Sing-a-long Celebrities

Welcome to this week’s edition of Mecca Bingo’s celebrity column, which has a distinctly musical feel to it. Every week you can play online bingo here at Mecca Bingo and tune into our fabulous online bingo celebrity gossip column – Enjoy!

With the final of Comic Relief Does Fame Academy looming imminently as this column is being written, our thoughts are turned to the many celebs of past and present who have tried to forge a secondary career as a singer, some have succeeded while others have failed. We’re thinking here of soap stars, models and reality TV stars. Many celebrities have heard the call of the recording studio beckon them away from their chosen claim to fame, and many have lived to regret heeding its call…

This kind of celebrity talent cross-pollination is not too surprising in some circumstances; after all, many actors and actresses started off at stage school where singing and dancing were as much a part of the curriculum as acting. In celebrity world, the largest amount of wannabe singers are of course drawn from the Pandora’s Box that is soapland. Just look at little Ray Quinn for example; the runner-up of this year’s X Factor. Ray played teenager Antony Murray in the (now defunct) C4 soap Brookside from 2000-2003 and managed to snaffle a fair few awards for his performance, which saw his character take fatal revenge on the girl who had been bullying him and making his life on The Close a misery. Who knew that a short four years later he’d be back on our screens, this time swinging his stuff to a selection of rat pack tunes in front of Sharon Osbourne, Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh? His voice may have not been up to winner Leona Lewis’s standard, but Ray certainly had bags of energy and wasn’t a bad singer by any means.

Some soap stars have gone about forging a music career in a rather more traditional way however, i.e. getting a recording contract rather than appearing on a reality TV show. No discussion of actors-turned-singers could be complete without the incomparable Kylie and Jason. The two Neighbours stars went on to enjoy musical successes individually and as a duo after they left the Australian soap. Jason’s career may have faltered somewhat at points, but the two certainly managed to shake off their soapstar label with some success, especially Kylie who is one of the most successful solo female artists around.

Kylie and Jason’s success had the sometimes unfortunate side-effect of encouraging many a soap actor and actress to give singing a go, with varying degrees of success. Another former Brookie star, Jennifer Ellison, has attempted to make it work as a solo artist but hasn’t proved too much of a chart-botherer to date. Although her first single reached number six in 2003, her second single wasn’t released until a year later and only reached number 13. Plans to release an album were shelved and no more Ellison-warbling is on the cards at this point. More successful so far is yet another Australian soapstar; Delta Goodrem. Like Kylie and Jason before her, Delta started off her career in the limelight on Neighbours. She is now equally as well known for her musical abilities; as a singer, songwriter and pianist she has won several ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association Music Awards) awards. Before you start thinking though that Australian-soapstar-to-successful-singer is an easy and trouble free move, cast your mind back to some slightly less successful attempts from Down Under:

Stefan Dennis has played Paul Robinson in Neighbours on and off since 1993. In 1989 he released a single “Don’t it Make You Feel Good” which failed to set the UK charts alight when it entered at number 16. This was impressive positioning in comparison to his second single however, which failed to make the Top 40 at all. Along a similar vein is Craig McLachlan. Who could forget this Neighbours and Home and Away star’s rendition of Mona? It actually reached number 2 in the charts but, again, failed to secure him a chart career of any longevity.    

It’s not just soapstars that give the old singing lark a bash of course; the number of former Big Brother contestants who have attempted to extend their celebrity shelf-life based on their signing voices is more than we care to remember. Think Nichola Holt from BB1, Nadia Almada from BB5 and Lesley Sanderson from BB6 for a start, and yet, not one seems to have actually succeeded. Showing that perhaps reality TV shows are not the route into genuine celebrity status, or at least talented celebrity status, that some might think.

Slightly less common than the TV-to-recording-studio route is the opposite approach: singer to stage. Both ex-Hearsay singer Kym Marsh and ex-teenybopper Billie Piper have managed to successfully shake off their not so credible musical histories and go on to enjoy much more credible acting roles, in Corrie and Doctor Who (among other things) respectively. Proving that you can side step from one area of celebrity into another if you have the talent to back it up.

Come back next week for more celebrity ponderings and in the meantime, play online bingo here at Mecca for the chance to win cash and bingo jackpots every day.