Initially, Will was just a viewer of The Voice like everyone else. In the Spring of 2011, he had watched the debut American series of the franchise on NBC and absolutely ‘loved it’. So he was thrilled when the approach first came for him to appear as a star on the British series, to run in the Spring of 2012. Setting aside any suspicions that he was going to be a harsh, tough-talking judge in the mould of Simon Cowell, in keeping with the producers of the show’s wishes, he preferred to refer to himself as ‘a coach’.
‘Throughout my career when I have coached people, it has always been all about being someone’s friend,’ he said on the Unreality TV website. ‘I want to go about The Voice with the same perspective in the sense that a friend is better than being a mentor or coach. I really want to be able to give my team my perspective on the music business.’
From the start, Will wanted to separate himself from the stereotypical judges of talent shows of recent times. So, in a thinly veiled critique of The X Factor, he explained on Digital Spy why he saw The Voice as different. ‘When singers go on the other shows, you’re probably never going to hear from those people again,’ he said. ‘Why? Because their souls and their whole world has been crushed and they’ve been embarrassed in front of everybody. This one’s different. I want to see every single person that walked off that stage proud and not battered and bruised, because this is their passion.’
Why, in reality, was Will at such great pains to differentiate The Voice from its rivals? It was not so much the public he wanted to convince that his show would be better than anything before: he seemed to also want to convince himself of it. Perhaps the only way he could truly relax into his role was to believe that the show he was joining was more sincere than its rivals. So keen was he to make this case that he was even willing to talk down its broadcasting appeal in order to talk up its musical credibility. ‘Maybe it doesn’t make great TV, but it’s gonna make great artists,’ he said, in a statement that might have made the production team shuffle uncomfortably when they heard it. ‘Do you want TV or do you want artists that are gonna go and perform for people and make people forget about their problems for five minutes in a song? TV’s great, but there’s lots of it.’
He went even further, with a surprisingly comprehensive swipe at all the judges on the X Factor and Idol shows. ‘The Voice is different,’ he said. ‘On one, you have people in the music industry, current and legends, coaching the next generation. The other format you have judges critiquing, giving their opinions on things when they don’t really know, other than Randy Jackson on Idol. But on The Voice, we’ve all got experience.’
Given that past and present judges on reality talent shows included artists of the not inconsiderable calibre of Paula Abdul, Steven Tyler, Dannii Minogue and Cheryl Cole, Will’s statement was quite a blow. Perhaps he had excluded Cole in his mind, given that she had, at this stage, left the reality-television sphere, for the time being at least. Indeed, he admitted that he had sought her counsel for his new job.
Even in explaining this, he could not resist yet another attack on The Voice’s rivals. ‘I reached out to Cheryl for advice on keeping your cool, having a poker face, the importance of sticking with the singers – it’s their dream,’ he told Capital FM radio. ‘A lot of the times when you have other performers as part of the show, celebrities tend to want the shine so they hog up time. So my whole thing was that I want to do The Voice, but I don’t want to hog up time to where the singers up there are looking like, “Is this about you guys?”’
Her advice, he felt, had been more than useful, ‘Her information that she gave me was inspirational. Her perspective and experience inspired me.’ However, although he sought advice, for Will, the talent search was not to be a new experience – just one transferred into a new context. ‘No, this is what I’ve always done when I’m not performing,’ he told the Radio Times. ‘I’m looking for new acts, I’m mentoring people signed to my label, wherever I am, after a show, when I go to a club. It’s just now I’m doing it on a different platform.’
The gimmick for The Voice is that the opening auditions are ‘blind’. That is to say the coaches sit with their backs to the singer and, if they like what they hear, they can press a button on their chair, which then spins them around so they can see the singer for the first time. The idea being that it is all about the voice of the person, not their look or stage persona. At the end of the song, all the coaches face the singer, but only those who spun round during the performance are allowed to bid to mentor the singer in the next round. As we shall see, the sincerity of this dimension of the show was to be questioned by many viewers and several critics.
