There’s something about the boy. By their final stages TV talent shows are full of nice people with laudable dreams and lovely voices, but when you first saw Shayne Ward on The X Factor, you knew he was different. The real deal. He has an extraordinary voice, of course. And he’s a sweet, good-looking lad. But there was something more. A hunger. A sense that he didn’t just enjoy performing, he needed it. Shayne, in other words, has that elusive X factor. He’s more than just a great singer. He’s a proper pop star.

There was always music at home. Irish folk acts like The Dubliners and The Furies. Country music, especially his mum’s beloved Patsy Cline. Dance, trance and jungle from his brothers. Money was so tight that Shayne has only ever bought one CD: Daniel Bedingfield’s ‘If You’re Not The One’. Yet the radio provided a steady diet of pop and R&B, and most of the family would go about their daily business singing. 

The Ward family are no strangers to the stage. Two of his uncles played the circuit as singers: Patrick was in London singing soul, Bernie was in Liverpool performing old school classics like ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’. When it became clear that Shayne had inherited their falsetto range, they told him he was lucky: “Most people only have the one voice, and you can have two.”

Shayne left school as soon as he could. “Looking back, I wish I could have gone to college and university, but I wanted to work straight away for my mum. I wanted to earn money.” He worked at a printers, got a job installing computer points, and did stints in factories making everything from chocolate to clothes and cardboard boxes. At the time of his X Factor audition, he was working in the shoe section at New Look in Manchester’s Arndale Centre.

At 16, he also joined a band called Destiny, with two girls called Tracy. They covered crowd-pleasing chart hits from Queen to Emma Bunton, and when Shayne joined he also bought in some of the older songs he loved: Eddie Holman’s ‘Hey There Lonely Girl’; ‘You Make Me Feel Brand New’ by The Stylistics; McFadden & Whitehead’s ‘Ain’t No Stopping Us Now’.

Destiny auditioned for the first X Factor series, but got nowhere. A year later, Shayne and one of the Tracys decided to try alone. Even then, he almost dropped out. “It felt pointless. I didn’t think I’d get anywhere with it.” But his family urged him on, and when two of his sisters decided to try too, he applied.

After winning the show, his debut single ‘That’s My Goal’ was pretty much a dead cert for the Christmas number one. It was the sheer scale of its success that was surprising. The first-day sales were the third biggest ever recorded for a single in the UK: some 313,000 copies.  It went on to sell well more than 1.3 million. “The idea that over a million people bought my single, it just didn’t feel real,” says Shayne. “It still doesn’t to this day.”

The eponymously titled album was recorded in Stockholm, Copenhagen and London with some of pop’s sharpest producers and writers: Steve Mac, Per & David, Cutfather & Joe, and Quiz/Larossi. They’ve put together a timeless, ballad-led set that showcases Shayne’s vocal and emotional range to the full. ‘That’s My Goal’ is there, of course, and the achingly beautiful second single ‘No Promises’, while X Factor fans will enjoy the live recording of his show-stopping version of ‘Over The Rainbow’. “I’d like people to see that I’m not just a talent show winner, that I can actually sing,” says Shayne. “I’d like to be seen as successful in my own right now.”

So Shayne Ward started out on a reality TV show. But in time that’s going to be about as important as Britney and Justin’s time on the Mickey Mouse Club, Kylie’s stint as queen of Neighbours, or Robbie’s teenage years in Take That. There really is something about the boy. It’s been a roller-coater ride so far, but this accomplished debut album isn’t the end of the story. It’s the beginning.