No Rock And Roll Fun

WHY DO PEOPLE TREAT HIM LIKE AN EXPERT?: The continuing habit on the part of TV companies of paying large sums of cash to Simon Cowell is something of a puzzlement: a man who, lest we forget, has been the lead figure on TV programmes which have launched Michelle McManus, Phixx, Hear'Say, Gareth Gates and others who even themselves have forgotten ever were supposed to be pop stars and yet is still treated as if he knows what he's talking about. Which...

"I find the whole Beyonce thing really mystifying," Cowell says in Esquire magazine. "She's not sexy, she hasn't got a great body and she's not a great singer."

... clearly he doesn't...

"[On Ashlee Simpson] Why should you have to do something substandard just for the sake of being real? If it sounds better with the vocal you recorded, why shouldn't people listen to that? There's almost a witch-hunt mentality about people miming."

No, Simon, the ridiculing of Ashlee wasn't because she was lip-synching: it was because when the backing tape fucked-up, she danced like a chicken and ran away leaving her band holding up a major US network on their instrumentation alone. Are you really so unable to understand a simple situation you don't realise the difference?