Nonetheless, as the countdown to the broadcast of the first episode continued, Will prepared to acquire a new wave of recognition in Britain. While The Black Eyed Peas had for some time been a very popular act here, theirs is the sort of mainstream success that means that far from all of those who can hum along to their biggest hits would be able to tell you the names of any of the band’s members, let alone recognize them. The Voice would jettison Will directly into the living rooms of a primetime BBC One audience week after week – recognition did not get much more mainstream than that. Will, for all his disdain of Simon Cowell and his shows, was more than aware of how Pop Idol and then The X Factor had taken Cowell from anonymity to huge fame at record speed. Meanwhile, there was always the risk that the entire project could be a failure, so the stakes were high.
Alongside Will on the show would be three other celebrity coaches: Welsh legend Sir Tom Jones, pop princess Jessie J, and The Script’s Danny O’Donoghue. The inclusion of O’Donoghue had proved controversial after he pipped Will Young to the post for the role. Young was furious and Twitter users were aghast, somewhat unkindly renaming him Danny O’Donog-Who? Will suffered no such issues with recognition, though he was new to some viewers. Still, the panel was described as a ‘blockbuster line-up’ by Will Payne of the Daily Mirror.
Will’s opening words on the opening episode were familiar: announcing that this was ‘not like the traditional, karaoke talent show’. Will was introduced to viewers as the ‘founding member of global supergroup The Black Eyed Peas, seven-time Grammy winner, and established producer, who has collaborated with music’s biggest names.’ It was a curriculum vitae that, arguably, cast him as the most widely qualified of the coaches. The coaches started the series opener by performing together one of Will’s biggest hits: ‘I Gotta Feeling’. In a grey-and-white baseball jacket, Will looked pumped-up and slightly nervous. There was much at stake for him.
In the opening audition of the series, Will was the first to press his button and face the contestant. It took him little time to be won over by the sound of Jessica Hammond covering Jessie J’s ‘Price Tag’. By the end of the song, all four coaches had followed suit, leading each time to much mock-indignant body language from Will.
It was then time for each coach to make their pitch to mentor the contestant. ‘So, I would like to work with you,’ Will said to Jessica Hammond. ‘The way I’ve worked with Macy, and Michael Jackson ...’. O’Donoghue then made a joke about Will name-dropping. This would be just the first of many such quips between the coaches on that topic. ‘I would like to have you on my team, we need to make an album, we need to put it out to where it’s big, in the UK, America, Brazil, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Argentina, Russia, Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, Slovakia, Turkey, Poland...’ After being – blissfully – interrupted by O’Donoghue, Will concluded by telling Hammond: ‘You need to come here, babers’. He then offered to hold her guitar for her: ‘I’ll be your roadie. I’ll be your producer and your roadie.’
As the coaches vied for Hammond to join their team, there was much banter between them. O’Donghue accused Will of being ‘like a lobster’ (meaning in this context ‘loquacious’), while Jessie J implied that Will ‘surrounds himself with “yes men”’.
Already it was clear that Will intended to be an electric presence on the show. To some, the chatter between the judges made for slightly awkward viewing. There was a sense that the judges felt less than comfortable performing such contrived roles. To others, the show made for a breath of fresh air in a format that had become bloated and tired due to the excesses of The X Factor.
As for Will, despite being the first to back her, he received his first knockback of the series when Hammond, while deliberating on which coach to choose, told him: ‘While I appreciate everything you said, I’m a songwriter. I’m only seventeen and from Belfast. Number one hits don’t matter to me. Making music and sharing my message is what matters to me.’ Wisely, Will did not respond to her meek slap down of his highly commercialized pitch. He had misjudged her core motivation, but not unreasonably so. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the fact she had auditioned with one of Jessie J’s songs, it was she that Hammond chose as her coach. Will would, though, win favour with a number of the contestants in the opening blind auditions round.
Meanwhile, backstage he was reported to have offended BBC executives. According to the Sun, Will turned his dressing room at the White City studios into a makeshift music studio, so he could satisfy his creative, workaholic tendencies. Initially, this was welcomed – everyone wanted their star turn to be happy. However, once he had set up his equipment and begun to make music, the sheer volume of his ‘mega bass bins’ shook up the building, literally and metaphorically. A ‘show source’ was quoted as saying Will’s music had caused serious offence among the suits upstairs. ‘Will has some serious bass in there and it was vibrating the walls – you could almost see the dandruff being shaken off their heads,’ said the source, providing a memorable image.
