Simon Cowell signed Harry Styles. It could have been me

Twice designated one of Time’s most influential people — in 2004 and in 2010, the year The X Factor UK peaked at an average of more than 14 million viewers and he assembled One Direction from offcuts of other acts before our very eyes — Cowell introduced the world to Leona Lewis, Little Mix, Kelly Clarkson and, of course, Harry Styles. En route, he became as famous as any of them for his bracing feedback (“You sound nice but you look like a shop girl”), attributing his “honesty” to his own dislike of empty showbiz compliments.

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His signature snark grew to become a stock trope across the whole of reality TV, without which we might never have known the prickly side of Craig Revel Horwood on Strictly or, dare I say, entertained a certain intemperate “boss” on the US version of The Apprentice. He also attracted the ire of music purists who tried everything to keep his customary X Factor Christmas No 1s off the top spot — including dusting down a pointed Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine to thwart Joe McElderry in 2009.

The X Factor may have experienced an ignominious death spiral in its erratic and underwatched 2018 season, but this month the hitmaker is staging his comeback with Simon Cowell: The Next Act, a six-episode Netflix series following the svengali’s search for a new boy band, from open casting call to first single. Familiar as this sounds, the show is truly international and represents a pivot towards the self-consciously intimate celeb confessional de nos jours. “This time,” he assures us in the trailer, “it’s going to be different.”

This may be more true than he knows. In his pomp, Cowell’s model was pure scarcity and gatekeeping — after all, only he controlled access to the recording contracts. In 2025, by contrast, TikTok dominates music discovery and fans like to feel that they were the first to see the potential of a PinkPantheress or a d4vd (me neither). What’s more, post-MeToo and after scandals involving the NSYNC impresario Lou Pearlman and the pop producer Dr Luke, the svengali is a problematic figure. Does Cowell have what it takes to compete on the terrain he himself fracked so comprehensively?

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Like Cowell with his “give the people what they want” ethos, I have never been unduly troubled by hard and fast notions of musical credibility. Although I loved Radiohead and Lauryn Hill like the rest of my University of Oxford intake, I had also grown up obsessed with Stock Aitken Waterman, aka the Hit Factory, and its assembly line of photogenic popstrels, most notably Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan. And after Britney Spears blew up with … Baby One More Time in late 1998, my guitar-playing mate Martin and I immediately adapted it into an indie version for a college “entz” night (Travis later had the same idea, just saying). When, as students are wont to do, I “caught” a segment of This Morning with Richard and Judy in which they appealed for hopefuls in their nationwide search for a boy band, I wasted no time in sending off a photo of me in my Gap shop boy uniform and a cassette demo of my a cappella take on George Michael’s Faith.

Weeks later, when a missive bearing the hallowed This Morning letterhead arrived in my college pigeonhole inviting me to the South Bank in London for a televised audition, I treated it with all the weight of a court summons. That weekday in early 1999 I should have been in my French literature lectures getting to grips with Molière or the theatre of the absurd. Instead, I was to be judged on my own theatrics while performing the mortifyingly on-the-nose Robbie Williams hit Let Me Entertain You.

As I recall, I was met in reception by Cowell’s fellow judge and the former Smash Hits editor Kate Thornton, who was delightful company as she stewarded me chattily to the green room where, in a cloud of the unmistakable Lynx Africa, lads from around the UK were practising their scales and their take on Robbie’s hit.

This was the eleventh hour of the 1990s, all the established boy band tropes were present and correct: the studly, slightly dangerous-looking one with a piercing and a sleeveless vest; the nerdy older-brother type who looked like he might know one end of a piano from the other; the classic heart-throb with slicked-back curtains.

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Me? Dressed in my pale blue fine-gauge Reiss V-neck in the style of Westlife (also one of Cowell’s signings), I was doing double duty as both the Mark Owen-style babyface and The Gay One. Not that the latter seemed remotely compatible with my pop dreams. Despite George Michael’s face-saving response to his own recent outing, we were still squarely inside pop’s don’t ask, don’t tell era. It would be a few months still before Boyzone’s Stephen Gately came out, testing (and disproving) the long-held pop industry truism that female fans would abandon a boy bander who liked boys.

Robbie Williams, Ayda Williams, Simon Cowell and Louis Tomlinson were the judging panel for the 2018 series of The X Factor

SYCO

A bigger hurdle, if I’m honest, is the fact that I can’t really dance unless alone or drunk. When the moment came and I stepped into the void, my Patrick Cox loafers welded themselves to the floor while my upper body made the kind of convulsions that might have had runners reaching for the defibrillator. My rendition of the song? Passable, but maybe not my key. After some sceptical grilling from the panel about whether I really would leave the dreaming spires if selected, I returned to the green room where, eventually, the dreaded knockback came. I would not be proceeding to the live final, with its nail-biting phone vote. Pretty devastating when you think that by this point, in his day-job capacity, Cowell had seen fit to sign both Robson & Jerome and the Teletubbies, and Mr Blobby had appeared on Britain’s Got Talent.

I had forgotten practically all of this before last year, when the BBC spliced extended coverage of the This Morning boy band experiment into its three-part documentary Boybands Forever, replete with Thornton’s prescient comment that she, Cowell and their fellow judge, the producer Ray Hedges, were on the hunt for “the indefinable X factor”. (Thornton went on to front Cowell’s X Factor.)

Coming at the beginning of the documentary’s third act, it was meant to illustrate how the slightly shambolic, spit-and-sawdust boy bands of the 1990s gave way to the corporate slot machine of Cowell’s imaginings. You can see me lined up with my fellow hopefuls, including one Will Young, who made the final cut and went on to win Pop Idol three years later. Nothing much came of the boy band itself, but seeing the “winners” again was instructive. They include not only Young, but Lee Ryan, latterly of Blue. Antony Costa, Ryan’s bandmate in Blue, fell at the last hurdle. The stars-to-be were aligning, in co-ordinating urban leisurewear.

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I confess, reader, this was not my only attempt at televised pop stardom. By the time my finals came round, my itchy feet (and a by now near-pathological fear of exams) had taken me to Brixton in southwest London, where I lined up with thousands in the hope of “replacing” Kym Marsh after she left Hear’Say, the band created on ITV’s Popstars. I was a contender, but the honour ultimately went to one of the band’s backing dancers. Part of me was relieved. Sometimes you have to know when it’s time to call it a day. I at least have my headshot from Sugar magazine’s “Boywatching” section in which I declare, “A girl’s got to have a good sense of humour — that’s really important.” Too right.

Now, it is Cowell who stands nervously on the precipice as he embarks on The Next Act, for which he convened 16 of today’s wannabes at a boy band boot camp in Miami. But will his magic trick work in the age of TikTok and K-pop? As he confesses in the trailer, “There is a huge risk here. If this goes wrong, it will be ‘Simon Cowell has lost it’.”

Strangely, I find myself rooting for the guy.