My husband was a pop star but we were too poor to eat – now we live in a £5m home says Fame Academy legend

CARRIE Grant has revealed she and her pop star husband were once so poor, they couldn’t even afford food.

But luckily for the former Fame Academy star, 57, and her partner David, 66, they now live in a £5 million home with a pool.

The vocal coach made the surprise admission in an interview with This Is Money, where she discussed how they struggled to make ends meet in the late 80s and early 90s.

David shot to fame in 1981 as part of the funk band Linx, when their single Intuition reached number seven in the UK Singles Chart.

But he they struggled to top the track’s success, and interest rates went through the roof, David and Carrie found themselves in a difficult situation.

Both self-employed artists not qualifying for a normal mortgage, they found themselves paying £1,100 each month and couldn’t even sell as the North London homes had gone into negative equity.

The One Show presenter said: “David or I would get work singing backing vocals in the West End and we’d be searching for change down the back of the sofa for Tube tickets so we could do that session and earn £125.

“Friends brought us groceries because we were living on pasta. Those were very stressful days.”

She explained how David wasn’t selling any records by that point – but a gig singing on a PC World advert in the mid-90s put them back on their feet.

The TV personality said: “We sang, ‘Where in the world? PC World,’ and were paid £150 each for an hour’s work. But the royalties paid our mortgage for three years: £6,000 each, per year.”

Carrie revealed the best financial decision they ever made was in 2002 when they paid £525,000 for a seven-bedroom house in North London.

The sprawling property boasts a swimming pool and is now thought to be worth five times its original value.

Around the same time, Carrie and David joined Robin Gibb and Richard Park as judges on Fame Academy, the BBC‘s response to Pop Idol.

They share four children – three of whom do not identify as the gender they were assigned at birth. 

Olive Gray, 26, is non-binary and so is Arlo, 15, who also identifies as demigirl – where a person only partially identifies as a woman.

Tylan, 21, who is the first autistic actor to portray an autistic character in Hollyoaks, came out as non-binary last year, changing their name and pronouns. 

The soap star has played Brooke Hathaway on the Channel 4 soap since 2018.

Their adopted son Nathan, 13, is a cisgender male.