[Harry!]

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news

In a career spanning rock, Chinese opera and cartoon pop, Damon Albarn has always been one step ahead of popular taste. But the Blur singer found himself out on a limb after demanding an immediate cull of the X Factor.

Invited to guest edit the Radio 4 Today programme, Albarn identified the “instant celebrity” culture espoused by the top-rated talent search as the source of society’s ills.

“We need to dismantle very significant parts of our culture and really re-examine them,” said the singer who followed the ground-breaking animated group Gorillaz with the Chinese-themed opera Monkey, Journey to the West. He said: “For a start you have to get rid of things like the X Factor immediately.”

Albarn, 39, explained: “I think it sends out all the wrong messages. I think it’s creating a mindset which suggests that you can get something for nothing, that it’s easy to acquire status and fame, which is rubbish. It should be one of the hardest things to do.”

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But Albarn’s comments caused a sharp intake of breath across the music industry, which has become reliant on the X Factor’s conveyor built of instant stars to avert a sales collapse.

Leona Lewis, winner of the Simon Cowell-produced ITV show last year, was the only artist to challenge Amy Winehouse’s dominance of album sales this year. Lewis’s debut album, Spirit, sold one million copies in just 29 days.

Leon Jackson, the 18 year-old Scottish singer who triumphed in this year’s series, was catapulted to the Christmas No 1 slot, days after 12 million viewers watched his victory.

Jackson’s ballad When You Believe sold 276,000 copies in its first week of release. Shayne Ward, the 2005 X Factor winner enjoyed strong Christmas sales along with Paul Potts, the first winner of Britain’s Got Talent, another Cowell production.

By contrast, it took Albarn’s group Blur five years of struggle, during which they were nearly dropped by their record company, before they emerged in 1994 with Parklife, the era-defining Britpop album.

Rather than repeat that success, Albarn retired Blur, began exploring African music in Mali and this year recorded a concept album about London, with a new group, The Good, The Bad & The Queen.

A spokesman for HMV said: “X Factor does raise expectations of some people with no talent but it’s also a new way of introducing genuine talent direct to the public.

“Leona may never have found a career without the show. Girls Aloud and Will Young have built careers from talent shows. The paying public votes with their feet.”

As an alternative to the X Factor’s cheap thrills, Albarn prescribed a dose of Radio 4. “My entire life has been supplemented by Radio 4,” he said, joining Ulrika Jonsson among the station’s celebrity fans.

Albarn, who based the Blur hit This Is A Low around the shipping forecast, continued: “My earliest memories are of mum tuning into The Archers, to my modern middle-aged anxiety, not being able to sleep at night, being calmed by night-time radio. I am Radio 4 and Radio 4 is me. I’d like it being piped constantly in my coffin.”

The singer used his edition of the Today programme to examine a recycling project in Africa, nuclear disarmament and his own passion for table tennis.