘most’.

In the end, this might be an existential matter. A concept that doesn’t extend anywhere outside of our own heads. A trick of the mind. It’s entirely possible that there is no such thing as we are all the creators and curators of our own hate-reads.

Provocative columns and clickbait don’t exist because we like to be annoyed. For a great number of us, they only exist because we simply cannot fathom a world in which Katie Hopkins is anything other than a massive, attention-seeking twat.

On October 29th 2013, a march was due to take place in Roundhay Park, Leeds. The march had been organised in support of a local man who had fallen foul of a full-scale character assassination. A once-loved member of the community – a philanthropist and entertainer who had dedicated most of his life to charity and the service of others – was now the target of a vicious, national smear campaign.

Owing to a sudden change in his own personal fortunes, the man in question found himself absolutely powerless to stage a defence. And so it fell to a small band of plucky truth-seekers – a select, self-appointed few standing up for the silent majority – to organise a rally on his behalf, in order to help secure justice for this wronged man.

The man in question? Sir Jimmy Savile.

Perhaps predictably, the #Justice4Jimmy march didn’t end up going ahead quite as planned. We know, because we were there.

Why mention it now? Because one year on from this march, two years on from the Exposure documentary and three years on from ol’ Jingle Jangle’s passing, it looks like the Savile Truthers are about to go mainstream.

And here’s the bit you weren’t expecting: some of it might even be worth looking at.

Dark Side Of The Loons

Had you gone looking for Jimmy Savile conspiracies, back when he was alive in 2011, you’d have found all sorts of theories. That he was the head of a huge paedophile ring which operates throughout the BBC, the NHS and the Government. That he was well connected with the criminal underworld, an honorary mobster who was friends with various ‘influential’ gangland bosses. That he was a prolific necrophiliac, who had his pick of stiffs in hospitals the length and breadth of the UK.

Now, in 2014, far from being mere tittle-tattle, these stories are widely considered to make up the back bone of Savile’s personal history.

Even the more outlandish theories have found their way out of the David Icke forums and are now being posited by the press. That Jimmy Savile was Peter Sutcliffe’s assistant; that Prince Charles used Jimmy as his pimp; that Jill Dando was murdered because she was on the verge of outing his sex network.

Everything that was once whispered about Savile has been making the front pages of tabloids, broadsheets and police reports for nearly two years now. They’ve become the accepted wisdom everywhere. So what happens when you go looking for Jimmy Savile conspiracies these days? Well, it’ll be one of two things.

Let’s get the attention-grabbing one out of the way first: the theory that Jimmy Savile was an Illuminati Grand Wizard.

There are people with internet connections who believe, hand on heart, that Sir Jimmy was a trans-dimensional sorcerer who harvested occult energies for his own nefarious ends. This idea is borne out of a larger theory that we humans are ruled by an elite race (possibly shape-shifting, blood-sucking lizard people who have come to Earth to mine monatomic gold; possibly black magic Satanists) who are using us ordinary civilians to gain greater and greater power.

It is clear to these conspiracists that Savile was – at the very least – chummy with some of these shadowy figures, but since so many stories of his alleged sexual abuses have emerged, they feel their case for fingering him as one of the Illuminati has become all the more compelling.

Their evidence is as follows:
– He was born on Halloween.
– He was born a seventh son.
– He was an architect of the Illuminati’s most successful tool of social control, modern pop music.

And that’s about it, in terms of the concrete stuff. The rest is a little more circumspect – but they do a pretty comprehensive job of explaining themselves regardless.

“Jingle Jangle” was an occult incantation invoke the energies of the Yin Yang

A YouTube documentary by the collective 5ocietyX (a “forever growing data whirlpool of esoteric data… working to reveal the blueprint of the Great Universe”) shows us how Jimmy Savile’s cigar was actually a wizard’s wand, that “Jingle Jangle” was an occult incantation to invoke the energies of the Yin Yang, and how Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics might have been our best hope at defending ourselves from a vampiric reincarnation of Jimmy Savile striking again.

As fun as it is to believe the intergalactic, trans-dimensional, supernatural explanation for Jimmy Savile, it’s old hat. This theory has existed in some form or other for decades. It is merely an extension of what went before: that (alien or otherwise) Jimmy Savile was an evil force, hellbent on having a debauched time of it, using his substantial power and influence to do whatever he wanted. All that the Illuminati watchers are doing is pushing this same story to the extreme edge of their beliefs.

What’s far more interesting is the other conspiracy that has developed over the last two years. It’s not necessarily any more plausible than any of the suggestions above, but it’s a brand new theory. The one that – far from being a depraved monster, possibly from another dimension – Jimmy Savile is actually an innocent man.

#Justice4Jimmy

Moor Larkin runs the blog The Death of the Life of Jimmy Savile. He was one of the first people to speak up in support of Sir Jim and has been the most prolific at continuing to do so. At his peak, Moor blogs daily – sometimes two or three times a day – disputing the evidence that is being put forward by various parties about the extent (or even existence) of Jimmy’s alleged abuses.

Moor admits that he was not a big fan of Jimmy Savile when Jimmy Savile was alive. His reasons for blogging aren’t out of admiration or a sense of loyalty. So what the hell are they?

In his initial mission statement (posted in December 2012 – two months after the sex attack stories started) he picked out the targets he felt were responsible for creating the web of lies and slander that surround Jimmy’s legacy. They were: the tabloid press, the police, the BBC, a string of individual journalists, MPs of all stripes, internet conspiracy theorists and the entire British public.

In the course of the nearly 300 posts he has written since (post #300 should be with us any day now) he has extended his purview to take in the Crown Prosecution Service, lawyers, the prison system, the NHS, the authors of various official inquiries, the whole of Operation Yewtree and more.

As you can see, this is no small war that he has decided to wage – but Moor is not alone.

A small, but very vocal, community began to develop in the comments under each of his blog posts – the same characters appearing again and again. A couple chose pseudonyms for themselves, some appear to be using their real names, and others stay largely anonymous (though some of them are distinctive enough in their debating style to be recognisable without a name).

As the conversations between these commenters became more and more involved, the more outside comments they attracted. A snowball effect. People came out of the woodwork to voice their support of the work Moor was doing. Fans offered testimonials to Savile’s good character. And (like any good hub of internet conspiracy) dyed-in-the-wool contrarians and anti-authoritarians dropped by to stick the boot into whichever institution was getting a kicking.

What was especially interesting was that almost all of them were in agreement. Very few of them voiced any objection to the theories being floated; even fewer tried to call the Savile Truthers out on them.

Other blogs soon started to appear. Some were individual posts from other amateur sleuths who had their misgivings about the way the Jimmy Savile was being treated in death; some were fully-dedicated blogs helping out with the campaign of picking apart the Savile media narrative.

No doubt feeling buoyed by these fellow supporters, and the sense of solidarity that had emerged below the line on these many, many thought-pieces – the #Justice4Jimmy march was announced.

Moor was one of the key organisers. He was also instrumental in them co-opting Katy Perry’s anthem of empowerment Roar as one of the march’s official songs.

Another of the march’s organisers was another blogger and serial commenter who goes by the name ‘Rabbitaway’. Rabbit runs Justice For Jimmy Savile – the blog which is credited with spawning the #Justice4Jimmy hashtag, announcing the march itself, and championing the use of Coldplay’s Fix You as the other official anthem.

