The "Altifever" phenomenon tore across New Zealand over the weekend, leaving a familiar wake of baffled journalists and crazed fans of all ages. Australia's newest loose canon, Altiyan Childs, fired some friendly spiritual potshots over the bows of the Kiwi media, tossed the gauntlet to the female half of the population with a challenge to "knock my door down," and then showed them how to go about it with a performance at Auckland's Carols in the Park that he himself rated as the "crowning glory" of his life so far.
Defying the "X Factor Factor", Altiyan's first solo album of classic rock and pop covers also shot to #3 on iTunes after it's release late this week, in company with the new Michael Jackson and Bon Jovi compilations.
Strange though it might sound coming from a die-hard Bon Jovi and INXS fan, Childs actually does these anthems considerable justice. Despite the pop style of Sony's arrangements he still manages to reveal, define and clarify each one as the gem that it has always been. Don't miss out on this one.
As I said at the beginning of this blog, one of the most staggering things to me about Altiyan Childs is that he struggled for twenty years to find a place in the music industry. So much so that in the end, the bottom line of the signals he'd been getting was that he'd be more useful to society as a forklift operator. At the time there were plenty of questions I wanted to ask about Childs; there’s just something not quite romantic, not quite bizarre about the story that for some reason really captivates me. But the question I most wanted the answer to that first week was this:
WHERE THE HELL HAS HE BEEN?
It wasn’t just that the guy had been forced into a corner so hopeless that to escape it, he eradicated from his life all signs of the passion that had driven him every day for as long as he could remember. It was also that after being madly in love with Jimmy Barnes, INXS, Metallica, Pink Floyd, Bon Jovi, Whitesnake and a dozen others at school, I'd been lumped with ten or fifteen years of thinking that Silverchair and Smashing Pumpkins were the best that Australia could come up with.
I remember mentioning this to a friend once, who very gently informed me that The Smashing Pumpkins were American.
Plenty of people will object; that’s OK. Silverchair don’t leave me completely cold. Just almost. Kurt Cobain I liked; there was always something about Kurt. Anyone who can be so completely dejected yet continue to hold an audience spellbound, has got to have something about them. But the Silverchair guy – what’s his name again ... oh that’s right, I never knew it.
I could never tolerate commercial radio, but I have to admit that after the Triple J Unearthed series which finished up with an aggressive marketing campaign for Silverchair - from memory it was 1993 - I pretty much stopped listening to Triple J as well. I suppose I thought I'd grown out of music.
Now we’re confronted with Altiyan Childs, and it takes a bit of adjusting.
Childs himself, apparently, is over it. A more astute journalist than most asked him while he was in Perth if he could forgive his new bosses for their past oversights. “Yes, they didn’t get to my demo; yes, they missed out, but did they really?” he said. “You know, was I ready at all? I possibly wasn’t; maybe this was, after all, my time.” A typically fatalistic response, and who can blame him; he’s balancing a lot of knife-edges.
Also buried in there is the assumption that they would have signed him if they had heard the demo. I’m not sure that they didn’t hear it, and we’ll never know what they would have done. But he definitely sent them more than one tape (see this interview with Dolly Magazine); and apart from that it's very unlikely that Sony were the only major label he approached.
I’m not saying that Childs isn’t “the real thing.” I firmly believe that he is. I’m saying that the music industry in Australia is in such a state of confusion that neither the alternatives nor the mainstream labels are interested in “the real thing.” We've had more than fifteen years of ordinary being the new black, and let me say this: ordinary is as ordinary does. I suppose that makes me old-fashioned, but judging by the massive public response to Childs there are a lot of old-fashioned people around.
Maybe there's a way to blame all this confusion on the bright spark who realized there was money to be made out of Nirvana.
Even more interesting than the glossing over of his years in the wilderness was Childs’ response to a question from Access All Areas about ... um ... “glorified karaoke competitions.”
“Let’s get real, it’s the perfect example of that,” he is quoted as saying. This response was labelled in print by the darling of Perth, The West Australian, as "a smack in the face to the show which awarded him his 15 minutes of fame.” Classy writing.
But the answer possibly reveals something I was looking for. I don’t think Childs' famous struggles in the auditions for The X Factor were stagefright, as Ronan Keating tried to suggest. Childs himself has talked about "muscle memory" and told a 3 News journalist over the weekend, "It was three years of retirement ... it was just rustiness, I needed to remember." But to some extent I wonder if he was also, in those moments, battling with fear of the depths to which he felt he was sinking.
Childs is nothing if not strongly principled; once Masonia was gone and he’d made the decision, he apparently did give up music completely: "I simply abandoned my voice, I buried my guitar, I burned my songs ..." For someone with his passion that seems like pretty fierce discipline. In the same interview for The West Australian he also said, “I was asked by my own band members to audition for Australian Idol at one point, but I was too loyal.” By which he meant, too loyal to his own music. Prior to the auditions, it may well have been ten years since he had covered somebody else's stuff.
I’m not surprised he was angry with his father for forcing him to go to the auditions. The X Factor really was one hell of a journey; and for more than one of us.
As for where Childs has been, and who was watching: more on that later.
www.altiyans-child.com
© Kathy Tuppurainen 2010
