Читать книгу More Than You Know - Matt Goss - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIf I Was A Wishful Thinker . . .
Once Tom was involved, through his Massive Management company along with his partner Mick Newton, events moved very quickly indeed. It was December 1986 and within a very short space of time, our band would be all over the papers. For now, however, we didn’t even have a record deal, yet that seemed an insignificant obstacle. Suddenly, demo tapes were recorded – there had already been a false start when Arista pulled out of a deal at the last second. It was disappointing at the time, but with Tom on board anything seemed possible. We were having meetings to discuss which record company would be best, CBS/Sony or EMI, the people behind Michael Jackson or the ones who looked after The Beatles. A few weeks earlier we’d been wiping bacon spread off our guitars in the summerhouse.
Tom was a very big character, physically and in terms of his presence. He would bundle into meetings full of ideas and it sounded like the world was ours for the taking. And you know what? Tom was right.
The name Bros came about from one of these highly-charged meetings and it seemed to fit perfectly. Tom even had his designer Mark Farrow create that famous logo which all seemed very ambitious yet totally natural at the same time. The strategy worked and the music business was soon talking about Tom’s latest act.
Eventually, we signed to CBS/Sony for an advance of £260,000 for the debut album. What that actually equated to for us in hard cash terms was a wage of fifty pounds a week. In a way, I have to be honest, I was more excited by the fact that someone was going to pay for us to go into a studio to make a record and then, amazingly, it would get released. It was a period when even the air I breathed seemed to be rich with dreams. When I arrived home one day after yet another exciting meet, this fantasy life turned to a horrific nightmare when Mum broke the news that she had been diagnosed with cancer.
Every day for weeks, my Aunt Sally had pestered my mum to have a check-up, for no other reason than she had a feeling she should get looked at. Thank God Sally did because eventually Mum did go in and they found something. The surgeons removed what they thought was everything but placed Mum on a strict routine of further check-ups to monitor the situation. Fortunately, three years later she was given the all clear.
The pace of the band was relentless. A girl called Tula, who was working with Tom, took us to the Cuts salon in Soho where we had all our hair chopped off really nicely. Prior to that our hair had been long, very Eighties, very Duran-esque (we also played around with a lot of different styles, even the Buffalo Boy look). I knew in my heart of hearts that the hair had to come off, I’d been thinking about it for some time anyway. When I was about fourteen, I went on holiday with my grandad and Aunt Sally, because I was Nobby No Mates and my brother had gone off sunning himself with some tasty bird, like you should be doing at that age! So what’s the next best thing for a pubescent, hormonally-challenged teenage boy? Go to Greece with your grandad and aunty.
Neither of them were great sun-worshippers, so I found myself on the beach alone most days. On one particular afternoon, I was lying down on the golden sand, with my beautiful long blond hair, slim body, very few hairs on my legs. The next thing I know, five guys start putting their towels down around me. I thought, Oh my God, they think I’m a fucking bird! So in the deepest voice I could muster, I said to the guy next to me, ‘Can you pass me the oil please?’ I’ve never seen five lads scarper so bloody fast!
When the day came to get the hair cut, it was a relief. What was strange was that prior to having the short cut, both Lukie and I did very well with girlfriends, we never had a problem. However, when we had that James Dean cut, it was like flicking a switch, it all started kicking off. Not long after, I was standing in a phone box when a girl who didn’t normally give me the time of day drove by in her car – and did a blatant double-take. She stopped the car and clearly didn’t know who it was, then as she got closer she said, ‘Matt?’ That felt good! My mum still has the ponytails, the string of hair that we had chopped off.
Our look – chunky Doc Martens, ripped Levi 501s, white T-shirts, Harrington jackets and James Dean-esque haircuts might seem quite tame, but at the time it was very striking. A lot of our gear was bought from American Classics and Red Or Dead and both shops did a roaring trade with Brosettes. Duran Duran and Wham! had both enjoyed massive success in the Eighties but their younger fans were starting to look elsewhere. New Romanticism was still very popular with all its flamboyance and melodrama, Goths were always skulking around (a look I have always liked when it is done well), soul boys were besuited and very smooth, casuals were in the mix too, but our look was very different. It just seemed to hit a chord with people. I think it was a time when a new generation was up and coming and wanted their own uniform.
I have often heard people suggest that we were ‘dressed’ by our management and PR team. Let me say now for the record, that is absolute nonsense. I have never, ever been dressed. I am the one who loved James Dean, I was a massive fan, hence the red Harrington. I loved James Dean’s hair. That’s where it came from and I don’t care what anyone says. The ripped jeans were just a case of the trousers we had on having worn out. Simple as that. Next thing you know, everyone is ripping brand-new jeans to simulate the ‘look’. I have never been the sort of person who will sit down with a stylist and say, ‘Do what you want with me.’ I firmly believe that you can’t be in bands and not have opinions. Our look might not have been considered state-of-the-art West End fashion, but people loved it.
When our management team said, ‘Okay, we’re ready, let’s go in and make the album,’ it was so exciting. We were recording at Hot Night Studio in Farm Lane, Fulham, on the top floor of a building in a trading estate. I went in on the first day with a lucky T-shirt that I was determined to wear to record all my lead vocals. Even though it was our debut album, to this day it was one of the few times that we really cracked on with the whole record from start to finish. We didn’t rush anything, it was just that the pace was blistering and yet so productive.
We weren’t studio virgins. In fact, we’d done quite a lot of recording for our age. Before things kicked off with Bros, we’d met a fireman called Ray Hedges – he went on to have success and work with Take That – who owned a sixteen-track, two-inch recording studio. It was pretty impressive, proper gear, and we recorded quite a bit of material with him, so being in the studio with Bros was nothing new.
