Alternate Universe Albums: Joe McElderry

I just read the news that the lovely and extremely talented Joe McElderry has signed a new record deal. It’s great news that his career is not over, but sad that due to a massive misjudgement of his audience by his previous label, he now has to release an album of ‘classic hits’ (Nessum Dorma etc) aimed at fans of Popstar To Operastar. I would call them the demographic with the worst taste in the UK, but Scouting For Girls are still having top 10 hits.

But back to Joe. Let’s go back in time to summer 2010. He had won X Factor through performing a selection of mum-friendly but good quality pop songs, and was putting together an album of this sort. Then he announced publicly that he was gay, and his label clearly saw an opportunity to cash in on ‘the pink pound’. They changed the direction of the album and, from what he eventually presented us with, the idea was clearly to turn him into some kind of Scissor Sisters/Mika type. It may have worked a) if Joe was that type of flamboyant, energetic artist in the first place and b) if that music was still popular in 2010. As neither of these things were the case, it was unsurprisingly an enormous flop.

Today I’ve been thinking about what should have been on that first album. Here are the songs I would have given him, compiled in a handy Spotify playlist. This is the tracklisting:

1. Alexander Denstad-With – A Little Too Perfect
2. Darin – Can’t Stop Love
3. Ola – Overdrive
4. Kevin Borg – The Last Words
5. David Archuleta – Crush
6. Espen Lind – Unloved
7. Eric Saade – Break Of Dawn
8. Nick Lachey – Ghosts
9. Erik Faber – Century
10. Måns Zelmerlöw – Hold On

Now that is a good pop album! Listen all the way through cos it’s not in order of quality, these are all top quality mum-friendly pop songs. Enjoy!

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