The Hidden Truth of the X Factor Auditions
Recently my inbox has been overflowed with emails inviting me to take part in different singing competitions. I guess I’ve brought it on myself because when I had just moved to Bristol I signed up to every single competition I could think of. X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, The Voice, Open Mic UK … you name it, and I’ve auditioned for it. So I thought, while the talent scouts are embarking on another national search for the contestants, I’d share my personal experience in dealing with those shows with you.
As every young and aspiring (and naïve) musician I thought that there’d be no quicker way to fame and glory than a feature on one of those programmes. Surely everyone has their own opinion as to how authentic those shows are. Some people even think that this quick popularity that the participants get is undeserved and plain wrong. However, if someone offers you an opportunity to get such exposure, you really can’t turn it down, can you? There’s no straightforward formula for success in the music industry, and you really want to try all the options available, especially when you’re just starting out and not quite sure how the music business operates. So back in the summer of 2015 there was I, full of hopes and dreams, standing for six hours in a queue near Wembley Stadium in London, trying to get to my first X Factor audition. What a day it was!
There’s no need to say that the conditions for the contestants are quite horrible. First, you stand in the huge mortified crowd under the boiling sun. Then you find yourself in the same crowd but on a different ground full of cameras and spotlights. Suddenly all those people who, just an hour ago were lying on the pavement exhausted and sunburnt, transform into the happiest loudest bunch, frantically waving at the cameras and shouting their names in hopes to get their ‘three golden seconds of live broadcast’.
When you finally get inside the stadium and start cherishing a silly hope that your sufferings have now ended and that now you are about to get that chance to showcase your talent, you realise that there’s actually another queue to join. So indeed you join it and hopelessly waste another three hours in a massive hall among the huge spotlights and lots of cameras, listening to the singing battles of other contestants who try to out-sin,g or more like outshout, each other in order to attract the cameras. From time to time the broadcasting crew would ask a few people to come with them and strike a pose or walk back and forth imitating the largest amount of excitement one can generate. I walked the same path back and forth at least fifteen times, striking different poses and trying to showcase different emotions, swinging my little Martin and displaying my Hollywood smile. What seemed fun at the beginning turned into a bit of a nightmare, but I was determined to proceed no matter what.
You probably have guessed by now that once you reach the main hall of the stadium you have to wait again… Then you wait in order to get into another queue, which only leads to another, and then another, until you eventually get to the audition. Everybody kept joking that it must be a dream for all the Brits who love queuing, but being serious, the whole experience is quite traumatic and it sucks out all your emotion before you even get to the audition.
So after all of this, you finally enter a tiny little booth from which you can clearly hear the future Christina Aguilera auditioning and someone’s worst ever cover of ‘Baby’ by Justin Bieber. You speak to your judge for a few seconds and it’s clear that they are as tired as everyone else around. You overcome your doubts about which song you should choose, start singing something you didn’t actually mean to, finish the last note and hold your breath in anticipation… Some are lucky, some are not. My judge passes me a little red ticket and congratulates me on making it to the next round. Then he sends me to the queue of ‘the lucky ones’ to wait again.
I guess at this point you don’t care anymore: you’re overwhelmed with joy and so exhausted that it really doesn’t matter how long it takes until they schedule your next round. Obviously, no one asks when it’s convenient for you to schedule another ten hours of waiting, so my audition’s scheduled for the very next day. I run to Victoria Coach Station, catch the last coach to Bristol, and return to London bright and early the next morning. I guess these are the crazy things we do for our dreams...
I must admit that the second round is much more civilised! You still have to queue for hours in order to get your one and only chance to stun everyone with your talent but it’s nothing compared to how exhausting it was the day before. There are almost no cameras around and you can definitely sense much more anxiety in the air. Instead of a huge stadium, you’re sent into a little room with three judges that refuse to look up and focus on their papers. A few seconds of a chitchat and it’s your time to shine! The judges keep looking at their papers making lots of notes and finally warm up at the end promising to give you a call later on and announce the results. Ta-dam! Mission accomplished and I return home for a well-deserved rest.
If you did bother watching X Factor 2016 you probably noticed that I didn’t feature. I could pretend like I’d missed their call or couldn’t fit the shoot in my busy schedule, but the truth is that I never really received an answer of any kind. And that in itself isn’t so bad, but none of other contestants with whom I kept in touch afterwards received any notification either. This is the saddest thing about the open audition to the TV programmes like X Factor: no one among those young and aspiring boys and girls, who spend hours and hours each year queuing for their lucky chance, will ever get in the show. It’s not because they aren’t good enough, it’s because those ten places have already been allocated for someone else long before the open audition took place… I guess it’s safe to say that the time when TV shows actually discovered new talents in the crowd of strangers and made them famous, that time is gone. Each year ratings of these TV shows keep falling and competition gets tougher, so producers can’t afford to rely on the random chance that they might pluck a good story out of nowhere. In order to get their ideas implemented as perfectly as possible, they send out talent scouts who select the perfect candidates separately from the open auditions you watch on TV. It’s sad but that massive crowd of young and talented musicians, who waited for ten hours to test their luck and get noticed, was brought there for one purpose and one purpose only: to allow the producers to get shots of large crowds, rather than a seriously attempting to find talented contestants.
As for the talent scouts, it’s important to understand that just as with real and fake auditions, there’s real and fake talent scouting. Near the time of the big auditions’ announcements lots of talent scouts from those TV shows start attending open mics in different UK cities, hosting what they call “pre-auditions”. One might think that going through a scout is actually a much better alternative than queuing for ten hours near Wembley Stadium. After my bad experience with the big audition day, I indeed tried to go though the scouts from the Voice, Britain’s Got Talent and my favourite, the X Factor. Unfortunately, at the end of those open-mics, all you get is a referral to the main open audition day. The scouts that loudly announce their arrival to the city and chat you up at the open-mics do it purely to promote the show. The real scouts, who select future contestants, go through special agencies and try to keep it private with little to no publicity involved. Unless you’re lucky to work with agents who do close doors auditions, I really don’t recommend investing time, effort and resources in auditioning, unless it’s a local open-mic you were going to pop into anyway.
Despite joking that I was quite naïve when I embarked on that auditioning nightmare back in 2015, I knew from the start that one shouldn’t wait for a miracle to happen in regards to securing a place as one of the successful candidates for a show of that scale. I did hope that the competition would be genuine, but it wasn’t the victory I was after. What I wanted was to peek behind the veil of how such a TV giant as The X Factor is produced and maybe, if I was lucky, meet someone important who’d express an interest in my music. I doubt I’d ever go through the auditions again, but I’m really happy I did it at an early stage of my career at relatively minimal expense. The reality of making programmes like the X Factor is quite mortifying and after talking to quite a few professionals working in different spheres of the industry, I’ve come to realise the actual scale of the pre-formatting of show like these. It is indeed a music “soap-opera” and nothing else. I guess the magic of The X Factor was lost on me for good. With slight differences in how they present themselves, all these TV singing competitions use the same formula, and to the great disappointment of thousands of young aspiring boys and girls, in that formula, there’s no place for random talent.
Photos taken by Ria Timkin.
Based on the article written by Ria Timkin for Rock-Vector N22 (42) 11.06.2016
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