Return to the Pink Hotel — the Italian X Factor


We’re watching the Italian X Factor in the Pink Hotel. A trio of girls has just performed a weird version of ‘Sail Away’ by Enya. It’s word perfect, although there are only two words.

Yesterday evening I had a night off — a concert was cancelled, and I’ve finally had time to face up to all the things I have been putting off for the past seven weeks or so — including telling you how it’s all been going.

The Italian X Factor host has a smooth white suit and a bad moustache – thin like RUC man at roadblocks used to have.  He’s introducing a group where the bass player is dressing as a  ‘comedy’ Native American. It’s really bad, and just as I say so, it turns out the singer is ‘molto famoso’ and not just a contestant.

In fact, in turns out that the contestants on the Italian X Factor are better than the special guests. The first special guest appeared out of a beautiful mist, a thousand candles lighting up her exquisite profile. Then sang a very dodgy version of ‘Here Comes The Rain Again’.

The most well-known singer in Italy, Vasco Rossi, has just put out a version of ‘Creep’ by Radiohead which is dividing the populace down lines of taste. You either love him, as 99% of the populace do, or you can’t believe why this dreadful cover, featuring a ‘sex-tourist’ vocal performance, is being played on the radio at all.

VR, one of the Big Four Italians, has ‘translated’ the words, and turned the song into the croaky lament of a dirty old man declaring his love for an unattainable woman. I haven’t seen the video yet, but since it’s VR, it’s a dead cert that she’s gorgeous, forty years his junior, and and becomes a lot more attainable around the time of the penultimate chorus.

When I heard last night’s concert was cancelled I knew immediately what to do — call the Pink Hotel. Antonio was at the end of the line in seconds, I could picture him staring at the computer screen, just as I’d left him a couple of weeks ago. Just as I’d left him this time last year. Hypnotised by the Microsoft Word calendar, with its blocks of colour, moving the mouse up and down the screen with no apparent effect.

Last night I drove a hundred kilometers in the rain to find a whole different scene in the lobby to the one I am used to. I’ve never been in the Pink Hotel in the evening — I am always playing a show and get in too early. I have never seen another guest here — I get in after everyone’s in bed, and get up so late that they’ve all left.

Then, just as I suspected that no one else ever stays at the Pink Hotel, I am thrown into the midst of an early evening party. Football is always on the TV in Italy, but when Inter or AC Milan are playing, the stakes are racked up and people gather in bars and dining rooms murmuring and gesturing at the screen. Before last night, I’d never seen as many people in the whole town, never mind the Pink Hotel itself.

This morning, the next X Factor contestant is a boy band refugee. He’s whistling a merry tune, wearing a red designer hoodie. Giuseppe tells me the lyrics mean, “Today eets raining, but outside for me, eets the sun,” and that seems about right. In this country of Dante and Boccaccio, where Giuseppe keeps up a running commentary on just about everything in super-fast Italian, I’m happy that this is all I have to cope with. To my ear, it sounds like the last line of the song is, “It really is fantastic to be stuck outside this lift,” although I could be wrong.

Giuseppe stopped talking for a few minutes to play my guitar this morning. He’s great at playing the intro of seventies classics — this morning, a Boston song and (without irony) the start of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. He only has time to play the intro, since he has to get back to talking after thirty seconds of silence — right now he’s practising saying ‘Thees ees sheet!’, as the panel gives their verdict on Red Designer Hoodie.

I watched the X Factor in England, one late night in the poshest hotel of the tour. We’d just played a wonderful show in the Liverpool Philharmonic, and were staying fifty yards away from the stage, in palatial circumstances. Lying on an ultra-comfotable enormous bed, the walk-in shower/bathroom peeking out of an open door down the corridor, I ran my finger across the remote control and a cinema-sized flat screen TV sprang into life. It flicked automatically to ITV, the goddesses on reception having programmed it to find a show closest to my interests, which they had listed as ‘music’ and ‘fashion’ (!)

Watching the X Factor that night, I reached some kind of moment of what I thought  at the time was pure insight. Either that or the smooth glass of whiskey the guy at the bar had poured me. For a couple of pounds the night porter not only filled my glass, but let me into the news that he had served in the (notorious) paratroop regiment in Belfast during the Troubles.

Not only that, but he told me in detail about the affair he had with the (married) daughter of the boss of the most well-known bus company in the city. That he took so much cocaine with her that he had to ‘get rid of her’. I am not making this up. I asked him if she had a special number she could call and a bus would appear to take them home. ‘If only, lar,’ he sighed, ‘the only buses came for her were full of f*ing droogs.’

I made it out of the paratrooper’s range to my room, and that’s when I flicked on the TV. The moment of insight I attained that night? I though maybe a talent show like this is where everyone’s dream of being Elvis reaches its apotheosis. Sure, music isn’t a competition, but isn’t this a place where everyone can be the truck driver walking into Sun Studios? Except that ten million people are watching your audition.

The only problem is that if we’ve returned to the fifties, it’s going to take another ten years until the singers start writing their own songs. Maybe it was just being in Liverpool that night, but what seemed clear in that early morning hotel room doesn’t seem such a good idea right now, watching a guy with a NYPD police helmet judgng the ‘Sail Away’ girl trio’s performance.

The house band strikes up the Zep’s monster ‘Kashmir’ riff, and the trio disappear in a flash of light. Giuliano is the next contestant. He’s got the hoarse voice and designer stubble of a guaranteed Italian superstar. But, on the other hand, maybe Marco will be even better. I’m hooked. Giuseppe tells me Marco’s intonation is perfect — and that he is gay. ‘Securo,’ he tells me, with a serious face. But then last night he said the same thing about George Clooney.

George Clooney? Maybe the girl by the coffee machine was right all along, being more interested in getting a cup of bad coffee off of aul’ Georgie, than having him sign her arm.

Marco ‘steps up’ (people are constantly ‘stepping up’ on these talent shows, usually to a ‘bar’ which has been ‘raised’), and I must get round to telling you about how the tour has been going so far. Just a moment, while I sink this heavenly cappucino and bite into this sugar-coated brioche…