Tuesday 1 December 2015

David Sneddon 'Stop Living The Lie'

Chart Peak: 1 [2 weeks]

YouTube
David is the self-taught pianist and sometime drummer who won Fame Academy... The former singer with The Martians who says his main musical influences are The Beatles and Van Morrison, shot straight to No. 1 in January 2003 with this song that he wrote in Glasgow when he was 17.
It's a much-noted irony that despite the title, neither of the winners of Fame Academy actually seemed to want to be famous. Presumably this the confusing format contributed to the BBC dropping te show after two years, although celebrity/charity spin-off Comic Relief Does Fame Academy actually made it to a third series. Whilst the initial series ran roughly concurrently with Popstars: The Rivals, nobody was brave enough to risk a chart battle so David Sneddon's coronation single was released in January, replacing Girls Aloud after they'd had four weeks at the top over Christmas.

It's not Sneddon's fault that he has one of the last pop-star-like names ever, but it kind of is his fault that he wrote such an insipid song. It's slightly ironic, given the show's supposed focus on training the contestants to write songs, that his career was to be launched by a song he'd written years earlier but in any case, he loses me in the first verse by rhyming "café" with "coffee". Despite this hit, by the end of 2003 he'd announced that he didn't want to be a pop star any more after all and publicly retired from recording, though he did briefly stage a comeback in 2007. Instead he's taken to writing songs for others, with some degree of success.

Also appearing on: Now 55
Available on: Now That's What I Call 2003

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