September 10, 2009. Copyright 2009, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Music producer Simon Cowell, whose slick, emotion-filled talent shows are screened around the world, hits 50
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, September 10, Graphic News:  He has turned what was once the most humble of television formats into the stuff of ratings wars. With every new season of American Idol, The X Factor and the Got Talent brand, millions of viewers arrange their social lives around the schedules. The programmes generate huge incomes for the television companies via telephone voting and, when it's all over, fans buy the CDs in such numbers that the winning artists are virtually guaranteed chart-topping success -- with Cowell's company, SyCo, reportedly taking royalties of up to 90 percent.  Like Westlife before them, Will Young, Leona Lewis and Kelly Clarkson have Cowell to thank for their pop careers; the multi-millionaire, who left his English private school without any qualifications, attributes his success to an instinct for knowing what the public will love. "I have a broad, popular taste in music," he says. "If I like it, chances are people out there are going to like it too."

Certainly his time in the mail room at music publisher EMI, where his father, Eric, was an executive, taught Cowell the value of starting, in a highly competitive industry, on the bottom rung. He became an assistant in EMI's A&R (Artists and Repertoire) department, where new talent is brought in -- moved up to record producer and then left to launch his own label, Fanfare, with partner Iain Burton. In 1989, when Fanfare's parent company folded, Cowell was picked up by the Bertelsmann Music Group, now part of the huge Sony Corporation, and it was here that he first heard the Irish boy band, Westlife. Initially critical of some aspects of their line-up and presentation, when he finally signed them Westlife became one of the most successful groups in music history, their first seven singles all going to No. 1 in the UK charts.

Cowell has a reputation for vanity, saying in an interview in 2003 that he couldn't remember the number of girlfriends he had had, but estimated it at "about 100" and choosing as his luxury on the BBC's Desert Island Discs radio programme, a mirror. His fellow X-factor judge, Louis Walsh, jokes that he is giving Cowell a hairdryer for his 50th birthday "because he is obsessed with his hair." And not all those he has catapulted to fame have thanked him for it. George Sampson, the teenage dancer who last year won the second series of Britain's Got Talent, recently complained in a newspaper interview that he was now out of pocket, having paid, under the terms of his contract, the production costs of his DVD. The third series, earlier this year, came in for particular criticism when the runner-up, Susan Boyle, who had attracted a worldwide following when her audition performance appeared on YouTube, was admitted to a private clinic at the end of the marathon contest in June. Cowell, whose legendary frankness in assessing the potential of would-be performers routinely produces emotional breakdowns, found himself facing a backlash from those who felt some particularly vulnerable contestants were being over-exposed.

But the shows go on. And millions continue to tune in to hear Cowell tell it how it is: "If your lifeguard duties were as good as your singing, a lot of people would be drowning", he once told a hapless candidate. Despite the celebrity lifestyle he now enjoys on both sides of the Atlantic -- he has a mansion in Beverly Hills -- Cowell has recently confessed to suffering bouts of depression. "If I went to a psychiatrist," he says, "it would be a long session."
/ENDS