Fame Of Two Halves

When CARRIE and DAVID GRANT transformed TV's Fame Academy celebrities into polished singers, they had bitter inside knowledge. For, as FRANCES HARDY reveals, the couple had already ridden the roller coaster from obscurity to celebrity - twice.

The Daily Mail 3/19/2005

Few people in the ephemeral world of pop know more about the fragility of fame and the transience of wealth than David and Carrie Grant. Few have more intimate acquaintance with the brutal journey from celebrity to obscurity than the husband and-wife team who voice-coached the would be singing stars of TV's Fame Academy.
Two weeks ago we watched, mesmerised, as David and Carrie mustered ragtag crews of rookie celebrity singers, gussied them up and turned them into polished performers. But what we didn't know is that the Grants' careers are now in glittering renaissance after a switchback ride that has pitched them, too, from obscurity to fame - and back again.

The lonely journey downwards has taught them those trite but enduring
truths about the worthlessness of status and the abiding value of loyalty and love. Armed with this knowledge, they've cast themselves as mentors and
carers to the academy alumnae. 'I got really emotional when Lemar came
back to Comic Relief Does Fame Academy,' says Carrie, who has a specially soft spot for the singer who came third in the first series of Fame Academy yet went on to huge success and acclaim, and won a Brit Award.

'I'd been coaching him since he came out of the Academy in 2002, and been to his early gigs, but I almost cried when I saw him come back. I always knew Lemar would do it for Britain, and he is the first true soul male black singer we've had. The thing I love about him is that he is proud of his Fame Academy roots. When he came back to visit the celebs, they had all been working so
hard and been crying all the time. They asked Lemar if he had cried during his time there and he said no, but that when he got home he might have shed a tear. They asked him how long he had been in there and he said 13 weeks - they'd only been there for five days. They all felt complete wusses.'

David Grant was a celebrity himself more than 20 years ago. He had an early entree into stardom in the 1980s. Raised in Hackney, east London, with little money but a surfeit of love, by his lone mum, Gereline, David, now 48, was instilled early with ambition and the self-belief that he could realise his dreams. By the mid-1980s he had a string of hit singles with the pop duo Linx
and as a solo act. He drove a Porsche, flew first class around the world and his burgeoning bank balance sustained a swanky home in a prosperous north London suburb and an ego of outsize dimensions. 'I judged everything by the status it conferred,' says David. 'If I went to Plymouth I expected to fly. If they sent a car for me, I wanted to know the model and marque.' Necessarily, perhaps, a fall from grace was on its way.

But not before David had met Carrie, who had graduated from dancer on Top Of The Pops via singing (she once represented the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest) to TV presenting. It was after Carrie interviewed David on a Saturday morning TV show that the relationship began. 'I knew she was travelling home on the same train as me and that I had a couple of hours to be at my wittiest and most dazzling,' laughs David.

Carrie was duly won over. They married two-and-a-half years later, but soon serious troubles accrued. First, David lost his record contract and then Carrie became desperately ill with Crohn's disease, a potentially fatal bowel disorder from which she has suffered, with varying degrees of pain, for 20 years. 'David's records had stopped selling,' recalls Carrie. 'People had just had enough of his face. The journey down is very difficult. There's almost a sense of shame, of "people don't want me anymore".

Gradually and painfully we lost all the trappings of success, the house and car. The income dried up. We had no money at all. There were times when we had to raid every pocket to scrape together enough cash for a bus fare. No one had any idea how poor we were. We learned that there's nothing wrong with obscurity; nothing shameful in not being famous.

'While all this was happening to David, I was in Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge and David was in London. Often he couldn't afford the fare to see me. I remember lying on my own in the ward and the woman in the bed next to me died and they wheeled her out on a trolley; then another patient died. I was at my lowest ebb. I was lying there on a morphine drip to alleviate the
excruciating pain. People say, "Take one day at a time." But I had to take it a minute at a time. When the effect of the morphine wore off I was in such agony. I thought, "I've gone from a glamorous job where nobody talked about
illness, let alone bowel disease, to this."

