Seeing as Louis Walsh seems to be a popular chap currently, I thought I’d update my occasional postings on his ‘makeover’.
Just over a year ago, I posted about Louis’ obvious makeover, but he’s gone much further this year. Taking a few tips from Simon Cowell, he’s clearly had his eyes done and he’s also removed much of the grey from his hair colour. There’s also possibly a bit of Botox in there, too.
I think he looks a lot better, but it’s quite a drastic change. Anyone else like his new look, or should he have simply aged gracefully instead?
The earth duly continued spinning and thoughts turned to the impact this development would have on the UK singles charts.
Surely, the public would suddenly rush to download a rash of Beatles tracks that they didn’t already own on LP, cassette or CD, wouldn’t they?
To increase the likelihood of chart domination, Simon Cowell conveniently scheduled a Beatles week on The X Factor, allowing the remaining finallists to ‘make the songs their own’.
As if that wasn’t enough, Apple ran iTunes TV ads, featuring black-and-white photos of the Beatles, the whole weekend.
And the result of this endeavour? The biggest-selling Beatles song of the week-ending 21 November was Hey Jude, which rocketed into the charts at… No.40! Yes, you read that right – no.40.
Now I like the Beatles (not obsessed), but as an average fan my first thought was: don’t most people own their favourite Beatles songs on CD already? If they don’t own the ‘red’ and ‘blue’ albums, then the relatively recently-released No.1s must have made its way into their collection.
And, if they do own any of these, then putting them in their CD drive and ripping them to iTunes sort of negates the need to download Hey Jude, doesn’t it?
Surely, there’s only so much Beatles you can flog to people. Yes, they were revolutionary in 1963, but most people are a little bored of ‘new’ Beatles now.
Also, the cynical X-Factor tie in was let down by the fact that most of the performances on Saturday were so poor, that younger viewers probably think the Beatles are about as relevant to them as Al Martino. Where’s the Elvis week – that’s what we want to know!
On a sidenote, it’s interesting that not all ‘modern’ reworkings of classic artists go unrewarded. Ellie Goulding’s version of Elton John’s Your Song (currently doing the rounds on the John Lewis Xmas ad) has stormed into the charts at No.3, just behind JLS and Take That.
For those of you who don’t know Tom Harris, he is a Labour MP who has become extremely well-known in the digital world for his blog And Another Thing.
This blog was ranked in the top 10 UK political blogs last year and was the most influential of those written by actual politicians.
However, Harris has now publicly admitted that the stress that has accompanied his blog is forcing him to hang up his proverbial digital pen.
Blogging is having a negative effect on my personal, family and political life for reasons too many and complicated to recount.
Fair play to him for admitting to this, but the real question here is, should you actually retire from blogging or can you not just cut back?
We all know that many blogs go untended and often remain dormant for a long time, if not eternally. I know I’ve started a number of offshoot blogs over the years that have withered.
As long-term bloggers, it takes time, love and energy to keep a blog going continuously, especially if you’re not in it for the money (as few of us are), so if that has become an issue for Tom Harris, then fair enough.
He also indicates that the online vitriol that comes with any successful blog has given him cause to think twice about continuung, which is also fair comment – very few people can completely ignore nasty responses to something they’ve put time and effort into creating.
But completely retire from blogging? That seems possibly a step too far. If you get that much out of blogging, then there’s always the opportunity to scale back the frequency of posting or simply take what you do elsewhere.
I would question that, if you truly enjoy blogging, you can resist the lure of WordPress, no matter how much you claim otherwise. It’s like an itch you can’t scratch, especially if you’re high-profile enough to receive lots of feedback (both good and bad).
Harris himself admits that he’s ‘become a blogger who is also an MP rather than a politician who blogs’, so my question would be, why can’t you simply reverse the two?
Ultimately, only Harris himself knows how beneficial a life without blogging will be – it will be interesting to see if he revives his postings after a self-imposed sabbatical.
Seeing as Louis Walsh seems to be a popular chap currently, I thought I’d update my occasional postings on his ‘makeover’. 
