Simon Cowell was nasty – but Louis Walsh is coming for his crown
When the going gets tough, the tough insult Ronan Keating. Such has been the Celebrity Big Brother strategy adopted by acid-tongued pop manager Louis Walsh, who has spent his time inside the Orwellian candy-cane shack insulting practically everyone he has ever worked with.
Invariably egged on by his old X Factor best pal Sharon Osbourne (who has now left CBB after her five-day stint as “lodger”), Walsh has been a one-person mud-flinging machine. During Wednesday night’s episode, he described Take That’s Mark Owen as “looking old” and wondered why Jason Orange had quit the venerable boyband. After all, “he didn’t have to do much”.
“What happened to Jason? He was a nice guy. He was just gone,” said Louis as he chatted with Osbourne and Love Island’s Ekin-Su. “Poof! I don’t know why he left, he only had to do a bit of dancing.”
He also had thoughts on Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. “Does anybody like that girl? Apart from Harry. Does anybody else like her? She’s a bad actress.”
Whatever about Meghan’s acting, you can’t question Walsh’s ability to stir things up on Celebrity Big Brother. In an otherwise tedious return for the ailing reality show, he’s been the gossiping gift that keeps giving. His feet were barely under the CBB multicoloured table than he was laying into his former Boyzone protege Ronan Keating.
“He was such a p___,” he said after Osbourne expressed her liking of Life Is A Rollercoaster. “Everybody thinks he’s a lovely guy, do you know what I mean?” He added: “He hasn’t had a hit record since I left. He sacked me.”
Louis was only getting started. While he had vaguely nice things to say about his former Pop Stars: The Rivals charges Girls Aloud (“Nadine’s a good singer,” he said, referring to Nadine Coyle, before acknowledging he “didn’t always get on” with Cheryl), he had lots of vitriol for tall-haired novelty twins Jedward, whom he had championed on X Factor and briefly managed. “They were vile,” he said, adding, “I got ￡5 million from them. I swear on my mother’s life.”
Jedward hit back on Twitter, dubbing Walsh a “cold-hearted b____” and claiming he hadn’t sent flowers when their mother died. Cold-hearted he may well be, but he’s the spiciest participant by far on Celebrity Big Brother 2024. Then, anyone familiar with his career should not be surprised. On X Factor, Walsh smartly let Simon Cowell take on the role of tall-haired villain and generally came off as pleasant and supportive by contrast.
But he’s long had a stinging side. As far back as 2002 and Pop Stars: The Rivals, he was all too happy to take swipes at pop stars. In an interview that year, he described Robbie Williams as a “jumped-up karaoke singer” and said Kylie Minogue’s success was due to her having “a massively power machine behind her.” He also had strong opinions about his rival judge on Popstars, Pete Waterman of Stock Aitken Waterman.
“He is not used to working with good singers,” he said. “This is the man who brought us Jason, Kylie and no end of shite”.
Walsh would win Popstars, yet his relationship with Girls Aloud quickly frayed. He said last year that he was “too busy” to manage them – and later claimed they couldn’t stand each other. It is fair to say the dislike was mutual. In 2017, Girls Aloud singer Kimberly Walsh said that Louis had made unkind remarks about their appearances (the group will reunite in May in tribute to their late member, Sarah Harding).
“We were doing our video for Love Machine in 2004,” she said, “and Louis Walsh waltzed in and said to us, ‘Oh, none of you are fat any more. Brilliant, that’s great.’”
Walsh has been involved in music since his 20s. He grew up in the County Mayo town of Kiltimagh, where listening to Radio Luxembourg honed his love of pop music. In 1975, he met a young Dublin singer named Johnny Logan, who was then appearing in a run of Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat at Goffs in Kildare. Walsh blagged his way into becoming Logan’s manager (seeing off a lawsuit from the previous holder of that position).
Logan duly won the Eurovision Song Contest twice. But despite his success, he saw himself as a singer-songwriter and had little interest in the glitzy future Walsh had charted out for him “[What’s Another Year] was number one in 10 countries,” said Walsh. “But even though he won it again in 1987 he did not want to be the pop star that I wanted him to be.”
In the early 1990s, he hitched himself to the boyband craze by putting together Boyzone. The band was initially regarded as a joke – their shambolic first appearance on RTé’s Late Late Show was instantly notorious. However, nobody was laughing when, following the break-up of Take That in 1996 and the implosion shortly afterwards of East-17, Boyzone became the biggest boyband in the charts.
Next came Westlife and the start of his relationship with Simon Cowell, with whom he would go on to work as a judge on X Factor. “Westlife never got the credit they deserved. They sold 45 million albums,” he revealed to the Sunday Independent. “Simon made great money. It worked, because I met Simon Cowell and that changed my whole life.”
Walsh was never big box office on the X Factor. He didn’t take immediately to the limelight as Cowell had and instead was just blandly encouraging of the acts in his care. But he could spot potential – nodding through Niall Horan on X Factor when the future One Direction member was rejected as “too young” by Cheryl.
His big talent during those years seemed to be disagreeing with people behind the scenes. There were those aforementioned fallings-out with Girls Aloud and Jedward. He and Ronan Keating never spoke after Keating decided he’d much prefer writing his own songs (the record-buying public much preferred that he didn’t). Despite his early support of Niall Horan, he also turned on One Direction.
“Too much money, too much success too quickly,” he said after the group went on hiatus (he reportedly turned down the opportunity to manage Harry Styles). “Simon created monsters and that was it. They all think they’re going to be solo stars. They’re not. Only Harry. That’s it. Then they’ll be sorry they broke up and it’ll be too late because there’s another boy band. That’s what always happens in boy bands.”
He was correct about Harry Styles becoming a star, though the rest of One Direction might quibble with his prediction that they would quickly return to obscurity. But Walsh is unlikely to have reflected too profoundly on his comments – he would have been busy looking for another pop star to insult.
Now, at 71, he’s left his mark once again. Whatever happens on Celebrity Big Brother – Walsh has expressed his concerns about being voted off next week – the impresario is the breakout participant in the series (revived by ITV following its binning by Channel 5 in 2018).
The takeaway thus far is that Walsh’s true ability is probably as a world-class hatchet man. He clearly couldn’t care a fig what anybody thinks of him. He has spent his week on CBB merrily burning bridges – and, while he can expect a heated response when he leaves, what fantastic entertainment it has provided. Forget about Love Island, Masked Singer or The Traitors. The reality TV treat we didn’t know we needed in 2024 has turned out to be Louis Walsh going at Jedward with all barrels blazing.
