Barry Manilow on The X Factor last night, or The Max Factor judging by the Baby Jane accumulations of slap on his face.
He told the young contestants to feel his songs, to sing from the heart, to visualise their inamorata(o) in the audience. He delved for their hormones, he sniffed at their blood like Count Alucard, imploring their primal force to bring life to the likes of … Mandy … yes, his mannequin Mandy, who (I think) never did sex or tampax, just romance in listening mode. Manilow's Mandy was always a stranger to the menstrual cycle.
(Message to assholes: No, Mandy was not a dog. That's an urban myth. And Mandy might have been Brandy were it not for someone's commonsense)
None of the sexy-leaky-tingly X Factor gladiators could quite grapple with Manilow's strange sealed inventions because they sought in vain the trail of organic secretion that might lead them to an identifiable experience: you have to imagine that your lyrical desired one may actually be a plausible human being before the highs of pillow (or even stage) fantasy and the lows of sheet stain. Manilow love is a sweet-stale pot-pourri of sensation for the mentally crotch-free.
Having advised his X Factor tyros to surface their humours, he then performed himself to a crowd of swayers and screamers and delivered a shameless, breathless mime - a dry come in sexual terms. He emoted not from his heart but from his mouth. Rollers of dazzling whitened teeth crashed on dead, silent lines, and he took the piss in a very sincere sort of way – and he smiled. How kitsch adores a vacuum.
An A-list zombie he maybe but only a true star like Manilow could get away with it.
5 comments:
Brilliant. I have a small cache of Manilow anecdotes which I won't bore you with here, but I do appreciate this recentg sighting, as it were.
Is it true he's had "work done"?
Oh, & you might like to know that a one-hit band called Looking Glass had a hit in the 70s with a song that went:
... "the sailors say, Brandy, you're a fine girl,
what a good wife you could be -
your eyes could steal a sailor from the sea"
etc. I think Manilow was saved in a bid to avoid reprising that.
Is it true he's had work done? asks Ms Baroque. It would be simpler to ask what's not been done. Then again, some people end up looking like that after the cosmetic surgery. But Bazza was born that way - so in a sense he has nothing to lose looking like a facelift gone wrong.
Trivia: 'Mandy'-the original song being Scott English's 'Brandy' was changed to Mandy when English met 70's/80's London singer and journalist called Mandy Miami. I know becase I was there. Scott was telling a few people that Manilow was to record his song-and then suddenly hit upon the idea of changing the title to Mandy-and told Ms Miami it was in her honour. She's soon to release a never-heard song written for by the legendary Ian Dury, called "Fits and Starts"!
Thank you Veritas, most interesting. I have posted this on the main site.
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