Unlike Moor, Rabbit appears to have been a fan of Jimmy Savile’s when Jimmy was alive. Her reasons for involving herself in the fight for justice is because she can’t bear to see a man who raised so much money for charity, did so much good for the sick and the needy, and made the wishes of children come true have his name so brutally tarnished.

For a full month, Moor and Rabbit were busy raising awareness of this walk, encouraging people to get the word out across social media, and to change their Twitter avatars to these #Justice4Jimmy graphics. This was to be the moment. The point in time where the nation rose up and spoke out as one “JIMMY SAVILE IS AN INNOCENT MAN!”

So what happened?

Of the dozen people who assembled at in Roundhay Park for the #Justice4Jimmy march that October afternoon, five were journalists hoping for a story, four were police or park security and just three were Savile supporters. Possibly there was a fourth. It was hard to tell who else was there to be a part of it. As you might expect, no-one was particularly forthcoming about their reasons for hanging out around Waterloo Lake at 1pm. It was right near a playground. In the middle of half-term. With kids everywhere.

The plan was for the supporters to complete a clockwise circuit of the lake but, in execution, the ‘march’ all but disintegrated within a few hundred metres. One of the marchers claimed she was unable to walk the full length of the lake, owing to a disability which affected her mobility. Moor and Rabbit didn’t seem to be enjoying the attention that the journalists and the photographer were affording them, and so splintered off in different directions to skulk behind trees.

The police dispersed when they realised the event wasn’t going to tip over into full-scale anarchy; the photographer from the Yorkshire Evening Post decided to take picture of swans on the lake instead (he had a new lens he was keen to try out); and after the last of disparate supporters peeled off, three of the journalists retired to the pub.

It was supposed to last for two hours. The whole thing was done in 20 minutes.

One of the journalists present had tried to speak to a few of the supporters, interview them about their reasons for marching, but she didn’t have the easiest time of it. As she said to us afterwards:

“It’s amazing how big a group can appear online but in real life, there’s five people.”

“To say that the walk was advertised as a friendly event, the organisers were incredibly unwelcoming. I tried to talk and hear their sides of it. It was really awkward walking along with them. The lady I’d interviewed began to speak alone with Moor and my friend and I were awkwardly talking about the weather and things with the remaining participants in the group.”

“It’s amazing how big a group can appear online but in real life, there’s five people.”

This was supposed to be Moor’s swansong – a final act of defiance and solidarity in support of Jimmy. In a comment he left on the bottom of his post Give Yourself A Voice, he said this.

“One of two things will happen on October 29th.
1) I will take my walk with a few true men and women. There will be half a dozen tweets. I see no purpose to be served gobbling up my life any further on account of a society that doesn’t care.
2) I will take my walk and having built it, I will see that they have come…….. and that they tweet. If this happens, the lions are awake and they no longer need me. Let the lions do the roaring.
You see? This is logic and reason. It must end for me after this date.”

The first of these two things undoubtedly happened – and even that puts an optimistic gloss on it. You could count the number of supporters who turned up on one hand. Only two tweets which used the #Justice4Jimmy hashtag in the two months surrounding the march appear to have survived – and one of them was reporting our story at the time of how many people turned up.

Yet even though it was a complete washout, and even though Moor has explicitly stated his intention to retire after the march, still he carries on. In the 12 months since, he has continued to blog at a similar rate and shows no real signs of stopping. Rabbit too. Her first post-march blogpost was entitled We Only Just Begun.

And this is one of the most fascinating things about the Savile Truthers. No matter how they see their actions perceived, no matter what negative reaction they receive – they just can’t seem to quit.

Their persistence may be about to pay off though. Not because they’re necessarily right about any of it; nor because anyone is taking what they have to say particularly seriously. But because another lone internet warrior has found something out which has succeeded in convincing someone in the media to sit up and take a fresh look at the Savile stories.

“The Truth – Wherever It Takes Us”

The most convincing and compelling voice in the debate about the allegations surrounding Jimmy Savile belongs to a lawyer, writer and blogger who goes by the name of Anna Raccoon. She’s not part of the #Justice4Jimmy campaign. Nor is she a Savile apologist. And, weirdly, she’s actually got some facts to add to this story.

Anna had been keeping a blog on politics and the media for years before she got herself wrapped up in the Jimmy Savile story. The subject was already perfect fodder for her – involving, as it did, so many of the institutions that she is keen to see monitored correctly and held accountable for their actions – but the Savile allegations held particular significance for her because, as a young woman, she was among those who spent time at Duncroft Approved School.

Duncroft, if you weren’t aware, is the school that was profiled in ITV’s Exposure: The Other Side Of Jimmy Savile – the programme which made the claims that Savile was a serial sex offender.

Anna decided to publish a series of blogs entitled Past Lives and Present Misgivings about her own experiences at Duncroft. Across the nine parts of the story, she gives some historical background to the school, casts some light on the context of what was happening there, and gives a more personally informed introduction to some of the main players in the story.

In particular, she is keen to defend Miss Jones – who was both the headmistress at Duncroft (accused of having Jimmy Savile stay over in her personal quarters) and the aunt of the journalist behind the story (Meirion Jones). Anna also has some serious doubts about the accuracy of the timelines put forward by some of the show’s interviewees.

Whatever you think of her blog, her motives or even her evidence, it does make for incredibly interesting reading. Not least because it’s pretty much the only place, outside of the specific Truther sites, that has questioned the current Savile narrative.

No-one wants to risk looking like some sort of paedo-defender

The media coverage of Jimmy Savile’s life and death has been a curious thing – swinging wildly from unconditional support for the obviously odd entertainer shortly after his death, to unconditonal hatred. There has been little, or no attempt to offer a nuanced view. We’ve spoken to a few journalists who have looked into the subject but have been dissuaded from sticking their heads too far above the parapet because just the suggestion of investigating this story is considered to be career suicide. In the light of the monstering that the BBC got (and is still getting) for allegedly appearing to suppress information, no other publication wants to risk looking like some sort of paedo-defender.

And yet Anna Raccoon has stuck with it for two years now. We asked her what drove her to speak out on behalf of someone who is unilaterally reviled and take up such an unpopular position. She said as a media blogger who actually attended the school in the eye of the storm she was in an almost unique position to offer some informed reflections.

“There were very few people in a position to speak with any degree of knowledge regarding Duncroft. Only some 20 girls at a time attended the school; most of the staff were now deceased – and I happened to run a well read blog that specialised in looking to see the truth, if any, that lay behind media stories.”

It’s plain that she didn’t start out looking into Savile because she was a big fan either. One of her earliest posts stated “Despite my knowledge of specific allegations being false, I think on balance, that I accept he was a man of many sexual preferences – mostly illegal. There are too many allegations now to think that they can all be without foundation.” Following all of her years of research, we wondered if she still thought this was the case.

“Two years on, I have had the opportunity to look at many more accounts of abuse alleged to have occurred at the hands of Jimmy Savile. I have not yet found one that didn’t have major flaws that detracted from its veracity. That is not to say that the remaining allegations, of which neither I, nor any other journalist, has access to, are either true or untrue. Merely that with so many gaping holes in the stories that have been published – the remainder should be carefully scrutinised and not merely ‘accepted’ as viable because of a desire to minimise the already gigantic legal fees.”

This is no quest to clear Savile’s name, as Raccoon is keen to point out.“I still have no interest in Savile – even now he is dead. I do have an interest in the veracity or otherwise of media constructs. I certainly have no interest in ‘preserving his memory’.Show me an allegation that holds water and watch me trash his memory.”

