Nigel Lythgoe’s interview with TVweek.com
Top 7 Post-Performance Review
This interview showed up late last night, but not before the TVweek.com website went down. Even though the results show is behind us, Nigel’s take on each contestant still proves to be interesting:
The interviewer mentions that the Top 7 performance show was “magical”. Nigel attributes this to the “warmth and the humor” of Rod Stewart.
- Chris – Nigel thinks his performance was great and that Chris showed he could sing other styles. But he’s not his favorite to sing standards, because of his “fast vibrato…which sounds a bit like a machine gun” (Nigel even imitated it). Nigel feels his vocals are fine for rock music, but not so great for the classics.
- Paris – The interviewer raved about her performance. Nigel thinks she’s “marvelous at this style…she has got the most devastating mature voice when she sings.”
- Taylor – Nigel enjoyed the end of the song, but not so much the beginning. But he thinks he was “great”.
- Elliott – Nigel thinks he’s a “radio singer”, he “loves listening to his voice” and and thinks he’s “just getting better and better and starting to look better. And you know, he started off as [some character from ‘Narnia’]…and now he looks really smart…he’s turning into an idol now.”
- Kellie – Nigel thinks Kellie is “bewitching”. He thinks she saved herself when she said, “if you’re going to screw up, always do it in a nice pair of shoes.” He went on to say, “She’s a very clever girl [he read somewhere] ‘she’s more wit than twit'”.
- Ace – Nigel said his hairdo “looked like a warrior out of Mulan.” He thinks his performance was “just ok”.
- Katharine – The interviewer didn’t feel her performance was “quite the wow they made of it”, and that maybe it sounded better in the studio. Nigel said it was “quite brilliant” and that along with Paris’s performance, it was the highlight of the night.
Notable comments:
- I wonder why Nigel made a point of highlighting one of Chris’s vocal limitations–his “goatie” vibrato. Since Chris’s voting totals have slipped, I wonder if the producers are having second thoughts about his potential “marketability”.
- Nigel goes out of his way to praise Elliott. That’s an interesting development. I can never figure out how interested they are in keeping Elliott around. Simon so far has ignored Elliott (never mentioning him in interviews one way or the other) and has been pretty dismissive during Elliott’s post-performance critiques.
- The love affair with Kellie continues, which is unfortunate. Compared to all the other remaining contestants, her vocals are distinctly sub-par.
- Interesting that the interviewer was not impressed with Katharine’s performance. Though her performance was “brilliant”, she did go a little wobbly on a few of the notes. She rarely gets through a song without pitch problems.