Nevertheless, we couldn’t wait. Each morning we would make our way to the studio, full of energy and ideas for the day’s work ahead. We were delighted to discover that our producer was Nicky Graham – I think we needed to bring Nicky in, it was quite formulated and organized as a result. He had charts on the studio wall which listed all the component parts of each track and we would diligently work through each one day by day, ticking off lead vocals, bass, guitar, drums and so on as we went, like an advent calendar. It was just the most amazing feeling.
I remember looking at my reflection in the vocal booth thinking, I cannot believe I am making a record! I just sang my heart out on all those tracks, ‘I Owe You Nothing’, ‘When Will I Be Famous?’, ‘Drop The Boy’, ‘Cat Among The Pigeons’, really giving it my all. When I had finished the vocals, I was more reflective and I distinctly recall saying to myself, I wonder if anyone will actually get to hear these songs?
We were fortunate to be using very experienced musicians, which was a great education for us, to be in there for a couple of months working in that environment. But we were far from puppets, as some of our harsher critics would later suggest. We would work with Nicky on songs in the loft of his house in Wimbledon, then they would be taken into the studio to be recorded. It was never a case of songs being given to us on a platter – ‘Here’s a tape with the songs on, learn them.’ Far from it. On reflection, I really did enjoy those moments with Nicky in Wimbledon.
My advice to any artist working on their debut album is to savour it. Get on with having a good time because that pure, naive ‘Shit! I’m making an album’ moment lasts for only a brief time. Once the first song is out and you’ve got a hit, it all changes. Before that, you don’t know if anyone will ever hear it, so just enjoy making that music. It is one of the purest moments you can have in the music business and, for me anyway, the recording of Bros’s debut album was delightful.
Both ‘When Will I Be Famous?’ and ‘I Owe You Nothing’ are credited on the Bros albums as written by Watkins/Graham, so neither Luke nor I receive any money from the publishing of those songs. However, ‘Famous’ was essentially a spoken-word song when I first heard it, but by the time I had sung my lead vocals, I had added a lot. I think that there are moments in those songs you just couldn’t write, it’s just my style of singing. I’ve always been forward in simply opening my mouth in the studio and going for it, it’s impossible to have that kind of character and that kind of sound without the lead singer. The famous ‘oh-ah’ and other ad-libs are not something that you could write down, but as a singer you are naturally inclined to come up with melody. If you listen carefully to ‘I Owe You Nothing’, you will realize that it is a very difficult song to sing; ‘Famous’ has a four-bar section in half-speed waltz time and when people heard we wanted to put 3/4 timing in a dance record they said it wouldn’t work. We stuck with it and we were right, but it was very demanding to sing, naturally. I would say that I added a lot but at the time I didn’t know anything about publishing splits and how money was generated. You think you are involved in making a record, so I was putting my ideas forward and singing, as was Luke.
To Tom’s great credit, he had a famous line that he used to apply to us all the time: ‘You can’t make chicken soup out of chicken shit.’ Nonetheless, we did not get publishing credits on those two songs.
That’s one of the key reasons why I soon wanted to get involved in the writing of the songs I sing, because it was all so disappointing when we realized later that even though we’d put so much effort and work into those songs we would not be entitled to any publishing monies. Having said that, I harbour no bitterness whatsoever about that situation, I don’t have the energy to focus on that, it’s just not wise – I will discuss my feelings towards Tom and Mick in more depth later on in my tale.
With the benefit of hindsight, what I will say to anyone going into a studio for the first time is if you are adding anything, then you are entitled to some of the publishing. At such an early stage in your career when you are around more experienced people, it’s a hard conversation to have, but you have to make your point. It also sets a precedent for future work – usually I will not go into a studio as a writer unless there is fifty per cent for me. I do lyric and melody, all the arrangements, some programming, harmonies and so on, elements which are never going to be worth less. If you have three people in a room, then it’s split three equal ways, but I would also say, to go beyond three people writing in a studio . . . it might work in Nashville, but be careful. Whichever line-up you have, get it understood what the splits are; it cuts out the disappointment. Believe me, I know.
By the time we were recording that debut album, the word on the street about Bros was already reaching epic proportions. We were increasingly being asked to do photo shoots and interviews and on some days it was as if everyone knew about us already. We were starting to be mobbed before we’d even had a hit.
We did some PAs to fan the flames, although not exactly hundreds like some young bands do. Nonetheless, something intangible was happening and we were already getting a following. Girls were beginning to go mad when they saw us. That was quite a shock, I can tell you. One of the first times it began to dawn on me that something was happening, was outside my mum’s house in Peckham (this would be the location of some of the most insane moments of Brosmania over the coming years). I came home one afternoon after doing some recording and there was a girl hyperventilating outside Mum’s house. I instinctively thought it was a passer-by in distress, so I ran in and anxiously said, ‘Mum, quick! There’s a girl outside and she’s obviously not well, she’s hyperventilating. Look! Look!’
My mum followed me out of the front door and looked down the street. There was no one there. I was completely bemused. We went back inside, puzzled, but I was not happy, there had definitely been a girl out there in discomfort, so I had to look out of the window to check again. This time there were four girls and they were all hyperventilating. I dragged Mum out to see if we could help. When they saw me, they freaked out and their condition escalated to what can only be described as hysteria.
‘I think that’s because of you, Matty,’ said Mum, a cheeky and proud little smile spreading across her face.
Within what felt like a month of that day, we were being mobbed by hundreds of screaming girls every day without fail.
We hadn’t even released a record yet.
