by Danny White
Perhaps the truth of their bond is that, despite their fame and success, both stars feel emotionally lonely and unsatisfied in some sense. Their professional success has come at the expense of personal happiness. The comfort that their professional journeys and personal bonding has brought to each of them has been significant.
Will had been delighted to see his client on The Voice. The way their paths crossed on the show provided a sense of closure after a tough year for both of them due to the X Factor USA saga. The Voice is an important chapter in Will’s life, so let us turn to his successful involvement on the BBC show, how it all started and how it led to Will becoming a much-admired part of the British mainstream, so much so that he got to rub shoulders with the nation’s real royalty – and secure a place in the hearts of the public. The Anglophile’s love was about to become more requited than ever.
7 The Voice and Beyond
Initially, Will was just a viewer of The Voice like everyone else. In the Spring of 2011, he had watched the debut American series of the franchise on NBC and absolutely ‘loved it’. So he was thrilled when the approach first came for him to appear as a star on the British series, to run in the Spring of 2012. Setting aside any suspicions that he was going to be a harsh, tough-talking judge in the mould of Simon Cowell, in keeping with the producers of the show’s wishes, he preferred to refer to himself as ‘a coach’.
‘Throughout my career when I have coached people, it has always been all about being someone’s friend,’ he said on the Unreality TV website. ‘I want to go about The Voice with the same perspective in the sense that a friend is better than being a mentor or coach. I really want to be able to give my team my perspective on the music business.’
From the start, Will wanted to separate himself from the stereotypical judges of talent shows of recent times. So, in a thinly veiled critique of The X Factor, he explained on Digital Spy why he saw The Voice as different. ‘When singers go on the other shows, you’re probably never going to hear from those people again,’ he said. ‘Why? Because their souls and their whole world has been crushed and they’ve been embarrassed in front of everybody. This one’s different. I want to see every single person that walked off that stage proud and not battered and bruised, because this is their passion.’
Why, in reality, was Will at such great pains to differentiate The Voice from its rivals? It was not so much the public he wanted to convince that his show would be better than anything before: he seemed to also want to convince himself of it. Perhaps the only way he could truly relax into his role was to believe that the show he was joining was more sincere than its rivals. So keen was he to make this case that he was even willing to talk down its broadcasting appeal in order to talk up its musical credibility. ‘Maybe it doesn’t make great TV, but it’s gonna make great artists,’ he said, in a statement that might have made the production team shuffle uncomfortably when they heard it. ‘Do you want TV or do you want artists that are gonna go and perform for people and make people forget about their problems for five minutes in a song? TV’s great, but there’s lots of it.’
He went even further, with a surprisingly comprehensive swipe at all the judges on the X Factor and Idol shows. ‘The Voice is different,’ he said. ‘On one, you have people in the music industry, current and legends, coaching the next generation. The other format you have judges critiquing, giving their opinions on things when they don’t really know, other than Randy Jackson on Idol. But on The Voice, we’ve all got experience.’
Given that past and present judges on reality talent shows included artists of the not inconsiderable calibre of Paula Abdul, Steven Tyler, Dannii Minogue and Cheryl Cole, Will’s statement was quite a blow. Perhaps he had excluded Cole in his mind, given that she had, at this stage, left the reality-television sphere, for the time being at least. Indeed, he admitted that he had sought her counsel for his new job.
Even in explaining this, he could not resist yet another attack on The Voice’s rivals. ‘I reached out to Cheryl for advice on keeping your cool, having a poker face, the importance of sticking with the singers – it’s their dream,’ he told Capital FM radio. ‘A lot of the times when you have other performers as part of the show, celebrities tend to want the shine so they hog up time. So my whole thing was that I want to do The Voice, but I don’t want to hog up time to where the singers up there are looking like, “Is this about you guys?”’
