Is the It Factor as Dead as Elvis?

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!