Читать книгу Stephen Gately and Boyzone - Blood Brothers 1976-2009 - Emily Herbert - Страница 7

It was 17 March 1976. Martin and Margaret Gately, who lived in Dublin’s tough, working-class Sheriff Street area, were beside themselves with delight. Margaret had just given birth to her fourth child, a boy called Stephen Patrick David, born in the Rotunda Maternity Hospital in Dublin. Mark, Alan and his sister Michelle were already in situ and Margaret would go on to have one more child, Tony.

The Gatelys were a typical Irish working-class family. Growing up, they were all close and, although they lived in a rough area, it was a source of pride to Margaret that they never got into trouble. And Stephen, in particular, was to turn into a charismatic little boy. Though shy throughout his life, once he was performing – which he started doing when he was very young – energy radiated out of him. From early on, it was clear the family had a special little boy.

The new arrival brought joy to the family, an adorable child who would grow up to be the apple of his parents’ – and Michelle’s – eye. But life for the Gatelys was not easy back then. Martin was a decorator, Margaret worked as a part-time cleaner and money was tight. ‘My dad used to be a painter and decorator, which was a nightmare for me, because sometimes I had to go to work with him, for a pound a day, and scrape about 20 walls,’ Stephen revealed in later years. ‘But my dad kind of taught me, and that was nice. And my mum was a full-time mum, except she used to do a spot of cleaning.’

All five Gately children shared one room; for a time, Michelle and Stephen even shared a bed.

‘I view it as an experience,’ Stephen once said. ‘We had great fun in that little bedroom. There was pipes going across and we would scale them to see who could get around the wall the quickest. We didn’t have money so we made our own amusement.’

But he was never able to put posters up on the walls – his older brothers had already bagged all the available space with pictures of Bruce Lee.

From very early on, Stephen and Michelle formed a particular bond, one that would endure right up until Stephen’s death at such a tragically early age. Like so many large working-class families, Margaret found she had too much on her plate to deal with all of them, and so care of the younger children was farmed out to the older ones – and it was particularly obvious that it should be Michelle’s role, as she was not only close to her little brother, but also the only girl. So Michelle became not just a sister, but also a parental figure – although without the same strictness of a parent. The two absolutely doted on one another, and they always would.

‘My mum was quite busy with the five of us, so she always used to get me to mind Stephen,’ Michelle later recalled. ‘I’d take him and Tony out. Mum would be looking out of the window, keeping an eye on us at all times. He was a good kid: a very smiley, good-humoured child. He was always happy until you did something wrong – like the boys took one of his toys – then he’d sulk. But Stephen never made a big fuss. He was a soft child, a lot softer than the rest of us. I always thought I had to look after him more than the others. If the boys were ganging up on Stephen, I’d protect him.’

It was a bond that would never break.

As an adult, Stephen was to gain a reputation for being the quiet one of Boyzone and so it was when he was still a child. He was a dreamer, who could sit quietly amid the frenetic goings-on all around him; even in a very small flat packed with his family, he had an ability to set himself apart that would stay with him for the rest of his life. ‘I was very quiet and introverted,’ he remembered. ‘I’d never say anything to anybody – I just sat in the corner. I’d sit at the window of our flat for hours, watching as if it were TV.’

And, when he did venture forth, it was more often than not in the company of his big sister. Stephen was never downright reclusive, but he did like Michelle to be present, whatever he did, and so he would turn to her when making any plans.

‘There were five shops near by, and right beside them was a big tree with a shrine to Mary, where people could sit and pray,’ he recalled. ‘I’d always be asking Michelle, “Could we go and see Mary?” She’d take me and we’d sit down, put our money in and light a candle.’

But he was certainly always very quiet. Michelle also remembered him being withdrawn when he was quite young, but then suddenly able to start playing up to the people around him. It was a very good description of how he would be in Boyzone: bashful one moment, then capable of holding the attention of millions the next.

‘Stephen was amazingly shy as a little boy,’ said Michelle. ‘At around six, he started coming out of his shell a little, then all of a sudden at eight he became a completely different person – a lot more determined than the rest of us. He always did well in school. The teachers doted on him because he was a cute little kid, and he worked hard.’

Stephen was also a team player, someone who took part in school activities, particularly theatricals. Of course, this would be the making of him in later years. But he was always reflective, another trait he maintained into adulthood. ‘I was into life and scenery and snowfalls,’ he once said. ‘I would sit wrapped in a duvet, watching the rain. I still like to. It costs nothing to walk around a park or read a book.’

Indeed, he had an almost dreamy quality, the soul of a poet. It was to be no surprise when he ended up making a career in the Arts.