A more serious reported bust-up occurred when Will and Jessie J competed to take a singer called Joelle Moses under their wing. Joelle’s soulful, slowed-down rendition of Adele’s ‘Rolling in the Deep’ was one of the highlights of the opening auditions. Once again, Will was the first to press his button, followed closely by O’Donoghue. By the end of the audition all four coaches had turned themselves around, with Jessie J the final one to do so. However, when she did turn around, Jessie J broke with etiquette to run onto the stage and embrace the singer. Will pitched himself against Jessie J, saying sardonically: ‘I know how to work with good singers, produce them, and stuff like that’. He won the pitch, when Joelle said her ‘gut instinct’ led her to choose him.
However, Will and Jessie J reportedly also exchanged some unkind words, which were not broadcast. After Jessie J mocked Will’s name as containing ‘two dashes’, he snapped that she was ‘Little Miss Jessie’. Will told the press: ‘There was one point where my team came in and expressed concerns on the banter between the coaches. I am the most unconfrontational man in the world – it is not my style – but that was the first time they have ever seen that side of me and they were like, “Will, what are you doing?” They pulled me back in the dressing room and told me that I should not be doing that. They said it certainly didn’t look like banter.’ Furthermore, Will insisted the row was genuine, describing Jessie J and himself as ‘hungry people fighting over a steak’.
Such stories frequently appear in the tabloids during reality-television series, some readers take them with a pinch of salt. A more significant claim surfaced in the Guardian, which said that Will was comfortably the highest paid of the show’s four coaches. The newspaper, a favoured read among many British media figures, claimed that there was a £1 million fund available for the coaches’ salaries. It reported that Will had received half of the money – £500,000. The other half was said to be divided between the other three coaches, with Sir Tom Jones taking £250,000. Undisclosed figures put Jessie J as the third-highest paid judge, with O’Donoghue in fourth place, but ‘still pulling in six figures’. These figures, though unconfirmed, seem to hold weight. Will was considered the biggest ‘catch’ by the producers, while O’Donoghue was only a late selection. Four weeks into the series, Will topped the figures for the coach most searched for online. All in all, things were going well for him.
He needed to find a special act to coach. Jaz Ellington was, for many viewers, the most stand-out of Will’s acts from the opening auditions. He sang ‘The A Team’, prompting Will to lead the charge of coaches spinning around. With the other judges having filled their teams already, this astonishing talent was Will’s by default. He laughed flamboyantly as he faced Ellington, signalling his soaring confidence that he had discovered a star. He told Ellington it was ‘like you just fell out of the sky’. With a very positive atmosphere permeating the studio, Ellington was invited to sing another song. He chose Will’s own song, ‘Ordinary People’. It was such a powerful performance that it reduced both Will and Jessie J to tears. ‘Here comes a little angel with wings’, said Will, summing up the moment. He compared his new act to ‘an owl’ who can see in the night.
By the end of the first round of auditions, Will believed he had assembled ‘the perfect ten’ contestants for his team. Among them were Heshima Thompson, barmaid Jenny Jones, Sophie Griffin, J. Marie Cooper, Scouser Jay Norton, Wakefield teenager Frances Wood and Londoner Tyler James. At this stage, for most observers, Ellington and James seemed the cream of Will’s crop.
Next up, came the ‘Battle Rounds’, in which the final forty acts would be reduced to a top twenty. The acts went head-to-head in a ‘sing-off’, held on a ‘boxing ring’-style stage. This made for an intense experience for Will, as he was forced to reduce his top ten to a top five. Among those he took through were Joelle Moses, who edged out Jenny Jones, despite Will feeling Jones was ‘smashing it’, and Tyler James, who Will said had ‘knocked me out with your performance’.
The most intense sing-off by Will’s acts came between Jay Norton and Jaz Ellington, who performed ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’. Between them, they produced a duet of enormous quality. Will told Norton that he had sung ‘better than Justin Timberlake’. However, it was Ellington who Will took through. ‘Jaz, I want to take you on to the lives’, he said. ‘You have something in you. You got soul in a bowl. You got soul on a pole. You got soul you don’t know! Whoa, you got soul.’
