'I've had doors slammed in my face' says Linda Martin. Now a judge on Popstars, she talks to Rosita Boland about dealing with thousands of music hopefuls - and being back in the spotlight.
It is an automatic assumption these days that Louis Walsh plus Irish singers equals fireworks - noisy, colourful, kitsch, popular - the ultimate contrived ephemeral spectacle. Yet, although Walsh managed Linda Martin for many years and their close friendship goes right back to the early 1970s, the Martin-Walsh combination never took off.
Martin never had the high profile that the six popstars (which she helped to choose as one of the three judges in RTÉ's series Popstars) will have, no matter how brief their shelf-life turns out to be.
We met the day before the final six were due to be revealed live on air - the six turned out to be five, since one member, Nadine Coyle, lied about her age by two years and had to be dropped from the band, which will be called 6. You have to wonder, however, why the judges never asked for any ID paperwork along the way, since age was such a crucial part of the selection process, upon which an investment from record company BMG of £2 million sterling is already riding.
Even at the very end, when the six were chosen, they naively never asked for proof of being 18; Coyle's doomed deception was discovered only by chance when the band was already rehearsing in the "secret location".
Martin arrives in a Dublin hotel, apologising for her lateness; manners are very high on her list of priorities. She is striking - graceful and slender, with a lovely face, and looks miles better in real life than on camera, where she looks a bit gaunt and glitzy, with the 1980s ghost of shoulder pads eternally hovering over her.
Popstars, for anyone unfamiliar with reality television, is a branded programme that has run in several countries thus far, notably Britain.
A panel of judges sets out to find a pop band through open auditions across the country. Everything is filmed: the auditions, the workshops, the tears, the consensus of the judges, the selection process, and the moment of hard truth when the contenders are told whether or not they've made it. It makes great television: whether it makes a great band is another question - Hear'Say, the British band selected last year, is now being called Flopstars.
Linda Martin's media profile has increased considerably in the past couple of months while Popstars has been on air, and she says she has since been offered television presenting work, which she has turned down for now. Along with Bill Hughes and Louis Walsh, she is one of the judges who has seen more than 5,000 people between 18 and 25 in Ireland. More people turned up for the Dublin audition alone than for all the auditions of the British version.
Martin empathises with the young hopefuls: "I've been those kids. I've had doors slammed in my face". She stresses that she "can pick up on attitude very quickly. And you can spot talent straightaway; you know a good singer or dancer right off." All the Irish judges have commented with undisguised and merry disdain about both the process of selecting Hear'Say and the merits of the band, which Walsh described as "Heresy".
"We were much warmer, much more caring. The English judges were cold, unneccessarily so. Most kids have fragile egos. And, quite frankly, that band wouldn't have got through our selection process."
It must have been tough emotional challenge for Martin to act literally as judge on a pre-hyped band-of-tomorrow, when her own career would have been a lot less starry. At one point, she says that she had been singing just the previous night at a corporate function in Jury's. Corporate work has been her bread and butter since winning the Eurovision in 1992 with Why Me?. "I'm a human jukebox," she admits cheerfully, since she always sings cover versions.
Pragmatism could be Martin's middle name. "The high point of my career was winning the Eurovision. It was a chance to get up the ladder a little. I was one of the last lucky ones; the show is outdated now and an object of ridicule, but any chance should be taken, and I took the chance it gave me."
In its 1970s heyday, the Eurovision was a crude precursor of the manufactured band phenomena: a singing competition for which the prize was the possibility of making it big. Although lots of winners were successful, only Abba, and later, Celine Dion, hit the superstar league. But the possibility was there to tantalise.
Unsurprisingly, since Martin will now be going on the road with 6 as their minder, she is all for the manufactured band, if a tad disingenuous about them. "There are no other outlets for people to get together and perform," she says, and worryingly, seems to believe it. What about the thousands worldwide playing music in their bedrooms and garages, some of whom will make it all by themselves?
"Take That was the first put-together band. It only ever takes one person to have an idea. Louis Walsh's success dates from that time. The only problem I have with manufactured bands is when they can't sing or dance. Can SClub7 sing? Can Steps sing?" From the look on her face, it's clear she thinks they can't. She leans forward conspiratorially. "Louis would be the first to tell you that Boyzone were slightly underpowered in the vocal area." Could that possibly be because they are now disbanded? He certainly never shared that insight with us when they started out.
The members of 6 currently known to the public are: Kyle Anderson, Sinead Sheppard, Andy Orr, Emma O'Driscoll, and Liam McKenna. I happened to interview O'Driscoll last year when she was part of the Bunratty Castle singers line-up, so the chances are that everyone in Ireland will have come across somebody connected with Popstars, no matter how briefly. This might explain why a staggering one million viewers tuned into last week's show, when the group's lineup was announced.
LINDA Martin thinks 6 will be around for a while. "These bands seem to go in five-year cycles. I hope they will still be nice and be stable, that they'll be hugely successful and have made a lot of money. I'm sure they will be huge." She stresses that she hopes they will still have good manners in 2007. Do they have to be nice and polite to be successful?
"Manners don't cost you anything," she says severely. It's somehow reminiscent of being a child, where Ps and Qs are drilled into you; the niceness of course is supposed to appeal to - and offer a good image to - what will be a very young fan-base.
It's probably no coincidence that the band's first public appearance last week showed them dressed entirely in white, the perceived colour of innocence.
The sixth member of the band, speculated to be a girl, will be revealed tomorrow night (although the programme refused to divulge the name of the replacement band member, bookies early this week stopped taking bets on it being Sarah Keating from Galway). The début single, a cover version of There's A Whole Lot of Loving, will be released on February 8th.
And lest you think this is Louis Walsh's swan song, which he claimed it was at the beginning of the show, think again. "They're the last band until he gets them launched, and then he'll be looking for fresh talent," Martin predicts with terrifying confidence.
Popstars runs until February 17th on RTÉ 1 on Sundays at 6.30 p.m.