American Idol

by Richard Rushfield

  His thinking at the time demonstrates just how the wheels were turning even at that preposterously early point in his career.

  “I said, ‘Okay, I’ve had a few hit bands. I’m generating a lot of money here for my company. What’s my next challenge? What do I do next? I just moved to A&R. So head of A&R probably ain’t going to happen tomorrow.’ . . . So I was thinking, If my next step isn’t going to happen here, maybe I should move to another record company and maybe that could be my next career move. I could be paid more money, given more responsibility, maybe be head of A&R. Then I thought, If I move to another record company I leave all my artists behind and I have to start from scratch. If my new acts were successful that would be great. If they weren’t successful, then, shit, I might be fired. Then I thought, If I stay here and I don’t have any success I’m going to get fired. If I have lots of success then I can get another job but I’m still working . . . I’m still an employee.”

  He decided to leave. “Because the truth is that if I leave and I start my own company, if I’m rubbish at it then I’m in no worse a position because they’d kick me out of there anyway and if I’m successful then I could be very successful.”

  And so at twenty-four years old, Simon Fuller said good-bye forever to a life on the traditional rungs of the recording industry and left to set up his own company.

  He phoned Chris Morrison, an industry mogul he knew, and brazenly asked him to fund a management company, saying all he wanted was an office, a car, and a guaranteed salary. Morrison, no doubt impressed by the boldness of the proposal, agreed to fund him for 3½ years. In April 1985, Fuller set up shop and signed a young singer named Paul Hardcastle as one of his first clients. He was still unpacking the new office when his first client’s first single was released. A pop/dance anthem about the Vietnam War, “19” instantly went to number one on the U.K. charts and sold six million copies worldwide. Fuller’s firm was a million pounds in the black—instantly.

  “Chris Morrison never invested one cent, never had to. That was the beginning of 19 [the firm, named after the song]. I remember Chris said, ‘Simon, it’s not always like this. It doesn’t always go like this.’ It was true. It took me a while to have my next number one.”

  The road, however, moved steadily upward. When Annie Lennox left the Eurythmics, Fuller signed her, seeing her potential to move beyond her 1980s pop star roots and become a true solo sensation. By the time the Spice Girls appeared, almost a decade later, Fuller was chomping at the bit to create something more than just a hit album—an empire.

  The Spice Girls came to Fuller after defecting from Bob and Chris Herbert, a little-known father-and-son team who held auditions to cast a girl group, originally to be called Touch. When they appeared on Simon Fuller’s doorstep, the Spices had tired of fruitlessly attempting to break out and staged the first revolt of their career. The possibilities for a bubblegum collection of mini-skirted warblers in the age of Alanis Morissette seemed dim. Nonetheless, Fuller took them on and readied them for the public eye. Following the release of their first single, the soon-to-be-ubiquitous “Wannabe,” he formed the first truly modern media empire based around a pop group. Fuller used the publicity generated by the music and the assertive personalities of the girls themselves, with their vaguely defined “girl power” rallying cry, and soon built the Spices into an empire.

  Svengali Spice found himself roundly criticized in the press for the shameless commercial exploitation of the phenomenon, as though it were possible to commercialize something so inherently of the marketplace. But no amount of oversaturation seemed to slow them down. The Spice Girls had the highest debut any U.K. band has ever had on the U.S. charts, taking the crown from the Beatles. As their second album hit the marketplace, as tickets sold out in moments for their impending yearlong world tour, as their film became a hit in the United Kingdom (and not badly reviewed, for that matter, as pop acts went), there seemed no end to where the Spice empire might go.

  And then all of a sudden, for Simon Fuller, it was over.

  After climbing as high as any manager had ever gone before he was forty, he was back at square one.

  Still bedridden from his back surgery, Fuller looked back on it all and thought, “Next time, we have to think much much bigger.”

  Chapter 2

  LIGHTBULBS

  It starts with an idea that’s sometimes kind of random, but comes into your head and then you sort of reflect and develop,” Fuller recalls of those first stirrings that led him to Idol.

