X Factor Live, The O2 - review

 
P42 ALTERNATIVE IMAGE X FACTOR 08/02 Embargoed to 1900 Sunday December 30 File photo dated 10/12/12 of X Factor winner James Arthur who was back at the top of the singles charts today. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Sunday December 30, 2012. Arthurís single Impossible went straight to the top of the charts on its release earlier this month but lost out on being Christmas number one last week to the Hillsborough disaster tribute single. See PA story SHOWBIZ Charts. Photo credit should read: Peter Byrne/PA Wire
27 February 2013

After nine seasons, it’s easy to knock X Factor as the root of all the evils besieging pop music and easier still to mock it as a melting pot for the nation’s chronically untalented, delusional chancers. There is truth in both arguments.

Yet, things are never quite so simple and simplistic. Last night’s celebration of last year’s contest was a brief (except for a 25-minute interval) karaoke evening, where a member of lumpen boy band Union J pronounced the evening a

sell-out without so much as a glance at the empty seats and curtained off sections. Amidst the rubble of the insufferably cheery Liverpudlian Christopher Maloney, the breathtakingly inept Rylan Clark and Jahmene Douglas, whose voice oozed technical perfection but who had the soul of a sofa, there were salvageable moments.

A second boy band, District 3, were all swirly vocal pyrotechnics on The Four Seasons’ Beggin’, while Ella Henderson transformed Cher’s Believe into a stately piano ballad of self-assertion.

And then there was the contest’s unlikely winner, James Arthur. A substantial makeover had smoothed his unruly hair but not quite trampled over his tattooed knuckles, his binman’s gait and his debt to Frank Turner. He sang Marvin Gaye’s lothario-friendly pillow talker, Let’s Get It On, with the vulnerable stoop of a man who hoped to have sex at some point in the future, but he roared through both his hit, Impossible, and the standard Feeling Good. Indeed, Arthur was that rarest of sightings: an X Factor contestant with genuine x-factor. He may surprise us all.

X Factor Live play 02 Arena on Fri Feb 8: 0844 338 0000.

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