N O I T C I D D A ” MY “UNCOOL
OLLY MURS
In each issue we take a pop act traditionally frowned upon by #REALMUSIC snobs and explain why they’re basically brilliant. Here, popular Murs Army member and blogger Alex MacGregor explains why he thinks Olly Murs is a better tunesmith than he’s given credit for... For some of the amazing popstars that it’s given us - Blur’s Damon Albarn, McFly’s Dougie Poynter and Harry Judd, and Saint Etienne’s Sarah Cracknell - Essex, it’s fair to say, still seems to meet with British pop’s critics on the same wavelength of approval as a copy of Toploader’s greatest hits. Up until September 2009 it was all white stillettos, positively radioactive tans and - *gulp* - Jodie Marsh. Hardly a county that could bring forth an amazing popstar. Or could it?
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Pop and the music industry generally is a bit on an ‘old boys’ club’, obsessed with its artists being ‘grass roots’ - starting at the bottom, and relentlessly networking up and knowing the right people, which of course, coming from such a small town like Witham, Olly didn’t know about or have access to. So on paper, this combined with his credentials on finishing his series of The X Factor in the Overs category, beaten by angelic voiced favourite Joe McElderry, and a proudly born and bred Essex lad - meant that he was never going to be met with critical
praise from the off. But Simon Cowell, who’d famously said he was ‘the easiest yes he’d ever given’ to a contestant, believed in him, and so too, did Nick Raphael, the A&R legend who’d steered Lemar to illustrious success after Fame Academy and then JLS, who he’d signed a year previously after they’d finished the show. And whilst pop’s critics look down upon Olly for his normality in a world of GaGas and Rihannas with OTT, diva-ish, headline grabbing personalities, it’s his normality that has