  Reeling from the breakup with the Spices, recovering from surgery, and locked out of his country on self-imposed tax exile, Simon Fuller’s road to Idol first had to run through a rebound relationship. Before Idol, there had to be S Club.

  “That year was so significant in my life. It’s hard to believe that so much can come out of one year. The thing that came out of it was that while I loved managing, I didn’t want to be totally beholden to the fragility of an artist’s management contract. I wanted to come back and build 19 into a much more ambitious proposition.”

  The day after the breakup, Fuller rolled up his sleeves and began sketching out what would essentially be the bigger, better version of the Spices. Better from his perspective because it wouldn’t be based on the unpredictable talents and personalities of a group of performers. The star of his new project would be the concept itself, a concept that would be big enough to start life as a multimedia empire rather than evolving into it.

  Fuller’s next project launched as a TV show targeted for the tween audience loosely modeled on The Monkees. Entitled Miami 7 on its original British run and S Club 7 when it ran in the United States on ABC Family, the show featured the adventures of seven singing and dancing telegenic young people. The septet quit odd jobs at Miami resorts to play together in a band called S Club 7, breaking into song at the slightest provocation. The on-screen band, of course, released real-world albums and merchandise. Seven years before Hannah Montana would make Miley Cyrus an international sensation by cross-pollinating a fictional on-screen rock star’s life with a real-life music career, S Club 7 revived the model once used by novelty band the Monkees for a much more ambitious media age.

  The show became a staple of tween culture and the teenybopper press, their second single reaching number one on United Kingdom charts. The band soon had its tour, its singing dolls, and its commercial endorsements lined up, the full marketing machine perfected for the Spice Girls. This, however, wasn’t a band that had come in looking for guidance, but a concept imagined, owned, and operated by Simon Fuller. And it was the concept itself—the teens, the outfits, the music, the TV show—that was the selling point and star, above and beyond any of its cast members.

  Dreaming up S Club was just the throat-clearing, the warm-up. Almost as soon as that concept was out of his head, Fuller had charged off beyond it, thinking about how he could take the idea of a self-contained, fully operating music factory and build something even larger than what he had in front of him. S Club had been cast through traditional means—talent scouts, open calls, and the like—with the finalists flown to Italy to perform before Fuller. But as these auditions took place, a whole new dimension was just opening up in the brand-new space known as the World Wide Web.

  “This was sort of when everything was the Internet,” Fuller recalls. “It was the boom years and so all my thoughts at this time were about talent, finding talent online and creating an experience born out of S Club. . . . The next phase I was imagining was that if I had this huge audition where people online registered to be in my next project, I could choose talent and then work with them in different ways. So the original idea was an online talent search but it was for singers, dancers, and actors. I thought that I’d do S Club Mach II and it’ll be a talent search and when you win the competition, you win a part in this online reality show. But all these ideas are all linked. It’s so bizarre.”

  In 2010, when American Idol announced it would open up its auditions to online
submissions, the world didn’t bat an eye. But when Fuller conceived his online reality show in 1997, the concepts “reality tv” or “online show” barely existed. The Internet was still very much in its infancy. Yahoo! was all of three years old. It would be another year before two nerds at Stanford would invent Google in their dorm rooms. In 1997, a mere ten million people on planet Earth had e-mail accounts.

  Not surprisingly, Fuller’s pitch to create the show of the future on a medium not yet in general use found few takers. Through 1999, he pitched the talent competition he now called Fame Search to, among others, the United Kingdom’s ITV, eventual home of Pop Idol. They summarily rejected the proposal. Fuller moved on to other projects, including a Eurythmics reunion tour, but the Fame Search concept, the idea of a massive audition and talent hunt utilizing interactive technology, wouldn’t leave his head.

  In February 2000, Fuller took another run at it, pitching Fame Search, now renamed Your Idol, to Nigel Lythgoe, a flamboyant television executive Fuller was friendly with. Lythgoe, as it turned out, had just committed to producing another talent competition that would soon be coming to the airwaves—a show called Popstars. Like the Fame Search concept, Lythgoe’s show also featured a talent hunt through the ranks of unknown singers and musicians, casting a new band, to be then launched on the commercial market.

