Is the It Factor as Dead as Elvis?

He shook his long, curly brown hair, stepped up to the mic, with eyes closed, and screamed. A long banshee-wail that sent shivers down the spines of the eager audience. Sweat dripped down his face onto the stage floor, which was littered with flowers, joints, and the odd pair of panties.

The first rhythmic chords of the bluesy “Back Door Man” stuttered from the guitar of Robby Krieger, while Ray Manzarek’s long fingers were poised over his two keyboards. The Lizard King stared out at his audience, through the haze of stage-lights, ready to bellow the first line, when instead of a bearded, stoned hippy rushing the stage, my mother came bursting into my bedroom. “Will you turn that poxy noise down, I can’t hear the bloody telly downstairs!” Suddenly, I wasn’t Mr Mojo Risin, the Lizard King, I was just plain old Lewis again, standing there in my pants.

We’ve all experienced these moments. The moments when we actually BECOME our musical heroes, only to be swiftly brought back to reality with a resounding thud. I really thought I was Jim Morrison. I’d bought all the albums, several books on him, grown my hair (which is naturally curly, so at least I wouldn’t need a perm) and even bought a pair of leather trousers. (Okay, they were PVC, but I was earning a pittance at the time, so I couldn’t afford the real thing, give me a break!) Let’s face it, I was obsessed with the man. He’d been dead for 20-odd years at the time (back in 1992). But we shared the same star-sign, Sagittarius, and I’d been born a year after his death, so I was obviously Jim re-incarnated! Wasn’t I?

So, what is it that manifests these obsessions in people? Is it the fact that you are at a young impressionable age, and you need, nay, require a heroic figure to look up to and admire? Or is it that these figures have “IT”? These days, you would associate IT with a geek in front of a PC. But, please don’t confuse IT with Information Technology. I just cannot imagine Hendrix sitting in front of his PC hitting Ctrl+Alt+Delete, instead of wielding his axe.

IT is that elusive, esoteric star quality that 99.9999% of us don’t possess, but some lucky blighters have in spades. Elvis had IT, Hendrix had IT, Jim had IT, Lennon had IT. And, yes, getting back to answer the age question, it is partly connected with the age/coming of age process most of us enjoy (or should that be endure?), but it’s mainly due to the “IT-Factor” (IT for short) of these lucky few.

First off, let me dispel any confusion before we investigate this phenomenon further. This is NOT connected with that other behemoth the “X-Factor”. Admittedly, I’ve watched some of these shows, (for research purposes only, you understand, oh, and to laugh at the deluded freaks that constitute the entertainment in the early shows in each series), and not once has there been one performer that possesses one iota of IT. Leona Lewis? You are joking? She’s more boring than Phil Collins! In fact, the only person connected with the show who comes anywhere close is the head honcho himself, Simon Cowell. And, when I say close, I mean as close as the Earth is to the edge of the universe! Nobody actually knows exactly how far that is, but I’m reliably informed you would have to travel at the speed of light (and that’s pretty swift) for 15,000,000,000 years to get there. You get my drift, and I am digressing.

But how do you determine who has this amazing quality? Is it quantifiable? If someone had IT, could they have more, or less of IT? We’ll cover the first question later, but for the latter two, it’s simple: You either have IT, or you don’t. It’s as simple as that. This is IT Fact number one.

One could argue that Elvis was cooler than Jim Morrison, or vice-versa, but coolness and IT are very different. That is not the issue. There are many more people that are cool, but having IT is so much more of a rarity. That is the difference between the two. Mick Jagger is (or should I say was) cool, but Keith Richards had, and still has IT. IT Fact number two…Once you have IT, you never lose it. You have IT for life. There will be times when the IT-Factor in a person is not so prevalent, but it is always there ready to rush to the fore in that person, if the circumstances are favourable. Not unlike genital herpes in that respect, but far more desirable!

You could argue that IT is the same as charisma. Well, I wholeheartedly disagree. Some politicians have charisma…Tony Blair certainly has, however much you disagreed with his policies, but there’s no way he could get people to pee with excitement. Unlike Adolf, who had the young frauleins, and fraus for that matter, pissing for Deutschland! But was Adolf cool? No. He may have been the Devil incarnate, but he wasn’t cool. Certainly not in those ridiculous puffy breeches he wore! Is Tony Blair cool? Absolutely not! Even though he plays the guitar? Don’t make me laugh! He would have to play better guitar than Hendrix, while blindfolded, using only his cadaverous gnashers, and he still wouldn’t be remotely cool. So, if you’re not even cool, there isn’t a chance that you have IT. That is IT Fact number three. Coolness is part of IT, but not ALL of IT.

Here’s another point…IT is not a singer’s ability to make girls swoon when he belts out his first syllable, which most popular front-men certainly possess, like Robbie Williams or Jim’s namesake, James Morrison. That’s par for the course, isn’t it? You could get the ugliest bloke on earth, stick him on a stage crooning the latest X-factor style tripe, and you can guarantee the St. John’s ambulance staff will be rushed off their feet within seconds, dragging away teenage girls who have forgotten to inhale rather than scream, thereby collapsing in blubbering heaps. This is not IT. Surliness, arrogance, a sense of indifference, these are all factors of IT.

So, we know that IT is very rare, it’s not quantifiable, and once someone has IT, they will never lose IT. But has anybody got IT in these modern times?

You could argue that it is precisely because the IT factor is so uncommon that it has so much potency, and this argument may be valid, because I struggle to think of any stars in the last 10 – 15 years with this most rare attribute. The only person (or persons, in this case) who are potential candidates, are Noal and Liam Gallagher. At the height of their power and popularity, which is over 10 years ago now, they had charisma, yes, they had the arrogance, and the surliness to go with it. Noel having more of the first, Liam more of the latter. But they just didn’t have IT, they were merely cool.

Moving on to people who could potentially have IT, but it hasn’t quite come to the fore, yet…probably the only person that springs to mind is Kasabian’s front-man Tom Meighan. When he struts about on stage, giving his all, the crowd are mesmerised, and he always has them in the palm of his hand. He has that Devil-may-care attitude, bordering on arrogance, something that is very polemic: It’s either love, or loathe him. Maybe as he develops, his IT Factor will shine like a beacon in these dark X-factor dominated days, we’ll just have to wait and see, but I’m not holding my breath.

So, back to the question raised earlier: How do you determine who has this amazing quality? This one’s easy. Everyone knows. When Elvis burst onto the scene way back in 1954 with “That’s All Right”, a record positively glowing with Elvis’s IT-ness, everyone knew. Even when he was fat and bloated in later years, a swift glance into his eyes revealed that spark of IT-ness burning brightly. When Morrison goaded the police for macing him backstage in Newhaven, the IT-Factor enveloped him, along with the ghostly dancing native Indians, as reported by Doors organist Ray Manzarek. Although he may have been stoned at the time. Jimi plucking complicated and magical non-sequiturs out of the air while facing the rising sun in Woodstock…the list goes on.

Maybe I’m just getting old and past it, and I’m sure there will be hundreds and possibly thousands of people that will disagree with me out there, not all of them younger than me, who will be waving a flag for their own personal hero. But until someone convinces me otherwise, I’m afraid I’m going to have to pull that tired (but still pertinent) cliché out of the air: They just don’t make ‘em like they used to! Come on Meighan, please prove me wrong!