Читать книгу More Than You Know - Matt Goss - Страница 8

FOUR

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Luke and I were as one back then. When you are floundering for foundations, you look to the constants in your life. I had my mum, there was Crawford Road and there was my beautiful twin brother. Luke was my saving grace, he was one of the reasons I could feel safe. We were young twins with strong personalities, so of course we would fight but we would always have a good time together. When I think of Luke back then, my face just cracks into a big smile, and I end up laughing. He was a hilarious physical comedian as a kid, always mucking around, a typical drummer I guess! I used to love how he made me chuckle, I’d be crying and aching on my sides, breathless from laughing. We did have other friends though, which was healthy. I like having best mates; I know hundreds of people, but I only have a couple of best mates. At Collingwood, I would befriend a boy who was my best mate through all of secondary school and on through the madness of the Bros years, a great guy called Lloyd Cornwall.

We went to Collingwood Secondary School in Camberley, south London, a year later than everyone else because of our stay in Cheddar, so not only was it yet another new school but by the time we arrived, most kids had gravitated towards certain friends and cliques had already been formed. However, we were into cool music and quickly became popular at the new school, which was a nice feeling. One of our new mates in that first year at Collingwood was a quite academic boy whom we met in the school dinner queue. His name was Craig Logan.

As for other teenage boys, one of the most important things in life was girls. Lukie and I have never done badly with girls. Luke dated prettier girls than me but I was more shy in that area. As we grew up, he went for a different type of girl, ones that would drive cars and stuff like that, which when you are a teenager is a defining element of your personality to other kids. I still had plenty of little romances though. There was a girl called Caroline whom I really liked when I was fourteen, but she moved to America and I was heartbroken. Caz was lovely, she wasn’t the prettiest girl in the school but to me she had the sweetest way about her (her best friend was Luke’s girlfriend, that’s how it was in those days!). Then I dated a girl called Cindy who still to this day is one of the loveliest girls I’ve ever met. She was my first love. Her parents worked for an oil firm and they had a lovely house on the Wentworth estate by the golf course. She was American and unfortunately she too moved back to the States. She was just so gentle, an earth angel.

I lost my virginity to Cindy. I was sixteen, quite late for a guy I guess. That first experience of making love was quite amazing for me. We’d heard all these stories that you had to use lubrication, so I covered my knob in after-sun lotion. From that shaky start, it was actually wonderful, not the horror story that many people experience! Afterwards, we both just smiled and smiled for hours. That is a great memory, although one that inevitably comes with a certain whiff of after-sun.

Those secondary school and teenage years can be so influential on your personality. For example, I have a real fear of sirens. If I hear a motorbike rev in a certain way, it will give me an absolute chill. Part of me sometimes wonders if I grew up during air raids in a past life. More specifically, while I was at Collingwood, we had a couple of incidents with sirens that, looking back, must have had quite a lasting effect on me. The school was near to Broadmoor hospital which over the years has housed notorious individuals such as the Yorkshire Ripper. Every Monday escape sirens would go off to test the system – this unnerving sound was strangely reassuring to locals because it meant that everything was working. Religiously, every Monday, this siren would howl across the area.

However, at the back of your mind, next to the face-at-the-window and the bogey-man-under-the-bed, you knew that if a siren went off on any other day then there could be someone out there that you really didn’t want to meet.

On one particular day, I was out on a school cross-country run, trekking through the woods near to Broadmoor. I was on my own thinking of nothing much when I heard the siren. The sound registered in my ear and a split second later I thought to myself, It isn’t a Monday. I shit myself. I started thinking, Maybe they have just found him, or has he been gone for half an hour on the run . . . ? By the time I’d run another mile, I was convinced I was about to stumble across some mass murderer. Obviously I didn’t, but I felt a panic that stays with me to this day.

Another time while I was at Collingwood School the four-minute nuclear warning went off. It sounds bizarre but it is true. Camberley was one of the few places in Britain where the nuclear warning signal actually went off accidentally. This blaring siren was absolutely everywhere, yet you couldn’t tell exactly where it was coming from. It was almost as if it was inside your brain rather than coming in through your ears. After four minutes of that, I was ready to explode myself!

We were in school at the time and it was such an extraordinary circumstance to find yourself in. We were in woodwork and the teacher, Mr Linnell, was usually a grumpy old bastard. However, when the siren went off, he had this really peaceful look on his face. Mr Euston was the same – he had a cool swagger about him like Lee Majors from The Six Million Dollar Man and he also seemed strangely serene that day. Even now I think they knew more than we did.