  There are many streams that fed into the great river that was to become Idol, but one of the most significant started its journey in a remote corner of the world, with a little singing contest/reality TV hybrid that appeared on the airwaves of New Zealand in 1999. Popstars was a huge hit in its first New Zealand season; the band it created, a girl group called TrueBliss, debuted their first album at number one on the Kiwi charts. Ironically, considering Fuller’s coming role, the band was widely derided by the New Zealand critics as being a Spice Girls rip-off.

  From New Zealand, the show’s success quickly fueled a replica of the format for Australian television. And from there, where it also caught fire, it was discovered by Lythgoe, then a U.K. network executive whose son was a member of the show’s crew and who saw the show while visiting him on vacation.

  Lythgoe recalls, “He said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to see the program I’m working on. I think you’ll really like it.’ So we stayed in. We were on our holiday and so you can imagine that my wife, Bonnie, really didn’t want to stay in on our holiday to watch television but it was so good and so interesting that we made a point of staying in the following week to watch it again. What thrilled me was the actual audition process, watching people judge honestly this talent, this raw talent. . . . I’d never seen that on television before, to be frank. I don’t remember any show that ever did that. I found it inspiring and immediately contacted the producers.”

  Lythgoe made a deal to bring the show to the United Kingdom and serve as its executive producer and showrunner. Like Simon Fuller, Lythgoe, the man who was to become a critical figure in the growth of American Idol, began his road to the pinnacle of entertainment from the unlikeliest of starting places. A real-life Billy Elliot, the son of a Northern England dockworker, Lythgoe developed an interest in dance at ten years old. After attending classical conservatory, in the 1960s he joined a modern dance troupe called the Young Generation, which performed televised shows on the BBC. By 1970, he moved behind the cameras and became the group’s choreographer, eventually working his way up to the producer’s chair, and from there, to the network front office, becoming head of entertainment and comedy for London Weekend Television. But by 1999, after a decade behind a desk, Lythgoe longed to get back on the set again. So when Popstars appeared in his life, driven by its musical elements, it seemed the perfect excuse to return to the stage.

  As preparations began for Popstars U.K., the production ran into another breeze floating through the entertainment skies in those days: the mean host phenomenon.

  Since the debut of Weakest Link on the British airwaves in mid-2000, the show’s deadpan dominatrix of a host, Anne Robinson, had become the United Kingdom’s most talked about new star, her acid tongue cutting its way through the clutter of the still soft world of television programming. Robinson’s direct and unforgiving demeanor projected to the public something refreshingly direct, something authentic. Years later, Simon Cowell would dismiss Robinson’s influence as calculated and contrived, calling her “this awful woman dressed in black like a ghastly, sadistic schoolteacher.”

  But Robinson’s debut had made the world safe for truth telling on prime-time television. Her hard-edged persona hit the marketplace at just the right moment. After the decade of Clinton and Blair had played itself out, the era had come to be seen as synonymous with the sort of weasely evasion exemplified by Clinton’s famous statement “It depends upon what the meaning of the word is is.” The stage was set for the ascent of a certain self-styled straight shooter in American politics, and in entertainment it would be reflected in the rise of a generation of no-nonsense personalities who tell it like it is.

  Suddenly, every show premiering in England needed its own meanie, and Popstars would be no exception. When Simon Fuller approached Lythgoe about Fame Search, Lythgoe informed him he was about to leave the front office to produce a talent competition. However, he quickly turned the tables and pitched Fuller to become a judge on the show. The publicity-shy Fuller declined. “I thought about it and I thought, I don’t want to be on television. That’s not what I want to do but I’ll help you with the record deal. I’ll help you put it together.”

  Which left Lythgoe with a slot to fill.

