By Spencer Bright

PUBLISHED: 15:31 EST, 16 August 2013 | UPDATED: 15:31 EST, 16 August 2013

You can understand why brothers Richard and Adam Johnson are worried they’ll only be remembered for The Eggs Factor, the awful moment when backing musician Natalie Holt emerged from the shadows of their performance on this year’s Britain’s Got Talent final to pelt Simon Cowell with eggs.

‘We had a dream,’ says Richard, the slightly taller and slimmer of the two, ‘of performing The Impossible Dream on the final and going for the best possible performance we could.

'It was our chance to show people everything we had. She destroyed that dream and we’ll never get it back. We just hope people will remember us for the right reasons, for working hard and doing our best.’

The final was enough of a trial without the viola player’s rude interruption. ‘Before we got on stage I said to Adam, “We’ve had so many knockbacks, this is our one chance where nothing can go wrong so long as we concentrate.

'Come on, we can do this.” We were nervous wrecks. We were concentrating so hard we actually didn’t hear the commotion at first. Then I caught someone in the corner of my eye. I saw her pull back her hand and then a shiny object and I thought, “She’s going to throw something at Simon.”

'When he stood up I realised it was nothing dangerous, but it could have been anything, couldn’t it?’

Adam, who was singing the song’s crescendo, says, ‘When I saw her I thought, “You shouldn’t be there, this can’t be real, something must have gone wrong.” My instinct was to turn away and carry on singing.’ ‘We’re not the sort of people to grab her,’ says Richard.

‘We’re very easy-going. And perhaps there were some sympathy votes for us. Coming third was amazing. We never thought we’d make the semi-finals, let alone the final, there was so much talent on the show.’

After the results all the judges came on stage. ‘Simon came up to us and said, “Lads, I really apologise. You did so well to keep going. Fingers crossed for the future.” I thought, “What does that mean?”’

They soon found out it meant signing to Cowell’s record label, and their first album The Impossible Dream has just reached No.1 and already gone Gold. It includes their signature song of course, as well as Bring Him Home from Les Mis, Ave Maria and Amazing Grace.

They’ve gone for the crossover style they performed on BGT. ‘We’re young lads and we want to do something that will appeal to people our own age as well as to all the nans,’ says Richard.

In fact, Sony are so pleased with the album that they’ve announced it’s going to be released in America, so the boys will soon be heading to the States to promote it before returning for a UK tour in February. 

While on BGT they faced accusations they were cruise-ship singers pretending to work as sandwich makers. ‘We weren’t pretending to be anything we weren’t,’ says Richard.

‘Britain’s Got Talent didn’t tell us what to say and we told them everything we’d been doing. When we did our first audition we’d done a few trials for P&O on cruise ships in the Mediterranean and we had occasional gigs here and there, but at the time we were working pretty much full time with Mum and Dad.’

Their parents own two Subway franchises and Temptations café in Flint, North Wales, near to where the boys, who are just over three years apart – Richard is 23 and Adam has just turned 20 – grew up in Holywell.

It was their grandmother Lorna who nurtured their love of opera and musicals when they stayed with her during summer holidays, turning them on to favourites like The Sound Of Music, Mario Lanza and taking them to see Alfie Boe and Tosca.

When they won the unofficial North Wales’s Got Talent in a hotel in Holywell in 2011 they were taken under the wing of record producer Gordon Lorenz, who produced Charlotte Church’s first recording Pie Jesu.

Lorenz recorded some tracks and said he would pass them to his contacts at Sony (who ironically they’re now part of). But before he could do so Lorenz died suddenly aged 68 in June 2011. ‘We were devastated, and then the gigs dried up for about six months,’ says Richard. ‘We just stopped. We were a bit deflated because we were quite young to have that hope and then to not get there was quite gutting.’

They were then spotted by Royle Family actor Ricky Tomlinson singing on the bill with Ken Dodd at a charity gig in Liverpool, and he invited them to be the opening act for his comedy routine at his Liverpool club The Green Room.

‘He said, “Because you’re struggling for work would you like to do something here every Saturday?” which was incredible,’ says Richard. At the end of last year a P&O talent scout saw them there and booked them for trials aboard cruise ships.

Then by chance a relative saw a BGT audition tent in a Morrisons car park in a Liverpool suburb about 35 miles away – it was due to close two hours later. The brothers dashed over arriving with only half an hour to spare.

‘We went into this tiny, pitch black tent and there was just a girl there with a camera who said, “Do you want to have a go?”’ says Richard. ‘We sang maybe four lines of O Sole Mio and she said, “That’s enough. We’re happy with that.”’

A few days later they were invited to the BGT auditions and passed the trials for P&O Cruises. The choice wasn’t difficult to make. And now they’re signed up with expectant father Simon Cowell. ‘I can’t believe he’s having a baby – it’s a shock,’ says Richard.

‘But I think he’ll make a great dad. The kid will have a Ferrari by the time he’s five!’

The Impossible Dream is out now. www.richardandadamofficial.com.