Monday March 28 2011
SHAYNE Ward offers a sobering lesson in what happens when a reality television star tries to cling on after their allotted 15 minutes has turned to smoke.
The 2005 'X Factor' winner had been eking out a respectable career as a one-man boyband but how the wheels came off when his relationship with Simon Cowell started to cool.
Delayed by 18 months, his most recent album, 'Obsession', was a something of a flop, limping into the UK Top 20 and falling shy of the Top 10 here, where Ward's following has been especially intense on account of his Manchester-Irish roots.
A sign of his diminishing stock is that he's performing in The Olympia, having once headlined what was then The Point (though, to be fair, he's booked for three nights).
Stomping around stage, in T-shirt and jeans, he looks less like the "new Justin Timberlake", as Cowell once described him, than a brick-layer with a decent voice.
Dark clouds have trailed him through his current tour. According to press reports, his gigs in London were sparsely attended -- which may have been as well, as he apparently used the occasion to launch a flailing broadside against his former mentor.
"I haven't spoken to Simon since I left the show," he reportedly stated at Shepherd's Bush Empire. "He seems to call everyone else but me."
Perhaps it has finally dawned on Ward that the raison d'etre of 'The X Factor' isn't to unearth new talent.
He does put in a spirited performance, illuminated by a gutsy cover of Bruno Mars's 'Just The Way You Are'. You only hope the next time he treads the Olympia boards it isn't for Christmas panto.
The 2005 'X Factor' winner had been eking out a respectable career as a one-man boyband but how the wheels came off when his relationship with Simon Cowell started to cool.
Delayed by 18 months, his most recent album, 'Obsession', was a something of a flop, limping into the UK Top 20 and falling shy of the Top 10 here, where Ward's following has been especially intense on account of his Manchester-Irish roots.
A sign of his diminishing stock is that he's performing in The Olympia, having once headlined what was then The Point (though, to be fair, he's booked for three nights).
Stomping around stage, in T-shirt and jeans, he looks less like the "new Justin Timberlake", as Cowell once described him, than a brick-layer with a decent voice.
Dark clouds have trailed him through his current tour. According to press reports, his gigs in London were sparsely attended -- which may have been as well, as he apparently used the occasion to launch a flailing broadside against his former mentor.
"I haven't spoken to Simon since I left the show," he reportedly stated at Shepherd's Bush Empire. "He seems to call everyone else but me."
Perhaps it has finally dawned on Ward that the raison d'etre of 'The X Factor' isn't to unearth new talent.
He does put in a spirited performance, illuminated by a gutsy cover of Bruno Mars's 'Just The Way You Are'. You only hope the next time he treads the Olympia boards it isn't for Christmas panto.
- Ed Power
Irish Independent
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