“The truth matters so much. Not fantasy. Not media hype. Not searching for evidence to prove a hypothesis. The truth – wherever it take us.”

Anna Raccoon has spent this last year assisting the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh with a project entitled “Reflections on Savile At Duncroft”. The Mail On Sunday has been examining the files that Anna has provided to the research team there, and David Rose – a journalist best known for his investigative work into miscarriages of justice – has apparently been looking at this story.

This proves nothing in and of itself, of course, but does this mean that the tireless Savile truthers will enjoy their moment in the sun? It seems unlikely that any mainstream media investigation could ever satisfy the cravings of the internet conspiracy theorists of the world, but it would mark a sea change in how the media deals with something which has so far been such a black and white story.

Panic Mode It’s a precarious business being famous. At any moment scandal could strike, misfortune could befall you, leaving your hard-earned reputation in tatters. Thankfully, there’s an entire industry on hand ready to act in your defence should disaster ever arise: corporate and celebrity crisis management.

The Wings Of Laugh In the course of his Facebook rant in support of UKIP, Andrew Lawrence raised a rather interesting point. Not his stuff about immigration, or reverse sexism in the BBC’s commissioning quotas, but about politics in comedy. Where are all the right-wing voices? Do they exist? And are they ever capable of making us laugh?

The Sexy Story Of Randall Grand Have you heard about that new Russell Brand book? The weird, clunkily-written one that reads like it’s been run through a thesaurus a half dozen times. No, not Revolution. The other one. The one written about Brand. By one of his ex-girlfriends.

Life In Kabul: A Photo Gallery Our Man In Kabul sends us some snapshot of the day-to-day domestic life of Afghanistan

A Ford Farewell? Toronto’s crack-smoking, vagina-hoarding, car crash of a mayor is stepping down for four years – but is this really the end of Rob Ford’s reign?

Making The Brand Bringing new meaning to the phrase ‘terrorist organisation’, IS have made headlines for their ruthless efficiency. Now – having drawn inspiration from the teachings of many of the world’s leading business – the Islamic State has become an absolute masterclass in corporate execution.

Release The Pounds For some inexplicable reason, some of the biggest global names in pop music appear to be ignoring the UK. While the rest of the world is getting to buy bona fide pop bangers, we Brits are being forced to wait, sometimes for months on end, before we can purchase them ourselves. What gives, guys?

The Brutal Truth Of Penguin Love John Lewis are trying to trick you. Monty the penguin is a sexual deviant, and his depraved lust knows no bounds.

Dapper Laughs’ Last Laugh Why on earth would ITV commission such a controversial comedian to make a blatantly sexist show? If you take Dapper out of the equation, it suddenly starts to make a lot more sense…

The Macedonian Cheryl Cole Eurovision isn’t for another six months but already we’ve had our first proper scandal of the 2015 contest.

Making The Brand The Islamic State have made quite a name for themselves this last year. Could it have anything to do with the way they have successfully adopted the self-same corporate culture of the devil they’re aiming to destroy?

Raking Over Old Coles Cheryl Cole surprised everyone by getting married to an immaculately bearded young beauty this summer. The people most surprised? The dedicated section of her fan base who believe she is in a secret lesbian relationship with Kimberley Walsh.

The Savile Defence Corps Now that all the old conspiracy theories about Jimmy Savile having sex with corpses have gone mainstream, a new type of theory has emerged. One claiming that Jimmy Savile is actually an innocent man.

Waiting For Hamas To Fall Acclaimed documentary maker Adam Curtis shows us how the rise of Hamas is intertwined with the rise of nationalist right-wing in Israel; reactionary forces who don’t want to change the world for the better.

All The Presidents: Mental Corruption, kickbacks and kidnapping: just another day at the office for a Spanish Football President. Ex-Rolling Stone editor Ed Needham talks us through how they do business in Spain.

The Black Hole Tiger Woods’ immense success in golf was supposed to lead to a whole new generation of young black golfers rising to the top of the game. So where are they all?

PLUS: Andrew Orlowski gives us the full lowdown on the internet’s most high-profile beggar, Jimmy Wales; and we look at secret UKIP racism testing, Sam Smith’s Stalinist history, Tom Hanks’ reputation for being Hollywood’s go-to guy for piss scenes — and more…

In This Issue

Through The K-Hole Western pop scandals are absolute child’s play. Ooh, Zayn from One Direction smoked a doobie! Justin Bieber pissed in a mop bucket! Lady Gaga wore some steaks! So. Fucking. What. You want to see what the pop stars of Japan and South Korea have been getting up to… Bronagh Fegan investigates the scandals of Asian pop.

The Axe Factor Ten years after getting six million votes in The X Factor final, Steve Brookstein (the man who got six million votes in The X Factor) finally releases his tell-all book in which he reveals exactly what it’s like to get six million votes in The X Factor final. And also to have the entire UK media conspire against you. [Read this as a free preview]

Cab’s Callous Ways It’s been a tumultuous year for Uber, losing friends as fast as they’re gaining customers. It was always their intention to shake shit up, but have they shaken it too hard? Because it looks like they’ve got shit everywhere.

A Lauren To Herself As Lauren Harries embarks on her new pop career, we take a little trip down memory lane with a retrospective.

The Spanking Crisis What new porn laws mean for Gregg Wallace

Seasoned Meat Things The Blairs wish you happy holidays

All Take, Take, Take… We work out Take That’s tax returns for them

…and much, much more.

“I’ve bagged a two-book deal with Scholastic UK. Okay allow me a moment’s pause whilst I pinch myself… Mental, right?”

So blogged Tallia Storm last week, the latest teen author to be signed up post-Zoella. Seeing the biblical shit-slinging that Zoella had to endure doesn’t appear to have deterred Tallia one bit as she is apparently “already working on her debut novel, a fictional tale loosely based on her own life”.

Bless her. She probably doesn’t know that ghostwriters have already been sounded out to take care of that for her (the best offer we’ve heard so far – “£5k… and minimal royalties”). But any ghostwriter considering striking up a deal with Tallia may wish to demand a larger flat fee in favour of a royalty clause, as we’re not convinced that she has that much selling power. Because where Zoella had a well-established audience of 6.7 million YouTube subscribers and 2.6 million Twitter followers, Tallia has… well, it’s not exactly clear.

Tallia is always described in the press as being a “pop star”, but we’re not entirely sure why. Sure, there’s plenty of photos of her out and about with Brooklyn Beckham. Yes, she’s blogging on Huffington Post, boosting her personal brand. But there’s something really rather crucial missing.

You see, despite having been talked up as “one to watch” for three years now (no mean feat when you’re just sixteen) Tallia has yet to release an actual record. Anything at all. Even a single. Three years seems like an awfully long run-up for a teen pop career. So who exactly is masterminding this?

Step forward, Tessa Hartmann… mother of one Tallia Storm.

A Scottish PR and self-publicist, Tessa is probably best known for being that woman who complained in the newspapers about John Barrowman’s gay kiss at the Commonwealth Games. (Her complaint was that it was “inappropriate for children” if you’re interested; not that the kiss wasn’t good enough).

She also gained a bit of attention for being the PR behind the Scottish Fashion Awards who managed to get into an online spat with Fish from Marillion, whose teenage daughter was nominated for an award. Fish was not terribly impressed by Tessa’s response to his mildly critical blogging of the event, as she chose to lay right into Fish’s poor, blameless offspring.

