As any tabloid editor will confirm, it is possible for the media to go too far. Sometimes, celebrities are so strenuously vilified that public sympathy shifts and the victim emerges on top. Christine Hamilton made the final rounds of I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here! after years as a national laughing stock. Jade Goody was branded a pig in the press, yet somehow ended up Big Brother 3's real winner. Goody and Hamilton's musical equivalent may be Will Young. Since he won Pop Idol, certain areas of the media have sought to blame Young for all the world's ills. He is killing real music. He is ruining the charts. He is destroying youth culture. He is deliberately marking down A-level coursework, treating Jeffrey Archer to lunch and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction in his flat.
This has become silly and disproportionate. Young simply cannot be as bad as some suggest. He seems a nice bloke - that's why people voted for him in the first place. When the Daily Mail began a whispering campaign about his sexuality, he bravely sidestepped the sneering by coming out in public. Surely he deserves a fair hearing?
Perhaps. But not even an open mind can make From Now On an enjoyable experience. With its orchestral arrangements, dragging tempos and saccharine delivery, it seems less like pop music than easy listening. Better looking than Barry Manilow and marginally less creepy than Daniel O'Donnell, Young is nevertheless in their ballpark, belting it out for toddlers and housewives. He is a good vocalist, in that he hits the right notes, doesn't belch while he's singing and never breaks off in the middle of a line to scream bitter obscenities. But if the technique is impeccable, the emotions are suspect. Young just doesn't sound interested in his material.
That's not surprising when you consider some of the clunking drivel he has to sing: "I'm so emotionally loved-up", "We're makin' love in the heavens above", "Please stay with me baby, I'm losing you lately". But it's a bit weird when you consider that a lot of this clunking drivel was co-written by Young himself.
Young's shortcomings are swiftly revealed by the album's cover versions. You need no degree in the semiotics of classic rock lyrics to know that the Doors' Light My Fire is not literally about lighting a fire. Yet on Young's version, the erotic throb has vanished. The song dangles, short and unappealing. He sings as if issuing instructions to a slow-witted housekeeper. Come on, baby, light my fire. And once you've done that, can you clean the bathroom mirror and give the living room a once-over with a duster?
Paul McCartney's The Long and Winding Road is a song that suffered much in the past. McCartney himself was so horrified by the version on Let It Be - badly played and buried in unctuous strings at John Lennon's treacherous behest - that he left the Beatles. Even at his Macca-baiting worst, however, Lennon could not have envisaged a version as grating and syrupy as that performed by Young and fellow Pop Idol Gareth Gates.
Despite Lennon's sabotage, the Beatles' version still packs an emotional punch: a world-weary song performed by a world-weary band in the twilight of their career. Fresh-faced and eager, Young and Gates cannot summon the requisite emotions. Flummoxed, they start making the noise that teen pop stars always make when they want to signify deep emotional torment, the Take Me Seriously Wail. Usually accompanied by a pained expression and a doleful shaking of the head, the Take Me Seriously Wail goes "Woah-HOAH-hoah!", or sometimes "Yaay- HEYA-haay!" Even without the associated visuals, the Take Me Seriously Wail has a devastating effect. Used liberally, as here, it can make the listener let out an involuntary wail of their own, the Take Me Somewhere This Music Isn't Audible Wail.
Young's debut arrives exactly one week after Britain's original docusoap pop stars Hear'say announced their split. Their explanation - "We were being called wankers by people in the street" - would make anyone snigger. But does that remark haunt Will Young in the small hours, symbolising the public's fleeting regard for TV-manufactured pop?
Young does not exist as an artist in his own right. He is inexorably linked with Pop Idol: months after the show's finale, he is still duetting with Gareth Gates, still touring with his fellow contestants. Like Hear'say, he is a piece of official merchandise for a TV series that has finished its run. His sell-by date presumably coincides with the final of Pop Stars: The Rivals, when the whole depressing cavalcade will move on.
You wouldn't wish him sleepless nights. He really does seem like a nice enough bloke. But after hearing From Now On, you wish this wretched business would stop, and stop soon.
