Blue Lines Revisited

It’s been a stressful few days - well, weeks, in fact - and I wasn’t feeling up to blogging Beatles Week over the weekend. Nor did I catch the sing-off, though I wasn’t wholly surprised at who was in it.

Very briefly, then - BEATLES WEEK! On paper it should be a winner but wait! The micro-canon of Beatles Songs That Get Sung On These Kind Of Shows is a very small one and consists mostly of all the Beatles songs I don’t like. And also, Beatle music involved amazing songwriters (and Ringo) who knew how to write for decent but not fantastic singers (and Ringo). This means the songs don’t always respond well to embellishment, but embellishment is what they got.

MATT: Amazingly managed to be even worse than Olly Murs doing this last year. This song is such a pitfall - classic karaoke problem of the chorus everyone knows and the ridiculous verses, plus it’s from the band’s couldnt-give-a-fuck-anymore phase and a reality show is never going to be the ideal conditions for that abstracted insouciance. Growly Matt must never be seen again.

CHER: Didn’t deserve the mangling the judges gave her for a pretty version of an awfully overdone song. “She should have put a rap in it” - and been on an even more direct route to the bottom two, it’s very hard to think of a Beatles song which would benefit from the Junior Jay-Z treatment. “Flying” maybe.

ONE DIRECTION: The arrangers are having tons of fun with One Direction, whose vocals seem to get sloppier week on week even as their confidence rises. Another not-great Beatles song - “All You Need Is Love” - done with vigour. Like I said last week, they’re just marking time now - success is pretty much assured even though they probably won’t win it.

REBECCA: Disappointing tilt at “Yesterday” - the most covered song in history which means there’s a precedent for almost any approach you can make to it, including Rebecca’s torchy effort. She was all over the place this week - blamed by the judges on her Liverpudlian heritage! But you’re on a hiding to nothing doing this song at this stage I think.

MARY: Back to something approaching full bellowing strength on “Something” but I fear the shine’s gone off her for good now: this is what she does, she does it well, people (as Louis KEEPS saying) like her and she’s never horrible to listen to but there’s no real excitement now.

PAIJE: RIP Paije! This was pretty good, one of the night’s best. Very obvious thing to do with “Let It Be” - soul it up big style - but there’s not a lot else you can do to enliven that song and fair play to Paije, he convinced. Shouldn’t have gone home really but given the “save Katie” narrative and the continued Wagner thing it was inevitable, and Simon was harsh but correct that he was never actually going to win it.

WAGNER: Did well here. The Beatles are a great band and one of the things they did well was be ridiculous. And as mentioned they gave Ringo one song an album to do, so it’s not like there’s no precedent. The odd one out in this trio was “Hippy Hippy Shake” - too fast for a visibly puffed Wagner. But he knew what to do with a late Beatles track better than Matt did, and for all that I’ve come round to liking “Hey Jude”, Wagner’s attempt on its life captured the pie-eyed bonhomie of the Beatles better than anyone else tonight.

KATIE: As everyone said, good song choice. After all, John Lennon was also a shark-eyed egoist with a desperate need to be loved. He was at the same time one of the great primal talents of his era but not every parallel is perfect. This is the first time the weirdly compelling black-hole neediness of Katie has turned up on a Saturday night instead of a Sunday and I think she deserved to get through - she sung this really well, the kind of performance Rebecca could (and probably should) have given.