Little Mix make X Factor history
Girl group win singing contest with 48.3% of public
vote
The girl band Little Mix made X Factor history last night by
becoming the first group to win the TV show.
Host of the show Dermot O'Leary announced the result in front of
10,000 people at Wembley Arena while millions more watched at
home.
Little Mix, made up of Jade, 18, Perrie, also 18, Jesy, 20 and
Leigh-Anne, 19, beat Marcus Collins in the final. They got 48.3% of
the public vote, while Marcus got 42.8%.
The girls and their mentor, Tulisa from N-Dubz, were stunned
when the result was announced.
Jade said: "We are just so grateful and thankful to everyone who
voted and to everyone backstage. We can't thank the public
enough."
Marcus, the runner-up, managed to smile and said that the group
really deserved to win and that they were "amazing".
The girls, who had never met before being put together as a
group during the show's earlier stages, come from different parts
of England.
Jesy is from Essex, Leigh-Anne is a Londoner and Jade and Perrie
come from South Shields, in Tyne and Wear.
During the later rounds of the competitions, the live shows, the
proportion of votes received by each act was kept secret.
It has now been revealed that Little Mix got the most votes in
the final, the semi-final and back in week seven. But Amelia Lily,
who finished third, got more votes in week eight and in earlier
shows the girl group lagged behind Janet Devlin. Janet got the most
votes for four rounds in a row, until being booted out by the
judges in week 8.
Little Mix have been given a record deal and will release their
winner's single, a cover version of the Damien Rice song,
Cannonball. They are hoping to get to the top of the charts with a
Christmas number one.
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Little Mix quiz
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Little Mix make X Factor history
Just the beginning - can Little Mix find inspiration
from pop's greatest girl groups?
Little Mix have already made history by becoming the first group
to win the X Factor. But anything could happen now.
Past X Factor winners have had very mixed fortunes. Some, like
Leona Lewis, have gone on to sell millions of records and enjoy
worldwide success, while others, like Leon Jackson, who won in
2007, have quickly sunk to the bottom of the celebrity swamp,
rarely to be heard from again.
So where can Jesy, Leigh-Anne, Jade and Perrie look to for
inspiration? Some of the most succesful girl groups in history
might not be a bad place to start:
The Spice Girls
Sporty, Posh, Ginger, Scary and Baby got together in 1994 and
together became a band that, for many, came to represent the 1990s.
Their first album Spice was the biggest-selling album of all time
by a girl group, with 23 million copies sold worldwide.
With nine UK number ones, including three consecutive Christmas
number ones, it should be no surprise that the Spice Girls made
themselves an awful lot of money. In 1998 they broke the Guinness
World Record for the highest ever annual earnings by an all female
group with an income of £29.6 million.
Destiny's Child
The X Factor judge Kelly Rowland used to be part of an R&B
band with Beyonce Knowles, called Destiny's Child, which enjoyed
huge success between 1997 and 2005. The group sold over 40 million
records, becoming one of the best-selling acts ever in the USA.
Managed by Beyonce's dad, Mathew Knowles, their breakthrough
album, The Writing's On the Wall, sold more than fifteen million
copies and was one of the best selling records of 2000.
TLC
Another American R&B girl band, TLC had ten top ten singles,
four number one hits, four multi-platinum albums and four Grammy
awards between 1992 and 2003.
Their best album was CrazySexyCool, which sold 22 million
copies. The band is still on the go, since reforming in 2008 after
a break of five years. Sadly, it is not the original lineup as one
member, Lisa (Left Eye) Lopes died in a car crash in 2002.
Bananarama
Bananarama is a British girl group that formed in 1979 and is
still performing today, though its heyday was in the 1980s. The
band has held the Guiness World Record for the all-female group
with the most chart entries since 1988. Not a bad achievement,
considering their first record was a cover version of a song that
they sang in Swahili!
Their more famous hits included: T'aint What You Do (It's The
Way That You Do It), Robert De Niro's Waiting, Really Saying
Something. The three members of Bananarama also featured in the
original Band Aid single, Do They Know It's Christmas, in 1984.
The Supremes
Diana Ross's girl group The Supremes was a massive success in the
1960s as the top act of the American label Motown Records. They
were one of the first acts featuring black members to be popular
with both black and white audiences.
Singing soul, pop and disco tunes, the band had 12 number one
singles and in their day they were nearly as popular as the
Beatles. The Supremes' biggest hits included: Baby Love, Stop! In
The Name of Love, Come See About Me, and You Can't Hurry
Love.
Click here to have a go at our
Little Mix quiz
Lesson ideas and
suggestions
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