An unwise move, perhaps, for a fame-hungry stage-mother hellbent on making her own teenage daughter into a star.

Tallia’s career got off to an encouraging start when Tessa managed to secure her baby girl a support slot with Elton John when he played Falkirk in 2012, but she has been pushing her relentlessly ever since, with absolutely no sign of profitability.

Profits, however, are not really a concern for Tessa – and this might help to explain a few things.

Tallia is not Tessa’s first big project. Her other gift to the world was the recent Sean Connery movie, Sir Billi. In case you missed it in the cinemas, Sir Billi is an animation about an eccentric Highlander trying to save Scotland’s last beaver. The film was described as being “tedious, crudely animated, bafflingly conceived” in the Guardian; “rubbish in ways that hitherto seemed unimaginable” by the Scotsman; and it has somehow managed the extraordinary feat of receiving a pristine 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Tessa acted as producer and co-writer on Sir Billi. Her husband, Sascha, acted as writer-director.

And how, you may ask, did two novice filmmakers manage to lay their hands on enough of a budget to make such an abysmal film? Well, they had a little bit of help from Tessa’s dad, the multi-millionaire industrialist, John Fraser — who also had a production credit on the film.

Sir Billi really was a family affair too, as who was that singing on the film’s soundtrack? Why, Tallia Storm, of course!

Last year, the Hartmanns  (Hartmenn?) announced that Tallia had signed with Virgin Records in LA, with an album slated for 2015. The release sounds pretty precarious though, as the label head who signed her has just moved on. All we have to go on now is Tallia’s Soundcloud, where you can find her covers of Silent Night and I Will Survive. And when you hear them, it all becomes painfully clear.

Tallia is a sixteen year old girl. Sixteen. She has just done her GCSEs (or National 5s – the Scottish equivalent). She has only recently been able to buy lottery tickets and superglue. She will have a secret journal tucked away in a shoebox in the back of her wardrobe. Her bedroom will look like the picture desk at Smash Hits. She calls her mother-manager her ‘#glamager’.

She’s sixteen.

No wonder she thinks it’s tremendously original and clever and meaningful to slow down a well-known disco song and warble earnestly over the top of it. No wonder she’s chosen to croak her way through a version of Silent Night, making the words of one of the most instantly recognisable songs ever written almost intelligible.

SHE’S SIXTEEN.

Of course she’s going to be crap. Nearly everyone is crap at sixteen – and trying to turn her into soul music’s new saviour, an actor and a novelist before she’s old enough to buy a bottle of Buckfast is doing her a great disservice. Because Tessa Hartmann is not going to be the one who is torn apart in the press when Tallia’s album of squawked soul classics hits the stands. She’s not going to be called a fake and a liar and a fraud when Tallia’s ghostwritten book eventually hits the stands. Her sixteen year-old daughter is.

So when the Tallia backlash starts, please resist the urge to lambast her personally. Save your criticism for her #glamager.

Not only is she more deserving of it, but after having the movie she wrote described as “woefully anaemic”, “the ugliest film I have ever seen”, “smutty”, “creepy” and “incoherently plotted, with unremarkable dialogue… consistently fails to amuse” Tessa surely has a thick enough skin to cope with it.

Stage 1) The Auditions

We said

“Shock as act who proved popular with audience turns out to have criminal past… Generally featuring a suspiciously swift turnaround in which a contestant who appeared on the Saturday audition show is unmasked in Sunday’s papers (to the vocal shock of the producers who told them about it.)”

What happened?

X Factor reject Orla Keogh faces jail time for ‘Ibiza drug possession’ (Daily Star)

“WANNABE chart-topper Orla Keogh was arrested in possession of Class A drugs – just months before she auditioned for X Factor. She secured a place in the final 12, but Cheryl Fernandez-Versini decided to take controversial contestant Chloe-Jasmine Whichello to the Judges’ House phase instead.”

Stage 2) Bootcamp /  Judges’ House

We said

“Fix accusations as contestant revealed to have record contract already.” This is a pattern we’ve seen time and time again around this stage in the competition, with Melanie Masson (Sun, 7th Sep 2012), Katie Waissel (Sunday Mirror, 22 Aug 2010), Laura White (Sunday Mirror, 31 Aug 2008), Daniel Debourg (Sun, 22 Aug 2007) and even Marvin from JLS (Sun, 21 Aug 2008).

What happened?

“X Factor’s Jay James Picton had a major record deal and released album”  (Reveal, 1 Sep 2014)

James Jay Picton was a music industry veteran who had supported Jessie J and Rebecca Ferguson, as well as promoting his single on This Morning. Perhaps explaining why his album never really troubled the charts, he was voted out as far back as week six.

“Fleur East has been on The X Factor before” (Metro, 20 Sep 2014)

Fleur East was part of girl band Addictiv Ladies, mentored on X Factor, by Simon Cowell back in 2005. Cowell mentors Fleur again this year. Simon seemed to pretend not to know much about who she was… until this fact started to get pointed out in the media.

Fleur had spent most of the years since that as a professional singer, one of the go-to vocalists for top house DJs and producers, even fronting the live shows for Ministry of Sound chart-topper DJ Fresh. This went so well she signed a solo deal with legendary American house label Strictly Rhythm earlier this year. Singles Broken Mirror and Turn The Lights On were minor club hits.

Stage 3) Early Elimination Rounds

We said

“Are contestant X and contestant Y having a secret relationship?”  A perennial favourite, the fake secret relationship has been part of the X Factor soap opera for years. Who could forget such romantic fairytales as Ella Henderson and Union J’s George, Niall Horan and Amelia Lily,  Aiden Grimshaw and Caoife Coleman, Cher Lloyd and Zayn Malik, Olly Murs and Stacey Solomon, Eoghan Quigg and Diana Vickers and many more…?

What happened?

“X Factor reject Lola Saunders laughs off romance rumours with Ben Haenow” (Sunday Mirror)

“X Factor’s Chloe Jasmine dumped Stevi Ritchie after he ‘sent sexual messages and images to her” (Mirror)

“Chloe Jasmine ‘DUMPED by boyfriend after cheating on him with Stevi Ritchie’ (Mirror)

“Louis Walsh Accuses Xtra Factor’s Sarah-Jane Crawford Of Sleeping With Stevi Ritchie” (Yahoo)

“X Factor’s Lauren caught sneaking into boybander’s bedroom” (Daily Star)

“We admit we love each other’ Union J’s George reveals romance with Only The Young star” (Daily Star)

Stage 4) Mid-way Point

We said

“Will X walk after falling-out between judges?” The ‘judges at war’ story can centre on either supposedly unfair eliminations or personal slights (Tulisa breathing fag-ash on Gary; Sharon throwing a glass of water over Louis) – and everyone is contractually obliged to take their turn.

What happened?

“EXCLUSIVE: Simon Cowell threatens Cheryl with the axe after bust up” (Daily Star)

“Mel B goes to war on Louis Walsh after X Factor deadlock results” (Daily Star)

“X Factor judges Cheryl Cole and Louis Walsh at war as their relationship turns ‘toxic'” (Heat)

“X Factor judges Cheryl Fernandez-Versini and Mel B are at war with each ­other” (Mirror)

One thing we did forget to mention was that the day he loses his last act in the contest marks out the time Louis Walsh has to declare this year could be his last…

“It’s been 11 years now. It’s too early to think about next year but it does take it out of you. “I don’t know what next year holds.”

