I discovered the power you get from being onstage.' He begins performing in the subway with a Casio keyboard, at times pretending he's blind so the cops don't arrest him. He befriends an instructor named Lena McLin, his 'second mother.' When he's 17, she enters him in a local talent show where he sings Stevie Wonder's 'Ribbon in the Sky.' He later tells Newsweek, 'That night it was like Spider-Man being bit. Instead of pursuing his interest in basketball, he chooses music 'because all the ladies loved me for it,' he later tells the Guardian. Robert's family moves out of the projects and he is enrolled in the esteemed Kenwood Academy after winning a scholarship. His mother tells an acquaintance that Robert was actually shot during a suicide attempt. He is later shot during a gunfight, getting hit in the shoulder.

Robert admits to witnessing some older kids in his neighbourhood rape his female friend at the age of 12. We learned wrong from right.' Joann teaches her son to sing Stevie Wonder songs by putting a nickel on the turntable to slow it down 'so the runs could go really slow and then you learn them and then you learn them and you get it down pat,' he tells ABC's Primetime Live in 2004. In 1994, he tells USA Today, 'My mother made sure we were there. His mother, a school teacher, encourages the family to attend a Baptist church and by the age of eight Robert is singing in the choir. He and his siblings are raised by their mother, Joann Kelly, in a Southside council estate after their father walks out on them. Robert Sylvester Kelly is born in Chicago, IL, the third of four children. As he says, 'When my backs against the ropes/ I can feel it mmm/ I'm the world's greatest.' There's no convincing him otherwise. From a new album, the retro-feel-good Write Me Back, and a long-awaited autobiography, to a cruise hosted by the man himself and yet more chapters of Trapped In The Closet, R. Despite having a personal life that would make Woody Allen and Chris Brown sigh with relief, he has somehow managed to hold on to a career that shows no sign of slowing down. Marrying a 15-year-old superstar in the making, sex with underage girls, spousal abuse, being tried by a jury on 21 counts of child pornography, empathizing with Osama bin Laden, naming an album Black Panties, he's allegedly done all of them. But for every gold certification and shiny piece of hardware, Kellz has produced a scandal he's struggled to keep under wraps. With more than 50 million albums sold, five #1 albums, ten top ten singles, three Grammys, and countless other awards, his ability to mesmerize fans has made him the most successful R&B artist of the last 25 years. The most prolific songwriter/producer of his generation, Robert Kelly isn't called the Pied Piper for nothing. Kelly never wrote anything down, he'd just come up with the songs off the top of his head.

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