Her advice, he felt, had been more than useful, ‘Her information that she gave me was inspirational. Her perspective and experience inspired me.’ However, although he sought advice, for Will, the talent search was not to be a new experience – just one transferred into a new context. ‘No, this is what I’ve always done when I’m not performing,’ he told the Radio Times. ‘I’m looking for new acts, I’m mentoring people signed to my label, wherever I am, after a show, when I go to a club. It’s just now I’m doing it on a different platform.’
The gimmick for The Voice is that the opening auditions are ‘blind’. That is to say the coaches sit with their backs to the singer and, if they like what they hear, they can press a button on their chair, which then spins them around so they can see the singer for the first time. The idea being that it is all about the voice of the person, not their look or stage persona. At the end of the song, all the coaches face the singer, but only those who spun round during the performance are allowed to bid to mentor the singer in the next round. As we shall see, the sincerity of this dimension of the show was to be questioned by many viewers and several critics.
Nonetheless, as the countdown to the broadcast of the first episode continued, Will prepared to acquire a new wave of recognition in Britain. While The Black Eyed Peas had for some time been a very popular act here, theirs is the sort of mainstream success that means that far from all of those who can hum along to their biggest hits would be able to tell you the names of any of the band’s members, let alone recognize them. The Voice would jettison Will directly into the living rooms of a primetime BBC One audience week after week – recognition did not get much more mainstream than that. Will, for all his disdain of Simon Cowell and his shows, was more than aware of how Pop Idol and then The X Factor had taken Cowell from anonymity to huge fame at record speed. Meanwhile, there was always the risk that the entire project could be a failure, so the stakes were high.
Alongside Will on the show would be three other celebrity coaches: Welsh legend Sir Tom Jones, pop princess Jessie J, and The Script’s Danny O’Donoghue. The inclusion of O’Donoghue had proved controversial after he pipped Will Young to the post for the role. Young was furious and Twitter users were aghast, somewhat unkindly renaming him Danny O’Donog-Who? Will suffered no such issues with recognition, though he was new to some viewers. Still, the panel was described as a ‘blockbuster line-up’ by Will Payne of the Daily Mirror.
Will’s opening words on the opening episode were familiar: announcing that this was ‘not like the traditional, karaoke talent show’. Will was introduced to viewers as the ‘founding member of global supergroup The Black Eyed Peas, seven-time Grammy winner, and established producer, who has collaborated with music’s biggest names.’ It was a curriculum vitae that, arguably, cast him as the most widely qualified of the coaches. The coaches started the series opener by performing together one of Will’s biggest hits: ‘I Gotta Feeling’. In a grey-and-white baseball jacket, Will looked pumped-up and slightly nervous. There was much at stake for him.
In the opening audition of the series, Will was the first to press his button and face the contestant. It took him little time to be won over by the sound of Jessica Hammond covering Jessie J’s ‘Price Tag’. By the end of the song, all four coaches had followed suit, leading each time to much mock-indignant body language from Will.
It was then time for each coach to make their pitch to mentor the contestant. ‘So, I would like to work with you,’ Will said to Jessica Hammond. ‘The way I’ve worked with Macy, and Michael Jackson ...’. O’Donoghue then made a
joke about Will name-dropping. This would be just the first of many such quips between the coaches on that topic. ‘I would like to have you on my team, we need to make an album, we need to put it out to where it’s big, in the UK, America, Brazil, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Argentina, Russia, Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, Slovakia, Turkey, Poland...’ After being – blissfully – interrupted by O’Donoghue, Will concluded by telling Hammond: ‘You need to come here, babers’. He then offered to hold her guitar for her: ‘I’ll be your roadie. I’ll be your producer and your roadie.’
As the coaches vied for Hammond to join their team, there was much banter between them. O’Donghue accused Will of being ‘like a lobster’ (meaning in this context ‘loquacious’), while Jessie J implied that Will ‘surrounds himself with “yes men”’.
Already it was clear that Will intended to be an electric presence on the show. To some, the chatter between the judges made for slightly awkward viewing. There was a sense that the judges felt less than comfortable performing such contrived roles. To others, the show made for a breath of fresh air in a format that had become bloated and tired due to the excesses of The X Factor.