Thanks Louis!

Stage 5) Approaching Finals

We said

“Is vulnerable contestant under too much pressure?” After Gordon Brown intervened in the ‘Fears For Susan Boyle’ campaign in Britain’s Got Talent, the contestant-under-pressure trope has been a fixture ever since. Cher Lloyd (who was a bit gobby in 2010), Janet Devlin (who was a bit mousy in 2011) and James Arthur (who was a bit homeless in 2012), all had the tabloids’ concern. The lowering of the age limit to 14 all but guaranteed that these headlines would happen again this year.

What happened?

“X Factor bosses ‘worried sulky Andrea Faustini will buckle under the pressure’ as final looms” (Metro)

Right on time…

See you all again next year for some more!

Postiljonen

Supreme was one of our favourite singles of last year and, although it was definitely the stand-out track, the album was pretty bloody lovely too.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGGozJjtbOQ

Heart Sick Groans

Heart Sick Groans’ first EP was a masterpiece of English-as-Second-Language indie. With cute, fun lyrics and a shuffly, guitar-led beat which stopped just short of sounding like twee folk, songs like A Bossa Nova With This Casanova could have killed on the right movie soundtrack.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFDr3uQ2edE

Iamamiwhoami

Theyarearetheywhoarethey? Well, they are singer-songwriter Jonna Lee and music producer Claes Björklund, and together they’ve formed the extremely-annoying-to-say iamamiwhoami. These two aren’t your usual let’s-bang-out-a-couple-of-tunes-now-and-again pop act though, they’ve gone the whole multimedia-artist(e) route, with a bunch of weirdo concept videos that follow an overarching ‘storyline’ to accompany their music. It’s all very ethereal and spooky, but it’s also all very good. It’s certainly not music to pop on at your next house party, but if you’re crying in your bedroom and staring out the window while it’s raining outside, then it’s the perfect soundtrack.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRazgMj_cfE

Martin Garrix

He’s not done anything in 2014 which has touched the brilliance or success of Animals, but he’s getting heavily tipped for the top in the States. Not least because he’s part of the Scooter Braun stable – joining Bieber and Ariana Grande. We have to remember Garrix’s tender years, though, as he doesn’t yet seem to have been able to move on up to the ranks of the real superstar DJs, as this piece on a recent LA gig in Billboard suggests. Perhaps we should give him some leeway and a few years to learn the skills he needs.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCYcHz2k5x0

Billie Van

LIPA (Paul McCartney’s performing arts academy in Liverpool) has an inexplicable magic touch with Norwegians. Christian from A1, Kate Havnevik and now Billie Van (pictured above) all cut their teeth there and all have become mighty fine pop stars. Billie’s album 1, 2, 3, 4 Radio Star is littered with catchy pop tunes – and How Can It Be So Hard? sounds like an early (i.e. ‘good’) Cardigans track.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihb56shcgv0

2014 In Gossip It’s been a bit of a bumper year for good celebrity dirt, so we present a month-by-month replay of some of the best stories – ones that you might have missed, or ones that you might want to remember.

Can You Kill Your Career? It’s a tough time to be a celebrity and the perils of fame have never been greater. But as we are bombarded with so much scandal these days, is there anything a celebrity can actually do to kill their career?

Lights! Camera! Tax Shun! 2014 has been one of the biggest years for tax avoidance schemes getting busted open – with over a thousand notable personalities being implicated in one particular scheme involving film finance. We examine how you make money from a tax scheme – and why people keep on picking on the poor old film industry.

The Big Questions Twelve of the biggest questions of the year, illustrated with our office supply of stuffed animals.

Planet Of The Grapes We got drunk with all sorts of interesting people, listen to some records and spoke of this and that. We’ve included some of the best bits in this issue.

There’s much more besides – and best of all? It is entirely free

The Science of Xmas No.1s We take an incredibly dweeby look at the last fifty years of Christmas number ones to see if there are any patterns which could help to predict future number ones. We think we might actually be on to something…

The Wrong Teletubby Private Eye journalist and author of The Prime Minister’s Ironing Board, Adam Macqueen has written us a special festive ghost story – just in case the winter chill hasn’t yet reached your bones…

Zombies At Eurovision Eurovision has had its very first case of zombie plagiarism in the Belarusian national heats; while in Moldova we’ve spotted the familiar face of Kitty Brucknell cropping up.

Carol Vorderman’s Swedish Sideline Someone browsing sexy Swedish sites on the internet is in for a very big surprise.

X Hits The Spot We revisit the predictions we made back in the summer about how the season’s headlines would play out for this series of The X Factor. And we hate to blow our own trumpets, but we did pretty damn well… [Read As A Preview]

Storm Clouds The ghostwriting scandal tore a strip out of Zoella, but is anyone learning a lesson from it? Because it doesn’t really seem so [Read As A Preview]

PLUS Plenty, plenty more…

Festivity

The first question it seems sensible to address when looking at potential Christmas number ones is “Does it help if the song is about Christmas?”

It’s not always easy to make the call. For example, Christmas number ones like Stay Another Day by East 17 and 2 Become 1 by the Spice Girls have become heavily associated with Christmas because of their wintery and decorative videos but they’re actually about suicide and proper condom use, respectively

On the other hand, Saviour’s Day by Cliff Richard sounds like something that Aer Lingus might use to soundtrack their cabin safety videos, but it’s very explicitly about Jesus’s birthday – so despite it not sounding too jolly or festive, it’s unarguably about Christmas.

In order to be clear about this, we split the songs up in to two distinct (and highly scientific) categories – ‘Christmassy’ and ‘Non Christmassy’ – based purely on their lyrical content. This is what we found.

In the last fifty years, forty of the songs which were number one on Christmas Day have been non-Christmassy, and just ten of them clearly about Christmas.

Those ten are: Merry Xmas Everyone – Slade (1973); Lonely This Christmas – Mud (1974); When A Child Is Born – Johnny Mathis (1976); Mary’s Boy Child/Oh My Lord – Boney M (1978); Do They Know It’s Christmas? – Band Aid (1984; 1989; 2004); Merry Christmas Everyone – Shakin’ Stevens (1985); Mistletoe And Wine and Saviour’s Day – Cliff Richard (1988; 1990).

Strangely, a lot of the incredibly festive songs that most people assume must have been Christmas number ones (All I Want For Christmas Is You; Last Christmas; Fairtytale Of New York) only actually made it to number two for Christmas.

So how does this help or hinder the three tracks this year? Well, although it is also about a rather contagious and unpleasant disease, this new version of Do They Know It’s Christmas? is still very much about Christmas – which puts it at something of a disadvantage.

On the other hand, Uptown Funk and Something I Need are entirely non-season-specific and so have a slight lead on Geldof and co. They might not keep that lead for long though.

Charity

As everyone knows, Christmas is a time for giving – so it’s no surprise that most charity singles are released around the November/December season. Partly this is because a lot of people are out spending and it makes sense to cash in on that fact. However, it is also often deployed as an excuse; a way to justify releasing a bullshit song that otherwise has no market.

The BBC Impossible Orchestra’s mass-butchering of God Only Knows would have sunk like a fat pebble if it hadn’t been released for Children In Need. It was for much the same reason that people felt obliged to stomach Gareth Malone’s hideous version of Avicii’s Wake Me Up – done in that weird St Winifred’s redux style. It was all for a good cause!

