The father-of-one broke down when contestant Josh Daniel took to the stage and gave an extremely emotional rendition of Labrinth’s song Jealous. Describing the reason behind his choice, the 21-year-old said that it was a tribute to his best friend who died two years ago.
"I kind of see it in the sense that I’m jealous that he’s now happy in heaven; that he’s moved onto a better place and that he can’t still be with me,” he said to the camera.
While the song touched all of the judges, Simon's emotional reaction really pulled at our hearts and he admitted to ITV’s Loose Women that he was thinking about his mum at the time.
The X Factor judge sadly lost his mum just a few days before the auditions, and he confessed that it was quite difficult listening to the song.
"I mean it was quite near when it all happened. I think it was the last audition and I wasn’t really expecting what happened and of course the lyric of the song and it was quite difficult because I thought: ‘God this is going to be really hard to sit through this.”
And while the emotional scene could have been edited out, Simon told The Sun that he let the show’s producers make the decision about whether to keep it in or not: "You can't censor stuff like that. In the end I kind of just said to them, 'I'm OK with it', but I don't want to approve anything, I'll let you make your decision as to what is acceptable and what isn't."
Simon, who was clearly overcome with emotion and asked the judges to go straight to a vote, said his late mum was a huge fan of the show and he found it hard to go back.
"She loved the show which sort of made the decision: ‘When do you go back to work on something like this?’ because it’s hard. And it really was what I thought she would have said to me which was: ‘No 100% you’ve got to go back to work'."