As for Will, despite being the first to back her, he received his first knockback of the series when Hammond, while deliberating on which coach to choose, told him: ‘While I appreciate everything you said, I’m a songwriter. I’m only seventeen and from Belfast. Number one hits don’t matter to me. Making music and sharing my message is what matters to me.’ Wisely, Will did not respond to her meek slap down of his highly commercialized pitch. He had misjudged her core motivation, but not unreasonably so. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the fact she had auditioned with one of Jessie J’s songs, it was she that Hammond chose as her coach. Will would, though, win favour with a number of the contestants in the opening blind auditions round.
Meanwhile, backstage he was reported to have offended BBC executives. According to the Sun, Will turned his dressing room at the White City studios into a makeshift music studio, so he could satisfy his creative, workaholic tendencies. Initially, this was welcomed – everyone wanted their star turn to be happy. However, once he had set up his equipment and begun to make music, the sheer volume of his ‘mega bass bins’ shook up the building, literally and metaphorically. A ‘show source’ was quoted as saying Will’s music had caused serious offence among the suits upstairs. ‘Will has some serious bass in there and it was vibrating the walls – you could almost see the dandruff being shaken off their heads,’ said the source, providing a memorable image.
A more serious reported bust-up occurred when Will and Jessie J competed to take a singer called Joelle Moses under their wing. Joelle’s soulful, slowed-down rendition of Adele’s ‘Rolling in the Deep’ was one of the highlights of the opening auditions. Once again, Will was the first to press his button, followed closely by O’Donoghue. By the end of the audition all four coaches had turned themselves around, with Jessie J the final one to do so. However, when she did turn around, Jessie J broke with etiquette to run onto the stage and embrace the singer. Will pitched himself against Jessie J, saying sardonically: ‘I know how to work with good singers, produce them, and stuff like that’. He won the pitch, when Joelle said her ‘gut instinct’ led her to choose him.
However, Will and Jessie J reportedly also exchanged some unkind words, which were not broadcast. After Jessie J mocked Will’s name as containing ‘two dashes’, he snapped that she was ‘Little Miss Jessie’. Will told the press: ‘There was one point where my team came in and expressed concerns on the banter between the coaches. I am the most unconfrontational man in the world – it is not my style – but that was the first time they have ever seen that side of me and they were like, “Will, what are you doing?” They pulled me back in the dressing room and told me that I should not be doing that. They said it certainly didn’t look like banter.’ Furthermore, Will insisted the row was genuine, describing Jessie J and himself as ‘hungry people fighting over a steak’.
Such stories frequently appear in the tabloids during reality-television series, some readers take them with a pinch of salt. A more significant claim surfaced in the Guardian, which said that Will was comfortably the highest paid of the show’s four coaches. The newspaper, a favoured read among many British media figures, claimed that there was a £1 million fund available for the coaches’ salaries. It reported that Will had received half of the money – £500,000. The other half was said to be divided between the other three coaches, with Sir Tom Jones taking £250,000. Undisclosed figures put Jessie J as the third-highest paid judge, with O’Donoghue in fourth place, but ‘still pulling in six figures’. These figures, though unconfirmed, seem to hold weight. Will was considered the biggest ‘catch’ by the producers, while O’Donoghue was only a late selection. Four weeks into the series, Will topped the figures for the coach most searched for online. All in all, things were going well for him.
He needed to find a special act to coach. Jaz Ellington was, for many viewers, the most stand-out of Will’s acts from the opening auditions. He sang ‘The A Team’, prompting Will to lead the charge of coaches spinning around. With the other judges having filled their teams already, this astonishing talent was Will’s by default. He laughed flamboyantly as he faced Ellington, signalling his soaring confidence that he had discovered a star. He told Ellington it was ‘like you just fell out of the sky’. With a very positive atmosphere permeating the studio, Ellington was invited to sing another song. He chose Will’s own song, ‘Ordinary People’. It was such a powerful performance that it reduced both Will and Jessie J to tears. ‘Here comes a little angel with wings’, said Will, summing up the moment. He compared his new act to ‘an owl’ who can see in the night.
