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“I stopped that after two weeks,” he says. He briefly worked in a call centre chasing strangers for unpaid debt.
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Reggy and bollie series#
“It had got to that point! We really wanted to change our lives.”Īinooson took on a series of odd jobs to make ends meet: night receptionist, food and beverage team leader. “We used to say ‘Have you ever been so broke you wish Barclays had a 50p limit of money transfer?’” He laughs. “We used to call ourselves and tease ourselves because we were so broke and laugh about how broke we were,” says Ainooson. In the UK they cemented their friendship over the phone. Hamid and Ainooson knew each other slightly in Ghana. Still, those first few years of acclimatisation were hard. The move was relatively smooth because Ghana is a Commonwealth country.
Reggy and bollie professional#
Hamid’s managers thought he would stand more chance of professional success in Britain. Ainooson’s wife was expecting his second child in 2010 and, he recalls, “I was thinking, ‘No, I have to give it up, forget music. Separately, they decided to make the move to the UK.
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But as adults they found it difficult to make a living as musicians in Ghana, despite Hamid releasing a single in 2003, You May Kiss Your Bride, which is still played at weddings across west Africa. Growing up, both Hamid and Ainooson had a love of music and won dance competitions as adolescents. “I want her to know that her only son has been able to make her smile after all that she did for me.” “At the moment, I’m saving money to get my mum in a nice house and to take care of her,” he says. Reggie N Bollie performing for Lorraine Kelly in the Lorraine studio Photograph: Ken McKay/ITV/Rex Shutterstock Recently, Ainooson’s eight-year-old son had his first Holy Communion “and it made me so happy and proud driving my son to that: in a new suit, in a big posh car.
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When he went to his first Holy Communion, his mother “had to pray someone would bring her clothes for me to wear”. She was a seamstress and struggled to make ends meet, and he remembers that there was never enough money for new shoes. His mother remarried but that relationship broke down when Ainooson was a teenager. “I thought: if I don’t do things right for myself, I might end up in a situation where no one can help.”Īinooson’s father left the family before he was born. “It made me always over-cautious,” he says now. They died when he was 14 and he went to live with his other set of grandparents. Hamid’s parents divorced when he was little and he was raised by his paternal grandparents. Both were born and raised in Accra, Ghana, and overcame difficult upbringings before finding success in Britain. Their story, too, is not the usual reality-TV fodder. Amid the balladeers and boybands, Reggie N Bollie were the high-energy performers who won over the pubic with Afrobeats and unstoppable positivity. The duo, better known as Reggie N Bollie (Hamid’s nickname is an acronym which stands for “Best of Lyrics and Lines in Entertainment”), are currently celebrating the success of a top 10 single after they were voted runners-up in The X Factor last December. “Because the moment you feel ‘I’ve made it’, you start to slow down.” “But we’re still at the beginning,” Hamid adds. “We feel so grateful and privileged,” Ainooson says, when we meet in a central London private members’ club.