'Meeting my dad was a D:Ream' - pop star's 50-year search for his birth father

He is the hitmaker behind Things Can Only Get Better, one of the biggest and most indelible chart smashes of the 1990s.

But, behind the rollercoaster ups and downs of pop stardom, D:Ream's Peter Cunnah was also on a personal journey - the search for his birth parents.

Now, after more than half a century, the singer has finally met his biological father after tracking him down in an emotional journey from Northern Ireland to England.

And, it turns out, Cunnah's musical talent didn't come out of nowhere – his father, Patrick Hanna, was a touring musician, his half-sister Philippa Hanna is a global star in Christian music and half-brother Stuart Zender is a former bass player with funk-pop mainstays Jamiroquai.

Cunnah and Zender have also since met and spent time together, comparing "notes" about their musical journeys.

"It's kinda surreal still," Cunnah said, reflecting on the emotional, tearful moment he knocked on the door of his birth father's home in Barnsley, Yorkshire.

It brought the pop star full circle, from being born in a mother-and-baby home in Belfast in 1966 to his adoption by Les and Monica Cunnah and upbringing in Londonderry.

He was still a young boy when Monica broke the news he had been adopted.

"Mind-blowing, very young, trying to process it, I was going 'that's all right Mum, you're my real mammy and daddy' and I sort of left it at that.

"I had that knowledge my whole life, I had friends who found out later on in their 20s that they were adopted.

"It was like someone had pulled the carpet from underneath them, their whole life had been a lie in some regards, so I was really glad she told me."

Fame, fortune - and finding his mother

Fast forward to the early 90s and Cunnah was finding fame and fortune with his band D:Ream, which also featured Prof Brian Cox on keyboards long before he became renowned as a physicist and broadcaster.

The band's big breakthrough came with Things Can Only Get Better, which went to number one in the charts in 1994, and was also later used by the Labour Party as their election anthem when they came to power in 1997.

But the London party scene came with a heavy price, with Cunnah becoming addicted to cocaine, ecstasy and alcohol - for which he is still in recovery.

He was also finding out more secrets from his past.

A seminal moment came in 1991, when his adoptive mother Monica received a letter.

"I said 'mum, you open it', so she opened the letter over the phone and there was tears and she was reading this thing to me - it was a pouring out of emotion by a woman called Ann McCrea, who was my natural birth mother," Cunnah said.

"And she said: 'I'll understand, all I want is a photograph'."

Cunnah decided to go and meet his birth mother, who lived in Strabane, County Tyrone, not far from his hometown of Derry - and was "blown away" to find out he had three half-brothers and one half-sister.

"And that was that," he said, adding that he has now known his birth mother for longer than he didn't know her.

But it would take Cunnah another 34 years to put the final piece of the jigsaw together and trace his biological father.

Ann told him his name was Patrick Dusky and that Cunnah was "his spit" .

But, it turned out, Dusky was a stage name.

"When you tried to find him, he was like a ghost," Cunnah added.

However, detective work by his sister-in-law tracked down a social media profile for Patrick Hanna.

It still wasn't straightforward.

"It's a big thing to go: 'Hello, I think you might be my dad.' How do you phrase that initial contact," Cunnah said.

"I emailed him and got crickets."

Last year, he emailed Philippa Hanna, who he found out was Patrick's daughter from his second marriage and a global name on the Christian music scene.

After talking on the phone and exchanging photos, she told Cunnah that two years earlier she had taken a DNA test to prove she was Hanna's daughter and suggested he do the same.

Six weeks later the results came through - a perfect match.

Cunnah "made a beeline" for Manchester, hired a car and drove to Barnsley, where Hanna lives.

"I brought my youngest daughter Madeleine with me and we just hung out for the whole afternoon.

"I loved it. I have a moment when I walked through Ann's door and I have a photograph of that and I have a moment when I walked through Patrick's door and they caught us in an embrace and, do you know what, we both snivelled a bit."

Knowing both the people who brought him into the world has made Cunnah's life more complete, he said.

Now, he lives with wife Ruth in the seaside village of Fahan, County Donegal, just a few miles across the Irish border from Derry - and not far from the mother-and-baby home where he spent his first days.

And he is still making music there - without the drugs and alcohol.

Things have only got better.