Go on my son: could Gary Lineker's son George be the next Simon Cowell?

It’s 10am in Quo Vadis in Soho, and George Lineker is drinking the first cheeky half of the day with his workmates. It would be tempting to judge them for this. But the photographer bought the beers. ‘It would be rude not to,’ they protest. Looking like four candidates for The Apprentice, George and his pals want their website to be the next Myspace — only more successful. A year after its launch, GetSung, where aspiring artists can upload music videos, has 5,000 artists posting self-penned songs and covers and gets a million hits a week. They’ve already come close to finding the Next Big Thing in the music industry — the up-and-coming Liverpool boyband MiC Lowry, finalists in this year’s MOBO UnSung competition, are one of their discoveries.

If their ambition is to break new acts, they have already succeeded in launching one career in particular. GetSung has given George Lineker a rebranding and a new lease of life. Lineker, 22, is the eldest son of Match of the Day’s Gary. He spent his late teens being mercilessly ribbed by the tabloids for being the former England football captain’s ‘fun-loving’ (code for: no job) son, and pictures of him emerging from London nightclubs with glamour models and Big Brother contestants regularly made the gossip columns. George now runs the social media side of GetSung from his home in Ascot, where he lives with mum Michelle and three younger brothers, aged 21, 18 and 17. A self-confessed Twitter addict with 79,000 followers, he takes credit for getting his dad to sign up to the site (Gary has 3.14m followers).

Lineker Junior became friends with Bobby Drewett, 24, owner of a Fulham-based catering company, and Nick Searle, 25, an electrician, after they met at a party a few years ago. It was Searle who came up with the idea for a music-sharing website: ‘I was watching a TV talent show and thinking, “You’ve got millions of people who apply to this. What happens to the ones who don’t get through?”’ Drewett brought in Craig O’Donnell, 29, who runs IT company Just Laptops. All four of them have put five-figure sums into the company and now they have three shareholders: Nick Raymonde (the A&R man credited with Take That’s breakthrough), Joe Cohen (formerly of Match.com and Ticketmaster) and — surprise, surprise — Gary Lineker. Drewett in particular talks a big game, saying in a recent interview about the dwindling audience for The X Factor that ‘every dog has its day’. So are they really trying to take on Simon Cowell? ‘Yeah,’ Drewett laughs, ‘It’s just us versus him.’ They’ve certainly got the outfits for it, all dressed at ten in the morning as if they’re about to go to a nightclub, shirts and trousers all precision-pressed. I’m guessing, in several cases, by their mums. I discover later that out of the team of four, three of them still live at home.

George, meanwhile, isn’t as billed. He is such a Mini-Me of his father that it’s hard not to stare. I was expecting a bit of a geezer and/or a wide boy and he is neither. He is softly spoken, impeccably polite, sweet and self-effacing. Before he started taking GetSung seriously, George had acquired something of a reputation thanks to Twitter, where he would micro-blog what looked like a fairly hectic social life. Now, he says, he’s more restrained. His latest posts are about hanging out with his mate Calum Best (33-year-old son of George), making chicken kebabs (‘I give up with this bastard cooking business’) and mastering pull-ups at the gym (illustrated with semi-naked Instagram pics). His only vice, he says, is spread-betting across a series of football matches every Saturday. The bets are interlinked and cumulative: ‘So obviously you never win,’ he explains, ‘I’ll bet £10 or £20. If you win, you win £1,000.’ How often does that happen? ‘Maybe three or four times in four years. I’ve won more than I’ve lost.’

His music tastes? Chris Brown, Trey, Tinie Tempah. Does he have a girlfriend? ‘No.’ Are you sad about that? ‘I’ll live,’ he grins. He only goes out at weekends now, he claims. During the week he works all day and stays at home in the evenings to watch MasterChef or Traffic Cops. But even his reformed Twitter feed suggests a one-man TOWIE episode at times. ‘Essex-bound. Let’s have a go.’ ‘Powerful weekend then. Curtains for me now.’ ‘How am I not asleep yet? Takes the moral piss.’ Good clubs are ‘double decent’, a description that also fits his favourite new hangout, Kensington’s Bodo’s Schloss. He goes to Nobu for ‘a bit of dinner’. When something bad happens it’s ‘agg’, as in ‘I don’t need this agg on the day of rest.’

When he was 13, his parents divorced — a situation which was, he shrugs, ‘the same as it was for any other kid, I think’. His father then married model Danielle, nearly 20 years his junior (and closer in age to George). How does he get on with her? ‘Fine. They live in London so I stay at theirs quite a bit.’ Growing up, he had no idea what he wanted to do, except that he could become a manager or an agent — something he might still consider. His father’s agent is his godfather and they’re close. ‘Of course, when you’re ten you want to be a footballer,’ he says, shyly.

He’s obviously super-fit. Last month he ran five miles to raise £5,000 for Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research and is barely sweating in the pictures. As a baby he was severely ill with a rare form of leukaemia, and both he and his father frequently raise money for leukaemia charities. It’s not an obvious thing for him to talk about because, well, he was a baby when it happened, but he recently retweeted this from his dad: ‘I know what it’s like to have a child fighting for their life. You do anything you think is for the best.’

George went to £25,000-a-year Charterhouse boarding school in Surrey. After school, he initially missed out on a university place (‘Didn’t get into uni... cheers school u massive knobbers!’ he tweeted at the time) and his father was upset. He ended up studying business and media at Bristol UWE and Roehampton University for a while before dropping out. Reading between the lines, things are better now that George is focused on GetSung. In a recent interview Gary said: ‘I’m not his mate, I’m his dad. You can’t be their mate because there are times when you have to try and guide... I think we have a solid relationship.’

George used to get abuse on Twitter about doing nothing with his life but ‘since I started GetSung that stopped’. Does he mind the criticism? ‘I don’t care, it doesn’t bother me. It’s no one who knows me.’ He admits he has revised his attitude to Twitter, especially since columnist Michael Hogan wrote (sarcastically?) that George was ‘the voice of male British youth’. ‘I’ve toned it down and I tweet a bit less,’ he says, ‘I didn’t mind it [the column] and I laughed at myself... It’s fine when you’re younger. But I thought it was time... not exactly to grow up but...’ He trails off. It made you self-conscious, I suggest. He nods.

So what about the playboy tag? Is that all over now? ‘GetSung is my priority. I’m not a playboy. I just do GetSung and I go out with my mates on the weekend.’ And where does he go to get away from it all, I ask? He looks confused. ‘Get away from what?’ You know — work, friends, city life. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. I don’t really need to get away. Ascot is pretty chilled anyway.’ Fair point. As he gets up to leave, I realise that neither he nor his mates have finished their drinks. The rebranding is working. Perhaps Simon Cowell really had better watch his back.