The Voice is wrong to think that pop music is just about the voice If you were to do a line-up of the greatest singing stars, pop idols and rock legends of the past 50 years, it would be a parade of geeks and misfits, covering every body shape and facial cast. For sure, it would have to include Roy Orbison, Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker, Van Morrison, Elton John, Barry White, Freddie Mercury, David Bowie (with his crooked teeth and dead eye), the buck-toothed Bee Gees, the oversized Meat Loaf, lantern-jawed Morrissey, wall-eyed Thom Yorke, a procession of little Napoleons under 5ft 7in (Prince, Paul Simon, Bono, Roger Daltrey and Bob Marley) and a battalion of self-styled freaks such as Tom Waits, Ian Dury, Johnny Rotten, Boy George, Grace Jones, Jarvis Cocker and Michael Jackson (a man so perennially unhappy with his appearance he constantly modified it, to disastrous effect). Yes, there's an abundance of matinee idols and beauty queens whose twinkly eyed good looks carries them a long way but they are massively outweighed by all the bad investments from record companies and would-be Svengalis operating on the flawed formula that extreme beauty plus a modicum of ability equals success. Once in a wondrous moment there may be a magical confluence of sex, style, beauty and musical precociousness that gifts the world an Elvis Presley (if we overlook the acne scars that would have curtailed any male modelling career) but mostly pop is populated by ordinary, gap-toothed, freckle-faced folk whose core talents are will power and a capacity for self-invention. Not to be unkind but neither Madonna nor Lady Gaga were ever going to win any old-fashioned beauty pageants, yet they have become archetypes of sexual power in pop culture. As for Adele, she seems to have been doing just fine without squeezing into a bikini or, indeed, queuing for a talent show. The look of a pop singer is both more significant and less predictable than The Voice would have us believe. What is often overlooked when discussing Adele's extraordinary success is that she is a fantastic writer and multi-instrumentalist who applied herself to creating a potent body of work that gave her voice a place to shine. Perhaps, if the makers of The Voice were going to establish a meaningful handicap in their talent search, they could take off the blinkers and actually do something unheard of in a TV talent show: make contestants perform their own songs, in their own unique way.