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Joe McElderry talks about his transition from reality TV to becoming a big star of musical theatre
IT may be ten years after the fact, but X Factor winner Joe McElderry still manages to elicit the same reaction then as now.
‘Ohhhh, wee Joe,’ comes the collective gush from colleagues when I mention that I’m meeting the singer ahead of the Dublin run of his latest musical, Club Tropicana.
But the thing is, Wee Joe isn’t that wee any more. The boyish frame of yesteryear has filled out; he’s taller than you might think, too. And the smile that put a sort of maternal glint in Cheryl Cole’s eye is still instantly recognisable. The Newcastle accent hasn’t been ground down by years of putting the hard yards in the West End; in fact, he still lives in South Shields.
The ‘Wee Joe’ thing that he still endures must grate though, I venture.
‘You get away with more, I think,’ he laughs. ‘I remember being so young on the show that I think people only remember Little Geordie Joe. But I’ve always Little Joe all the way through school, so it’s nothing new to me.’
In Club Tropicana, he plays sassy manager Garry, at an ailing holiday hotspot. As chaos looms all around him, Garry is a man who is prone to belting out ‘80s hits by Depeche Mode, Dolly Parton, Bucks Fizz, A-Ha and Culture Club in the name of entertainment.
‘He’s quite over the top, camp and flamboyant so I’ve got no idea why I would be cast in that role,’ he says, cackling. ‘I’ve never done comedy before, so that was the reason I really wanted to do the show. That’s been a great learning curve in and of itself.’
Critics have praised Club Tropicana for getting its audience on its feet night after night in Britain, where it’s already enjoyed a successful run. Given the current craze for all things ‘80s, it’s likely that Dubliners will follow suit.
‘Honest to God, by the time the show gets to a Thursday or Friday it’s like a rock concert,’ says Joe. ‘People just want to be reminded of their childhoods and their teens – besides, all those bands are getting back together. It just shows you all it all comes around in cycles.’
Club Tropicana also pays homage to a pop age when pop music was a true cultural powerhouse; something that Joe reckons has lost its way in more recent times.
‘The songs from the ‘80s stood the rest of time,’ he explains. ‘Spotify and streaming and all those kinds of things makes all of today’s music so throwaway.
‘I think (streaming) has its pros and cons, but what it does do is take away the connection to an artist,’ he adds. ‘Before, you went and bought the record you wanted and you had your copy. Now you can listen to a song for a minute and a half and if you don’t like it, you can switch off. People don’t invest as much now into supporting bands. It’s changed the charts, it’s changed radio play, for reasons good and bad.’
After McElderry beat Olly Murs to become win the X Factor in 2009, he was inundated with offers from the West End, even as his pop career soared on the back of X Factor’s 15million strong fanbase.
‘From the get-go, I was offered hundreds of musical theatre roles,’ he recalls. ‘In that chaos, I was trying to just to this life-changing moment. I wanted to establish myself as a performer first.’
It was a slightly rocky start: at that time, X Factor winners usually bounded with next to no effort into the Christmas Number One slot. Yet Joe’s winner’s single, The Climb, was beaten to the top of the charts by Killing In The Name by Rage Against The Machine, after a Facebook campaign protested Simon Cowell’s near-strangle-hold on the Christmas Number One slot.
Cowell admitted that he was ‘gutted’ for Joe at the time, yet undeterred, Cowell’s company Syco released McElderry’s debut album Wide Awake in 2010. The album was well received commercially, yet a year later, Joe and Cowell’s team parted ways. That same year, he terminated his relationship with Modest! Management, the management company that had steered him since his victory on X Factor.
‘I changed management and got rid of a lot of people associated with the X Factor team,’ he recalls. ‘Not through any fallouts or anything — I just needed to have people around us that I trusted and wanted to be there for the right reasons, and not just because of a product.’
Joe is more than aware of the typical X Factor contestant’s career trajectory: a flavour of the month flourishes for their 15 minutes before they are cast out of Cowell’s pop paradise and onto the scrapheap.
McElderry remains sanguine about it all, refusing to badmouth his former bosses.