But Stephen certainly had a silly side, as well. When he was seven, he walked into a joke shop in Dublin’s Camden Street and poured a bottle of invisible ink over himself, in the full expectation that it would make him disappear. Naturally, it did not. In fact, his earliest ambition was to be a wizard, with J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings being one of his favourite books. His earliest exposure to music came via the family’s scratchy old record player. Stephen would listen to Whitney Houston and Madonna; blues records belonging to his mother, too, opened up another, very different world.

And the bond with Michelle merely strengthened as time went on. The two played together when they were alone and would be sent out to do the weekly shop, quite a responsibility in itself. ‘Michelle and I got groceries for my mam every week,’ Stephen explained. ‘From when I was around 12, I never used a trolley. I’d say, “That’s for grannies.” So I’d lug the bags, two on each shoulder and one hanging from each arm. Once a bottle of washing-up liquid burst – we were so upset and scared. Not having much money, letting something get spoiled was just something you didn’t do. After that, we’d wrap the washing-up liquid in at least two bags, so that, if it burst, we’d be OK.’

Michelle also remembered those shopping trips as being something of a bone of contention. ‘I’d go off shopping for my mum and I’d always drag Stephen along to help,’ she said. ‘He didn’t like it one bit and we often rowed about it. So there were bad times as well, but never anything serious. Neither of us can stay angry for long – we’d always end up laughing.’

Stephen initially attended St Laurence O’Toole’s school, which describes itself as a ‘small, friendly docklands school situated in the centre of the Dublin’s Docklands area’. Among much else, the school offered many after-hours clubs, with varied activities for the pupils to take part in. Stephen settled in well, made friends and began to work out where his interests lay.

Back with his parents, there might not have been much money, but it was a warm, comfortable home. There was great jollity in the evenings: Martin would have a pint of stout and sing Irish ballads, while Margaret played the spoons, displaying a talent for entertainment that clearly ran in the family. And they did, at least, have a television set.

‘I was the remote control,’ Stephen remembered. ‘“Get up and change the channel”, “Change the channel”, “Change the channel”… Also, I was the tea maker. I don’t know how many cups of tea I’ve made in my life. You know what people are like in Ireland, they just drink so much tea.’

He also looked back on his childhood fare with much affection: it was usually mash, mince flavoured with Oxo cubes and sometimes a dish along the lines of pig’s trotters: ‘They were gorgeous! I don’t eat red meat any more, but I would love a pig’s foot. I remember Saturday night sitting down, watching TV, sucking on a pig’s toe.’

But, while Martin and Margaret were loving parents, they were also strict. Living in a rough area, there was plenty of scope for the growing family to land themselves in trouble, but the couple would have none of it.

‘Our parents really kept an eye on us,’ said Stephen. ‘They didn’t want any of us getting into trouble; they did a good job. People come up to them and say, “How did you raise such a lovely family?” It was discipline – we had a lot of respect for our parents. If they said, “Don’t do that,” we didn’t do it.’

Indeed, the possibilities for going off the rails were all around. Dublin had an increasing problem with drugs and it would have been all too easy to get sucked into that particular mire, either in search of some form of escape or a quick buck. But somehow, like the other members of Boyzone, all of whom came from equally poor backgrounds, they managed to evade the temptations and grew up in a totally respectable manner. His steady upbringing would stand the adult Stephen in good stead. At the time, there were also fights between the residents of the different blocks of flats, St Bridget’s and St Laurence’s, mainly between the children, but ‘some of the adults would probably end up fighting as well’.

It was a poor area, although Stephen would express irritation in later years when it was described as a slum, with a strong community spirit. ‘I have lots of fond memories of growing up in Dublin,’ he said in one interview. ‘I had a happy childhood, with a very close family. I seem to remember spending a lot of time hanging out in the playground in Sheriff Street, near where I used to live. There was a boys’ playground with slides and a girls’ playground with swings. We had a football pitch too. I grew up in a close community and I remember once a year we’d have a community week, where there were competitions for things like snooker, darts and fancy dress. All the kids would queue up and they’d hand us out a packet of crisps, some sweets and a drink each.’

He did, however, remember much darker aspects too. ‘When I was a kid we were living in Sheriff Street flats, and there was this ghost of a man who used to come out,’ he said. ‘I used to see him all the time, and I’d scream. I was around four when I saw him for the first time walking around the flat, and he used to come out every night. [But] I had a happy childhood, not too much darkness at all. Not that I was spoiled because I was a pretty boy or anything like it, at home or at school. I get my downs, but they don’t last long.’

From an early age, Stephen was also beginning to display some of the traits that would lead him to the very top of the show-business tree. For a start, he had the performing gene, but, perhaps just as importantly, he possessed perseverance, patience and determination. When he wanted something, he went all out to get it, and, although he and the other members of Boyzone would go on to find success relatively quickly, for the first year they would need every bit of determination they had.