By the end of the first round of auditions, Will believed he had assembled ‘the perfect ten’ contestants for his team. Among them were Heshima Thompson, barmaid Jenny Jones, Sophie Griffin, J. Marie Cooper, Scouser Jay Norton, Wakefield teenager Frances Wood and Londoner Tyler James. At this stage, for most observers, Ellington and James seemed the cream of Will’s crop.
Next up, came the ‘Battle Rounds’, in which the final forty acts would be reduced to a top twenty. The acts went head-to-head in a ‘sing-off’, held on a ‘boxing ring’-style stage. This made for an intense experience for Will, as he was forced to reduce his top ten to a top five. Among those he took through were Joelle Moses, who edged out Jenny Jones, despite Will feeling Jones was ‘smashing it’, and Tyler James, who Will said had ‘knocked me out with your performance’.
The most intense sing-off by Will’s acts came between Jay Norton and Jaz Ellington, who performed ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’. Between them, they produced a duet of enormous quality. Will told Norton that he had sung ‘better than Justin Timberlake’. However, it was Ellington who Will took through. ‘Jaz, I want to take you on to the lives’, he said. ‘You have something in you. You got soul in a bowl. You got soul on a pole. You got soul you don’t know! Whoa, you got soul.’
Will was relieved that things were going so well. He had harboured concerns for this round and beyond. ‘I’m nervous for the first live battles,’ he wrote on Twitter. ‘I haven’t been this nervous since we played a concert in Brazil in front of 1.5 million people.’
As the resultant live finals played out, Will admitted that he did not know why one of his acts, the much-loved Tyler James, had even entered the series. ‘Tyler is an artist, a true star,’ he told Radio Times. And I don’t even know why he’s in the competition because he has albums out and I’m a fan of them. He’s great. And hats off to him for joining the competition when you have a career already.’
His other much fancied act was Ellington. ‘Jaz is just an angel, he’s a true gift,’ Will said. ‘He’s on his way to legendary status because he has a legendary voice. We saw a star in the making in his performance.’
It was at this stage in the competition that some of the series’ boasts – many of which Will was at the forefront o
f promoting – began to unravel. With the healthy dose of pomposity and earnestness inherent in their publicity for the show, the producers had made a rod for their own back. Having made – and emphasized so strongly – the claim that The Voice was different and more credible than other reality talent contests, it had positioned itself for a fall.
In the battle round, it was quickly realized by many viewers that the coaches were now in a perfect position to weed out any contestants whose appearance did not live up to their voice, thus undermining the show’s unique selling point that the entire project was, as it repeatedly barked, ‘all about the voice’. The Guardian’s influential pop-music writer Peter Robinson nailed it when he wrote: ‘Behind all the bluster surely everyone involved in The Voice – unless pathetically deluded – knows that it’s a reality show much like any other.’
The other claim, that the series would be about the contestants and not the coaches, was somewhat compromised by the row that erupted around Will’s use of his smartphone during the broadcasts. After he was caught on camera using his phone during one of the live shows, Will was reportedly scolded by BBC bosses. According to the Sunday Express, they told him his behaviour was ‘unprofessional’ as well as ‘rude and disrespectful’. Will, however, was unrepentant. He argued that, by using his phone to tweet, he ‘wasn’t being rude’ but was merely conforming to the ‘new way’ viewers followed The Voice. He added a rhyming couplet to underline that he intended to continue utilizing technology as part of his involvement during the series. ‘TV, phone, laptop, & tablet ... it’s a new day ... if I don’t tweet during live TV I’m not connecting to people watching in the new way.’ All of the controversies, however, fed the publicity machine and kept the show in the public’s mind.
Indeed, his tweeting was not the only thing for which Will was criticized. He travelled around the world in between the live shows, prompting accusations that he was not spending enough time coaching his acts. This was a familiar controversy of the genre. Simon Cowell had been accused of the same thing during past series of The X Factor.
