Ronan Keating Born: Boyzone's Breakout Voice

Ronan Keating was sixteen years old when he auditioned for Boyzone, the Irish boy band assembled by manager Louis Walsh in Dublin in 1993. Walsh had watched New Kids on the Block sell out stadiums and wanted Ireland's answer. Keating, born on March 3, 1977, in Dublin, was the youngest of five children in a working-class Harmonstown family, and he became the youngest member of a group that would dominate the British and Irish charts for the rest of the decade. Boyzone's early days were rough — their first television appearance on The Late Late Show in 1993, in which they danced awkwardly to a backing track, became a notorious clip. But Walsh's persistence and the group's steady improvement paid off. Their debut single "Working My Way Back to You" was a modest Irish hit in 1994, and by 1996, "Words" reached number one in the UK. Boyzone scored six UK number-one singles between 1996 and 1999, with Keating's clear tenor carrying most of the lead vocals. Keating launched his solo career in 1999 with "When You Say Nothing at All," recorded for the Notting Hill soundtrack. The song reached number one in the UK and established him as a mainstream pop artist independent of the group. His debut album Ronan, released in 2000, sold over eight million copies worldwide and produced four UK top-ten singles. Through the 2000s and 2010s, Keating maintained a steady recording and touring career, releasing ten studio albums and scoring more than 30 million record sales in total across solo and group work. He became a judge on The X Factor Australia from 2010 to 2012 and on the UK's The Voice in later years. He also co-wrote "If Tomorrow Never Comes" for Boyzone's 1999 album By Request, one of the group's signature tracks. Keating's career outlasted most of his boy-band contemporaries, built on a voice that adapted from teen pop to adult contemporary without losing the warm directness that made him Walsh's first pick in a Dublin audition room.