Bob Geldof knows this. He’s been very vocal about the fact that he knows the song is shit, but he was urging people to buy it anyway because it’s helping provide aid to the sick and needy. Certainly compared to ebola, Band Aid 30 is the lesser of two evils, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any good.

Simon Cowell knows this too, and he has often shackled a dross X Factor single onto a good cause to make it sell. In recent years, with dwindling viewing figures, it has become de rigeur for the winner to release their debut single for charity.

Now it seems that the entire music industry has cottoned on to the trick. Look at how charity and the Christmas charts have gone hand in hand in the last half century.

Those first three, spread over twenty years? Geldof – Band Aids 1, 2 and 20. Then, in the last three years, we’ve had nothing but charity singles – The Military Wives, The Justice Collective and then Sam Bailey (once Cowell caught wise).

It seems that the only way to climb your way to the top of the tree nowadays is to release your single for charity. As we know, Geldof’s is for the Band Aid Foundation. Haenow’s is for Together For Short Lives. But Ronson’s? His is just a regular payday single. Going up against two charity releases might make him look a little callous, but let’s not forget why his single has been released in time for the Christmas market. It wasn’t Ronson’s fault at all. It was Simon Cowell’s.

And as we’re talking about Cowell, now is probably as good a time as any to talk about the X Factor bump.

X Appeal

Are you wrapped up warm? This next graph is a little chilling.

Simon Cowell positively shits Christmas number ones. Second only to his ridiculous shoebrush haircut, they are his most distinctive feature. His calling card. His signature.

He was already managing to get turkeys like Mr Blobby by Mr Blobby and Can We Fix It? by Bob The Builder to number one long before he became Mr Showbiz with his primetime Saturday night programme – and it’s only been getting worse since.

Since The X Factor began in 2004, six out of the ten subsequent Christmas number ones have been X Factor contestants (in order: Shayne Ward, Leona Lewis, Leon Jackson, Alexandra Burke, Matt Cardle, Sam Bailey).

Steve Brookstein missed out on a Christmas number one because of a huge global conspiracy against him (plus he was in direct competition with the star-studded Band Aid 20); Joe McElderry missed out on a Christmas number one because of a Facebook campaign to get Rage Against The Machine to number one (the only Facebook campaign to ever have worked); and two others missed out, giving up their usually guaranteed places to the Military Wives and the Hillsborough Justice charity singles.

Cowell has kept his place as kingmaker though, even after all these years, by getting Sam Bailey to number one last Christmas. However, the whole thing is a little more complicated this year as Ben Haenow isn’t the only one to benefit from the X Factor bump.

Do They Know It’s Christmas? got its debut play on The X Factor – replete with its rather graphic and gratuitous intro of a dead woman being lifted off her bed – which propelled the song to number one straight away.

Uptown Funk wasn’t even supposed to be in the running for Christmas number one. It was due for release in mid-January but after Fleur East’s impressive performance of it in the X Factor semi-finals, Ronson’s record company finally pulled their thumbs out of their arses and got the track on sale in the UK. It went straight in at number one too.

Haenow does look poised to benefit from the X Factor bump as well, but the only advantage he has got over the other two in this case is timing, as Cowell has been equally keen to push all three.

But all this talk of marketing isn’t very fun, is it? Let’s look at something a little more musical.

The Key To Success

For about five years now, we’ve been managing to fairly successfully predict Eurovision winners by pulling apart the musical elements of each entry (the key, the tempo, the use of modulations, etc…) and then seeing how well they fit against the model established by previous winners.

We thought we could maybe apply the same system to Christmas number ones too. If we figure out all of the keys of the previous festive chart toppers, it might give us some clue as to how well this year’s hopefuls are primed for success.

Let’s see.

We see a fairly even spread across all the various keys there – which you’d expect with such a wide sample. Only one person went for Db (Rolf Harris – Two Little Boys in 1969) and B seems to be pretty unpopular too (The Beatles – Hello, Goodbye in 1967; and Little Jimmy Osmond – Long Haired Lover From Liverpool in 1972) – but none of that’s an issue for Band Aid, Mark Ronson or Ben Haenow.

Haenow’s version of Something I Need is in F Major. As we can see, major keys are by far the most popular for Christmas songs – people clearly enjoy something bright and happy sounding at this time of year – but minor keys have started to creep up in popularity in recent years. (It’s probably no coincidence that all those sparse, breathy, downbeat versions of otherwise happy Christmas songs – made popular by John Lewis ads and the like – are becoming increasingly familiar).

Ronson’s Uptown Funk is in D Minor (which, coincidentally, would make it absolutely perfect for Eurovision) but the heavy use of sevenths in the chords keep it sounding funky rather than funereal. Even though the downbeat quality of a minor key is quite successfully masked, it still doesn’t make it a great fit for a Christmas number one.

Do They Know It’s Christmas? is in C Major, which is the single most popular key. Eight of the last fifty Christmas number ones have been in C Major. As there are twelve keys, you’d ordinarily expect the distribution to work out at around four songs per key – so C Major is churning out twice as many hits as it statistically should.

On the face of it that bodes very well for Bob, but let’s delve into that a little further, shall we?

Novelty Value

The reason C Major is the most popular key for a Christmas number one is two-fold. Firstly, Do They Know It’s Christmas? has already been number one three times and it has been recorded in C Major every time – so that accounts for three of the eight uses.

The other five? Lily The Pink by The Scaffold; Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West) by Benny Hill; Lonely This Christmas by Mud; Mr Blobby by Mr Blobby and I Have A Dream by Westlife.

You may have noticed that a number of those are novelty records. Lily The Pink, Ernie and Mr Blobby are definitely novelty; Lonely This Christmas is definitely a bit of a tongue-in-cheek Elvis pastiche too. And Westlife? Well, Westlife are Westlife.

But if we assume that what happens in C Major is representative of Christmas number ones as a whole, that would seem to suggest that three in every six Christmas number ones are novelty songs, wouldn’t it?

Only six of the fifty Christmas number ones since 1964 have been novelty songs – and three of those appear to be in C Major.

Why is C Major used for novelty records so frequently? Because it’s the most basic key to play on the piano, and usually the first key that any beginner learns. It’s very easy to toss a quick song off in C (Do They Know It’s Christmas? was also famously written very quickly) so that might explain why it’s so often used in novelty records.

The trouble is, novelty records really haven’t been popular for a very long time, so this actually might be a pretty bad sign for Saint Bob.

Originality

OK, enough nit-picking. Let’s blast through a few quick ones. How important is originality? Are we more likely to send a Christmas cover to the top of the charts, or do we prefer something fresh?

Covers are surprisingly unpopular at Christmas, which is not great news for Ben Haenow. As the last four Christmas number ones have been covers, statistically, we’re not really due another this decade.

That said, a lot of that 40% has come from number ones in the 21st century. In fact, aside from Can We Fix It? – Bob The Builder (2000); Sound Of The Underground – Girls Aloud (2002) and Killing In The Name – Rage Against The Machine (2009) everything since 2000 has been a cover. So perhaps we’ve changed our tune?

Timing

Totting all those up and dividing by 50, we get the mean average length of a Christmas number one – 3:47.

Check this out.

Band Aid 30’s version of Do They Know It’s Christmas? is listed in iTunes as being 3:48

Ben Haenow’s version of Something I Need is listed as being 3:46

Uptown Funk has choked it, checking in at 4:30 – but the other two? You couldn’t get a slip of paper between the arsecheeks of that. It is close.

