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Grant was born in April 1971 just on the outskirts of London.From a very early age he showed more than an interest in music but oddly enough it wasn’t what he wanted to do with his life. He was always the class joker and overall entertainer through his school years and it was maybe his love of cinema that convinced him to become an actor. To this date, he swears that if things hadn’t unfolded the way that they did he would have gone to R.A.D.A and who knows, maybe we would be watching him on the silver screen now.
So when did the music bug first bite?
At around the age of 9 he first began dabbling in acoustic engineering
– oh okay, pulling his parents hi-fi system apart and recording the results onto his granddads old reel to reel cassette recorder. He claims that he was a mix DJ before the term had even been invented. “I used to take a bit of Queen’s ‘Another one bites the dust’, throw in some beats from some dodgy old Hawaiian drums LP and, very poorly, scratch in orchestral hits from my ‘Star Wars’ original motion picture Soundtrack album. The result was nearly always terrible but it was the fact that you could make something different by layering pieces of music that first drew my attention to the intricate workings of music production”.
Then came the classical training….
Nope, not in this case. With a present of a keyboard for his thirteenth birthday he started tinkering away at his own pace. Within a few short months he had set up a band with some school friends.
Sadly the highlight of the band’s career was playing a few Pet Shop Boy’s covers to the rest of the school in an assembly period one morning, but it was his first taste of musical performance and he liked it.
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Joi Cardwell sang for the pleasure of it before she turned
professional and started contributing backing vocals for a list of other artists that includes LL Cool J, the Pointer Sisters, and Jermaine Jackson. A native of New York City, she stepped onto the stage at Carnegie Hall when she was five years old, singing "Three Blind Mice" as part of her school's performance there. Her teen years saw the dream of performing solidify, and she enrolled in New York University as a liberal arts major with a concentration in philosophy and literature. During her time at NYU, she entered a talent competition hosted by Harlem's Apollo Theatre. She earned top prize a total of five times, the first time by belting out "For Your Eyes Only." It wasn't long before she turned professional and started touring with Ben E. King. Producer Kashif tapped her to join a group called the Promise in 1989. The all-girl outfit made one album, but the recording was never released. Within two years, Cardwell quit to strike out on her own. She sang on the dance numbers "Saved My Life" and "Club Lonely" in 1992. During this time she sang backup for others, while her own solo career took her to a string of labels. She put out "Was It Something I Said" for Epic, "Holdin' On" for Freetown Records, and "Hot Little Body" for Tribal America, which also featured Behavior and Fred Jorio. A new career phase started in 1994, when Cardwell signed with Eightball Records, an independent label based in New York. She penned all the songs on The World Is Full of Trouble, her debut album, which she also produced. The 1995 album launched the hit single "Trouble." She went on to score hits with the singles "You Got to Pray," "Run to You," "Jump for Joi," and "Soul to Bare." A self-titled album was released in 1997, followed shortly by the 1998 remix compilation Clubland's Greatest Hits. In 2000, "Last Chance for Love" was honored as the Best Dance Song of the year by the Glama Awards, and she remained active throughout the next several years, with 12" releases on Junior Vasquez Music, Twisted, Curvve, and King Street Sounds. Cardwell is openly gay; she came out of the closet at the age of 21. Linda Seida, Rovi
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