In eight days’ time, somebody will win The X Factor. The euphorically tearful singer will be awarded the customary prize of a £1m recording contract, and accorded all the glittering privileges of celebrity status, until the end of the year at least. Beyond that, it’s anybody’s guess. After 10 years on air, the annual talent show has created surprisingly few enduring stars, of whom even fewer actually won the contest. But however things pan out for this year’s winner, it’s hard to see how it could possibly go worse than it did for the first one.
When the primetime show aired a decade ago, viewers believed in its promise to confer stardom on the winner. Not unreasonably, so did Steve Brookstein. The public cast more than six million votes for the 35-year-old soul singer in the final – a staggering figure that only one other winner has ever surpassed. But within nine months, Brookstein’s “million pound” record deal with Simon Cowell’s label was terminated. He had barely seen his former mentor, hadn’t even released a single, and walked away without a penny. His name quickly became pop-cultural shorthand for humiliating celebrity failure, and he has been taunted and ridiculed by the press ever since.
There are two very different theories as to what went wrong. According to Brookstein’s, the show’s pantomime rivalry between judges got out of hand, and Sharon Osbourne and Louis Walsh planted malicious stories in the press to destroy him. Cowell only pretended to champion him for the cameras – and when Brookstein refused to submit to his despotic control, Cowell told Max Clifford to “bury him”. No matter what the singer said or did after that, the media made him look like a bitter, angry loser.
The reception Brookstein’s new book has had shows they’re still at it even now, he complains. The X Factor memoir has been out for 11 days, and not one tabloid has so much as even mentioned it. Brookstein puts their indifference down to the sinister power of the Cowell media machine. His publisher did do a deal with the Sun for exclusive coverage – “and I don’t like the Sun, but I was talked into it, ’cos apparently I mustn’t appear bitter,” he says, rather bitterly. Brookstein’s suspicion that the deal was just a ruse by the tabloid to keep his book out of all the other papers was confirmed, he says, when the Sun declined to publish the piece it had paid for. “To me, that was proof that they had no real intention of running it. They’re not going to run an article that’s perceived to be anti-Simon Cowell. They’re a pro-X Factor paper.”
But his book arguably also proves the alternative explanation for his calamitous public image. If bookshops reserved a shelf for Autobiographical Car Crash, Getting Over the X would be a category gem, and many readers may struggle to believe that its ghost writer was not Craig Brown. Cowell and Clifford themselves couldn’t have done a better job at making its subject sound humourless, arrogant, hubristic and resentful, isolated in the toxic fog of his perpetual huff about the unacceptable priorities of a primetime entertainment show. “TV always seemed to come before performing music,” is a recurrent grievance, and even after he’d won, his first thought the following morning when the alarm clock went off at dawn was: “I wasn’t happy. I couldn’t imagine a footballer doing GMTV the morning after winning the FA Cup.”
If Brookstein had confined his anger to legitimate provocations, it would be easier to sympathise, for he seems to have suffered more than enough of them on The X Factor. He says that during the dress rehearsal for the live final he was called “a fucking cunt” by Osbourne; then, he claims, he was summoned to Cowell’s dressing room to find his mentor flanked by two ex-girlfriends. Jackie St Clair was dressed in a tiny thong and high heels, Sinitta undid her top, and Cowell smoked and watched as the two women wrapped themselves around him and fondled his crotch. “I thought it would relax you,” Cowell grinned when the contestant protested and bolted. But Brookstein didn’t seem to have been any less shocked and insulted when Cowell had invited him to dinner the night before, and served microwaved Marks & Spencer ready meals. “It’s not as though he couldn’t afford a cook,” he fumes.
The absence of any quality control in his anger makes the book highly entertaining. But it also makes me worry that he’s going to take offence and fly off the handle, whatever I say. When we meet in a coffee shop near Waterloo, his disarmingly sweet self-deprecation and excruciating vulnerability take me by surprise. He doesn’t want to have his picture taken before we talk, “cos I’m not good in mornings,” and he frets about looking old and fat in the photos. He is so heartbreakingly delusional that by the time he erupts – “Louis Walsh is a complete imbecile. He is a complete imbecile. What’s he had? Westlife. Westlife! Louis Walsh is irrelevant, musically irrelevant. Simon Cowell is musically irrelevant” – not even Walsh himself could have mistaken the outburst for anything other than guileless insecurity. Just because they are after you, I find myself thinking, that doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid.
I start with some of his complaints about his treatment on The X Factor. “I don’t think this is important,” he soon bristles. “I’ll be honest with you, these things you’re talking about are irrelevant.” But he’s just written a book about them, I point out. “I think the most important things are what the Sun did and what Closer magazine did after I won. People have picked up on the trivial stuff in the book that isn’t important, and I get concerned. People have an agenda.”