Write On The Money

Does it help to have more hands on deck when writing a possible Christmas hit? Or do too many cooks spoil the broth?

Do They Know It’s Christmas? was written by two people, which works in its favour (although Band Aid 30 have taken a fair few liberties with the actual melody, more than ever before, so it could technically be considered to be a 20-strong writing team on that).

Something I Need was written by two people as well (Ryan Tedder and Benny Blanco – who are both behemoths of top pop success) so that puts Haenow in very good stead.

Uptown Funk has six listed writers. The only people to use that many, or more? The Spice Girls. All three of their Christmas number ones (2 Become 1, Too Much, Goodbye) are the only ones to use more than four writers.

The Last Word

Of course, when it comes down to it, the only thing that matters to the Official Charts Company is sales – and this is where Ben Haenow appears to be leading the pack.

Band Aid are going to be lucky if they scrape the Top 10 this year and Bob Geldof has probably used up all of his couch time on breakfast TV for the next ten years, so it’s unlikely he’ll be able to admonish the nation into buying further copies.

Uptown Funk is selling well this week, but Ben Haenow had already taken a 23,000 strong lead in digital downloads alone, before the physical CD copies of his single had actually hit the shops. It’s by no means a done deal, but who fits the model best? Ronson or Haenow? Let’s tot up the points.

Festivity Both unfestive. Both score one.

Charity Ronson will get paid more for his, but this is a score for Haenow.

X Factor Bump Both had it, Ben’s is better timed. Another for Haenow.

Key Ronson is in the more popular key (D); Haenow is better in major though. One each.

Novelty Neither are novelty. Both score.

Cover A much-needed point for Ronson here for writing his own track.

Length Haenow is pretty much precision engineered to be the right time. He wins.

Writers Ronson’s credits list is too long. Haenow takes it.

The Grand Total? Haenow – with a score of 7-5.

We’ll be keeping a keen eye on the final sales tallies this weekend. If Ronson ends up selling five-sevenths of Haenow’s amount, we’re going to patent this method first thing Monday morning and we’ll absolutely clean up in 2015.

We hope you’ll join us.

The caption next to that picture of Carol Vorderman is “Tonight you can fuck a horny mother.”

(And, no, in case you were wondering: Carol Vorderman is not at all famous in Sweden.)

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This story, and many others like it, appear in the Popbitch Annual 2014 – which you can download for free now.

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With thanks to SW.

Everyone – regardless of age, class, gender or political leaning – has a columnist that they love to hate. Someone whose every dunderheaded thought makes you want to smash the closest thing to hand. Someone who couldn’t write a logical sentence if you traced it out in pencil for them first. Someone whose words you wouldn’t even use to line a hamster cage.

A columnist who, time and time again, manages to be so consistently wrong about every single matter they turn their attention to – and does so with such flair, passion and complete lack of shame – that they would actually be kind of inspirational if they just weren’t so fucking wrong all the time.

They’re nothing new, of course. Annoying columnists have always existed. But now – because of the freedom of digital journalism and the rise of social media – you are only ever one click away from their moronic outpourings. Once upon a time, you would have to go out and actively purchase a newspaper you didn’t enjoy (or didn’t endorse) in order to read this stuff, but no longer. It’s everywhere. It’s free. And it’s almost impossible to resist.

The kicker is that you know you’re only increasing their web traffic by reading it. You know the writer is more likely to be hired again because you’re engaging with it. And, worst of all, you’re not even sure that it wasn’t deliberately commissioned precisely to invoke this sort of reaction in the first place.

So why (oh why, oh why) do we keep falling for it?

Controversy and Conversation

Before the internet, the success of a story would be measured by the resulting sales and subscription spikes. Now it is measured in clicks, shares and likes. How many people posted the article on their Facebook feed? How many people tweeted about it? Did anyone +1 it into the soundless void of Google+?

More and more, editors are placing greater stock in the ‘social engagement’ of their stories – which is to say the amount of discussion that stories generate, either in the comments section of the website or across other platforms.

One way it’s claimed that editors chase this sort of social engagement is to commission consciously controversial pieces. But how well does controversy translate into this sort of traction?

A research study conducted into this very matter has shown that, in terms of people’s preparedness to engage with controversial material, controversy works along an inverse-U shape. Write something uncontroversial and people might read it but they won’t feel compelled to discuss it. Write something offensively controversial and people might read it but they won’t feel comfortable discussing it.

Somewhere in between the two points though is a sweet spot. An amount of controversy enough to pique the interest of people into paying attention and cause them to comment.

This inverted-U shape does neatly accommodate some flagship examples of well-known hate-read columnists – past and present (Frankie Boyle has since retired from column writing, to make space for Katie Hopkins’ massive gob) – though it is important to note that this shape does not reflect the reading figures for any individual columnist; just the level of engagement they inspire.

There are a hell of a lot of outliers though. Rod Liddle and Jeremy Clarkson write pieces designed to court this middle ground of controversy, but people rarely bite.

Why? Well, partly it’s because they’re stuck behind one of Rupert Murdoch’s paywalls (and people aren’t prepared to pay to become indignant). It’s also partly because crusty, white, middle-aged men with disproportionately high pay-packets are constantly wanging on about something they haven’t got the first fucking clue about. It is the very lifeblood on which opinion-editorial has existed for so long – the background noise against which other pieces stand out. As such, we find it much easier to tune that sort of thing out.

This inverted-U also doesn’t account for at least one genuinely controversial column which created huge amounts of chatter – A.A. Gill’s infamous baboon killing.

[It too sits behind a paywall, so if you aren’t prepared to pay to find out what it was about: A.A. Gill derailed one of his restaurant reviews to talk about the time he shot, and killed, a baboon for fun. Bad enough on its own, but Gill claimed he had no excuse for doing it other than trying to get a feeling for what it might be like to kill a man. It horrified a huge number of people – not least Masterchef host John Torode, whose restaurant Gill was supposed to be reviewing.]

While our inverted-U might not give us a watertight explanation for how columnists enrage us, it does suggest why columnists will at least try.

So if controversy doesn’t give us the whole picture, what else is at play?

Clickbaiting (v.)

The word ‘clickbait’ was added to the dictionary a few months ago. It’s an excellent word that perfectly describes a rather modern media trope. It refers to web content which is tailor-made to lure you in with the promise of something that will improve your mind, enrich your soul and give your life purpose, and then ends up being a rather pedestrian and shallow observation.

The headline is the bait, and you click through to the trap. You expect to be delighted, and you end up disappointed.

Aggravating columns are often called out as being clickbait, but this isn’t quite what happens when we hate-read. The pieces we hate-read don’t promise us anything rewarding in the first place. If anything, it’s exactly the opposite. We click on them knowing full well that they’ll make our piss boil.

But they can still be accurately described as ‘clickbait’ if you’re using the word ‘bait’ as a verb, meaning ‘to taunt, annoy or provoke’. It’s not so much clickbait; it’s clickbaiting.

Samantha Brick executed the seminal clickbaiting with her masterwork “‘There Are Downsides To Being This Pretty’ Why Women Hate Me For Being Beautiful”.

The whole article can be summed up in six words: “I’m pretty and bitches are jealous”

To date, the article has attracted over 5,700 comments.

