Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

An interesting column on Paul Potts from the Sunday Star Times by way of the Paul Potts website. I don’t agree with the criticisms but as i say it’s an interesting reaction.

Potts of gold
Sunday Star Times, 5th August

A phone salesman with bad teeth and a love of opera has become an overnight sensation. Grant Smithies reports.

You look at Paul Potts and you immediately think this man must have been near the back of the queue when God was handing out the blessings.

Potts is fat, for one thing, with a round, jowly face that suggests a collision of jolly peasant genes and bad tucker. He has terrible teeth, for another: yellowish, uneven, like a row of knackered old fridges lined up at the tip. He has a slight lisp, too, and a crap job, selling cellphones in the culturally impoverished backwater of Port Talbot in south Wales. Even his name is profoundly unpromising; say “Paul Potts” fast, and it sounds as though you’re talking about the murderous former dictator of Cambodia.

But there is something special about Potts, as British viewers discovered recently when he appeared on UK TV show, Britain’s Got Talent. The guy can sing. Not “sing” like most of us sing in the bath, or even “sing” with the bland competence of the average run-of-the-mill pop singer. I mean “sing” like a wannabe Caruso.

He opens his mouth, and out past those ravaged teeth floats the kind of voice you might perhaps hear in heaven or, at the very least, in Naples.

The best way to see Potts in action is to have a look on YouTube, where he features in one of the most downloaded clips in the site’s history. There’s Potts, meek as a kicked cat, wandering tentatively onto the stage at the Britain’s Got Talent auditions. The camera then moves to the show’s creator Simon Cowell, who sighs when he sees the guy, and sighs again when Potts says he dreams of being an opera star.

But then Potts starts to sing. Oh. My. God! A voice wells up out of the guy that is rich, virile, resplendent with pain and passion. By the second or third note, most of the crowd are gaping like goldfish.

People start cheering like they’re at a football match. Old dears in the audience reach into their cardie sleeves for hankies to mop up tears. Amanda Holden, a severely over-botoxed female judge with a face like a porcelain doll, starts to cry as well, her tears streaming down a face too paralysed to display emotion in any other way. She dabs at her frozen cheeks with her hands.

As the strings swell ever louder, and Potts hauls down some hefty high notes, the crowd rises to its feet. By this stage Cowell is beaming as if someone has put ecstasy in his drinking water. It’s no wonder.

This is televisual gold. Even the least media-savvy couch potato in Christendom couldn’t help but extract a big fat “rise of the underdog” metaphor from what they’re seeing here: it’s a triumph for the unfortunate looking schlub with the big dreams.

“The most amazing thing is, I almost didn’t apply at all,” says the soft-spoken Potts, 36, from his Port Talbot home.

“As far as I was concerned, my career was selling phones. But I tossed a 10 pence piece to see if I should audition or not. If it landed on tails, I’d keep selling phones. If it landed on heads, I’d audition. It landed on heads.”

Potts went on to win the competition, and last week released an album called One Chance that topped the UK charts and shipped nearly 300,000 copies. His life now is “like a strange dream”, and that famous audition seems like a lifetime ago.

“I was terrified! I walked out on to that stage and I seriously considered just keeping on walking, right past the microphone and off the other side of the stage. Then, when I did it, I thought I’d blown it, because I didn’t manage to hit my top B note properly and, you know, that’s the money note. But people didn’t seem to notice. I got an amazing reaction.”

The following day, inevitably, the British tabloids dubbed him “Pava-potti” and competed for the wittiest “Lend Us A Tenor” pun-fest headline.

Potts became famous overnight, but had been singing since his teens. The son of a bus driver and a supermarket cashier, he grew up in Bristol where he was relentlessly picked on as a child.

“Being bullied helped me to find music, in a way, because I discovered that Tchaikovsky and Dvorak made me feel better. That music felt safe to me, like home.”

After leaving school, Potts stacked shelves in a supermarket and spent his wages on singing lessons. Later he performed with the Bath Opera, and made a trip to Italy after winning 8000 ($NZ20,000) on a previous TV talent show. In 2003 he married his girlfriend Julie-Anne, 26, whom he’d met on the internet, then landed a job at the Carphone Warehouse.

“Then I had a long run of bad luck. First my appendix burst, then I had an operation to remove a benign tumour, and then somebody knocked me off my bike and I broke my collarbone. I was off work for about two years, and we were really struggling for money.”

Not any more. Potts won $267,000 on Britain’s Got Talent and subsequently signed a $2.67 million record deal. He has now given up his day job and his debut album sits atop the UK charts, despite the fact that it contains inexcusable operatic versions of “My Way”, sung in Spanish, and REM’s “Everybody Hurts”, sung in Italian. What will Potts do with all the dosh that’s rolling in?

“I want to take my wife on a safari to South Africa at Christmas time, and take my old workmates from the Carphone Warehouse out for dinner. I plan to get some work done on my teeth, too.

“But the best thing about my success isn’t the money; it’s that I get to sing for a living. When I sing, I become who I really am. It frees me. I’m generally a very shy and nervous person, but when I’m singing I feel confident. I feel like I’m fulfilling my potential as a person.”

Not everyone is supportive of Potts’ operatic ambitions. The Independent’s Philip Hensher called his voice “bog standard”, adding that his tuning was “all over the place”, his phrasing “stubby and lumpy” and that he “made a constipated approximation only of the fluid sound of an Italianate tenor.”

Potts admits his singing has room for improvement. “I’m only 36, so I have the rest of my life to get better. I’m just grateful to get that chance.

“I dreamed of being a singer for years, and here I am. I hope that other people who’re struggling might look at my story and think `if he can succeed, anyone can’.”