  His next choice—he would later say, his favorite choice—to fill what would become for a generation of TV shows the mean music critic slot, was an eccentric, bombastic figure named Jonathan King. Britain’s consummate impresario, King was widely known in the United Kingdom as a singer, songwriter, producer, talk show host, newspaper columnist, and novelty act. Most recently prior to the Popstars launch, he had released a cover of “Who Let the Dogs Out” under the pseudonym Fat Jakk and his Pack of Pets.

  A massive presence with giant glasses and a triple chin, exploding with hyperbolic personality from every pore, King seemed the perfect star presence to anchor the Popstars judging panel. His fearless truth-telling bona fides had been well established a decade earlier when he went public as perhaps the only person in the Western world to criticize Live Aid. England was at the height of beatific hysteria about the project when King lambasted the charity concert, as well as its organizer and candidate for sainthood, Bob Geldof, for seeking fame rather than simply good works. To Lythgoe, such a history of brash iconoclasm seemed the answer to Popstars’ prayers. King’s bold, unapologetic style seemed the perfect attitude to capture the reality of what it is to audition in the real world. He had the rare ability, it seemed, to speak unvarnished, to deliver a truth to people that would cut through an entitled generation’s sense that life should be handed to them on a platter.

  Unfortunately, as the show was in its planning stages, King’s role came unmoored in the most dramatic and horrifying way. In November 2000, Jonathan King was arrested and charged with sexually molesting five boys between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. The alleged events had occurred over a decade earlier, and questions of the authorities’ handling of the events persist to this day. Nevertheless, King was tried and ultimately sentenced to seven years in prison. He was released after serving half that time and continues to protest his innocence. At the time, however, there could be little question of King judging Popstars.

  Lythgoe then turned to the man he thought closest to King—the friend who had in fact put up the bail when King was arrested—a little-known record label executive named Simon Cowell. Cowell, by Lythgoe’s account, was eager to jump into the role, but was prevented from doing so because the band that the show would produce would be committed to a company other than Cowell’s. “He said yes originally and then we did the record deal with somebody else. At the time we did the deal with Universal and he was with BMG and he was told that
he couldn’t be a judge on the show.”

  Cowell remembers it differently: “[W]hen I thought it through, I felt uncomfortable being on a show that would show people how the process actually works. I didn’t feel comfortable with that. I always thought it was something which should have a certain mystique about it, and I didn’t really like the idea of being on TV either, so I took a step back and said I’m not interested.”

  It was a decision he would soon regret, but one which, in the long run, would prove fortuitous beyond his imagination.

  With the clock ticking, Lythgoe decided that the judge he was looking for was, in fact, he himself. Nasty Nigel was born.

  The panel was filled out with manager Nicki Chapman (suggested by Fuller) and Paul Adam, the director of A&R at Polydor Records.

  The show debuted at number one for its time slot, pulling in a very significant—by U.K. standards—7.6 million viewers in its first week. Its advertising campaign put the new judge front and center with a series of billboards featuring young singers crying out, “Pick me, Nigel!” The early audition episodes immediately struck a chord as the public watched judges Lythgoe, Nicki Chapman, and Paul Adam bestow in unambiguous terms showbiz life or death on the 3,000 variously talented young people who came out for the first series. “Have you seen Popstars?” wrote the Independent. “It’s hugely exploitative and artistically bankrupt and horribly contrived and all that, and I’d most certainly boycott it, if only it wasn’t so gripping and fabulous and I wasn’t so spectacularly addicted already.”

  The thrill of those early episodes sprang from seeing the extravagantly untalented have their illusions stripped away by the barbed tongue of “Nasty Nigel,” as he was quickly dubbed by the British press. Adapting the Robinson formula of sharp comic put-downs delivered in an unapologetically direct manner, Lythgoe restaged the tension of the showbiz tryout as dramatic spectacle. His zingers such as “I’m sure there’s a tune in there somewhere,” or, when one singer asked if he could pick up a song from the bridge: “You can take it from the bridge or you can take it from the hold, but I can tell you now the ship still sinks in the end” became water cooler fodder across Britain. “He had asked a number of people to do it,” Simon Fuller recalls, “and the irony is that in the end Nigel did it himself. He was fantastic at it. He created the bad guy character.”