When all four chairs turned for singer Taylor Beadle-Williams at The Voice’s blind auditions, that wasn’t the first time she’d come face-to-face with coach Ronan Keating. Back in 2017 they acted opposite each other in an episode of Love Child.
Taylor tells TV WEEK that she was playing a heavily pregnant woman, with Ronan as Dr Lawrence Faber, attending to her.
“I was given all these lines,” she remembers.
“During the lunch break on set, I sat with Ronan Keating and we went back and forth with the lines and we had a brief chat. And then we shot the scene. But in the final edit, they cut all my lines!”
Taylor says she hasn’t tried to reminisce with Ronan about shooting that scene.
“No way! I was such a blip in his incredible career. There’s no way he would remember.”
At that time Taylor was getting a lot of acting work, also appearing in Tricky Business and multiple TV commercials. Then she left acting, working with wildlife in Africa and qualifying as a zookeeper, before deciding to focus on a music career.
Music had been a big part of her life growing up, with her father being Mark Williams, the lead singer of Dragon and one of the vocalists on the original Home and Away theme song.
“I used to go with him to a lot of gigs,” she remembers. “I used to just watch him on stage and be in awe.”
In recent years, Taylor and her dad have been performing together: he accompanies her when she sings her original songs, and she sings back-up vocals at his gigs. She’s even sung the Home and Away theme with him on stage.
“When we started rehearsing for that part of the show, I just knew all the words!” she laughs.
Getting to perform with her dad has brought the two of them “even closer”.
“That just unlocked this whole new relationship. We became each other’s bestest friends on stage.”
Taylor, 37, believes that when relatives sing together, it’s a “beautiful sound”.
“And I feel that’s the same with my own dad. When we sing together, there’s nothing like it. And I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoy singing with him.”
With auditions on The Voice finishing on Monday, it’s straight into the knockouts on Sunday – and Taylor, who’s in Kate Miller-Heidke’s team, finds herself up against “two incredible powerhouse vocalists who just blew me out of the water with their auditions”.
The song that Kate gives Taylor to sing presents a challenge to her.
“But I love to be given a challenge,” she says. “And I went into Team Kate knowing that Kate would potentially challenge me!”
Catch The Voice on Mondays at 7.30pm and Sundays at 7pm on Channel Seven or 7plus.
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