Gerard McGarry's blog

I wanna try something a little bit different with my American Idol elimination show coverage tonight. Rather than recap the whole thing as we do on the live shows, I want to pick out the parts of the show that we really need to talk about - the pure discussion points.

Seacrest v Cowell

If you remember on Rolling Stones night, Ryan Seacrest and Simon Cowell appeared to have a 'hostile moment', when Ryan walked up to Cowell and asked him for constructive criticism for Mike Lynche. Cowell responded poorly to that.

On the results show, Seacrest reprised his "in your face" behaviour with Simon. At first I assumed that it was intended to show there was no malice intended, but Cowell wasn't in the mood for fun. He told Ryan to back off and stop eyeballing him. Even though he offered a handshake to prove they were friends, it was a very stiff and awkward moment.

So I'm confused. Is this hostility between Cowell and Seacrest genuine, or is it manufactured to cause a bit of controversy on the show?

Tonight's the night when American Idol gets serious. We're down to the Top 12 contestants, and those contestants will be singing the hits of The Rolling Stones. This is interesting for me, because being a Led Zeppelin guy, I've never really given the Stones any due consideration. Shocking, but tonight I may be hearing some of their songs for the first time sung by voices other than Mick Jagger's.

Michael Lynche

We begin with Michael Lynche, who briefly talks about his time growing up in St Petersburg, and about how he drifted away from football after his mother died. He's singing a Stones song called Miss You. Like his performance last week, Mike alternates between a husky vocal and a falsetto. There's a sweeping shot of the judges, and we see Kara boogieing along.

One suspects there's a touch of viral intent behind this video of Dave Grohl going a little bit loopy in the studio after one too many cups of coffee. But seriously, how many coffees is too many? Well, probably however many Dave just drunk.

Here's a video of him looning around the studio, presumably high on caffeine and being very annoying. I've known drummers to get punched for more sedate behaviour. Is this newsworthy? No, not really. No more than my own addiction to bacon sandwiches. But I suspect the real goal is to draw attention to Grohl's latest collaboration with Queens Of The Stone Age's Joshua Homme and Led Zeppelin legend John Paul Jones.

I've been watching HBO's Hung for the last few weeks since it premiered here in the UK. If you're not familiar with the concept of the series, let me lay it down for you. Thomas Jane plays lead character Ray Drekker. Ray is at the end of a serious run of bad luck - he's a poorly paid high school football coach, his wife has left him, his house is uninhabitable because it caught fire, and his teenage kids - who were living with him - have had to move in with their mother. Oh, and did I mention he can't afford to repair the house and lives at the bottom of his garden in a tiny tent?

Yeah, things aren't looking too good for ol' Ray. Desperate to find additional ways of making the cash he needs, he signs up for an entrepreneurship class where the participants are urged by the tutor to find their most lucrative tool. Being a guy, Ray interprets 'tool' in the only way he can - relating it to his sizable man-parts. He meets - and sleeps with - another participant in the course, Tanya Skagle.

Somewhere along the line, Ray and Tanya partner up as 'happiness consultants', a lovely euphemism for male prostitution, with Tanya as Ray's pimp.

It's ironic that I've been blasting the first two Bat Out Of Hell albums over the last couple of days. It was totally a whim, a need for Meat Loaf's distinctive brand of blustery performance rock. I sure as hell didn't know he had a single coming out, and I sure as hell didn't need his classic material in my head when I heard this.

Everything about Meat Loaf's new single, Los Angeloser, is hand-me-down. He's wearing Elvis' cast-off costumes (and possibly his accent), he's got the slutty police costumes from George Michael's Outside video. And that song! Where did he dredge this from? It's a country-rock plodder that barely gives Meat a chance to show off his considerable talents. If they're still buried in there somewhere.

To anyone who saw Mr Loaf's recent stint as a judge on Britain's Popstar to Operastar show, this is the next step on his descent into celebrity hell. It's like he's been morphing into the rich Texan from The Simpsons - an eccentric, slightly crazy-eyed fella. And I hate saying this, because I'm actually loving the vintage Bat Out Of Hell material right now, but Meat Loaf is making the classic mistake. There's no "Hand of Steinman" on this material.

Ken Grimwood's Replay is a book which fell in my lap about ten years ago. It blew my mind with a tale of a man who kept dying and reliving his life from different points in his past each time.

Replay revolves around the story of Jeff Winston, a 43 year old man who dies in the first page of the book. But his death is unusual. Whatever force causes the heart attack, propells him back in time, and Winston wakes up in 1963. The last words he hears in 1988 are his wife, about to launch into another tirade about their limping, tired marriage. After Winston establishes that he's really in 1963, the contrast is clear - he's been reborn before some of the greatest mistakes of his life. He's gone from being a middle-aged man to a college student with all the choices of life at his feet again.

There's an element of the American Idol watching public that hates Kara DioGuardi. Hated her presence last year when her arrival changed the chemistry of the American Idol judging panel forever. Blamed her for dislodging original judge Paula Abdul and taking away one of Idol's most recognisable assets.

But, as Lilly Scott sang a couple of weeks ago, A Change Is Gonna Come. And with the departure of Simon Cowell, American Idol will shift into a new era altogether - one in which it's not the only singing competition on the block which Americans can audition for. There's going to be Amercian X Factor. So, how does American Idol compete with the undeniably more sensationalist style of competition that Mr Cowell is known for running? Well, they need to pick some winners.

Can't you see the change this year? Last week's Idol shows were awash with contestants playing instruments. There are a couple of contestants who claim never to have seen Idol before (which means they actively avoided it or held it in disdain). The end result has been a couple of clever comments - like when one of the judges claimed that Crystal being in the competition might encourage other seasoned artists to try out next year.

One of the downsides of this internet-enabled age is that anybody can start a petition, regardless of how ill-advised or pointless that petition may be.

Take, for example, the case of Alex Lambert. Alex was one of four finalists eliminated from last week's American Idol. Admittedly, he was one of my favourites, and the guy had a lot of talent. He was definitely the most talented of the four who got eliminated.

Therefore, some crackpot(s) have started a campaign to have Alex returned to the series, despite failing to get enough public support to keep him in. Now, for those of you who don't understand how shows like Idol work, I put the words public support in italics, as a clue. Look, I even did it twice!

The petition (see it here on Change.org) claims:

I feel horribly underwhelmed by this week's top ten. I'd say 40% of the songs mean nothing to me. Only a couple really impress me - like Alicia Keys and Gabriella Cilmi. And two I actively hate. Yes, hate. And those two are Justin Bieber and McLean - both remarkably dishonest songs that espouse romance when in reality they're about boy trying to convince girl to do something using romance as leverage.

I've got a bit of a bee in my bonnet about this kind of thing at the moment. If you want to hear a song that is honest about the emotions that pass between teenage girls and boys, then can I recommend you listen to Meat Loaf's Paradise By The Dashboard Light - possibly one of the most funny, biting and honest 'love' songs you'll ever hear. But first, here's this week's top ten...

In three short weeks American Idol has whittled 24 finalists down to a meagre 12. It means we've transitioned from the 'big numbers' stages (30 million applied, only 24 remain!) to the Top 12, the serious contenders. These are the singers that we're hoping will set the charts ablaze in the next year or so.

As promised in my elimination post, here's our run-down of the American Idol 2010 Top 12. They're listed in alphabetical order by surname, but in our opinion, they're not created equal! Here's the verdict on the Top 12: