Keith Urban (1983: Doomsday)

Keith Lionel Urban (born October 26, 1967) is a popular music singer, songwriter and guitarist who has become perhaps the first true global "rock star" since Doomsday.

His commercial success started in Australia and New Zealand in the early 1990s, spread throughout southeast Asia and through Mexico by 2000, and in the last five years has spread into South America, Europe, Africa, Siberia and North America.

Urban began his career in Brisbane having moved to Caboolture, Australia at an early age. In 1991, he released a self-titled debut country album, and charted four singles on the Australian country music chart. Record labels looking for a breakout pop star competed for his services; Urban eventually signed with CBS Records Australia (a label formed by the merger of four independent Brisbane-based labels and with the help of a few American music executives who were in Australia on Doomsday).

Urban was groomed for pop stardom by CBS Australia; his singles were played on Australia's highest-rated Top 40 station, Triple J. His first major hit was 1994's The Ranch, a song where the writer laments the loss of his fiancee' in the destruction of Melbourne 11 years before.

Urban continued to work on his songwriting, but was forced by his label on three of his 1990s albums to sing covers of several popular U.S., British and Australian male acts (his biggest hit was his version of Andy Gibb's I Want to Be Your Everything, which was No. 1 for 14 weeks in 1996. Urban balked at being the lead singer in CBS Australia's version of the Bee Gees, and left the label when his contract expired in 1998. While CBS Australia released five greatest hits compilations over the next six years, Urban was working on new, rock-oriented material and shopping for a new label.

He signed with Singapore-based World Records in the summer of 1998, and released his first album on the label, Keith Urban, the following year. His 2002 album Golden Road became a runaway hit in Oceania and Asia and also in Mexico and the Caribbean.

2004 saw the release of his highest selling album to date, Be Here. 2006's Love and Pain was somewhat controversial, as it dealt with the darker sides of relationships in a not-quite-so-friendly manner for radio. 2009's Gravity took a lighter turn. It hit No. 1 in 39 countries and helped cemented his image as the post-Doomsday continuation of the legacy of such pop singer/songwriters as Paul McCartney and their rock counterparts in Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen and Harry Nilsson.