TV3 Signs Brit Award Winner For The X Factor NZ

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Friday 21 December, 2012

TV3 Signs Brit Award Winner For The X Factor NZ

International pop sensation Daniel Bedingfield will join Stan Walker on the judging panel for TV3’s The X Factor NZ.

One of the most successful artists produced by New Zealand, the Kiwi-born singer-songwriter has enjoyed phenomenal international success: including multiple number one UK singles, international album sales in the multi-millions and a BRIT Award for Best British Male Artist.

Bedingfield is best known for the hit ‘Gotta Get Thru This’, famously recorded in his bedroom, which topped the UK charts. The track also cracked the top 10 on the US Billboard Hot 100, and earned Bedingfield a Grammy nomination for Best Dance Recording.

His first album, also called ‘Gotta Get Thru This’, sold over four million copies worldwide, and gave Bedingfield a second UK number one with ‘If You’re Not the One’, as well as three further top 10 UK hits. His second album, ‘Second First Impression’, reached number eight in the UK, and Bedingfield released the EP ‘Stop the Traffik – Secret Fear’ earlier in 2012.

Bedingfield is known around the world as a British singer-songwriter, but the Kiwi-born musician says he is looking forward to being part of the search for the next great New Zealand recording star.

"Sweet, I get to spend three months in New Zealand with a bunch of random geniuses, coaching them, and perhaps helping them live their wildest dreams (can't help the ones who want to breed sea monkeys),” he says.

“I've been voice coaching around the world for a little while and I find it particularly exciting to assist in the development of raw talent. There's something particularly refreshing about engaging with wide-eyed innocence."

Daniel Bedingfield is the second announced Judge for The X Factor NZ, which will be hosted by Dominic Bowden. Bedingfield joins Stan Walker on what will be a four-person judging panel; the final two female judges will be revealed in the coming months.

TV3 is also delighted to announce Samsung Electronics as the technology partner for The X Factor NZ. Samsung Electronics joins Broadcast Sponsor Ford New Zealand, and programme partners McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. NZ on Air is a minority funder of the show.

Entry information is now available online, as well as details of the pre-audition tour, which takes place in early 2013. Starting in Queenstown on January 5, and finishing in Kaitaia on Waitangi Day, The X Factor NZ will travel to 27 locations throughout New Zealand to find contestants for the first local version of the global television phenomenon.

The X Factor NZ is a SYCO owned format and will be co-produced by MediaWorks and FremantleMedia Australia.

For more information, including pre-audition dates and entry forms, visit TV3.co.nz/thexfactornz or join the conversation at facebook.com/xfactornz.

About The X Factor NZ

Hosted by Dominic Bowden, The X Factor NZ is the first local version of the global television phenomenon format put on the map by music mogul Simon Cowell.

The world’s leading singing talent search, The X Factor has launched numerous internationally successful music careers, including Leona Lewis, Reece Mastin and One Direction. The X Factor artists have globally sold over 100 million records, achieving 250 number ones, 270 Top 10, and 501 Top 50 hit records.

In 2013, New Zealanders will have the chance to put their singing talent to the test, as The X Factor NZ travels the length and breadth of the country, from Invercargill to Kaitaia, with one goal - to discover the next great New Zealand recording artist.

The X Factor NZ is open to singers of aged 14 and up, either solo performers or groups. Contestants who make it through the audition process are split into categories – Boys under 25, Girls under 25, the over 25s and the Groups.

Daniel Bedingfield and Stan Walker are the first announced of the four judges of The X Factor NZ. Each category is mentored by one of judges, who will work alongside the contestants as they compete for a prize that includes a recording contract with Sony Music Entertainment New Zealand.

About Daniel Bedingfield

Daniel Bedingfield's pop wizardry earned him a BRIT Award, six U.K. Top 10 singles and 4 million in album sales from 2001 to ’04. But with that success came unforeseen consequences: a protracted contractual tug-of-war with a record label resistant to his artistic growth. Now, after eight years, the songwriter who rocketed to the top of the pop world with “Gotta Get Thru This” is back in a huge way, with new batches of genre-splicing, pulse-pounding music that not only appeals to a broad spectrum of fans but reveals Bedingfield's resolve to control his own fate.

“The record company simply wanted me to keep repeating the same formula," he says. “If I’d done that, it would have sounded massively dated the moment it came out. Music has to be dangerous. You have to be mortally terrified of everyone hating it, or you’re not doing the right thing. So I don’t mind failure. What I do mind is being stuck in a cage for eight years.”

Bedingfield's new material moves adroitly between dance-floor bangers and R&B-spiked rock, between freak-funk and chilling piano ballads, between effects-heavy electro and sunny island reggae. All brim with his distinctive melodic sense and arching romanticism. “There are a million ways of self-expression, and I can’t hold to one style," he says. "There isn’t one sound in my head, there are thousands."

To share those sounds, Bedingfield struck out on his own, mounting a campaign through PledgeMusic that has reconnected him with his still-ardent fans and fostered a spate of new releases — each seemingly springing from a different creative impulse.

His percussive single ‘Rocks Off’ (released in March) and its accompanying video offer a whimsical argument that “nothing, not even the hottest girls in the world, can distract me from my music,” he says. Its B-side, the disco-funk ‘It’s Not Me, It’s You’only hints at the spectrum of music to come.

The follow-up is a deliriously catchy EP, ‘top The Traffik - Secret Fear,’ the proceeds from which in part benefit Bedingfield’s global charity Stop The Traffik, an organization that fights to prevent human slavery and works to prosecute the traffickers.

Two more EPs will follow in 2013, each showcasing a different facet of an artist who is eager to make up for lost time, who is “absolutely unafraid to suffer the consequences of my own mistakes” and who, he points out wryly, does his best studio work stark naked. “Except when people are around,” he says with a smile. “Then I wear boxers.”

The best expectation, he warns, is to have no expectations at all. Which is what Bedingfield started with so many years ago before ‘Gotta Get Thru This’ elevated him to U.K. garage hero.

The son of New Zealand philanthropists who relocated to London to work in the areas affected by the Brixton riots, Bedingfield and his two talented sisters, Natasha and Nikola Rachelle (The Golden Phoenix), were reared in a musical household surrounded by the diverse sounds of the time — the Police, Rage Against the Machine, Nirvana, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan — as well as the reggae embraced by his family’s many Jamaican friends.

Those sounds still inform artist who fully embraces the DIY ethic: His new material, recorded on his M Box in bathtubs, state parks, parking lots, hotels and studios all over the world, draws from a sonic palette as vast as the planet itself.

“When I sit down to write a song, it's as if my whole self demands its birth — I don't really have any choice. And it has a core sound that I have to be faithful to," he says. “Which is why I’m not good at co-writing and why, apart from collaborations with some truly genius musical friends, I'm beginning to play most of the instruments myself.”

Ambitious, bold, brazen even; with this EP Daniel is taking a distinctly different approach from his former pop-loving, uber-calculated chart topping debut and venturing into brave new territory to carve out his claim as the wild and diverse wide-eyed crooner he's always been.

MediaWorks NZ Limited (website: www.mediaworks.co.nz) is New Zealand’s leading private sector broadcast and online media company. Through its specialist divisions – MediaWorks TV, MediaWorks Radio and MediaWorks Interactive, it owns and operates the TV3 and FOUR television networks, national radio brands The Edge, The Rock, MORE FM, Kiwi FM, RadioLIVE, LiveSPORT, The Sound, The Breeze, George FM and Mai FM, plus several local radio stations, and a family of websites.

ENDS

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