Will was relieved that things were going so well. He had harboured concerns for this round and beyond. ‘I’m nervous for the first live battles,’ he wrote on Twitter. ‘I haven’t been this nervous since we played a concert in Brazil in front of 1.5 million people.’
As the resultant live finals played out, Will admitted that he did not know why one of his acts, the much-loved Tyler James, had even entered the series. ‘Tyler is an artist, a true star,’ he told Radio Times. And I don’t even know why he’s in the competition because he has albums out and I’m a fan of them. He’s great. And hats off to him for joining the competition when you have a career already.’
His other much fancied act was Ellington. ‘Jaz is just an angel, he’s a true gift,’ Will said. ‘He’s on his way to legendary status because he has a legendary voice. We saw a star in the making in his performance.’
It was at this stage in the competition that some of the series’ boasts – many of which Will was at the forefront of promoting – began to unravel. With the healthy dose of pomposity and earnestness inherent in their publicity for the show, the producers had made a rod for their own back. Having made – and emphasized so strongly – the claim that The Voice was different and more credible than other reality talent contests, it had positioned itself for a fall.
In the battle round, it was quickly realized by many viewers that the coaches were now in a perfect position to weed out any contestants whose appearance did not live up to their voice, thus undermining the show’s unique selling point that the entire project was, as it repeatedly barked, ‘all about the voice’. The Guardian’s influential pop-music writer Peter Robinson nailed it when he wrote: ‘Behind all the bluster surely everyone involved in The Voice – unless pathetically deluded – knows that it’s a reality show much like any other.’
The other claim, that the series would be about the contestants and not the coaches, was somewhat compromised by the row that erupted around Will’s use of his smartphone during the broadcasts. After he was caught on camera using his phone during one of the live shows, Will was reportedly scolded by BBC bosses. According to the Sunday Express, they told him his behaviour was ‘unprofessional’ as well as ‘rude and disrespectful’. Will, however, was unrepentant. He argued that, by using his phone to tweet, he ‘wasn’t being rude’ but was merely conforming to the ‘new way’ viewers followed The Voice. He added a rhyming couplet to underline that he intended to continue utilizing technology as part of his involvement during the series. ‘TV, phone, laptop, & tablet ... it’s a new day ... if I don’t tweet during live TV I’m not connecting to people watching in the new way.’ All of the controversies, however, fed the publicity machine and kept the show in the public’s mind.
Indeed, his tweeting was not the only thing for which Will was criticized. He travelled around the world in between the live shows, prompting accusations that he was not spending enough time coaching his acts. This was a familiar controversy of the genre. Simon Cowell had been accused of the same thing during past series of The X Factor.
Will defended himself in the Mirror. ‘I’ve just got a different approach. My coaching is, “Hey, let’s talk”,’ he said. He felt that his absence on other business would not harm his acts. ‘I’m not worried. I don’t get nervous about not being here. It all depends on how you coach. If you focus on trying to unlock the magic within you, there’s no coach and no rehearsal which can bring that.’
He also insisted that his travelling was all professionally related, not an act of leisure. He had travelled so extensively, he told the Evening Standard, that it had made him ill. ‘I’m recovering from bronchitis,’ he said. ‘Because I travel upon travel upon travel. If I leave here it’s not like I go home and rest – I literally go to Mexico and work, and Brazil and work, Singapore and work. Since I saw you last I’ve probably been to eight countries.’
With his act Jaz Ellington reportedly becoming ‘unpopular’ backstage for behaving like a ‘diva’, Will was finding that The Voice could spark crisis headlines almost as much as the bloated, hyped X Factor could. In time, the show would also prompt controversy over issues as varied as Jessie J’s use of the world ‘lame’, the perceived softness of the coaches, and Will’s cutting comments about some of his rivals’ acts.
The tweeting row continued re-erupting for some weeks, but Will remained defiant. ‘I’m not going to stop tweeting during live shows ... I think it allows people to live the moment with me as I’m in it ... ,’ he announced on the social-networking site. ‘I told the bbc: “It may seem odd me tweeting ... but trust me ... this will be the norm one day & people are going to copy it”.’
Then came a fresh round of headlines, this time claiming that he was ‘subliminally advertising’ his own fashion range on the show. Will was often featured wearing a blue-and-yellow ‘superhero’-style jacket from his collection. It was unmistakably one of his creations: it even included his beloved slogan ‘Go hard or go home’ just beneath the left breast. In promotional photographs for the series, he is featured wearing another jacket from his range, this time a grey-and-white effort. Then, in footage of him rehearsing with his acts backstage, he was wearing an orange-and-blue jacket.
By the time the series reached its semi-final, just eight acts remained overall. Of Will’s acts, Jaz Ellington impressed again with his performance of The Beatles classic ‘Let It Be’. Tyler James, meanwhile, bravely took on ‘Bohemain Rhapsody’ by Queen. By this stage, viewers had noted Will’s tendency to use the complimentary word ‘dope’ a lot during the shows. When Leanne Mitchell sang, Will was so impressed that he went ‘dope’ crazy, to the amusement of many viewers. Of Will’s acts, James was the one to make it to the final, where he would compete with Bo Bruce, Mitchell and Vince Kidd. James, a former friend of Amy Winehouse, with a self-confessed colourful past of his own, was not the favourite. That honour belonged to Bruce – though there would be a twist in the tale that would send the title elsewhere.
On the night of the final, James sang Michael Jackson’s ‘I’ll Be There’ and then teamed up with his coach Will to perform Usher’s ‘OMG’, with the pair arriving onstage in style, descending from the ceiling with the aid of harnesses. The duet was a strange one due to its bizarre choreography: Tyler seemed not entirely comfortable with the song, nor entirely at ease with the excitable presence of his coach flying and dancing around him. The climax to the song featured a masterpiece from Will, incorporating ‘Vote, vote, for Tyler James’ into the closing chant. Throughout the evening, Will gave his man plenty of support and encouragement, reminding viewers how many issues he had ‘overcome’ and declaring him a ‘superstar’. He also said he had ‘learned from Tyler how to be hungry, to appreciate opportunities’ and that he was ‘proud to have him on my team’. Tyler described Will as not just a ‘coach, but a friend’.
Will and his fellow coaches also performed a ‘mash-up’ of their own. The quartet performed an unlikely medley of their own songs, comprising of Will’s ‘Where is the Love?’, Jones’s ‘It’s Not Unusual’, Jessie J’s ‘Price Tag’, and The Script’s ‘Breakeven’. The final product was not half as ridiculous as one might have thought. It certainly outclassed the unintentionally comedic performance of U2’s ‘Beautiful Day’ by the coaches earlier in the series, which had been rightly mocked on the Internet.
Will’s man was not to win the series, however. James finished third, ahead of Kidd but behind the top two of Bruce and Mitchell. The final crown, for which Bruce had been so widely tipped, actually went to Mitchell. ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe it,’ she said. Neither could some of the final’s 8.7 million viewers, though it was ultimately the voting public who had made her the victor.
The following day’s press reported that Will was keen to return to the show for its second series in 2013. Announcing his intention to move to London full-time, Will said: ‘I’ll definitely come back.’ BBC One controller Danny Cohen was said to be keen on bringing all four of the coaches back for the second series.
Will, ever the canny and speedy operator, also revealed that he had already taken three of his finalists into the studio to record. ‘The annoying thing for me is people go on these shows but it takes for ever for their albums to come out,’ he told the Sunday Mirror. ‘I wanted to do The Voice because I want to speed up the process. I just want to come live in London and do that.’
The first significant and official release in the wake of the show put one of Will’s contestants at the top of the ‘chart’. A compilation featuring performances by the final eight contestants was released, and Tyler James’s cover of Steve Winwood’s ‘Higher Love’ quickly became the most downloaded track on iTunes, giving James, and his coach, a retrospective victory of sorts.
