Frankie Cocozza’s bum note: the dark side of reality TV

WHAT momentous event slowed Twitter to a crawl last week? Was it the demise of Silvio Berlusconi, the G20 meeting in Cannes, Theresa May’s admission that she has no idea how many suspected terrorists may have entered the UK? Of course not. It was the departure of rock gonk Frankie Cocozza from The X Factor.

Thousands logged on to find out why a singer who makes Noddy Holder sound like Aled Jones had been hoofed off the flagging reality show and overloaded the microblogging site.

Cocozza’s crime was not, as one critic has it, having “a voice like a goose being kicked down a slide and hair that looked like Chewbacca’s arse”. It was taking cocaine at a party. This may be par for the course if you are a bona fide rock star but it is unacceptable when you are a teenage trying-to-be appearing on Saturday teatime telly. Underneath the greasy eyeliner and desperate hair you are still expected to be a role model to millions of impressionable young viewers. Cocozza, who had already been in hot water for boozing and swearing, went too far and Simon Cowell, the show’s founder, and his organisation issued his marching orders.

If Cocozza was cast in The X Factor, as many people assume, to bring a bit of cheeky chappy to the Saturday night sofa and give the otherwise vanilla line-up a little edge, it has backfired spectacularly. It might have put the show back on the front pages but Cocozza’s cocaine headlines have seriously undermined its position as a family entertainment show. It has also exposed the policy of casting contestants who are going to make good television rather than ones with potential or talent, as well as the gulf between karaoke contenders and genuinely emerging music stars.

Those who prefer to spend Saturday evenings with an improving book will not be familiar with young Frankie and his work. An 18-year-old former holiday rep from Brighton, he enlivened the X Factor auditions by pulling down his pants and revealing seven girls’ names tattooed on his bottom. A thorough tabloid investigation later found his claims to know Natasha, Roxanne et al in the biblical sense of the word to be unfounded.

It was this memorable gesture, rather than his ragged rendition of the Zutons’ Valerie, that won him a place on the show and set the tone for future weeks. From the start none of the judges, even his mentor Gary Barlow, had anything positive to say about his voice. But, desperate for a new Robbie Williams, they kept insisting, as if to convince themselves, that Cocozza had “on-stage presence”. And, as was no doubt the plan all along, by the time he had hacked his way through Coldplay’s The Scientist and the Clash’s Should I Stay Or Should I Go, he had become one of the few talking points in a dreary series.

Cocozza flipped the finger to the camera while shooting a video clip. On a filmed round-up of what the contestants had been up to during the week, he was shown out in various London clubs, prompting 28 complaints to Ofcom that he glamorised the misuse of alcohol. Later on, having been saved by Barlow, he hugged the former Take That singer and roared, “F***ing have it, get in there”. On live television, before the 9pm watershed. The incident is now the subject of a separate Ofcom investigation.

Compared to the other forgettable faces on the show, Cocozza has what passes, in the degraded world of the gossip mags and tabloids, for personality. He buys his trademark skinny jeans from Primark. (Size 10, £8 a pair.) He made a distinctive phone gesture while appealing for votes and appeared to be getting it on with fellow contestant, Amelia Lily. Most importantly for a show with ratings problems, he got X Factor talked about again.

So, last Saturday, with some trepidation, the nation watched Cocozza massacre the Black Eyed Peas’ party anthem I’ve Got A Feeling. According to presenter Dermot O’Leary, he had only had half an hour’s sleep, having been out on the lash the night before. Yahoo’s TV editor, Ben Skipper, described it as “one of the worst X Factor performances ever. So bad it managed to ruin one of the worst songs ever.”

Once again Cocozza survived the voting process, only to be dumped by the show’s producers three days later. His mistake was not to go on a big night out before performing live on national television, in a competition with the potential to make him a proper star. It was talking about it. A gauche teenager among The X Factor’s older, more worldly crew, some of whom he has described as “fit birds”, he boasted openly about what he had been up to. Production staff passed word up the chain of command and, within days, Cocozza was packing his case. He had, apparently, broken the show’s “golden rule” which has yet to be spelled out but seems to be: do not take drugs.

Cocozza, a young man of average intelligence, simply behaved in the way he has been told that rock stars behave. Having just made the X Factor ad for M&S he had £3,000 smouldering in his pocket. Women who would have previously pushed him out of the way to get to a footballer were suddenly hanging on his every word. He went for it, with no thought of the consequences. And, unable to quite believe his luck, he couldn’t stop talking about it.

Now he is back living with his mum in the unglamorous fringe of Brighton. From there he is going through the motions of disgraced-person-in-public-eye: apologetic tweet (Sorry to my supporters AND haters that I haven’t tweeted for a bit, I always saw the Xfactor as a start. Nothing’s changed. God bless x), confessional interview with the Sun, comfort shopping spree with fat wad of notes. Cocozza is still represented by Industry Music and Modest Management, as is all the other X Factor “talent”. But his career is over before it even began.

According to the Sun interview, he is not an addict, “just an idiot.” He has taken cocaine on six occasions, always when he has already been drunk, and has never bought it for himself. Cocozza also admits to sleeping with seven women while filming X Factor, fancies appearing in I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here and can see himself as a TV presenter in the style of Big Brother’s Little Brother’s George Lamb.

In other words, Cocozza has no musical depth or ambition of any description and aspires to follow in the footsteps of a presenter whose work for Radio 6 Music was described as “wilfully inane”, “crass” and “the worst DJ I have ever heard”.

This does not go down well with those involved in the real music industry. Producer John McLaughlin, who has worked with Busted, 911 and Blue as well as Ian McCulloch and Shane McGowan, sees no future for Cocozza. “I think he will have notoriety and minor celebrity for a while. He’ll be used by the media, then forgotten.” For him, Cocozza represents all that is wrong with reality television.

“He is the epitome of everything that’s horrible about the X Factor. I don’t mind anyone doing karaoke to make a few quid. If you can make a career, even singing on a boat is better than working in a chip shop. But he is heinous and fake, all Top Shop indie. Every kid in a band must be throwing their TV out of the window on Saturday night, seeing him flying the flag as this indie street soldier. It’s weans who watch The X Factor, and I don’t like them seeing someone like him, with no talent, striding about like Charlie Big Bananas.”

For Bruce Findlay, former manager of the Simple Minds, Cocozza may have looked the part with his ill-advised eyeliner and lady’s denims, but that was as far as it went. “He was a cute kid with very little talent.” It irks him that Cocozza was chosen ahead of Scot Jade Richards. “She had a voice to die for but wasn’t controversial and didn’t fit the mould.”

He is adamant that Cocozza’s “partying” – a catch-all phrase that includes recreational drug use, drinking, womanising and other hell-raising – is not in fact typical of the music industry. “Most of the people I’ve worked with over the years might like a drink and a joint but they have to keep fit and behave themselves. If they don’t, well, you can see what’s happened to this young man. He’s 18 and he’s already burned out.”

Grainne Braithwaite, a concert promoter and ex-wife of Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite, agrees. “Real musicians don’t have time for nightclubs, coke and girls. If you play a bad show because you’ve been on a bender, it’s going to cost you money.

“I know more people who work in offices who take cocaine than do musicians. Frankie Cocozza is behaving like a DJ or a footballer. Not like a rock star.”