What she’s saying here isn’t particularly controversial. She isn’t saying she’s genetically superior. She isn’t saying ugly people should be sterilized. The reason it raised so many heckles isn’t because it offended people’s sensibilities, it offended people. Directly. It was a shot across the bows to practically every single female reader. You hate me – and you’re either beautiful and you understand my point, or you don’t understand my point, which must mean you’re butters.

The piece was a global sensation.

A similar thing happened a few months earlier with Liz Jones’s infamous spunk-stealing article.

She whipped up quite the furore with it. Not because she admitted to taking her husband’s used condoms to try to inseminate herself in private (people expect Liz Jones to pull weird shit like that) but because she very heavily implied that the majority of women in their 30s and 40s would do exactly the same thing. To add insult to injury, she then warned men to be very careful where they leave their sperm.

Naturally, Liz Jones was then hauled onto the couch of every daytime TV show to defend her position, while everybody called in to register their outrage.

Goading people appears to be a much more effective method for reader engagement than plain old controversy. Where we might choose to let someone’s shitty opinion slide, we don’t find it so easily to do the same when they serve up a slight on our character. We jump to defend ourselves.

The two needn’t be mutually exclusive though. Richard Dawkins, for example. His ability at baiting people is practically unparalleled. He can start a week-long shitstorm with little more than a tweet.

Look at this little one-two combo. Dawkins not only makes sweeping pronouncements about paedophila and rape (generally considered to be ‘hot button’ issues) he also implies that anyone who disagrees with these statements is stupid. It is boss-level trolling. And even though an otherwise outwardly-sensible person should see that there is no winning an argument with him, they continue to lash out.

Or take that self-appointed slaughterer of sacred cows, Katie Hopkins – a woman with so much bovine blood on her hands she looks like an abattoir’s Employee Of The Month.

She has taken the art of riling people to whole new worlds. She’s so determined to piss off the overweight that she has gone to the trouble of putting on four stone in order to lose the weight again to prove how easy it is. Assimilation tactics. She’s like those vets who put on panda suits in order to examine the baby panda cubs. Only incredibly, incredibly cruel.

It would be very easy to ignore these maniacs if only you had the resolve. In fact, Twitter – their preferred medium – actually gives you the option to block them if you want. A button that will stop you from seeing anything they say if only you could go ahead and push it. And yet there are hundreds of thousands of people who check in with the latest Dawkins/Hopkins outrage daily, with no other intention or purpose other than to make themselves absolutely furious.

So now we know what it involves, we know how it works and we know why it’s encouraged in certain quarters, but the burning question still remains: why do we do this to ourselves?

Is it straight-up masochism? Or is it something else?

When Two Tribes Go To War

There isn’t a single action we take as humans which isn’t pored over by scientists and psychologists and social anthropologists. So surely that means there is a solid scientific or psychological principle behind this self-inflicted torture we put ourselves through?

Experiments conducted recently at the University of Virginia showed that we have a predilection for exactly this sort of behaviour. Volunteers for this study were left alone in a bare laboratory with nothing to do and were asked just to sit and think for 15 minutes. Predictably, most people found this hugely unenjoyable.

Certain subjects were given another option though. The only other thing they were allowed to do was to administer themselves a mild electric shock. Nothing medically dangerous, but nothing particularly pleasant either. A proper jolt.

And guess what? Rather than sit alone with their thoughts, the study found that a significant number of people (men in particular) would rather electrocute themselves than sit in peace and quiet. One guy administered himself 190 shocks in the 15 minutes he was left alone. That’s roughly one shock every five seconds. (His data was left out of the study.)

It seems that when the two options facing you are boredom and physical discomfort, a lot of people are prepared to go for physical discomfort, just to give themselves something to do.

However, this isn’t an entirely accurate equivalent. The study might explain why we’re happy to flick through a shitty magazine in a doctor’s waiting room rather than sit and tap our thighs, but it doesn’t explain why we actively seek out things to annoy us when we have equally simple access to things that delight us.

So why do we choose to do it when we have other options? Psychologist Alan Redman – who has a background in the study of our social behaviours – gave us a compelling explanation.

“What social psychology does is try to explain how we behave in groups, which – as social animals – is where we are most of the time. A lot of research in this decade done into online behaviour illustrates a lot of these social psychological processes at work.

“A good term to hang this all on is that of ‘self-concept’. ‘Self-concept’ is how we see ourselves; our sense of personal identity. One of the big ways in which we develop our sense of self is through the groups of which we are members. As a human being, you are a member of a lot of different groups – at work, with friends, in a family, the team you support, the bands you like, your particular fashion. All of these are helping you to develop and maintain your sense of self.

“When you’re online and you see a bit of clickbait, if it’s something which will help you reinforce your sense of self it’s likely you’ll click through. This might be a columnist offering up a view that you are actually firmly opposed to, and you read it because – as much as it’s making you angry – you do feel better about yourself because you think ‘That’s not me’.

“It makes you feel more certain about yourself and your group membership.”

If this is true, then what we’re doing is less like torture and more like a workout. We are strengthening ourselves. Improving our resolve. Galvanising our position. Alan continues:

“What makes you feel very, very certain and secure in your sense of self and your group’s identity is how clearly it’s defined in relation to another group’s identity. So, paradoxically, the more frequently and strongly you see the other group’s opinions being expressed, the stronger you feel about your own group’s rightness, size and status. You think ‘Not only are we right, but look at those idiots’.”

Something that compounds this particular state of mind is what is known to psychologists as an ‘attribution error’ – specifically the attribution error of false consensus. In short, humans have a tendency to mistakenly believe that their opinions and values and views are largely shared by most.

“Left and right[-wing politics] is a good example of this,” Alan says. “It’s kind of a 50/50 split, but each group will think it’s got the majority – certainly the moral majority – of any argument.“

So if you read a piece by Rod Liddle and think “Wow, this guy is a nutjob! This piece must have been meticulously and consciously constructed to annoy absolutely everybody!” then that is a perfectly natural response. However, it’s entirely likely that you are discounting the sizeable number of people who will read the very same piece and thought “Yeah. Sounds about right.”

Conversely, at the other end of the spectrum, you might be the sort of person who finds Owen Jones to be a bleeding heart crybaby who needs to have an angry wank about Thatcher to get it all out of his system – but there are thousands and thousands of people who agree with every word he says.

This idea of false consensus may hold the final piece of the puzzle as to the real reason that hate-reading exists.

We are so good at blinding ourselves to the possibility of other people having sincerely-held opinions which differ to ours that, rather than concede they exist, we instead explain them away by thinking they are deliberately antagonising us.

It’s a very egocentric way of reacting to someone’s opinion, but then we are incredibly egocentric creatures. When we take this knowledge in conjunction with the evidence that we are drawn to unpleasant stimuli despite our better judgment, and our innate desire to carve out a well-established identity for ourselves, often by pitting ourselves against adversaries, it becomes clear why we think we’re being trolled by writers and editors and pundits.

To many, it makes more sense that a columnist would troll the entire nation for kicks than it does for the same columnist to sincerely think that fat people are lazy and repellant. But ‘many’ doesn’t always equal ‘most’.

In the end, this might be an existential matter. A concept that doesn’t extend anywhere outside of our own heads. A trick of the mind. It’s entirely possible that there is no such thing as we are all the creators and curators of our own hate-reads.

Provocative columns and clickbait don’t exist because we like to be annoyed. For a great number of us, they only exist because we simply cannot fathom a world in which Katie Hopkins is anything other than a massive, attention-seeking twat.