July 31, 2007

CTV

Canadian Idol contestant Brian Melo is a long way from the Woodstock Toyota Plant project where he once worked for Dufferin Construction. The singer from Hamilton will find out tonight if he is back on the jobsite tomorrow or has survived to sing another week on national television.

In The Spotlight

Idol contestant credits construction for helping build his career... and his character

From road crew to Idol stage, Melo understands hard work

YVONNE BENDO

correspondent

Brian Melo admits CTV’s Canadian Idol stage is a long way from the construction sites where he previously spent most of his long, hard days.

But the Hamilton native, and son of a Portuguese immigrant, proudly states his construction experience has helped mould him into the person he’s become.

“Each day on the construction site you need to stay focused or you can get hurt or someone else can get hurt,” Melo, 24, says, in a break from his busy Idol schedule.

“I’m not in danger here, but staying focused and working hard I learned working in construction.” He laughs, noting how he’s really cleaned up these days, compared to his work over the last four years with Dufferin Construction on a grading crew doing road and foundation work.

“We were lugging in amazing amounts of stone to get the roads and foundation ready...it was quite a feat,” Melo recalls of the Woodstock Toyota plant project he worked on.

“I don’t miss those hot sticky, and some very long days. But it was all worth it. Construction was one thing that really helped me,” he says of his passion for music. Because it paid “decent money” while he was working, he says when he wasn’t working “I could work on doing what I loved to do. With another job, I couldn’t have done that.”

But that doesn’t mean construction and music didn’t mix.

Melo says there were times when his co-workers caught him testing out a new tune on the job site.

“I got in trouble almost every day for singing,” he says, adding his foreman, Dave Beadle, often caught him singing in a trench. “He gave me heck every now and again to stay focused on the job.”

But he says Beadle and his co-workers were very supportive of his music and often came out to see him and his band, Stoked, perform.

In fact it was Beadle, who has become a close friend, and Melo’s family especially, his father Augusto (who also worked at Dufferin Construction for 25 years), who really encouraged him to audition for Canadian Idol.

“I’m really proud of this guy, I knew he could do it all along,” says Beadle.

He knew it was just a matter of “pushing him to that point where he’d go and audition. He has a great voice,” Beadle says.

He laughs as little about how Melo would begin singing on the job and have to stop because “he came up with a few lyrics for a song and had to jot them down.” And then his singing teacher told him he needed to protect his voice, so Beadle says Melo began wearing a dust mask whenever he worked.

“We were working on the Toyota site...It was funny to watch, he was the only guy on the job site with a mask,” Beadle says.

Melo is now the talk around the job site and Beadle says there’s a growing interest in his efforts around the Hamilton area.

“Here, people are supporting him a lot. You see posters in cars and that,” Beadle says.

He admits it’s not typical to see a construction worker competing on TV and he hopes everyone in the industry gets behind him and helps him win it.

This week Melo and the seven other remaining competitors hit the stage unplugged. Voting was last night with the results airing tonight.

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