Each year, the X Factor has its pantomime stereotypes.
There is the overconfident baddie who everyone loves to hate (Katie), there is the ridiculous novelty act (Wagner) and then there is the everyman hero plucked from obscurity who will almost inevitably go on to win.
According to The X Factor spin, the show’s favourite, Matt Cardle — who this week was the first contestant to win a standing ovation from all the judges — is that everyman.
A modest painter and decorator who just happens to have an extraordinary talent.
Except everything on The X Factor is not as it seems. Far from being the archetypal down-on-his-luck Essex lad, Matt attended a £15,000-a-year boarding school, has been on the brink of fame for years and had even released an album just weeks before he hit our screens.
So it turns out Matt is every bit as fame-hungry as his much maligned rivals Katie and Cher.
‘All he has ever cared about is the music,’ Matt’s father David told me this week.
‘It can cost £150 for an hour in a recording studio so he did everything he could to fund it: painting and decorating, waiting on tables, you name it. At the end of a hard day at work, it would always be back to the music.
‘He has knocked on so many doors handing out his discs. We’ve used every contact we could to try to get success.’
No wonder many of Matt’s friends are surprised at his portrayal on the show. Chris Heap, manager of the Bull Hotel in Halstead, where Matt waited on tables, says: ‘Matt’s not really a painter and decorator, he just did that to support his music. Matt comes from a nice, middle-class family.’
In fact, Matt comes from a very nice, very middle-class family. The singer, 27, grew up in a £500,000, four-bedroom detached redbrick home in the village of Little Maplestead in Essex.
His parents own a logistics consultancy firm called Frazer-Nash Associates, but his father says music is in the genes. ‘I was a chorister for 12 years while my father was a gifted amateur singer,’ says David, 60.
Matt’s mother Jennifer says he was humming in his pram at four months. Aged two, he survived kidney cancer, had chemotherapy and had a kidney removed — no wonder the Cardles were happy to encourage their son’s love of music with piano, guitar and singing lessons.
Aged 11, the family’s world was further rocked when Jennifer’s best friend Sharon died. Matt’s parents refuse to give her surname, but they became a surrogate family to Sharon’s four sons.
Matt’s emotional rendition of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face on Saturday night was dedicated to Sharon — he sang it at her funeral and at the wedding of his ‘adopted’ brother Julian. He also sang it at the X Factor bootcamp before Simon Cowell stopped him halfway. ‘Simon Cowell is very canny and it’s my theory he stopped Matt singing it at bootcamp so he could sing it on the live show,’ David says.
‘It is a song which has so much meaning to all of us and when Matt first told me about singing it at bootcamp, we were both in tears.’
At the £15,000-a-year private boarding school Stoke College, in Suffolk, Matt was popular and good at sport. He was suspended aged 11 for sneaking an imitation gun into school. His furious mother begged police to give him a stern warning.
Standing ovation: Matt performed an emotional rendition of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face on Saturday's show in tribute to a late friend of his family
At school he was mentored by music teacher Adrian Marple, who says he saw something special in the boy.
‘There was one school concert where he performed Jailhouse Rock and it was one of those moments where you sit up and realise something special has happened,’ says Adrian.
‘He had a natural talent for performing, a real magnetism, and whenever he appeared on stage you could see everyone sitting up in their chairs.’
When Matt left school at 16, Adrian recommended he attended the £500-a-week summer drama college Lights Music Action! where, with three others, he formed a group called Darwyn. Matt was the main songwriter of the group which lasted for two years.
From there he joined alternative rock group Seven Summers. At the start of the year they released an internet album.
So it came as a surprise to them that Matt chose to go down the X Factor route. After his first appearance on the show, the band tweeted: ‘Well, it’s been an interesting few days in the Seven Summers camp.’ (Their album has since rocketed up the Amazon charts.)
They were not the only ones dumped; Matt split with Lauren Cutmore, his girlfriend of four years, saying X Factor bosses thought it would be better if he was single.
Adrian, who will be supporting Matt backstage on Saturday, says of X Factor: ‘It’s very formulaic and I would not have thought he would be into that sort of stuff.’
But it appears the lure of instant fame may have appealed to Matt. After all, he has gone from living at home to living the dream in the X Factor’s Mill Hill house.
‘People say fame is going to change him, but we know it won’t,’ his father laughs. ‘Recently me and Matt’s mother were on holiday in Spain when we got a call from Matt asking us to put £100 in his bank account because he did not have enough money to pay his phone bill.’
He won’t need those handouts for long as, win or lose, he is liable to earn a small fortune. For starters, he’ll get £100,000 for the X Factor tour.
But what about the future? There are signs Matt may already be worrying about his credibility. Earlier this week, he was quoted in Heat magazine as saying: ‘I know what this show is — it’s a f***ing TV show, like Big Brother. It’s not like I’m James Blunt and have just released an amazing album.’
His father says: ‘There is so much more to Matt than we have seen yet.’
But it is unlikely we will be allowed to see the ‘real’ Matt. His favoured indie music has already been replaced by ballads and his beloved cap and checked shirt swapped for Simon Cowell’s shirt and tie uniform.
Having found the fame he craved, Matt may find X Factor success can be a double-edged sword. If he does win, as the bookies are predicting, the serious artist may find himself as just another one of Simon Cowell’s puppets.
source:dailymail
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