Martyn Hett speaks with pop hun Michelle McManus!
Michelle McManus won the second series of Pop Idol back in 2003, with over eight million people picking up their phones to vote for her. Unfortunately, Michelle’s pop career was short-lived, and, despite a number one single and album sales of over quarter of a million, she was dropped by her record label. For many in England, that is where her story ends, but in her native Scotland, Michelle has gone on to forge a successful career. Not only has she enjoyed a stint presenting The Hour, Scotland’s answer to The One Show, but she’s also written and toured a one-woman comedy show that’s received rave reviews across the board.
The show, Michelle McManus: Pop Goes The Idol, is a hilariously self-depreciative look back at her own career, from the highs of reaching the top of the charts, to the lows of opening a branch of LIDL in Rutherglen. Michelle is now bringing the show to England for the first time, and having sold out her only date she’s already in talks to extend her run.
So your show is now in its fourth year, something you never thought would happen. How did it originally come about?
It started four years ago. I was extremely drunk in a gay bar in Edinburgh, and the owners asked if I’d consider being an act at their venue for the Edinburgh Fringe. I was really pissed and agreed, but I didn’t have a bloody clue what I was going to do! After deliberating, my friend Bruce and I came up with an alter ego based around… without naming names… a few people we know in Scotland who have almost made it, and will make you think they’re partying with Beyonce, when really they’re opening their local Aldi. So we decided to do a show that’s about my life, but told by an exaggerated alter ego. We had no idea how it would go, but four years later, here we are!
A lot of the show is stand-up comedy, and I think people will be surprised at how funny it is. Is comedy something you’ve always been interested in?
I’ve always grown up with comedy. Scottish people are really good at telling stories, and I was lucky to grow up in a family where my relatives were great storytellers. Even though I never had the success of people like One Direction and Leona Lewis, winning Pop Idol meant I found myself in the most surreal situations, and the audience seem to love it when I tell these stories and am not afraid to take the piss out of myself. When we started the show, there were 19 songs because I was too scared to push the comedy side of the show too much, but as it has grown, we’ve had to knock off a load of the songs because the comedy has taken over!
You’ve mentioned you play an exaggerated character in the show with delusions of grandeur, but are there any similarities between you and her?
I wish I was half as fun as she is, she’s crazy! All of the stories I tell in the show genuinely happened to me, but she deals with them in a way I wish I could’ve done. She laughs things off and pretends everything is fabulous, whereas I was probably dying inside.
So does that mean you don’t actually hate Gillian McKeith?
[Michelle laughs] No I don’t! She actually transformed my life! When I won Pop Idol, they literally just handed me a cheque for a huge amount of money and then left me to it. It was at the time when Simon Cowell and Simon Fuller were locked in a horrific battle because Simon Cowell wanted to start X Factor, but we were still managed by Simon Fuller’s management company. Me, Darius and Gareth Gates were all caught in the middle, so we ended up partying with all this money, and because I was only 23, I went into free-fall. I got up to 23 and a half stone, and that’s when Gillian came into my life. She was really tough to work with and there were times that I wanted to force feed her with a Mars bar, but she really helped me. I lost over 10 stone and it meant when things went wrong for me in London, I could come back to Scotland with a big news story behind me. The Scots love it when you come back home and say “I’ve had enough of London”, so I ended up getting offered a load of jobs with the BBC and STV, and I honestly believe if it wasn’t for Gillian I wouldn’t have got those offers.
The show has been a huge success, and it was exciting to hear you were bringing it to England. What made you choose Manchester, and are there any plans to do more shows?
Manchester is one of my favourite cities – I’ve got lots of friends here and I’ve done Manchester Pride a couple of times, but it actually happened by accident. Somebody from the Waterside Arts Centre stumbled across my show at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, and asked me to bring it down to Manchester. I suggested we did it in the smallest space they had to test the waters, and it sold out without them having to do very much, so there’s lots of talk going on now about different venues and perhaps doing a mini tour in England. I just need to make sure it’s the right decision and the right time.
I often wonder if artists listen to their own music. Do you ever just sit back and listen to your old album to reminisce?
It’s so funny you should say that, I wasn’t able to listen to it until a few years ago when my sister got married. The only negative experience I had in the whole Pop Idol journey was making that album, because it was so rushed. They threw 19 songs at me that had been rejected by other artists and I wasn’t allowed to say whether I liked them or not. I had to learn and record three a day and I couldn’t even pick the key – some were really high and I struggled to record them, and they told me it was fine because they’d use auto tune to manipulate my vocals. When the album came out, it went to #3, and I got dropped because of that, so I couldn’t listen to it anymore. But when my sister got married, she asked me to sing one of the songs at her wedding, and it was only then that I listened back to the album. There are actually a few songs on there that I quite like.
I love the album, Emotional is a bop!
There’s a story behind that song. I absolutely begged the record label to make that my second single and they wouldn’t let me and I had no idea why because it was such a good song. I later found out that the song had been sitting in a vault, and when I recorded it, it brought it to their attention and they ended up giving it to a girl from American Idol. They allowed it to go on my album, but they’d never tell me why I couldn’t release it as a second single. It’s a shame because I think if that had been the second single, things may have been different, but alas, it was not meant to be.
Would you ever consider going back into pop music?
I think I’m too old to go into pop music now! I think people would just be like “who’s this grab-a-granny who’s trying to release a pop song?” Although I have to say, hats off to Steps – they’re selling out arenas and they all look fabulous! For me personally, I’m currently working with two guys and we’ve written four of five beautiful Americana-style country tracks. We’re in the studio recording them right now and it’s such a lovely process to be able to write my own music. Nowadays you can put music out on iTunes without the need for a label, so it’s nice not having the pressure of such a big machine behind me. The music is very sweet, and very reflective of how happy I am in my life right now. It doesn’t matter to me if only 300 people hear it, if 300 people hear it and enjoy it I’ll be happy.
What does the future hold for Michelle? Do you have anything else you want to venture into?
To be honest with you, I feel very content with how everything is at the moment. The shows are taking care of themselves, and I also enjoyed a stint in panto, but once you’ve done panto with David Hasselhoff in an arena with 7,000 people coming to see you a day, you can’t really top that! The new music is a big focus for me now and I’m really looking forward to releasing that in the summer. I just want to carry on working, and being in a position where I can choose what I want to do, and not just take jobs for the money. I’ll always have Pop Idol to thank for where I am today though, and I’m really glad that even though my pop career didn’t work out, it gave me a platform to go on to other things.
