Harsh reality after TV talent show triumph
HE’S terribly shy, Stevie McCrorie. You could see it on The Voice, the BBC reality TV music competition he won back in April, when he blushed furiously at Rita Ora’s attempts to flirt with him.
It’s obvious now, too, seven months on, as he sits in a changing room deep in the bowels of Glasgow’s Barrowlands and tries to explain why he’s launching his first, self-penned album.
‘I think a lot of people will be surprised,’ he says. ‘I think to go on a show like that and write your own album and not sing any covers is quite a bold thing to do. It’s a risky thing to do.
‘As you’ve probably gathered, there’s quite a lot going through my mind at the moment,’ he concludes nervously, taking a swig from a can of Irn-Bru.
You can hardly blame him. For who’d be a reality TV music show winner these days? Particularly a Scottish one.
Who now remembers Leon Jackson from West Lothian, X Factor winner in 2007, or David Sneddon, winner of Fame Academy in 2002? Susan Boyle aside, it’s a road paved with broken dreams, expiring record contracts and invitations to switch on the Christmas lights in Paisley town centre.
No wonder he’s worried. ‘I think that’s part of the problem with singers on reality TV shows – they get thrust into people’s faces and they’re made out to be stars before they actually are a star,’ he says.
Yet here’s McCrorie, the firefighter from Alva with the pretty-boy looks and the crystal clear voice who wowed The Voice’s judges – Ora, Sir Tom Jones, will.i.am and the Kaiser Chiefs’ Ricky Wilson – from the get-go, storming through to the final with a stonking rendition of the Pretenders’ I’ll Stand By You.
His first single was released the day after he won the show and shot to the top of the iTunes chart – and why not? Almost seven million viewers watched him win the BBC’s flagship singing competition and his shy, boy next door demeanour gained him legions of swooning female fans.
BUT seven months later, will they really rush out and buy his new album, released in January, or the first single, released yesterday? Even he’s not sure. ‘I think sometimes winning a show like that, you’ve actually got a harder task because people expect a lot from you straight away,’ he says.
‘I think you’ve almost got a stigma as well. I would never have gone on one of those shows before. It’ll be hard to get rid of the stigma that I won The Voice. I would like to be known as a singer-songwriter. That’s the goal.’
At 30 years old, and married with a twoyear-old daughter, McCrorie is far from your average wide-eyed reality TV star. He grew up in Denny, Stirlingshire, a working-class lad in small-town Scotland.
‘I started picking up the guitar when I was 14,’ he says. ‘It was a good way of getting away from the small town struggle.
‘There weren’t a lot of opportunities for young people where I grew up. Where I was a teen, you either liked football or you hung around the streets.
‘Music was a way of meeting a different type of people, meeting new people.’
He joined the Fire Service and became a firefighter, spending his free evenings on the pubs and clubs circuit with his guitar.
There was a little taste of fame five years ago – playing at T in the Park and having a song featured on Radio 1, but the spark failed to ignite and he wound up playing in quiet pubs in (the ignominy!) Kirkcaldy.
‘I’ve done the slog,’ he says. ‘I’ve played gigs to my soundman and his dog.’
If nothing else, that lack of initial success has certainly made him determined.
He’s trying to overcome his natural shyness in interviews, and when we meet he is halfway through a full day photo shoot at the Barrowlands – accompanied by a fleet of stylists and assistants, ready to coiff and primp him into the perfectly preened pop star.
‘I want to make this work,’ he says. ‘And I know there’s going to be a lot of work to do it but at the end of the day whatever happens, it’s been a great experience. I’ve got to release an album on a major label, you can’t argue with that.’
His wife Amy, who regularly appeared on the show in the latter stages, seems bemused at his success.
‘She doesn’t really let anything bother her,’ he says. ‘Even before The Voice people would come up to her and say, “You must love it, your man’s in a band,’ but she’s great. She’s very calm. She knows I’m very faithful and that I’d probably run a mile if anyone approached me. Honestly, she just looks at me like her husband. I’m the same guy she met ten years ago. She copes with it brilliantly.’
Still, he was away a lot over the summer, commuting up and down between London and Alva, Clackmannanshire, almost every week.
They’ve just bought a new house, and friends were quick to demand to know if he was planning on moving to London. But no, the new place is just down the road.
‘There are artists up in Scotland who’ve made it work,’ he says. ‘My family’s up here. If I was younger I probably would have moved down, but never say never.’
It was his firefighter colleagues who put him up for the show.
‘In a way I didn’t want to do it because I thought you had to do it the hard way,’ he says.
‘And I guess it was also nerves and a lack of self-belief that I would actually win, or even get through the first stage. It was the fear of rejection, especially after all those years. It scared me.’
THE thing about McCrorie is he actually can sing. He writes songs, too, and his new single, My Heart Never Lies, is quite good – an unfussy, acoustic guitar-led ditty about missing his daughter, two-year-old Bibi, when he’s away from home.
It sounds a bit like early Del Amitri – catchy, simple, McCrorie’s Scottish accent unrepentant throughout.
It’s not going to set the Mercury Music Prize alight, but then it wasn’t meant to.
But in an age when so much of the music industry is constructed on style over substance – so much so that even one of The Voice’s judges, Ora, appears to have built an entire career on a large collection of hair extensions and the occasional bubblegum pop single – will the screaming masses really rush to buy the warblings of a lad from Alva banging on about how much he loves his wife and child?
Perhaps. After all, everyone loves a hero, which is how the show billed him.
He was mildly embarrassed by it. ‘Och, I dunno,’ he says. ‘It’s just a bit of TV. I don’t consider myself a hero.
‘I’m a modest type of person. I laughed when I saw it.’
If anything, the people he meets in the street (and there are rather a lot of them these days, he can still, seven months on, barely get down Alva high street without being accosted by fans) think he’s a hero for going on the show.
‘I think people recognise that it does take courage to do something like that,’ he says.
‘I’ve made a lot of people happy. I’ve certainly made a lot of pubs happy in my home town.’
He misses the Fire Service, which has left the job open for him (although he admits that after the album has been launched, he will have a final decision to make in that area).
‘I miss the guys. You spend a lot of time with your firefighter mates when you do a job like that. I really enjoyed what I did – getting turned out to incidents and occasionally getting to help people. I miss that.’
What will he do if it doesn’t work out?
‘I would just keep singing,’ he says. It all sounds a bit vague. Does he have any plans for Christmas? He shrugs. ‘I do whatever I’m told at the moment.
‘I’m just free to do whatever management or the label want me to do. I’ll just do it.’
He’s already booked in to switch on the Christmas lights in Alva.