When Ryder won second place at the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest, it was the culmination of a dream he’d had chased for half his life.<\/p>\n
From the age of 16, he’d sung in dozens of bands, surviving “empty gigs and bank accounts”, by taking jobs in construction and a vegan cafe in Essex.<\/p>\n
Everything changed in the pandemic, when he started posting covers to TikTok, with a falsetto so astonishing it grabbed the attention of Alicia Keys, Justin Bieber and, crucially, the team who select the UK’s Eurovision entry.<\/p>\n
But in the whirlwind that followed his success in Turin, Ryder’s debut album was rushed and underwhelming. <\/p>\n
The Evening Standard said, external<\/a> the music “offers no surprises and takes no chances”. The Guardian called the album, external<\/a> “so toothless it makes Ed Sheeran look like Nick Cave.”<\/p>\n Fans disagreed, sending Ryder to number one and selling out his tour.<\/p>\n Then, on the final date, the singer discovered his record label had effectively sacked the team who’d signed, developed and worked with him.<\/p>\n In a display of solidarity, he left too, turning down the offer of a second album to go independent.<\/p>\n “It feels really empowering when you make the decision and you make the announcement, because everyone’s rooting for you,” he recalls.<\/p>\n But reality set in a couple of months later, when he tried to start work on a new record.<\/p>\n “You go to the tap, and it’s not connected to the plumbing.<\/p>\n “You don’t have the resources that you used to have: The manpower and the battering rams to move things along. So you start to think that you’ve failed and you’re on a downward trajectory.<\/p>\n “And the biggest fear any human being will have when they’ve achieved a dream is losing it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Ryder won second place at the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest, it was the culmination of a dream…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":219316,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-219315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}