Journey South reach their goal

05-06-2006 08:53

By Jacqui Meddings

Less than a year ago, blonde haired brothers Carl and Andy Pemberton were getting their hands dirty working as a plumber and an electrician. Fast track 12 months and Journey South are polished pop-stars with a platinum selling number one album, self titled ‘Journey South’.

The Middlesbrough pair shot to fame when they won the nation’s hearts, and perhaps more importantly Simon Cowell’s ‘seal of approval’, as X Factor finalists last year. Since then it seems to have been a speedy trip to the top for the adorable Pemberton brothers. But in reality it was a much longer journey. With that lovable north east accent, they talk to Jacqui Meddings about why X Factor was their last chance realise their dreams and what’s up next for them.

Journey South’s next single, a double a-side with two tracks called Circle and Desperado, is out on June 19th.

The duo go on tour in September, visit www.journey-south.com for more information.

You’ve achieved so much in the past six months, where would you like to see yourself in another six months time?

We’ve got the tour coming up in September so we’re excited about that. We now have 43 instead of the original 25 dates because of the demand. We’re also writing all our own songs for the next album so hopefully we’ll be making a few potential hits. We’d love to write the next Angels. That would be amazing!

If you hadn’t done X-Factor would you still be pursuing your music careers?

Not at this level we tried before and got into loads of debt and I don’t think we could put ourselves through that again it was really hard. Trying to get a record deal and good representation off your own back is so tough. If it wasn’t for the X Factor we probably wouldn’t have had another chance. We had good jobs and everything and didn’t want to jeopardise that. This was just a chance in a lifetime that we couldn’t miss out on.

Did you ever think you would get this far?

We first went into it to because we wanted to see what they thought of us. We couldn’t have imagined that we’d get as far as we did but as we got through each stage we started believing in ourselves again and were thinking ‘maybe we have got what it takes!’

More about Journey South reach their goal on page 2