Brookstein says the real problems began after he won. Cowell swanned off to Barbados, having assured him that his first album would not be a medley of covers. When the two eventually met again, Brookstein says, he announced: “‘Your album’s going to be an album of covers.’ He was extremely stern. I’d never seen him like it on X Factor. It was cold – just: ‘Look, this is how it’s going to be.’ Inside I’m thinking: who the fuck are you talking to? I don’t take this shit. But I thought: you know what, I’ll give you one album. But you mess this up and we’re falling out. I didn’t want to go on The X Factor and be made a fool of. And I thought: no, I’m not having this. ’Cos I know that the music I do is good.”
Brookstein was still smarting when he gave a fatal interview to Closer magazine, and was asked if he’d ever questioned his sexuality. He told the journalist he had. He and an ex-girlfriend used to visit strip clubs, take home a stripper and “have fun” – but on one occasion they took a man home instead. “I thought, you know what, this could possibly come out – and I want it to come out on my terms.”
The trouble was, Clifford and Cowell had asked if he had any secrets they should know about, and he hadn’t told them. It was the beginning of the end. “They were angry that I’d told the press and not them. Like: ‘You should have told us that. ’Cos that secret should have been ours to sell.’ And I’m thinking: no way would I have given you that secret, ’cos you would have used it against me. I’m not an idiot. They’re not there to protect me, they’re there to protect their brand. It was Max’s job to protect Simon. I’m not the one paying Max 200 grand; Simon is. So who’s he looking after – me or Simon? And if ever I do get out of line they can use that against me. So I thought: right, it’s my secret, I’ll deal with it the way I want to deal with it.” Clifford persuaded Closer not to run the interview, and Brookstein was promptly banned from giving any more interviews.
Relations with the label quickly deteriorated, until he could see no tenable future and decided to walk away. When Clifford warned him: “I will bury you,” the threat sounded laughable. “I grew up when there were movies like Capricorn One, where the guy gets out of this conspiracy and gets to the press and then it’s all OK. I grew up in that belief structure. So I thought: I’ll just go to the press and tell my story.” He pauses for a dry chuckle. “Un-bel-ievable bunch of pussies you guys are! I couldn’t believe it!” Every time he tried to tell a journalist his side of the story, he says, Clifford trumped him by offering the paper a juicier story in exchange for ditching Brookstein’s.
His explanation for this hostility would be more persuasive if his other notions didn’t indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of how the media works. He considers his vigorous Twitter commentary on the current X Factor series a subversive signifier of his “active opposition” to the show, unaware that such avid attention in fact looks more like an endorsement. He finds the lack of media interest in his wife’s jazz album unfathomable, and interprets his six million votes in 2004 as proof that today’s public “want me to make music”.
The incontrovertible truth, however, is that Cowell has created a culture in which it’s easy to forget that contestants are real people. It’s so easy to laugh at Brookstein – but when he was 14, a family friend introduced him to hardcore pornography. Soon the man was masturbating next to him, and would take the teenager cruising through red light districts. This went on for about six months, and Brookstein never told anyone about it. He dropped out of school, withdrew into himself, and lived with “this really uncomfortable feeling” that made intimacy impossible, and left him “very untrusting, emotionally in a place that I wasn’t equipped to deal with the demands of X Factor – people controlling you, having to trust people you don’t know”.
His book mentions “battling my demons” a lot, and it seems clear to me that he has mental health issues, but the word “depression” makes him bridle. “I know I can get angry. I lose my temper. I know all the parts of my character.” His distrust is so acute that any doctor who suggests anti-depressants is instantly dismissed as a charlatan “selling drugs”. It seems to me that the public eye, let alone the X Factor stage, is the last place where Brookstein should be. But he refuses to give up and walk away, “’cos then they win”.
For his own sake, I wish he could. In his first X Factor audition, the judges questioned whether he “wanted it” enough – and they were right to. “Yeah,” Brookstein admits. “If I had played the game I would have been a certain sort of artist. I’d have been a TV celeb type, done these albums that are nonsense – and yeah, with hindsight, that wouldn’t have been a bad idea.
“But I didn’t trust, I had issues with being controlled. So it’s easy to go, ‘I should have done this, I should have done that’, but that person doesn’t exist in me. The person who could have done this, could have done that, is Olly Murs. They’ve found that guy now.” He pauses for a second, before adding: “He’s not as good a singer as me.”
• Getting Over The X is published by Matador at £14.95