Having had concerns about what might be ahead when he first signed up to The Voice, Will had learned to love the show. Perhaps it was only after the series had ended that he began to grasp what an experience it had been. ‘I felt very strange not doing #thevoiceuk this weekend,’ he confessed on Twitter, a week after the final. ‘I felt as if it was all a lovely dream and it never really happened ... #imisslondon.’
Whether the show had been a success overall became a point of debate. A tour had been arranged in the wake of the show, in which the final eight contestants of the series were scheduled to perform at venues across Britain, including London’s O2 Arena, and in other major cities, including Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Cardiff. This mimicked the annual X Factor tour, in which the finalists follow the same route. However, in the case of The Voice the plan went awry when poor sales meant that the entire tour had to be called off.
Andrew Lloyd Webber criticized the series, saying that most of the finalists sang ‘out of tune’, while BBC Radio 2’s Paul Gambaccini described the overall experience of the show as ‘karaoke’. There was also embarrassment when two BBC executives, speaking at the Edinburgh Festival, failed to recall the name of the show’s winner just two months after she was crowned.
A glance through the history of reality television paints a more realistic and promising picture. All of the genre’s shows have had their critics and teething problems. The X Factor, which in terms of cold numbers remains a benchmark of success, endured a rocky opening series in which critics slammed it. The final of the first series descended into farce when Sharon Osbourne denounced its winner, Steve Brookstein, as a ‘fake’. Brookstein then spectacularly fell out with all concerned before experiencing an astonishing flop.
A fact about The Voice that no critic can dispute is that the BBC felt sufficiently impressed with its performance to commission a second series, which will be broadcast in 2013. Putting aside the inevitable ‘paper talk’ surrounding which celebrities will, won’t or might be coaches in series two, Will would certainly be a popular choice to return to those famous rotating chairs. While he had not won the debut series he had, more than any other person taking part, won the hearts of viewers. Will, for so long an Anglophile, was now feeling the love coming the other way more than ever.
*
In the week after he had lost Frances Wood and Joelle Moses from his team on The Voice, Will was thrilled to be part of the London 2012 Olympic torch procession. This satisfied a longstanding ambition on his part. In 1984, as a child, Will had sat in front of the television and watched the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. The tournament captured his imagination and made him wish he could one day have a part to play in one. His turn with the torch transported him back to 1984. ‘I had that flashback when they handed me the torch to run in Taunton,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘It’s like a blast moment and a surreal moment and a can’t believe it moment all at the same time.’
Will, who has appeared on primetime television, played to huge sold-out stadiums and participated in no end of other potentially nerve-wracking events, said he felt more anxious taking part in this activity than he had in anything before. The reason for his intense nerves on the day was the potential for pyrotechnic calamity. ‘I got a little more nervous this time than all the things I have done,’ he said. ‘I am not holding a flame when I am performing in front of people and the last thing you want to do is make a mistake with fire in your hands.’ He avoided such perils but managed to create a minor controversy all the same.
It all started when the torch reached Taunton in Somerset. Will was the 109th runner to take part in the seventy-day relay that covered 80,000 miles in total. It was an exciting moment for him as he set off with the torch. In keeping with his self-confessed addiction to Twitter, he tweeted about his torch-run, even as it was going on. It was with this fact, and the tweets themselves, that the controversy started. One of his tweets read: ‘Thank you coca.cola for this once in a life time experience to come to taunton and #runthetorch ... Crazy energy in the uk’.
This seems innocuous enough in itself. However, while some onlookers were ambivalent about his tweeting, others were offended, feeling he was disrespecting or even desecrating the moment. To an extent, this reflected a sense of negativity about the Olympic Games that some in Britain were determined to air. It is easy, in the wake of the gloriously successful tournament, to forget how many people were convinced it would be a disaster in the weeks beforehand. Will was unfortunate just to have walked into this atmosphere of negativity.
However, his position was not helped by the fact that in some of the tweets he spelled the name of the area incorrectly. For instance, one message read: ‘Its nuts here in taurton ... so much excitement ... #runningthetorch’. This unintentional spelling error only served as grist to the mill of those who were questioning why an American was even taking part in the torch procession. As he ended his part in the procession, Will felt almost euphoric. He explained why he had performed a short ‘moonwalk’ during a part of the run. ‘I was thinking “me and Michael” ... I don’t want to Tom Jones it right now,’ he said afterwards. ‘Me and Mike were really close and he would have been proud that I ran the torch, so I thought why not moonwalk it a couple of steps while running with the torch.’
