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QUICK FACTS

DATE OF BIRTH: 23/2/90

BORN: Luton, Bedfordshire

PARENTS: Jackie and David Hensley

SIBLINGS: Aaron, 17

GREW UP: Luton

SCHOOLS: Putteridge High School

As a dance teacher and choreographer for her local theatre group, Jaymi’s mum Jackie had always hoped her oldest son would take up a career in the performing arts. From an early age Jaymi often joined his mum on stage with the Phoenix Players, Luton’s amateur dramatics group.

The first time he took to the stage with adults was in 2001, aged 11, when he took on one of the lead roles in the production of Blitz! – a musical by Lionel Bart, writer of the hit musical Oliver! In the same year he began attending Luton’s Putteridge High School, but despite homework and studying, he continued appearing in productions with the Phoenix Players.

At 14, he decided to do something incredibly brave for someone so young. He had been torn by feelings for others around him that many other people of the same age did not share. Taking them to one side one day, he gathered his family and other people close to him around him and summoned up all his courage.

‘I’m gay,’ he told them. It wasn’t as if those who knew him best hadn’t guessed, but sometimes people can react badly when so many people still find it hard to understand how anyone can be attracted to someone of the same sex. Jaymi had been worried those close to him wouldn’t understand. Fortunately his family took the news really well. This allowed him to move on and concentrate on what really mattered to him – his singing career.

He later told Heat magazine: ‘It is not a big thing for me – I came out when I was 14 to my family and friends and never had one piece of negativity.’

After leaving school at 16, he put his heart and soul into his plan to work in the entertainment industry and tried out for a new band called Code 5. Not only did he win a place, but the band were quickly snapped up as an exciting new boyband and were given the chance to support Irish act Westlife on one of their last series of arena gigs, called ‘The Love Tour’.

As the youngest member of the five-piece act, Jaymi had only been with the four other band members for two months when he travelled up and down the country, playing some of Britain’s biggest venues including Brighton, Wembley, Newcastle, Dublin and Belfast.

His bandmates included ‘Ash’, cousin of Antony Costa from the boyband Blue, and ‘Jossy’, who had both had previous stabs at boyband fame. Code 5 were brought together as a manufactured vocal harmony boyband to sing a mix of material written specially for them, as well as versions of songs by other artists, some as diverse as Lionel Ritchie.

Louis Walsh, Westlife’s manager, was said to have personally chosen Code 5 as one of the support bands for the tour, but who knows if he remembered Jaymi when he performed in front of him at the auditions, five years later?

After the Westlife tour, the band continued touring before featuring in a BBC3 programme fronted by top rock record producer Tommy D, called Singing with the Enemy. The programme saw Code 5 having to work alongside their musical opposite, anarchic performance artists called K-Tron and The Exploding Triangles. They all had to put aside their differences and work together. The bands had just one week to dream up and record a brand new track and then perform a surprise gig in front of their die-hard fans.

Viewers watched as they struggled to live together in an intense pressure cooker of creativity and reconcile their musical differences. Despite all the attention, Code 5 didn’t achieve the success they had hoped for, which left Jaymi looking for a new challenge.

After a spell at a holiday camp on the entertainment team, he returned to Luton, where the talented vocalist was able to make ends meet by teaching singing and dancing – just like his mum. At every opportunity, he did what he could to return to the stage and perform in front of a wider audience, though.

In 2010, he performed at the Maspalomas Gay Pride festival in Gran Canaria, Spain, in front of an audience of thousands. Before that he had been working as a singer, touring the clubs and bars of Britain and the resorts like those found on the beaches of Spain.

Also in 2010, he entered a competition to find singers called the Open Mic Competition. After sailing through the regional heats, he made it to the final at London’s indigO2, where he sang a slowed-down version of Michael Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean’. It was a close-run competition and he narrowly missed out on winning by being beaten by another competitor.

Jaymi tried out for BBC1’s The Voice, but didn’t make it through to the final stages. Then in 2011, he thought his time had come when he nearly made it through to the last acts in The X Factor. On this occasion he was part of a band called Brooklyn, who were all from his hometown of Luton.

When the four-piece group tried out in front of Gary Barlow, Louis Walsh, Tulisa Contostavlos and Kelly Rowland, it was the first time they had performed together on stage. They had formed in January of that year and just five days later, travelled to Cardiff to audition for the ITV show. Despite hardly knowing each other and having only a few hours to rehearse, they made it through the first rounds to audition in front of a live audience of 4,000 people.

They were allowed to perform two songs: ‘Forget You’ by Cee Lo Green and ‘In My Head’ by Jason Derulo. Their audition caused some disagreements between the judges but despite this, the boys still made it through to Bootcamp. At the time, Jaymi said: ‘The whole experience was just surreal. We spent 24 hours a day with cameras following us round. The press were everywhere and we were being driven round in big X Factor buses that had to go on huge detours because we were being followed by paparazzi.’

But that was as far as Jaymi and his new pals went – they were booted out before they could get to the Judges’ Houses stage. The group managed to sing on a tour of schools before yet another of Jaymi’s shots at the big time came to an end and he found himself looking for yet another route to success. But he certainly wasn’t about to give up: this time he had got so close. He knew that fame and fortune must only be round the corner.

Within just a few months, Jaymi had met up with the other boys from Triple J and finally, he was on his way to the superstardom he was destined to achieve.