Circumstances made them all pretty inventive and practical, too. Growing up, Stephen and his friends had to earn money any way they could: at one stage chopping up wooden pallets into kindling and selling them for 10p a bag.

‘I think most people bought them because they thought, Aw, God love them, out there in the freezing cold,’ he remembered.

At other times, they would spend the day bagging potatoes for a bar of chocolate, a Coke and a packet of crisps. He did not, however, complain about this, saying, ‘There was a lot of poverty and crime. It was a tough and rough area, but nice people and good community spirit.’

In stark contrast with the life that he would one day lead, Stephen was used to doing without, so much so that even his shoes were worn down.

‘I know what it’s like to have no money,’ he told one interviewer years later, when he’d become famous. ‘I remember having to wear a pair of shoes to school which had a couple of holes in them – they were stuffed with cardboard so the rain wouldn’t get in. To this day, I love buying myself new shoes. I’ll never get fed up with that!’

His school had no uniform, which meant that Stephen stood out all the more: in fact, he used to wish there was a uniform just so that he could blend in.

Unsurprisingly, there was no money for anything like a holiday, which Margaret minded far more than her children ever did. Indeed, Stephen remembered her weeping when they couldn’t afford to send him on a school trip, although there were sometimes excursions elsewhere. ‘Our holidays, for summer, were being sent to our aunt’s house, or else it was this big place, this huge house, 300 kids, with these dormitories… All the kids from the area went and it was your holiday. It was brilliant.’

On another occasion, he recalled, ‘We never had holidays; we just used to hang around together. Or have treats like the cinema or winkle-picking on the beach. We used to boil the winkles and sell them on the street.’ He was never ashamed of all this in later life, unlike so many stars who try to create a very different image of their previous lives to the reality. ‘I am proud that I have succeeded, but I am also proud that I have some stories from my childhood that are very different to the way I live now.’

And there were deprivations. Christmas, especially, could be a difficult time: ‘Christmas was always tough and Dad, who is a decorator, used to do lots of work around that time to make sure that money was OK for the presents,’ said Stephen. ‘My parents did whatever they could and were brilliant, but I didn’t want to live like that forever. I didn’t want to scrape through, always having to get certain foods and brands because they were cheaper. There were always lots of stolen things going around the doors of the houses in our street and we would buy two for the price of one. I have lots of happy memories but, when I grew up, I wanted more.’

His parents also became highly adept at avoiding their children’s requests by saying that the asked-for present was far too heavy for Santa to carry. But they all accepted this and the stark contrast between then and the later years, when Stephen had a great deal of money and could give some of it to his family, was even more marked. And he always had an ambiguous attitude towards material wealth: although he was happy to have it and would, in adulthood, acquire large properties with the rest of them, he never gave the impression that this was all that motivated him. His parents had brought him up to see what really mattered in life.

There was something brewing away in Stephen, though, which surfaced when he was still very young. ‘When he was 12, he asked for singing and dancing lessons,’ Michelle later recalled. ‘I don’t know where it came from – maybe something he saw on TV. Our mother and father were really supportive but nobody we knew had done singing or dancing before. My folks had to ask him, “Where do we go?”

‘So he found the place and they let him go, and right away he did really well at it. I don’t ever remember Stephen singing at home. It was just so quick – suddenly, he wanted to do the dancing and singing, and he was so good they asked him to teach the younger children at the community centre after school.’

By this time, he was attending North Strand Technical College. He was not particularly academic, but began to excel at some sports and increasingly discovered a talent for drama. And his ability to entertain displayed an unexpected confidence, one that would shortly be put to good use. Stephen was slight, as a child as well as an adult, but he never allowed himself to be pushed about. ‘We had a good schooling, even though it was very tough,’ he admitted. ‘I got kicked around a couple of times when I was 14, but that was it. I stood up to the biggest guy in our class, had a fight and kind of got the better of him. After that, if there was a fight going on, I got left out.’

Although it was to be years before he came out, Stephen knew from very early on that he was gay. ‘I had a couple of dates with girls when I was at school, but, by the time I was 15, I knew that wasn’t what I wanted,’ he said. ‘I’m sure some of the other kids noticed that, and that I was different, but I’d won the fights, stood up to the bullies, so I never got any bother about it.’

At home, however, his family had no idea of his sexuality. Michelle, who remained close to her brother throughout his entire life, might have suspected something, but, as far as the others were concerned, Stephen was simply a little bit gauche and shy. Certainly, the fact that he was still tiny, with a shock of blond hair, might have explained why he didn’t have a girlfriend, and then there was the fact that this was Dublin in the late 1980s. It was all very much stricter back then, but that was the background the boys came from; the background against which Stephen would one day be forced to admit to being gay.