In the days that followed, several newspapers whipped up negative headlines about Will. Judith Woods, of the Daily Telegraph, asked: ‘Why is Will.i.Am all over us like a rash?’ Complaining that Will was ‘fast-tracked to National Treasure status’, she entered slightly uncomfortable territory when she stated that he ‘came over here on a visa for The Voice but, rather like the programme, overstayed his welcome’. She concluded her piece with a jokey speculation that Will might have been considering applying for the BBC Director General’s job. The Daily Mail, as is its wont, joined in the outrage, asking: ‘He’s not an athlete, he’s not British so why is Will.i.am carrying the Olympic flame?’
It caused much shock when he was suddenly revealed as one of the participants. One wonders how much angrier some commentators might have been had they been aware that Will had known that he was going to take part in the procession, for a year – a fact he only revealed after the run. Some writers still managed to see the lighter side of the story. A somewhat tongue-in-cheek – but still indirectly admiring – article was posted on the Guardian’s website. It argued: ‘Will.I.Am has become a beacon of hope to us dreary Brits, with our punctuation-free names. So what a flash of genius to get him there in Taunton.’
Meanwhile, Will was too busy getting excited about the forthcoming Games themselves to lose much sleep over criticism. He declared himself a ‘huge Olympics fan’. He added: ‘I want to see the swimming match, I want to see Usain Bolt. I want to see if he’s really that fast because I want to race him one day. I wouldn’t win but I want to see how close I would come.’
Were he to take part in an Olympics, it would be track running that he would choose. ‘I’m very fast,’ he boasted in the Guardian, adding that he has been nicknamed ‘Willie Zoom’ due to his speed. ‘I take pride in how fast I am, still to this day. I was in the studio the other day and me and Chris Brown were talking. I don’t know how it came up, but I was like: “I’m fast”. And he was like: “You ain’t fast, man”. So I said: “Let’s go race!” His trainer gets in on it too, who was supposedly an ex-NFL footballer, so we’re standing in the middle of the street and I asked if I could take my shoes off because I had dress shoes on – at least let me run barefoot! But they made me run in my Christian Louboutin shoes!’ In his telling of the story, he was comfortably victorious in this impromptu R&B race. ‘Man let me tell you they were so upset because I not only smoked them once but smoked them twice,’ he boasted. ‘And now people know not to mess with me. I beat Ne-Yo too! And his trainer!’
His humorous remarks certainly deflected some of the sting surrounding his interest in the Games. In the weeks after his time with the torch, other runners came in for criticism. For instance, Paloma Faith’s red high heels prompted questioning headlines about how ‘ridiculous’ her ‘unsuitable’ footwear was for her stint on the torch relay. It was all part of the pre-Olympics pantomime. Will was just pleased to have taken part in the Olympic experience. His love of Britain was deepening the more embedded in and recognized by the public he became.
The ever-adoring Cheryl Cole spoke in his defence. ‘I heard a couple of people say, “He’s not British”, but it’s not about that,’ she told Capital Radio. ‘We’re inviting people from all over the world to come and race or do whatever their part is in the Olympics in our country, everybody is welcome, so [the criticism’s] not right.’ She continued: ‘He thoroughly enjoyed it. He carried that torch everywhere – he had it on The Voice. He’s obsessed with it. I think he’s an honorary Brit.’
An honorary Brit, indeed. As he told an interviewer for Radio Times, he really had fallen for Britain and the rich creative state it is currently in. ‘I don’t know what’s brewing here, but you guys have so many great singers, from Adele to Jaz to freaking Marina and the Diamonds, to freaking Everything Everything,’ he said. ‘Great talent coming out of this country. Get out of here.’
Recognition of his place in the hearts of an increasingly mainstream audience came when he was invited to appear on BBC One’s primetime chat show The Graham Norton Show. Alongside him was the actress Miriam Margolyes, and some of her remarks to Will during the broadcast took the programme to the front pages of the newspapers.
