The Trouble With Leona

I felt dizzy and had to throw my arms around the microwave to steady myself. The noise had done something to my balance, my inner ear swamped by alien acoustics. I can’t begin to describe the aural pain I was feeling. It didn’t seem to affect Judy. She just sat at the kitchen table, a large mug of coffee in her hand, and her head bouncing like a overactive thyroid made of rubber.

‘Bleeding hell!’ I cried.

‘No,’ said Judy, ‘Bleeding Heart.’ She held up her latest acquisition, an album by somebody called Leona Lewis.

It was too much for me. A series of noises had made me feel nauseous and not a little suicidal. ‘Why does she have to whine like that?’

‘It’s called spiralling.’

‘And all the groaning?’

‘Oh Richard, it’s called putting a bit of passion in it.’

‘Are you sure she’s not enjoying a bowel movement?’

‘Do you always have to be so rude?’

I staggered across the table and picked up the album, if only to see how much more of it I had to endure. ‘Oh good,’ I said, scanning the back cover, ‘there’s even a bonus track.’

‘Stop complaining. It’s currently the number one album in the UK charts,’ explained my wife, who believes that anything voted number one by the great British people somehow ensures quality.

‘You could present people with a turd and they’d take to their hearts if it were packaged right.’

‘Oh, Richard, you’re so negative. The girl has got a good voice.’

‘It’s a matter of what you want the voice for,’ I suggested. ‘Animal testing, anti-terrorism, anti missile countermeasures…’

‘What don’t you like about it?’

And indeed, it was a good question. What don’t I like about Leona Lewis and her voice?

Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s the musical equivalent of sugar-fuelled fast food chains where obese children sit sucking syrup through a straw and petulantly demanding a hit of whatever they’ve been told is good by the clever people in marketing. It’s ITV’s endless dirge of middle-of-the-road cover versions and their obsessive promotion of wannabees with above average voices and no personality, when a credulous public vote for either generic black soul singer no 8, the usual camp Cliff Richard impersonator, a paint-by-the-numbers bimbette ‘super group’, or an odd looking outsider whose actually quite safe because he’s only dyed his hair white. I’m a man who enjoys neither an ‘urgh’ nor an ‘ooh’ in my music. I detest the easy way that the music industry manufacturer ‘hits’ based on their knowledge of the market. It little matters what they promote, the fact that they promote it will ensure the product’s success. The country is being run not from Whitehall but from the offices of public relations companies and advertisers. Success isn’t based on achievement but on hiring the right publicist who can ensure your name appears in the right places. KT Tunstall didn’t go far enough when she described American Idol as a ‘money-making puppet show’. These programmes destroy people’s souls, indoctrinate them with the belief that minor talent is enough to achieve nationwide fame, and that the country is blandly uniform in its celebration of the inarticulate, the moronic, the vacuous, and the musically dull.

‘I’m going back to bed,’ I said after the second it took me to consider all of this and then realise that Judy wouldn’t agree with any of it.

‘I’ll shout you when it’s finished,’ said Judy, smiling in triumph.

I didn’t answer. I wouldn’t hear her anyway. Soon Neil Young was screaming in my ear, repairing the damage that Leona Lewis had done and reminding me that sometimes the world actually gets things right.

Cobbling With Louis Walsh

Along with a few other celebrities, I spent my Monday doing a sponsored hike around Kent on behalf of the Queen Alexandra Hospice’s Prosthetics Appeal. Not only was it an extremely good cause but a fun time was had by all. Afterwards, a very relaxed group of celebrities retired to the pub where we all proceeded to get legless.

It’s not really like me to enjoy other people’s company. Madeleys aren’t great socialisers, or at least, I’m not. I’m not a people person. I’d much rather be on my own, researching some new subject, discovering a new element, working on my cold fusion reactor. It’s why I’m not a man to be bullied. I don't care what people think. If anybody tries to intimidate me, I’ll show them the stern side of my face and if they continue they get the even sterner side of my fist.

Which is my long-winded way of explaining how I came to punch Louis Walsh.

Now, I know what you’re going to say, you Swearing Mothers, you Glamourpusses, you… Well, anybody else who bothers to read this post. You’re going to say that Louis Walsh is an inoffensive little Irish love puppet, that there’s not a hair on his cheeky little body that would wish anybody any harm. Only you’d be wrong. Halfway through the ten kilometer walk, I come across Walsh sitting by the side of the road. He seemed to be having a problem with his shoes.

‘Lousy fecking cheap hiking boots,’ he explained, holding up a shoe with a six inch gash in the side. ‘I paid a hundred quid for these off that feckin Sharon “I’ve contacts in retail” Osbourne.’

I dropped my rucksack by the side of the road and took out my tupperware box into which Judy had that morning placed a pile of tuna sandwiches.

‘Have some tuna, Louis old chap,’ I said. ‘And let me have a look at that shoe. Little do you know but this is your lucky day. I am an expert cobbler.’

He looked at me. ‘I believe that,’ he said and seemed to mean it.

So, while he muched on my sandwiches, I took my ubiquitous needle and thread from my bag and proceeded to do him a tip-top service on his shoe. When I was done, it looked as good as new. In fact, I’d say it looked even better than ‘tip top’ on account of the way I’d cleverly stitched his name into the leather.

‘That’s amazing!’ said Louis, handing me back my empty lunchbox. He slipped the shoe on his foot and began to dance around. (I was about to type that he began to dance around like a Leprachaun, but that sounds a bit non-PC, even if it is bloody accurate.)

‘Yippee!’ he said, raising his little green hat off his head as he continued to dance a jig. ‘Tipperary, here I come!’

I smiled, rubbed his shock of hair that’s redder in real life than you realise from the TV, and I packed up my bags. I was about to head off when I felt something tugging on my trouser leg. I looked down and there was little Louis, on the floor and a slightly unfamiliar shade of green.

After about a minute of laughing at what I thought was another example of Gaelic wit, I realised that the poor little mite was choking. I did what only trained medics can do. I began to kick him where he lay. Eventually he gave a cough and whatever was stuck in his throat came free. He rolled over, regaining his breath, and then he held out his hand. In it sat the largest fish bone I’ve ever seen.

‘Those feckin sandwiches,’ he gasped, standing up and raising himself to his full height. My kneecaps have never had such a staring down.

‘Don’t blame me for that,’ I said. ‘I didn’t ask you to eat all my lunch.’

To that he said something which I wouldn’t like to repeat in a place where Judy might be listening. Needless to say, when Diana Rigg came waltzing imperiously along five minutes later, she found the two of us scuffling in the dirt. Though Louis isn’t a great fighter, he does play dirty. But I’ve not gained a black belt in Judo for nothing. I had him in a headlock and was planning to let him to pass out so I could make my getaway. Only, in the end, I didn’t have to worry. Diana lifted him from me and carried Louis away on her back. I watched in some relief as they went off, with him waving his fist at me from her rucksack and swearing that he’d have his revenge.

By the late afternoon, the little fellow seemed to have calmed down. When I entered the pub, he was the first person to come up and offer to buy me a drink. I sat with him for the rest of the evening, drinking my stout and singing songs about the old country.

It was during this drinking session that I discovered some interesting facts about Louis Walsh. Did you know, for example, that he is one of twenty seven brothers, all of whom are record producers? They account for nearly ninety seven percent of the middle-of-the-road music produced in the UK. Louis has made a fortune from Boyzone but has promised to rectify the harm he has done by leaving his fortune to charities working with the terminally tone-deaf.