Lee Matthews

His gold medal was for the song "I May Be Young", co-written by him and his mother Veronica, who was in Irish showbands in the 1980s.

He won the silver as well during the same competition with his cover version of "The River" from Garth Brooks.

Lee Mulhern (born 12 June 1988), now known as Lee Matthews, is a singer-songwriter from Northern Ireland.

Starting age 8, Lee Mulhern (his birth name) had performed as a child star prodigy covering pop and country songs on many Irish and UK radio and television shows.

At age 17, he embarked on a series of music projects like Streetwize, Streetside and Access All Areas, in a bid to be launched as an "international boy band" made up of singers from various nationalities.

After the boy band projects fell through, he relaunched a solo music career adopting the name Lee.M, and for a short time formed NXT-GEN, an electropop duo collaboration with Pete Doherty.

In 1999, at age 11, Lee was chosen to represent Ireland at the World Championships for Performing Arts in Los Angeles.

He travelled with 35 other Irish contestants to compete against 1500 hopefuls from around the world.

He won a gold, a silver and two bronze medals.

In 2001, at age 13, he participated in a Las Vegas New Year's Eve concert that included Barbra Streisand, Billy Joel and Neil Diamond.

He made television appearances on TV3, BBC, ITV, RTÉ.

In 2002, he performed at the Buncrana Music Festival and also in many TV shows in Ireland and in the UK.

On 6 September 2002 in New York, Lee joined Ronan Tynon of the Irish Tenors and a host of other American artists at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center for a concert to remember the victims of the 11 September attacks on New York.

Lee also joined RTÉ's Gerry Ryan at Ground Zero on 9 September when he sang "Fields of Gold" at a special wreath-laying ceremony.

Songs from this early period performed by Mulhern include most notably "I May Be Young", "The River", "Fields of Gold" and "Bright Eyes".

At various times, he appeared on various stages with well-established artists like Daniel O'Donnell, Hugo Duncan, Brian Coll, Philomena Begley, and Michael English.

In 2004, he was the lead actor in the short film "Buy Rights" about shoppers rights in the UK.

He also completed a one-year acting course in performing arts in Northern Ireland's NW Institute of Performing Arts.

Lee Mulhern studied at St Colman's Secondary School in Strabane with music studies at North West Regional College in Derry.

In 2005, Lee Mulhern joined the band Streetwize, billed as the world's first "global boyband", as one of its original members, alongside Irish Donal Skehan, English Lee Hutton and Swedish Jonathan Fagerlund following successful auditions.

The original members made a tour in Ireland, UK, Sweden, and appeared on the US television station CN8, a cable television station where they performed "Room in Your Heart" during morning show hosted by Greg Coy.

Streetwize (with the amended set-up of Lee Mulhern, Lee Hutton, Kyle Carpenter, Antonio Jones and Allan Cutler sang its signature song, a cover of Living in a Box's hit "Room in Your Heart" during the annual drive of the "ChildLine" charity in 2007 in Ireland. Soon Streetwize disbanded without any actual hits.

Streetwize band members were successful individually.

Lee Mulhern left the band in August 2008 preferring a solo career.

Other members included Chris Johnson and Ben Hazlewood

Besides Mulhern's solo musical career, two other original members of Streetwize project, Donal Skehan and Lee Hutton went on to form a 4-member boy/girl Irish band named Industry (2009–2010) with two number one singles in Irish Pop Charts.

Another Streetwize member, Jonathan Fagerlund became a successful solo singer in Sweden with two albums, the single "Playing Me" and a participation in Melodifestivalen 2009 with "Welcome to My Life".

After many member changes, Streetwize was reformed and renamed Stateside.

The main vocalists were Lee Mulhern and Venezuelan Antonio Jones, a young singer in a popular Latin American musical formation Fuera de Clase.

In 2009, Lee Mulhern became part of a 4-member boy band project called Access All Areas alongside former Stateside member, the Venezuelan Antonio Jones in addition to 2 new recruits, Mali-Michael McCalla, the UK X Factor Final 24 contestant from series 5 and another UK recruit Tom Pepper.

McCalla was later replaced by the Irish/Welsh/Australian Brandon Kemeny.

The band broke up in 2011.

In 2013, as Lee Matthews, he became part of the country music scene in Ireland in the Country and Irish genre releasing two albums, A Little Bitty Country in 2014 and It's a Great Day to Be Alive in 2015 and a string of singles releases.

Lee Mulhern was born in Omagh, Northern Ireland.

He now lives in the County Tyrone town of Strabane.

He started his career at age 7, making his first appearance on Irish television winning the top prize in Children at Heart.

He went on to sing live on the BBC for Children in Need appeal.

Aged 8, Lee released his first cassette album entitled Hey Good Looking a selection of pop, country and ballads.

At age 9, he appeared on Hugo Duncan's BBC TV show Hugo and Friends as a child star.

At 10, he won top spot in an 'Esat Digifone' talent competition.