At one point, turning to Will, Margolyes said: ‘Unfortunately, I don’t know many black people. We don’t get to meet across the colour line much except in show business and that’s what’s so nice.’ Will, in common with much of the audience, was rather flabbergasted by what Margolyes had said. At first, he seemed unable to work out to what extent she was joking – if at all. His normally loquacious manner was nowhere to be seen.
Their fellow guest on the couch, the actor and comedian Greg Davies, tried to cut through the awkward atmosphere with the quip: ‘It’s exotic’. While host Norton also tried to lighten the mood, saying: ‘It’s lovely, Miriam, you’re right.’
When Margoyles learned that Will had made a major donation to the Prince’s Trust and of his other charitable works, she continued to make the atmosphere awkward. On learning he had donated nearly half a million pounds to the charity, she told Will: ‘You’re fabulous! How unexpected that a rapper would do this. I don’t have a very positive attitude towards rappers. I don’t really know any, you’re the first one I’ve actually talked to.’
Again, for a moment, Will could hardly believe his ears, but he recovered his poise long enough to say: ‘I’m the first rapper and black guy you’ve kicked it with!’ The audience was loving the exchange and continued to do so as Will humorously taught Margolyes the meaning of the phrases: ‘home boys’ and ‘old school’. It was a conversation that made the front pages of some of the following morning’s press.
Will’s new stature in Britain was symbolically reaffirmed when he was invited to play a significant part in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations. It was to be a night in which Will’s role sparked considerable debate among viewers. Wearing a military-style outfit of red, white and blue, he certainly looked the part for the occasion. He was one of the first performers onstage at the London concert, performing his band’s hit ‘I Gotta Feeling’ with his fellow Voice coach Jessie J. Some newspapers claimed that he had used Auto-Tune for his performance. He made a second appearance onstage to accompany soul legend Stevie Wonder in his rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’. It was a strange turn for the evening to take. It was not The Queen’s birthday that was being celebrated, after all. Also, as Will first reappeared on the stage in response to Wonder’s beckoning, some wondered what he could add to the performance.
The answer was not much of worth. Will looked uncomfortable as he stood next to Stevie Wonder. He sang some weak backing vocals on the chorus, and added a few spontaneous ad lib comments such as ‘Happy birthday, your highness’, ‘Put your hands up, y’all’ and ‘Yo’. As the song ended, and Wonder’s band launched quickly into the next track, ‘Superstition’, Will left with no acclaim, awkwardly shuffling off the stage as the show went on without him.
Twitter, that increasingly valued barometer of public opinion, delivered a largely unimpressed verdict. One typical tweet read, ‘So at what point in man’s aural evolution did we resort to needing will.i.am to shout “yo” over Stevie Wonder?’
There was little comfort for Will in the knowledge that the evening’s other much-criticized act was his very own client, Cheryl Cole. Her half of the duet with event organizer Gary Barlow on Lady Antebellum’s ‘Need You Now’, left many unmoved.
It was Cole herself who, feeding the media’s ongoing love of stories involving Will tweeting in inappropriate situations, claimed he had been set to Tweet while alongside the Queen onstage. ‘I actually had to warn him as we walked on to the stage,’ Cole told Graham Norton later. ‘He had the phone at the ready. I’m not joking, I had to say to him, “Put that phone away right now before I kill you”.’
Will had happily tweeted photographs of himself at the event, including one of him alongside Prince William, the prince positively towering over Will in the photograph. ‘I just realized I’m the shorter “will.i.am” #diamondjubilee’, Will wrote on the accompanying tweet. He also posed alongside a group of royal guardsmen, commenting that he was now ‘brit.i.am’.
He also got himself snapped alongside Robbie Williams, Sir Elton John, Sir Paul McCartney and Annie Lennox. As protocol dictated, Will was not to have a side-by-side photo of himself with the Queen, though he was officially snapped shaking her hand backstage. ‘I love the queen’, he Tweeted later. ‘She’s super dope. She reminds me of my mum. I mean, my mum and no money and the Queen is obviously loaded, but just their strength and perseverance.’ His admiration for Debra is never far from Will’s mind, her presence never far from his existence and work.