Matt Cardle

The Corn Exchange, Saturday 3rd March, £26.50

[rating:2/5]

Here are some FUN FACTS you might not know about Matt Cardle:

– His favourite food is sushi, because it’s healthy!

– To relax, Matt likes to lie down and listen to music, go fishing, or go skateboarding!

– The thing Matt missed most when he was on the X Factor was his dog!

Needless to say, when we heard that we’d blagged the hottest gig tickets in town, we were pretty excited. So excited that we devoted an entire evening to poster making, researching FUN FACTS, and finding (in)appropriate underwear to throw at the X Factor’s most forgettable winner.

Working on the poster

We were going to pre-drink to One Direction, but Spotify told me I’ve listened to too much teen pop recently, so we were forced to venture into the unknown: Letters, Matt Cardle’s debut album, which he has mostly written himself.

During this time, we made two discoveries:

1) Every single one of Matt Cardle’s songs sounds the same. They are genuinely indistinguishable.

2) Matt Cardle’s middle name is Sheridan.

But bad music wasn’t going to let us ruin our night, and a cheeky text from my Mum reminded us that what really matters is not the quality of the music, but rather what underwear we were going to throw.

Saskia’s Mum? So yesterday.

He didn’t want a bloz.

But as the night went on, and we reached track 6, Faithless (more on this bad boy later), we realised that we really don’t like Matt Cardle. At all. Not even X Factor eXpert Rob Young could persuade us otherwise.

The harsh truth.

But we decided to give Matt the benefit of the doubt and so, poster in hand we set off for what we hoped would be the best night of our lives.

It’s unclear why we’ve gone for these facial expressions.

Upon arriving we were greeted by a sea of ex-Jezza K audience members and past guests. Who had paid £26.50 to see Matt Cardle. Oh well, we thought. We will drink some pints and do some fitting in.

Drinking some pints, doing some fitting in.

The lights dimmed, we held onto our seats excitedly, and the moment we were waiting for finally arrived. Matt Cardle entered the stage. And he was looking good, despite the fact that he’d forgotten to wear his trademark hat. But luckily, this did not fool us; we knew who he was because of his VERY DISTINGUISHABLE songs.

All at once the stage turned red, Matt started singing and it was all worth it. We held up our poster, flung forth our underwear and kind of hummed along. Yes, the songs were very bad, but they were in tune. Whatever you say about him, Matt can sing. In fact, the main problem wasn’t the singing, or the smell of the crowd, but rather Matt’s non-existent stage banter.

“This song is a personal one,” he said of Beat of a Breaking Heart. “But I don’t want to talk about it.” Excellent. Oh well, we thought. That one’s a toughie. He’ll regale us with more fun tales later.

He did not.

“This one’s called Faithless, it’s about these two girls,” is as good as it got.

Naughty Matt tried to trick us by merging all of his songs into one, and to be honest his singing voice wasn’t vastly different to his speaking voice, which didn’t help us to decipher between songs. But luckily Matt’s lighting director anticipated this problem and employed a rainbow technique, whereby the first song was played against a red backdrop, the second was played against a yellow backdrop, the third was played against a pink backdrop… you get the picture.

Yes, we had to leave before the end because we were falling asleep, but that’s unimportant. What is important is that Matt Cardle now has my mobile number, and there’s a slim chance that he could father my offspring.