The G Force factor

The Scotsman June 10, 2005 | Fiona Shepherd MAR HALL is an opulent and secluded baronial hotel situated on the banks of the Clyde, not far from the Erskine Bridge. Kylie was sequestered under its discreet battlements when she brought her Showgirl tour to Glasgow, and now “popera” foursome G4, the latest reality TV pop stars to gain a foothold on the charts, have commandeered a suite for the day and are conducting a vigorous pillow fight in the luxury bedroom at the behest of The Scotsman’s photographer. It makes a refreshing change from the formal suited and booted shots taken of the Smash Hits-friendly barbershop quartet and, in the end, there is no collateral damage.

Pillows abandoned, the huffing quartet seat themselves around a table the size of a football pitch to plot their recent trajectory. G4 are a non-manufactured group catapulted – willingly – into the manufactured-pop wing of the recording industry when they became runners-up on The X Factor, the ITV talent show which expanded the Pop Idol remit to embrace groups, over-25s, and Welsh rockers wearing eyeliner.

Despite having been beamed into our living rooms every Saturday night last autumn, they still look like a slightly odd motley crew. Most instantly recognisable are the 22-year-old tenors Jonathan Ansell – regarded by common consent as the cute, blond, emotional one – and bushy-eyebrowed Ben Thapa, whose only previous brush with fame was providing the operatic vocals for that lunatic advert about the warring lettuce leaves. Providing the bottom end, as it were, are lanky baritone Michael Christie, whose erudite demeanour puts years on him – he’s 23 – and jocular bass singer Matt Stiff who, at 25, is the group’s senior partner.

Although Ansell, the high tenor, was identified as the group’s natural frontman by Simon Cowell at their first X Factor audition, G4 are at pains to present themselves as a democratic unit. Interviews are conducted with a united front, all members contributing equally. They don’t so much complete each other’s sentences as wait politely for their compadres to finish their remarks before stepping in with an eloquent, assenting viewpoint. There is no “separate tour buses” mentality in this group. go to website force factor reviews

“Oh, we have separate tour buses,” deadpans Ansell, “but we do interviews together.” These archetypally decent chaps formed G4 less than 18 months ago while they were all studying opera at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, naming their ensemble after Guildhall and not – to nick a joke from Kaiser Chiefs’ frontman Ricky Wilson – because A4 didn’t look good on paper.

“It was an amazing grounding,” says Ansell. “I think the fact that we’ve all studied at Guildhall gives us credibility, especially with the older generation, who can relate to other artists who have come out of those sorts of conservatoires.” Their coursework was geared to classical solo performance, so forming the group gave them an outlet for performing a wider spectrum of material at college bashes and city functions. They would have dissolved as casually as they had come together when they graduated last summer if it hadn’t been for a certain TV show. Interestingly, Thapa describes the Guildhall curriculum as “a conveyor belt”.

By entering The X Factor, they simply substituted one conveyor belt for another.

Thapa didn’t actually take up singing seriously until his mid- teens and Stiff was an even later bloomer, eventually choosing voice as his second instrument at A-level. “What I really wanted to do was psychology,” he says. Ansell and Christie both started young, however, as choristers – and persevered after their voices broke. Christie’s choir was involved in film work, including Four Weddings And A Funeral but, despite this buzz, he swithered over choosing singing as a career. Of the four, Ansell was the most resolved from a young age, performing solo concerts and even releasing a CD of pop classical standards before starting at Guildhall. He also auditioned – unsuccessfully – for Cowell’s operatic vocal group, Il Divo. When G4 walked into the X Factor audition room Cowell didn’t remember him at first but, says Ansell: “When he did make the connection, it gave us a nice bond.” From that first distinctive audition, when they performed their idiosyncratic rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, G4 garnered a reputation as one of reality TV’s most curious talent show entrants, going from oddball to curveball with successive performances. One of the most bizarre snapshots of the show had to be their notorious mock operatic rendition of Britney Spears’ Hit Me Baby One More Time, which reduced Cowell to gaping disbelief and proved an unlikely watershed for the group.

