One quarter of the British boy band
Blue,
Duncan James was born April 7, 1978, in Salisbury, England, and raised by his grandparents in Dorset. After high school,
James moved to London to pursue a career in music, where he met up with friends and future bandmates Anthony Costa,
Simon Webbe, and
Lee Ryan. In May 2001
Blue released their first single, and over the next four years the group sold millions of albums both in Great Britain and across Europe. In 2005, though no official announcement was ever made,
Blue split up, and each of the members began working on solo projects (though a single by
James -- actually a duet with
Keedie --
I Believe My Heart, from
Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Woman in White, had already come out in England in 2004). In the spring of 2006
James' true first single,
Sooner or Later, was released, followed soon after by the full-length
Future Past. Though the album didn't chart as high in Britain as
Blue's had, it did do well in places like Italy and Belgium, where he (and his former band) had a strong, mostly female, fan base. ~ Marisa Brown