Chart-Topping Natasha Bedingfield To Cap PrideFest Saturday
Milwaukee -  Turning 21 is a pretty big deal for most. If you're Wisconsin’s largest annual gay pride festival and coming off a record-breaking anniversary event, the traditional “coming of age” year means having to hurdle even higher bars to give the LGBT community a party it won't soon forget.
  PrideFest demonstrated they are up to the task Monday, March 24 when they announced the signature headliner for this year's festival: the reigning queen of Britpop, 2007 Grammy nominee and current U. S. chart-topping pop diva Natasha Bedingfield.
  “Booking Natasha as our top act on Saturday takes PrideFest to another level,” Williams said. “Until this year our top acts have been the legends of pop music - we’re bringing in Natasha just as she’s about to embark on a  major U.S. tour.”
  Natasha herself is excited about her appearance as well. “I can’t wait to come and do my thing at PrideFest,” she told Quest. “I’m a big supporter of the gay community, so I’m honored to be headlining! It’s going to be a great event!”
  Natasha Bedingfield is one of the biggest and most talented acts on today’s pop charts. With a number one single in America, three additional top ten hits, and over six million albums sold worldwide, Natasha Bedingfield is the UK’s biggest female pop star bar none, and she’s poised to repeat that success in the US.
  Often compared to uber-diva Pink, Bedingfield took the U.S. by storm last year with “Unwritten,” which became the most played song on mainstream American radio and the first British chart topping hit by a female in almost twenty years. Vanity Fair singled her out as the spearhead of a new Britpop invasion; she became one of the faces of Gap (alongside Mia Farrow and Common); she jammed with her hero Prince at a private party; and Bono enlisted her in his (RED) campaign.
  Natasha is also in an exclusive group of performers beloved by gay audiences for their strength, style and ability to tell it like it is. Chicago’s Boi Magazine recently named her one of the “New School Divas”, along with Rihanna and Kelly Clarkson, and remixes of Natasha’s songs have been hugely popular in every gay dance club in the nation.
  With over 1.4 million downloads of her single, “Unwritten,” Natasha became the first British female to score a number one song in the US Billboard pop chart since Kim Wilde and “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” 19 years earlier. “I got to experience the American dream, the concept that you start out a nobody and make yourself into someone. It was humbling, but freeing as well and I found that’s quite a good place from which to write,” Bedingfield said.
  Bedingfield’s first album also produced the hits “These Words,” “Single,” and “I Bruise Easily.”  In 2007 she received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
  Critical acclaim and chart success are continuing with Bedingfield’s new CD, “Pocketful of Sunshine,” which debuted this past January at #3 on the U.S. Billboard charts, the highest ever debut for a UK-signed female artist. The new collection is full of hook-heavy tunes like the album’s first hit which recently tickled the Top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100, “Love Like This,” featuring another current chart superstar, Sean Kingston.
  The full power of Natasha’s voice is heard on the just-released second single, “Pocketful of Sunshine,” which is blazing up the charts with its full-on, hard-to-forget chorus. USA Today rated the entire album 3 1/2 stars out of four and recognized the album as “musically mature” with “artfully R&B-spiced pop-candy arrangements.” With many other radio-friendly songs on the album, Natasha is poised to become a fixture on the charts with one of the best albums of the year.
  “Though we’ve announced the big guns, we’ve got a lot more to share with the community about what’s happening at PrideFest over the next nine or ten weeks,” Williams said.
  Advance tickets, and the full updated festival schedule will be available through the PrideFest website at: www.pridefest.com.