In 2004 Tom Parker’s audition for the TV talent show The X Factor left him convinced that his pop career was over before it had even begun.
Singing Flying Without Wings by the Irish boy band Westlife and accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar, he was stopped by Simon Cowell and the show’s judges barely a minute into the song.
“It was a ‘no’ before I even finished the chorus. I was 16 and it shattered me,” he recalled. He was so crestfallen that he did not sing again for two years.
He achieved his revenge six years later, however. By then he was a member of the five-strong boy band the Wanted, whose debut single All Time Low had gone to No 1 in the UK singles chart. Invited on to The X Factor as established stars, Parker and his bandmates sang Lose My Mind. It became the group’s third consecutive hit and Cowell confessed that he was “blown away” by their performance.
Parker’s comeback showed an admirable ability to overcome adversity, a quality that was tragically tested further when in 2020 he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour at the age of 32. He was told that life expectancy for such an illness ranged from three to 18 months but refused to accept the prognosis.
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“I’m going to be here. I’m going to fight this,” he said defiantly as he began a course of radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
Vowing to use his illness to “raise awareness of this terrible disease”, he pledged that he intended to survive for the sake of his young family. At the time of his shattering diagnosis his wife, Kelsey (née Hardwick), was seven months pregnant with their second child, Bodhi Thomas.
They were married in 2018 after a chance meeting outside a nightclub and a whirlwind courtship. Their daughter, Aurelia Rose, was born in 2019. Kelsey and their two children survive him.
With the Wanted, Parker scored ten UK Top Ten singles and three Top Ten albums between 2010 and 2014, when the group was put on hiatus. Managed by the American pop entrepreneur Scooter Braun, whose other charges included Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, the Wanted also achieved success in the US charts, where the single Glad You Came reached No 3 in 2012.
Parker had spoken of hoping to reconvene the group in 2020 on the tenth anniversary of their first chart entry, but the plan was scotched by the Covid-19 pandemic and then by his illness.
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Thomas Anthony Parker was born in August 1988 in Tonge Moor, Bolton, the second son of working-class parents. He took drama classes at school but had little interest in music until he was 15, when he taught himself to play Oasis’s Wonderwall on his brother Lewis’s guitar.
After his rejection on The X Factor, he enrolled at Manchester Metropolitan University to read geography, but as his confidence returned he dropped out to resume the singing career he feared had stalled. After a spell in a tribute act called Take That II, he auditioned in 2009 — along with more than 1,000 other hopefuls — to join a new boy band being assembled by Jayne Collins, who had already tasted success with the girl group the Saturdays.
After a process that lasted nine months, the quintet of Parker, Max George, Siva Kaneswaran, Jay McGuiness and Nathan Sykes were chosen and the still unnamed group were signed to Island-Mercury Records. They became the Wanted after recording a spaghetti western themed track titled Let’s Get Ugly for their debut album, which inspired the idea of creating a set of “wanted” posters depicting the group’s five members as bandits.
The idea was later expanded in concerts with a big screen showing a mocked-up Sky News report in which the group were named as diamond thieves before they appeared on stage in convict uniforms.
At their peak the Wanted rivalled One Direction as the most popular boy band and had their own reality TV show The Wanted Life, created by Ryan Seacrest, the American producer.
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On one infamous occasion an adolescent fan chopped off a lock of a group member’s hair and promptly ate it. Another time Parker hit the headlines over a punch-up with Tony Blair’s former press secretary Alastair Campbell during a charity football match.
When the group disbanded in 2014, Parker had mixed emotions. “You’re a product and part of a machine. But we all accepted that and I loved it,” he said. “Yet it was good to step away and take back some control of your life.”
He turned down invitations to appear on Strictly Come Dancing and I’m a Celebrity to spend his time in a recording studio learning how to become a producer, although he re-emerged to reach the semi-finals of Celebrity Masterchef and to compete in the Channel 4 skiing show The Jump.
A new career on the stage beckoned when he was cast in the John Travolta role in a UK tour of Grease but his illness meant he was unable to build upon a promising start to his acting ambitions.
He had planned to release a memoir, Hope, later this year.
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Tom Parker, pop singer, was born on August 4, 1988. He died of a brain tumour on March 30, 2022, aged 33