Born in Melbourne on December 13th, 1982, singer-songwriter Anthony Callea first found fame in 2004 as the runner-up on Australian Idol. After his rendition of Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli’s “The Prayer” had proven a hit on the show, he inked a deal with Sony/BMG following the season finale, with whom he promptly released a studio version of the cover. It stayed at number one on the ARIA Singles Chart for five weeks and went quadruple platinum, becoming the second-best-selling song in his home country of the decade. His 2005 follow-up, “Rain”, also claimed the #1 position for two weeks, and was backed with another cover familiar to Australian Idol fans: “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. Callea’s self-titled debut LP, largely consisting of covers, landed later the same year, reaching number one in Australia and later achieving double platinum certification. Continuing to attract strong sales with his second album, 2006’s A New Chapter, he increasingly ventured into songwriting, with all but one of the songs on the LP co-written by Callea himself. After a brief spell on Broadway, he returned with a self-released EP, Last to Go, in 2012. A third album, Thirty, emerged the following year, as did This Is Christmas, in which he dueted with his husband-to-be, actor Tim Campbell. Callea’s fourth solo LP, Backbone, arrived in 2016. With his national profile boosted by an appearance in I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here, the album saw his return to the Australian top spot for the first time in eleven years. Callea matched this achievement once more in 2017 with ARIA Number 1 Hits in Symphony, which saw him cover various best-sellers alongside the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. In 2019 and 2020, he returned with a string of non-charting singles including “What’s Wrong with Me?” and the Bonnie Anderson collaboration “Together Again”, a cover of the Janet Jackson song.