“It was only afterwards that we realised we’d caused such a controversy,” says Stiff. “At the time we were like, ‘yeah, let’s just do it’. There was no question of it not being a good idea until afterwards. Now we feel we could take on any song and no one would bat an eyelid.” Their willingness to stray from their comfort zone is refreshing but also problematic. With no prior experience of the pop world, G4 became guinea pigs throughout the series. There were experiments with their image (they wore hoodies under their suits to perform an Oasis song), their stage presence (standing in a line, then walking forward slowly in unison was always a popular formation) and repertoire (rock, pop, standards, musicals, opera, hymns… no death metal, though, strangely).

“Most groups come into the public eye fully formed,” says Christie, “but this was the first time we’d spent a lot of time together, learning our personality as a group, and people saw that every week on TV. The pressure was just incredible and it made you realise how easy it is to sit back on a Saturday evening and slag people off on a programme like that.” Their natural singing talent was never in dispute; how they use it is. Initial trial and error has concluded that they are at their most popular interpreting the rock operatics of Queen and at their most comfortable with what they already knew, performing Nessun Dorma in the final.

“It was the first time ever that opera has been performed on a reality pop show,” says Ansell. “We’d gone all the way through all these different genres and essentially had come back to our roots in classical training. The atmosphere in the room after we’d finished that was electric. I think everyone just wanted to go up and hug someone.” The curtain had barely come down when the scramble to sign the group commenced. Ten days later, they inked a deal with Sony. G4 may flaunt what they see as their originality in the current pop market but, like all reality pop graduates, they are subject to the same intensive process of throwing something at the wall and hope that it sticks.

To preserve momentum, their eponymous debut album was recorded hastily, with the normally fastidious berproducer Trevor Horn souping up many of the songs they’d already performed on the show that had received bland orchestration.

Britney didn’t make the cut but middle-of-the-road renditions of REM’s Everybody Hurts with novelty takes on Radiohead (Creep) and David Bowie (Life on Mars) did. The blatant rush job paid off. On its release in February the album topped the charts, selling nearly quarter of a million copies in the first week. Having reached double platinum status, it’s one of the year’s clear hits.

Next on the whirlwind schedule was an X Factor tour, which was another overwhelming crash course for a group more used to busking in Covent Garden or providing after-dinner entertainment. “We’re standing there as ourselves doing our own take on different things and we’ve got this many people responding directly to us live,” Ansell gushes. “That instant engagement with an audience is what we all strive to get and it’s one hell of a rush. It isn’t a buzz you could ever get performing classically.” Rather endearingly, he then reels off a list of regulation live show elements – lights, backdrop, stage set, costume changes, solo spots – that G4 will be using on their own debut tour, evincing all the enthusiasm of someone who’s only just discovered the existence of such fundamental pop concert ingredients. go to website force factor reviews

They may be rookies, but they are learning the pop patter. As if coached to do so, Stiff dutifully gets the plug in for the tour as soon as is politic, and the band seem keen to steer the conversation on to forthcoming projects. Promotion, promotion, promotion.

In the accelerated timeframe of today’s pop world, G4 are already planning their second album, to be recorded and released later this year. With only marginally more time to chew over potential new covers, they are hopeful of collaborations with Robin Gibb, Lesley Garrett (with whom they performed Barcelona on the Queenmania show) and – milking the Queen connection until its udder shrivels – with Brian May on Who Wants To Live Forever.

Naturally, looking beyond all the current blizzard of activity, they are hoping to escape the reality TV curse of a truncated career. But they’re already ahead of the game: One True Voice, the last “male harmony group” to emerge from a British TV talent show, didn’t even get to make a debut album.

“When you go on these shows and you’re thrown on to people’s TV screens for two months you give yourself a fantastic head start,” says Thapa. “When that’s over and you’re not having the opportunity to perform every Saturday night at primetime, you have to work a lot harder.” “It’s an assumption that people who come out of reality TV shows don’t have longevity or a career afterwards, but there are a lot of reality TV shows and it’s a very small music industry,” notes Ansell, realistically. “I think we’ve had a great response because we’re so different from anybody out there. Let’s hope that keeps going because we have a lot more to give.” Ansell cites Will Young as an obvious example of someone who turned success on a reality programme into a proper career. Hopefully, he and the rest of G4 are not ignorant of the fact that the turning point came when Young stepped away from his Pop Idol contract, took stock and took time to make an album that truly reflected his character and tastes.

* G4 play Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow on 13 June and the Playhouse, Edinburgh on 14 June Fiona Shepherd