I’m able to write now at least, although the clips on YouTube are still running on a loop in another window. I have to shake it off soon; my bandwidth probably ran out about twelve hours ago. And I’m drinking black coffee, which I hate, because I’m out of milk and a trip to the shops just doesn’t seem worth the interruption. 

Not being much interested in reality TV, I completely missed the story as it was happening. In fact before I saw Altiyan Childs on stage, the music industry as a whole hadn't really touched me for about ten years. (This has puzzled me somewhat, since I got through all the exam sessions of the '80s and early '90s powered by a set of headphones.) 

I must have caught a few glimpses of The X Factor in previous weeks, although I almost always work with my back to the TV, which usually isn't turned on anyway. This audiovisual nugget locked itself into my brain and went to work repairing a bunch of broken and rusted connections, and sometime last Sunday, it began to dawn on me that there was something I needed to watch that evening. 

I actually sat down in front of the TV that night, and by 8:30, an hour into the "Grand Final," I was feeling, well, pretty damn strange. I was wide awake by 5am Monday and haven’t slept much since, nor has YouTube been off my screen. (It's currently pre-dawn Thursday morning.)

I've had a lot to catch up on. I've tried to pack four months of Childs' life (and the rest) into a few days of my own, and it's been an emotional experience. I'm also significantly annoyed about one or two things.

If you’re wondering why anyone would get so nuts over Altiyan Childs, believe me, so was I. The tapes of his auditions are a classic example of the reasons why I really can't handle this stuff. It almost killed me to watch even the few seconds-worth that are publicly available.

Even so, I’d like to see the rest. I’d really, really like to see what Ronan Keating saw. Because a short six weeks later, in Week 4 of the Live Series, Childs is completely unrecognizable as the alien mockery of pop culture who bumbled through the earlier episodes. In Week 4, he suddenly turns in a version of Bon Jovi's Living On A Prayerthat leaves me wondering - in dismay - where music has been since I was a schoolie. 

I won’t try to explain what I mean by that; if you’ve really and truly watched Childs work and you still don’t get it, well, there’s nothing I can do for you. Childs’ Living On A Prayer isn’t perfect. There are faint signs here and there that he was still getting his sea-legs back. But the guts, the fever, and the primal arrogance of Rock! just never miss a single damn beat.

There’s a crucial point here which still hasn’t fully dawned on the ubiquitous skeptics who, in declaring their disregard for Childs, are actually expressing their opinion of TV talent quests as a questionable use of resources. Childs isn’t thirty-five going on seventeen, nor is he a middle-aged weekend rocker. He’s a fully fledged, self-made, commercially invaluable professional who has been kept in a cage and fed on scraps by the blind stupidity of industrial economics – for which no one person or group of people can really be blamed.

Not having watched the series in real time, I was spared any doubt as to the outcome, which in truth was categorical. Perhaps not in Week 4. But Kyle Sandilands, who sat immobile with his jaw hanging slightly open during Childs’ incontestable delivery of U2’sBeautiful Day in Week 5, proved that he wasn’t born yesterday when he said afterwards, “You are probably going to win;” and in Week 6 after Survivor's Eye of the Tiger, came right out and said “Everybody else is a pretty kid that can sing and you are the star, mate, it's as simple as that (sic).” By the time I caught on for the Grand Final, any question about the "winner" was either delusionary or manufactured. Listen to the audience if you've got any questions.

Childs is supremely, and uniquely, talented. That’s an opinion that is already echoing back from the reviewers, however they might be inclined to hedge their bets and whinge about his “eccentricities.” The single released on Monday night demonstrates it well enough. In most languages the song is a crude melody and the lyrics are simple, maudlin nonsense. But with Childs’ capacity for internalization, what little emotive gold there is actually pans out pretty well. On the scale of what we know he’s able to do, it reaches maybe twenty percent; and it seems to be selling well enough to date. If Sony can't manage him better than that for the rest of the album, it’s an extreme case of “lead a horse to water ...”

The greater question, however, is how such talent could have gone unsupported for so long by an industry so badly in need of it. If Childs himself was repeatedly refused, how many other valuable artists are left out there, completely wasted, for lack of a  bit of time with a Ronan Keating? I don’t know the answer, and I wonder if the people whose business it should be to know, actually care. 

If anyone is interested in learning something from this season of The X Factor, it seems to me that it could just as appropriately be called The Mentor Factor. Everything it achieved, and everything Childs achieves in the future, comes down to Keating. Successful mentoring relationships are not such icky, feminizing, unnecessary things after all, perhaps. It works like this, guys: You put fuel in the engine, it goes. Artists run on fuel, too. Twenty four years without it looks like a heap of junk, or maybe a bowl of frootloops, who knows. How about cutting out the TV ratings crap altogether, and just sell tickets? People can even write their vote down on the stub. Only a thought. From someone who obviously knows nothing about music. A member of the public, that is.

As for me and many, many others, I’ll buy everything Childs ever makes, including Incy Wincy Spider if he wants to do it, out of sheer gratitude. I had quite simply forgotten what music was for. 

GOD help me if I ever do that again. I really hate black coffee.

© Kathy Tuppurainen  2010