SOMEWHERE in a hotel in London, Lothian’s latest reality TV winner, X Factor victor Leon Jackson, is contemplating his new songwriting partnerships, his up-and-coming album and how hard it is to walk the streets of his home town without being mobbed.
There’s a chart-topping single under his belt and a bumper record contract in his hip pocket; he’s “boy next door” good looking and he has some of the biggest names on planet pop orchestrating his every move. The outlook is surely bright...
Head s
ome 350 miles north, however, and another reality TV star is considering his future, too. Ainslie Henderson is sitting in a student bar in South Nicholson Street. He’s been where Leon is today, done that, bought the T-shirt, and, surprisingly, doesn’t have any burning desire to go back to it.
Thrust into the limelight five years ago when he appeared in the BBC’s first attempt at a reality talent show, Fame Academy, the 29-year-old has spent a large chunk of the last few years trying to forget it.
So there was a top-five single, a £250,000 record deal and even a Fame Academy live tour, but there was also the rapid realisation that this was “fame” at a personal price.
“The lovely thing now is that I’m at ease with it all,” he says in a voice so surprisingly gentle that you can’t help but wonder how it holds up, song after song, at one of his regular live gigs. “For a while I was just so deeply embarrassed and ashamed. I used to apologise to people who recognised me.
“People would say, ‘oh, are you Ainslie from Fame Academy?’ and I’d say ‘yes, I’m really sorry’,” he confesses.
“But now I think, OK, I went to Fame Academy with a real ambition to be myself and write music and get out there, take a step forward. Being ambitious like that is something that you can be made to feel ashamed of – I’m not any more.”
He learned a few lessons from his spell in the spotlight – none more important than realising he wasn’t really cut out for a career of manufactured pop, singing other people’s songs in outfits chosen for him by enthusiastic stylists.
His single, Keep Me a Secret, made it to number five but Ainslie was already feeling he had slaughtered his credibility on the alter of fame, that he’d taken a cheeky shortcut to get where he was and he’d somehow cheated his way to the top.
It sparked a three-year spell in the shadows, when the rising star screeched into reverse, turning down gigs for fear of being labelled “that bloke Ainslie from Fame Academy”.
Today he is so far removed from it all, that he doesn’t even bother to tune in to reality TV “talent” shows.
“I caught a glimpse of that guy Leon, but to be honest watching stirs up things for me, there’s a weird feeling. I just got this rush of empathy for him.
“But maybe it will work out for him – I hope it does.”
Former shop assistant Leon, 20, scooped the top prize in the Simon Cowell-led show in December from under the nose of hot favourite Rhydian, picking up a £1m recording contract and a number one hit on the way.
It emerged last week that he has now left the Whitburn home he shared with his mum, Wendy, and is living in a London hotel, helping to write songs for his debut album and taking singing lessons. His plans to study architectural technology at Napier University have been put on hold.
It’s not a million miles from where Ainslie found himself in 2003 – but it’s certainly nowhere near where the singer songwriter would want to be today.
Instead, he’s happily reviving his career on his own terms.
Now back performing a string of city gigs and recording – his first album Growing Flowers by Candlelight was released on his own label early last year and another is now being worked on – it’s a very different Ainslie to the one Fame Academy fans might remember.
Unlike the reality show, this, he insists, is the “real” thing.
“I’m in a nice place just now,” he confirms. “I’m trying to focus on generating as much new material as I can. I have more control and even though sometimes I find writing songs a real torture, it’s still a magical feeling.”
Born in Edinburgh, Ainslie lived in Scotland just briefly before his family moved to Manchester for the next seven years. They eventually settled in Denholm in the Borders.
He was 14 when he developed an interest in learning to play the guitar. Inspired by the burgeoning grunge movement led by Nirvana, he pestered his dad to buy him an instrument, learned a handful of chords and began to write his own songs.
But the notion that he might be a performer only kicked in when he saw a local Hawick band – “they were called the Sunbirds,” he recalls – play their own material on stage.
“I went to see them when I was 16, they were a little local band, a bit like the Stone Roses and brilliant in their own way,” he remembers. “They were playing their own thing, they were within arm’s reach. It made me see that it could be done. Even now I don’t know many cover songs because I was always doing my own.”
It’s that drive to be his own performer – in control of his own career even if it doesn’t bring an instant £1m recording contract – that probably made him unsuitable material for the reality TV world in the first place.
Of course, that doesn’t mean others can’t benefit where he chose not to . . .
“I can’t give Leon any advice, he needs to make his own mistakes,” stresses Ainslie. “Even if everything turns out to be a failure it’s better to be chewed up and spat out and then heal again, rather than not being there at all.
“He’s got to just take it for what it is.”
And if the BBC suddenly appeared at the door of Ainslie’s Stockbridge flat offering a Fame Academy reunion?
He laughs and shakes his head. “I don’t think I’d really want to do that again,” he grins. “It was a totally mad life experience, brilliant, terrible, wonderful and it made me realise that I wanted success but more importantly it made me think about what I wanted success with.”
That, it’s now clear, is his own material on his own terms.
“I would love for this new record to get played on radio. I would love to go on tour for months with my songs,” he explains.
And it might be nice if he could finally shed that irksome Fame Academy tag, once and for all.
“What I’d love,” he adds with a grin, “would be for someone to come up to me and say ‘Aren’t you Ainslie? I recognise you because I bought your album and it’s a beautiful album.”
Ainslie Henderson will be appearing at Henry’s Cellar Bar in Morrison Street on February 13. For further information and to listen to Ainslie Henderson, visit
www.ainsliemusic.com and ||WEBSTART||www.myspace.com/ainsliehenderson
