Boyband 'a1' to return to US in September

SINGAPORE, July 19 (UPI) -- You may have seen them on "The Young and The Restless," when they played themselves singing the full version of their latest single "Caught in The Middle," you may have heard them on the radio, or seen them on stage as support act for Michelle Branch or Def Leppard. The truth is "a1" have yet to become a household name in the United States.

But the English lads are quite keen to break in. This is not the first time European artists are trying to crack the elusive American market. Some have already knock on its door and failed. But a1 is taking a softy-softy approach, working hard with the radios and the press. They've just spend their first 6 weeks throughout the States, moving quickly from New York to Kentucky, Tucson, Seattle, Sacramento and Orlando, and are now planning to return for another 12 days early September for more radio shows and promotions.

"Obviously, it's still early days and it could take up to a year to crack up with one song. So we're going to go back as early as we can," says band member Ben Adams (vocals, keyboards). The band is currently in Singapore for a few days of promotion works, before heading for Australia.

Band member Christian Ingebrigtsen (guitar, vocals, bass) adds "the U.S. market is such a huge market and they have so many artists themselves, that you really have to offer something they don't already have in order to be successful. The response that we've got from the radio stations when we were there, is that we represented something that they don't quite have. Something in the middle. We're not a rock band, we're not a poppy boy band, we're something in between. We just bring good guitar-based music that at the moment seems to be not a lot in the U.S. So maybe that's our edge."

The band released their first single in U.S. "Caught In The Middle," last April, and has just launched a mini-album "a1" of selected highlights from all three of their UK albums--Here We Come, The A-List, and Make It Good.

If the band has yet to make it in United States, it has been very successful in Asia and Europe, and won last year the prestigious Brit Award, the U.K. "Grammy," for Best British Newcomer. One of their appeal has been that the four members -- Adams, Ingebrigtsen, Paul Marazzi (vocals, percussion, bass) and Mark Read (vocals, keyboards, drums) - write and perform their own songs.

Their third album, which was released in the U.K earlier this year, was a slight departure from their previous sound, more guitar based and also more coherent from a musical point of view, the band says.

"Our first album was very diverse, with several songs going into different direction. On the second album, we're learned a bit, we were trying for a contemporary sound, with a lot of bang-bang-band, heavily produced sounds. The third album for us is the one that comes together as a whole, because we've got only one producer," says Ingebrigtsen.

"If you want a long term career, you've got to evolve. You only have to look at Madonna for this," adds Adams.

The boys spend last year off writing 60 songs, which have been narrowed down to 14 for the album. Ingebrigtsen says the band would really like for other artists to sing the songs they wrote and didn't make the album. "Some of them are hit songs and it would be a great honour if other artists wanted to sing them. Hopefully when we have more time towards the end of the year, we'll try to pitch them to other artists," he said.

Over the coming week, the band will be touring Australia, before returning to the U.K., where they expects to shoot the video for the album's second single "When I'm Missing You," which will be released in the U.K September 16.

Meanwhile, the band has just recorded for the French market a version of "Caught in the Middle" in French with a popular local artist Eve Angeli, and they've also recorded a version in Spanish. The busy-bees are hoping to start touring around the end of the year in Europe and Asia, but will left out the U.S. for a later stage, once they've managed to crack it there.