This article is taken from the April 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Lewis Capaldi is either an improbable popstar, or an inevitable one, and where you stand on that depends a lot on your relationship to social media. If the first way you encounter the Scottish singer-songwriter is through his songs — guileless, unguarded ballads delivered in a soulful rasp — then the man himself is probably going to come as a surprise.

Because Capaldi sings like a heartthrob, but he doesn’t look like most people’s idea of one. Including his own: pale, scruffy and overweight, the 26-year-old regularly jokes about his own unattractiveness. “I’ve found in my travels that I am equally repulsive to women halfway around the world as I am to them in my hometown, which is a heart-warming thing,” he told one interviewer.

Capaldi sings like a heartthrob, but he doesn’t look like most people’s idea of one

His image can only really be described as one of aggressive anti-hotness. A London Underground campaign featured a deeply unflattering selfie of him with a towel wrapped round his head, laconically tagging himself “the Scottish Beyoncé”. To promote the lead single of his next album (Broken by Desire to be Heavenly Sent), he ran billboard ads in which he wore nothing but tighty whities, moobs and belly on full display.

The photo came from the single’s video, which was — hilariously — a shot-for-shot remake of Wham’s video for “Club Tropicana”, with Capaldi taking the place of both George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. The joke, of course, is that where the Wham boys were improbably beautiful, Lewis Capaldi looks like Lewis Capaldi.

He’s a kind of artist who was supposed to have been killed off by this shallow millennium. The Simon Cowell talent shows which dominated pop music in the noughties arrived with a promise of elevating the overlooked — and ended up making celebrities out of people who just happened to be stunning. (Fat Rick Waller and drab Susan Boyle are the exceptions here, and they enjoyed only fleeting success.)

The dominance of the beautiful was so obvious, we even got a show dedicated to taking the looks out of the talent search: The Voice. To date, it cannot claim to have created a single star to rival those who’ve come out of Pop Idol and X Factor. The public could pretend to extend an ear to the unglamorous; in practice, though, ugliness remained as disqualifying as ever for a career on stage.

Social media heightened that. Artists became influencers in the service of their own product, posed and filtered to perfection. Sexiness is so integral to celebrity now that a few years ago, female artists started to throw down mentions of starting an OnlyFans (the subscription-based social network largely used by porn performers) as a brag.

But social media doesn’t only reward the gorgeous. It also stans the authentic and, especially, the funny — and Capaldi is both. When he first made his mark, some critics lumped him in with the wave of white male folk adjacent artists kicked off by Ed Sheeran, and he often seemed to be counted the least promising of the pack. It was presumed that his clowning would ultimately undercut the tender, serious music. Even if the Brits were suckers for his self-deprecation, surely it would be a turn-off for the congenitally irony-proof Americans. But what this prediction missed was that his seeming-ordinariness is the essence of his star quality.

Social media doesn’t only reward the gorgeous. It also stans the authentic and, especially, the funny

He talks frankly about how the pressure of fame has caused him to have panic attacks and exacerbated his Tourette’s, but he never talks like a victim. He doesn’t take himself seriously, he says, because he doesn’t expect people to like him. The result is that he comes over as immensely likeable, and this translates into success. In 2019, “Someone You Loved” spent sevenweeks as UK number one, and broke him in the US too.

The neuroscience of music says that our pleasure in a song is intimately bound up with familiarity. We enjoy the prickle of anticipation when we know what’s coming next. That’s why radio play was so indispensable to twentieth-century success.

It’s also why my delight in the “Forget Me” video turned me into a Capaldi fan: by the time I’d finished watching it on repeat to catch all the details, the song had snuck its way into my heart. So had Capaldi himself. You can overstate his hideousness. Being funny is sexy. He’s fanciable, in part, precisely because he plays down how fanciable he is. And his hometown girlfriend was future Love Island contestant Paige Turley, which suggests it’s not just fame that’s made him desirable.

The fame — or rather the reason he’s famous — does help, though. It’s tempting to describe his songs as simple, and in a sense they are. “Pointless” (Broken By Desire’s second single) is a sweet recitation of the routines of love: coffee in the morning, lighting the fire. You could play it at a wedding and no one would snigger.

There’s nothing as attractive as someone who trusts you with his faults

But there’s often an unexpected edge to his lyrics, usually aimed at himself. “Forget Me” is about how he’d rather be loathed by an ex than irrelevant to her — a declaration of flawed masculinity from someone who cheerfully acknowledges every demerit.

His vulnerability is comic on social media, charming in his music, but equally winning in both mediums. In an age of perfection, there’s nothing as attractive as someone who trusts you with his faults.