Jamming with the Don't Forget The Lyrics Band: A Roundtable Discussion

The participants:

Jess Bailey: Musical director and keyboard player
Troy: Drums
Marcus: Bass
Hannah: Keyboards
Kim: Singer/Percussionist
Adam: Guitar
Matt: Guitar
Graham Perkins: Musical director

Q. Would you ever want to be a contestant on the show?

Matt: No I wouldn't want to be a contestant.

Troy: No I wouldn't, I'd be useless!

Marcus: [The contestants] have all been really good. A lot of them have gone out really soon which is a shame cos they've been so convinced that they're right.

Troy: They've been over confident.

Marcus: They're incredibly - I hate to use the word pedantic - about the lyrics. So somebody can say dream instead of dreams and they go: "I was sure it was that". You could go on there and not be able to sing a note, but provided you can remember the lyrics then you'd do well.

Adam: I think the guy that sang "Wuthering Heights" was a high point. That was a bit of a shock, we were looking through the folder [thinking] he'll never pick that, and he did. Aw.

Matt: Actually all the contestants have been really nice. What's been really surprising to me is seeing the extent to which the people behind the scenes, the production company, are rooting for the contestants. They're all back there afterwards when people have gone out, there have been tears shed, because they are like "oh I thought he was going to get to the next level, you know I really thought he was going to get through". So there's a very pleasant lack of cynicism. I sort of expected people would be more cynical.

Hannah: We had one girl, Joanne, who was really sweet - 24 years old, cute, who was almost to her 5 grand mark and Shane asked what are you going to do with the money and she said "I'm not going to say or I'll cry."

Kim: Out come the tears.

Hannah: She said "if I do get the money I'll give it to my parents 'cos they've helped me so much with moving to London," so I started blubbing.

Kim: It was so obviously real, it wasn't crocodile tears, it wasn't an onion in my hanky fake TV moment, it was obviously the real thing.

Hannah: She was our favourite.

Kim: We all really felt for her.

Hannah: Quite a tearjerker.

Adam: I think they're fairly normal. There's been a quite high number of singing teachers.

Marcus: Interestingly enough some of them have good voices but tend to crumble when they get to the studio. And then there's some people who don't seem like they have great deal of experience and they spring into life and sound quite good.

Adam: It's a hard thing to do if you've never done that kind of thing.

Hannah: I'd be rubbish. I don't care about the lyrics, I only listen to the music so I'd go out first round.

Kim: I'm a session singer which is , I work in the studio a lot and I'm always given the lyrics and I find I learn the music a lot faster than I learn lyrics, just because of the nature of my job. Even on this show, I've got the lyrics, don't tell anybody but me and the MD have the lyrics most of the time, so I can't think of anything I routinely get wrong when I'm going on memory.

Troy: We're struggling to remember our part when there's music in front of us so. (laughs)

Q. Tell us about the breadth of musical categories in the show.

Kim: The show is really hard. Because the nine categories that they get are so broad, that it would take one hell of a person to know lyrics from a sample that wide.

Marcus & Troy: musicals, the 80s, the 60s, the 70s pop, the 90s, rock ballads, Take That ..erm and many, many more.

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