Although many people don’t find it easy to accept their homosexuality, especially when they are younger, matters were complicated by the fact that Stephen was, and remained, a practising Catholic, and of course Ireland happened to be an extremely Catholic country. Many others in similar circumstances have been wracked by guilt, but for some reason this never seems to have been the case in Stephen’s life.

‘Never,’ he once said. ‘I’ve never thought that God would come down and say that I can’t do this or that. I went to church and sang at Christmas mass, but I stopped going because I couldn’t sit there, bored out of my head, for an hour. God forgives everything. I read a book called Conversations With God by Neil Walsh, which explained a lot of things. This is the only life I have, and, in a hundred years’ time, who’ll give a shit?’

By his early teens, he was beginning to show a marked talent for entertaining. He landed the lead role in his school’s production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (a role he was to play again as an adult), and went on to join Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre Group and also taught drama at the local youth centre. Another role was in Juno and the Paycock, the second play of Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy. At this time, he started to direct short plays and choreograph dance routines; he also joined a 12-strong disco dance troupe called Black Magic, which won the all-Ireland Disco Dance finals when Stephen was 13.

The experience also proved rather remunerative. ‘It was dancing I loved – I would go to a teenage disco every Friday night and take over the whole dance-floor,’ he reminisced. ‘I went to classes and eventually a friend and I took them and charged the children 50p each. Mum was very proud of my dancing and would get me to perform little routines in our living room when she had friends round.’

But there was no calculation behind any of this: Stephen was doing it because he genuinely wanted to dance. ‘It wasn’t about getting out of Sheriff Street,’ he said simply. ‘I just wanted to dance.’ He considered himself to be a real-life version of the musical Billy Elliot, the story of the young boy from a miner’s town, who went on to become a dancer: ‘The rough area,’ he pointed out. ‘They had a miners’ strike. We had a bin strike!’ Indeed, he went on to sing the title track of the film version in 2000, but had no clue that such greatness awaited him. Back in those days, the height of aspiration was to dance at Butlins – which he did every Wednesday afternoon.

Stephen knew something else from a young age, too: that he fully intended to become famous. ‘From when I was around 14, I practised my autograph,’ he admitted in 1999. ‘All the boys at school would laugh. About two years ago, two of the guys in my class passed me by in town. I stopped to chat and one said, “I remember you sitting in class signing autographs – they’d be worth something now!”’

And his acting skills were beginning to pay off. Stephen and his mother Margaret actually appeared in Alan Parker’s wildly popular 1991 movie The Commitments, albeit for just a second: they can be seen at the start, haggling for goods in a market. ‘I did a little piece in The Commitments, but blink and you’ll miss me,’ he said in later years. ‘Literally, I’m gone. I was like 14 and they got about 300 kids from my area, and we got £20 for doing it.’

Another film appearance almost followed: Stephen also filmed a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it slot in In The Name Of The Father (1993), starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a small-time Belfast thief, wrongly implicated in the IRA bombing of a pub, based on the story of the Guildford Four. He and various other youths were filmed throwing bricks from a rooftop: in the end, alas, the footage ended up on the cutting-room floor.

But, in fact, Stephen was turning into something of a prodigy. He was a good-looking boy, and so, from the age of 14, he began a brief career as a model, having signed up with Dublin’s International Modelling agency. Assignments included modelling clothes for some major department stores, as well as weekly visits to Butlins to take part in fashion shows and dance routines. As he was rather small, he couldn’t take on every assignment, but did enough to get himself noticed – a fellow model and friend was the young Colin Farrell, who would also go on to do great things. At the same time, he supplemented his earnings with a job at Makulla’s clothes store.

When he was 16, he moved to Assets model agency, and at around the same time started to sing karaoke. Indeed, it was because of his modelling that he himself discovered for the first time quite what a good voice he had. ‘I was on a coach travelling to one of the modelling assignments I used to do as a teenager,’ he later recalled. ‘We all used to sing on the coach and one day an agent asked if there was anyone who could sing, and everyone chorused, “Stephen can!” I had no idea my voice was good, and, to this day, I’ve never had a singing lesson.’

But the episode gave him ideas. ‘I always knew I wanted to do something in the entertainment industry when I left school, but it wasn’t something I was pushed into. I loved drama and dancing at school and I would always be the first one who’d get up in front of the class to do some acting. I had a good drama teacher who encouraged me, but I think a lot of my teachers thought I should stick my head in books and concentrate on studying, so I’d get a good job when I left school.

‘My ambition was to be successful doing something to do with music – not necessarily being famous. Coming from a poor family, I didn’t want to have to worry about money when I was older. I had a dream and I wasn’t going to let anyone take that away from me.’