'It's very hard on a marriage when you hit rocks so early, but David and I never turned against each other. It was as if we were standing on an island in the middle of the sea, watching the tide erode it away until nothing was left but a column of stones and the two of us clinging to each other. But we never blamed one another. That's what kept us strong. Even my bad health did not stop us loving each other.'

David and Carrie, 39, have much of that two-become-one togetherness that bonds the solidly married who have weathered such troubles with stoicism. They finish off each other's sentences; talk in a seamless stream of shared reminiscence. The large home in Southgate, north London, they share with their daughters Olivia, nine, and Talia, three, is a perpetual open house to friends and family.

'We've learned a lot,' says David. 'Like how the important gets in the way of the essential. We now know the essentials are our relationship and our family. Careers are merely important. Carrie is the person I admire most in the world. She is still in pain much of the time and the hardest thing is seeing someone you love suffering.' But from their nadir, the Grants fought back. They eked out a living as session musicians and their distinctive voices got them noticed. While session singing with Take That they were asked to join the team as vocal coaches.

From here fame accrued. Carrie and David also coached the Spice Girls. 'They had been through a squad of voice coaches and none had made any
difference. And then they called us in,' says Carrie. Since then, Melanie C,
Victoria Beckham, Atomic Kitten and Will Young have all been knocked
into vocal shape by the Grants.

Now they have their own TV show on BBC2, starting in April. 'I know we're having a great season professionally, but it could all end tomorrow,' says David. There is something warming about his complete absence of smugness. Experience has taught the Grants not to be complacent. They have also both learned that bitterness corrodes and forgiveness is cathartic. In both their lives they have had much to forgive.

Like David, Carrie was raised by a strong, supportive mother. Her father deserted the family when she was seven, to live with another woman. 'My mum, like David's, was a huge source of inspiration,' says Carrie. 'She told me I looked like Miss World and sang like Aretha Franklin. It was a huge shock to me to learn that neither was the case! My dad was a rough diamond who played no real part in my upbringing. He was a racist who hated black people. When I got married, Dad grudgingly came to the wedding and told David, "If you hurt my daughter I'll kill you", overlooking the fact that he had hurt me terribly by disregarding me completely for so many years.'

But redemption belatedly arrived for Carrie's father, Bob, who, inspired by his
daughter's Christianity, started attending church with her after his second wife deserted him. 'At 56, Dad went to Bible college to study theology,' says Carrie. 'He became a missionary in Sierra Leone and the irony was not lost on us because Africa is, of course, full of black people.

'He died of cerebral malaria at 62. I buried Dad in Sierra Leone because I knew that is what he would have wanted. The people, who were so poor, thanked me for lending them my dad. Everything he had failed to be for me, he became for the people of Sierra Leone in the last four years of his life. 'I remember standing in a downpour of rain, under an awning, looking at him in an open coffin and thinking his was the most incredible story. He died in 1996 and the eight years I had with him were so precious. I forgave him totally for not being there in my childhood.

If you don't forgive, you become consumed by angry emotions. My dad was such a lovely man, in the end, having failed my brother and me so horrifically.' Uncannily, similar themes of paternal neglect and absolution run through David's childhood and later life.

Meanwhile, Gereline Grant, David's mum, proved a shining example of self-betterment, raising her only son while taking a battery of O- and A-levels, holding down several jobs, and completing a degree. David, too, has enjoyed a late rapprochement with his absentee father, Beris, a retired police captain who left, when his son was tiny, to live in his native Jamaica. When Carrie was pregnant with Olivia, David realised he lacked a model for fatherhood. Perversely, perhaps, he decided to phone the father who had been absent during his own formative years.

'I called Dad,' he says. 'It was a wonderful conversation. I forgave him, of course, for not being there. I looked at what I'm doing now and thought, "I've been given a second chance professionally. It would be churlish not to give one to Dad."' And so it was that David belatedly acquired a father in Jamaica while Carrie's dad was being buried in Africa.

What is the message this engaging and immensely likeable couple have learned from the vicissitudes of their startlingly eventful lives? David has a handy aphorism up his sleeve.
'Have big dreams,' he says. 'But also have people in your life who are
more important than the dreams.'

Facing The Music will be shown on BBC2 from April.