Okay, so it’ll probably come as no surprise that us lot at The Ocelot aren’t big fans of X-Factor.
We believe that it is propagating an industry of inane covers of other people’s music and not really leaving much room for airplay of the thousands of proper hard-working musicians who have gigged day in day out to really hone their craft with a view to one day seeing their love of music appreciated by the masses.
X-Factor is a quick fix for people who just want to be famous and not proper musicians who actually play their instruments, sing their own songs and eat, drink, and sleep and live music.
But, we like to be surprised and have an open mind.
This month a tiny bit of X-Factor arrives at the Oxford O2 Academy’s doorstep in the form of Jake Quikenden.
Apparently he appeared in the show not once but twice. How’s that for dedication?
So rather than going away from his first failed attempt, he decided to come back and try again instead of actually putting himself out there on the proper live music circuit to try and gain an audience that way.
Well, it must have worked as he’s now playing the Oxford O2 Academy. He’ll be there on Friday July 17 with support from Concept and Chris Bourne. We bet it’s packed with an audience that only hard-working musicians could dream of. Life’s unfair like that.
But we could be being a tad unfair. He’s obviously got a good voice otherwise he wouldn’t have got through to the finals of X-Factor.
And he does, in a lot of ways, fill the space in people’s record library for inane saccharine pop a la Matt Cardle.
You never know he might now have a chance to hone his craft and become a proper musician having done it in a backwards manner.
And then we saw that he was also in I’m A Celebrity and when looking for an image of him saw mostly shots of his toned body in his underwear and realised that actually this isn’t a person who’s in it for the love of music but simply in it for the love of celebrity.
Good luck to him.