‘My view on it is, no-one is responsible for my career but me,’ he says firmly. ‘I’m responsible for my career. Simon Cowell is not responsible for my career. I was given a platform by him and his production team, and I took that platform and used the stepping stones and navigated to where I wanted to go. I’ve been able to do this wonderful job for ten years.
‘I think it’s very ruthless though, the (music) industry as a whole – it’s not just X Factor. It’s easily publicised because X Factor is such a big brand, but the whole industry goes like that. You just don’t hear about it because it goes on behind the scenes. But I’m glad I did it and I’ve got nothing but love for the show.’
MUCH of Joe’s appeal on the X Factor was wrapped up in his mentor Cheryl’s staunch support of him. Coming from the same part of Newcastle, she affectionately took him under her wing and helped propel her ‘wee pet’ to victory.
‘She knew how to break the whole process down in a language that an 18-year-old could really understand,’ Joe says. ‘People don’t understand I’d never really been away from home and I was thrust into this big deal, but Cheryl kept this air of calm around us at all times.’ The big question remains: are they still in touch now?
‘We don’t speak all the time, but it’s like that when you’ve worked with someone from years ago and you form a bond through working together and you go through a life-changing experience together,’ says Joe. ‘But when we see each other we have a great catch-up.’
Four or so years after his appearance on X Factor, Joe felt sufficiently adjusted to the slings and arrows of showbiz, and was ready to spread his wings a little. And so his thoughts returned to musical theatre.
‘I was really apprehensive about doing it, not because I didn’t want to do musical theatre — I went to performing arts college before X Factor — it was more of a confidence thing,’ recalls Joe. ‘I thought, “Can I do it? What if people hate us?”
‘It had got to a point where the whole X Factor criticism had started to die down a little bit. People almost waited for you to fall straight after you’d won, but I was there trying to establish a solid foundation for me career. I was like, do I really want to step into a whole new arena of criticism?’
After a low-key, two-week run in Tommy: The Musical in Blackpool, Joe was offered the lead role in Joseph & The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat on its 2015 tour.
‘A week into the run I was like, “Oh my God, I absolutely love this”,’ recalls Joe. ‘I’m lucky now, I get to flit between musicals and doing my own live shows —I go out on solo tour at the end of the year’.
Sounds like a happy ever after, but Joe knows that not every reality TV alumnus is quite so lucky. In fact, fresh focus has been thrown on the
psychological welfare of reality TV contestants.
Many have argued that reality TV bosses should be doing more to safeguard the psychological wellbeing of those thrust suddenly into the limelight; who effectively become public property for a brief time.
‘You have to make a responsible decision to go on these shows for the right reasons, not just to become famous,’ reasons Joe. ‘Secondly, there needs to be an infrastructure in place in television across the board of any kind of television show where they are looking out for people’s mental health and well-being.
‘It needs to be completely separate from the TV companies, because if they’re put in there by the TV companies, it’s a conflict of interest. Someone needs to make sure the individual is okay after, during and before filming.
‘You take young people and promise them success and they then end up doing things on television that they wouldn’t do in normal life because they think there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,’ Joe adds.
‘It’s human nature to think, “Well, if that’s going to get us successful, do it now and deal with it later”. I’m pretty lucky that I had a really, really strong family outside of the show that were really good at saying, “Listen it’s just singing. Don’t take it too seriously. Have a great time if, but if it gets too much you can walk away from it”.’
Instead of a TV executive taking care of his welfare, young Joe mercifully had his mum Eileen.
‘She came on the road with us for the first two years,’ he recalls. ‘She was like my personal Rottweiler and she took the brunt of everything and I was allowed to just be a teenager. She navigated me through all that showbusiness. It’s a great job, but it’s not a nice industry.
I absolutely love what I do, but fame is just a by-product of what I do,’ he surmises.
‘I know it’s there, I know it exists, it sits on my shoulder. I try not to pay too much attention — I know it’s there and I respect it. But more than anything I try and just concentrate on being great at my job.’
Club Tropicana runs at the Bord Gais Energy Theatre, Dublin from July 30 to August 3. Tickets cost from €18.50. For more information and tickets see bordgaisenerytheatre.ie.