A former child model who at one point looked to have a promising career ahead of him as a soccer star, Mark Owen from Oldham in the north of England never expected to be a pop star. He was 17 and working in a pub in Manchester when he met Gary Barlow, a singer-songwriter who happened to be performing there. Barlow suggested Owen attended auditions for a new boyband he was joining and the rest is the long and glittering history of Take That; one of the most successful groups of all time with worldwide record sales of over 40 million in two spells since they originally formed in 1990. Owen, who took lead vocals on Take That's 1993 Number 1 hit Babe and was regularly voted the most popular band member in various teen mag polls, launched his solo career with the single Child in 1996 after Take That split. It went to Number 3 in the UK charts, as did the follow-up Clementine, but Owen was dropped by his record label after relatively disappointing sales of his album Green Man in 1997. However, his popularity was revived when he won the TV reality series Celebrity Big Brother and returned to the charts in 2003 with the Top 5 single Four Minute Warning, followed by the album In Your Own Time. His third solo album How The Mighty Fall was released in 2005 and, despite some bad publicity surrounding his private life, he proved as popular as ever after joining the Take That reunion
