Forklifts to fame: a rock star story

Altiyan Childs turned his fortunes around after a dismal debut on The X-Factor Australia. Photo / Supplied

The faces said it all when Altiyan Childs took to the stage for his first audition on The X-Factor Australia.

The audience stared in disbelief as he stumbled around, looking dazed and confused.

Childs' sex was far from on fire that night as he mumbled his way through the Kings of Leon hit.

He'd forgotten the words and appeared more like a crazed, constipated Charles Manson lookalike than a man oozing X factor.

But in a little less than three months, the forklift driver from Sydney had turned his fortunes around.

Last month he won the grand final and is now one of the hottest acts south of the equator.

"Here I was on stage, rusty and clumsy," he tells the Herald on Sunday.

"It was hard to think it was being witnessed; it was on television. I thought it was over."

Childs, 35, is calm and contemplative - nothing like the manic, unhinged rocker he appeared to be at times on the show.

He has barely had a moment to himself since his November 22 win - spending long days in the studio putting the final touches on his debut self-titled album.

Born in Queensland but raised by his father on Sydney's North Shore, Childs has made no secret of the difficulties his family faced: his father was abandoned alongside his baby sister under an apple tree; the 2-month-old girl was murdered and his father grew up to name his son Altiyan and his daughter Altiyana, after her.

It was Childs' father, Jimmy, who pushed him to apply for the show.

Having tasted mild success with the band Masonia 10 years earlier, the frustrated singer had taken a labouring job, all but giving up on his dream.

The story goes some way in explaining his deflated demeanour as he tried to sing Sex on Fire in that first audition.

Scraping through, the kooky singer was never far from controversy throughout the 10-week show, infamously leaving his mentor and judge Ronan Keating red-faced by going AWOL: He had fallen asleep in a cave on a Sydney beach, claiming he needed time out to reconnect with his "beautiful sadness".

But Keating stood loyally by his eccentric protege: "I think a lot of the time the greatest artists in the world are mysterious."

Childs is scruffy, a little odd, and on the wrong side of 30. But he's clearly, well, got X Factor - and this is one dream he's not going to let slip through his hands.

Altiyan Childs appears at The Warehouse, Sylvia Park, in Auckland today at 2pm. And tonight at 7pm, TV3 screens his performance at Coca-Cola Christmas In The Park.