The headlines on the local papers the next day said, ‘Camberley Plays It Cool With Four-Minute Warning.’ Funnily enough, we still have the tray that Luke was making in that very woodwork class. Mum still uses it for tea. This tray is indestructible. If a nuclear bomb had obliterated Camberley that day, I am certain that in among the fall-out and hinterland of atomic waste, Lukie’s tray would have been on the floor, right at the centre of the explosion, unscathed. Ten out of ten, Goss.

To any secondary-school pupil, teachers can provide both the best and worst moments of your time in class. I think it was our English teacher Ms Funnel who wore fishnets, that was fantastic. One time she climbed on my desk to open a window with her fishnets on, I remember that very clearly! But the best teacher was Ms Sinkovich who, for some reason, used to play an accordion while wearing very short skirts, which to a hormonally-charged teenage boy was definitely a nice bonus.

Mr Brooks was a great biology teacher, phenomenal. To this day, I still remember every valve in the human heart and how it all works, solely because of him teaching us so well. He was cool with it too. One day, a mate of mine dropped a condom on the floor. I don’t really know why we had them at that age because we’d have only lasted ten seconds had we caught sight of a naked woman anyway. This condom went ‘SPLAT!’ on the classroom floor. A hushed nervousness fell over the room, you could almost hear people thinking, Oh my God! Mr Brooks is going to go mad! Sure enough, Mr Brooks saw the condom, but simply crouched down, picked it up, said, ‘I’ll save this for later’ and promptly put it in his pocket and carried on teaching.

Another nice memory (albeit earlier at St Clement’s) is that of Mr Bromley and the eclipse. He had a really great way about him, he was a very knowledgeable, gentle but very firm teacher. While he was teaching us, there was a solar eclipse which we all watched; rather than just make an afternoon of it and then forget about it the next day, Mr Bromley said, ‘When there is another eclipse, let’s meet on the top of Box Hill.’ I thought that was an amazingly thoughtful thing for a teacher to say to his class. It would be lovely if that sentiment could be in all classrooms, that kind of foresight.

I don’t know if Mr Bromley would even remember saying that, but when it came to the eclipse in 2002, I was in LA and I thought about him all day, wondering if he was sitting on Box Hill all those thousands of miles away, and indeed if anyone else was sitting with him.

Without doubt the person I have the fondest memories of is Jane Roberts, my drama teacher and someone I still hold dear to my heart. I would love to get back in touch with her. She was so different to your normal drama teacher, and absolutely brilliant at her job. Jane gave me a lot of confidence in myself as a performer. She used to say, ‘You have something special about you, you’ve got what it takes,’ and constantly encouraged me. In fact, I would say that she is the reason that I was able to pursue my career as I did, she gave me that confidence. I absolutely trusted her judgement one hundred per cent so when she said I had what it takes, I believed her and my confidence surged.

Despite what people may think, I have never been a confident person. As I have grown older, I have become a more self-assured man, but on a vanity level I am not confident. I don’t want that to change. I have always had an absolute dislike for arrogance. In the Bros years, the press would often say we were ‘brats’ or ‘arrogant’ and those words really stung. I would be devastated if someone said that about me. I find arrogance so boring, so uninteresting. I love kindness, respectful people; life is too bloody short to be around arrogance. Jane knew the difference between arrogance and confidence and she instilled some of the latter in me, for which I will be eternally grateful.

I should point out that at secondary-school age, I absolutely loved drama. Acting was my bug, not music. I desperately wanted to be an actor, even my work experience was at Windsor Theatre. For some reason, one of my first assignments from Windsor was to go into central London, by myself, and buy some blank bullets. That was pretty daunting!

It was always acting and, later, music for me. I just wasn’t interested in anything else, especially the sciences (although I loved biology). I hated physics. When I did the exam for physics I just put my name at the top of the paper and walked out. I knew I didn’t want to put myself through an hour and a half of stress – I wasn’t going to build rockets. The teacher actually shook my hand, he seemed to admire the fact that I knew what I wanted not to do.

Jane was always very encouraging and I was a good pupil – I suppose because I wanted to learn more and more and more. My application paid off when I won the lead role in a 1984 production of Cabaret. It was a big show, beautiful costumes, expert sets, you would never have known it was a school effort, Jane made such a perfect job of it. I was in my element on stage playing the German Master of Ceremonies at a prewar Berlin nightclub. I won a standing ovation and loved every minute of it – I am still very proud of that performance. It was the first time I really felt appreciated in that environment. It would have been odd to think that less than a decade later, I would be sitting in a hotel suite with Liza Minnelli herself, who had won an Oscar in 1972 with that very same musical . . . but more of that later.

It was my show-stopping performance in Jane Roberts’s production of Cabaret that brought me very directly to a crucial crossroads in my young life. Jane later took me to one side and said that there had been a scout from RADA at the show and if I wanted to, I could get invited to attend that very famous drama school (the following year I was in Sweeney Todd). Yet, while on the one hand that was everything I ever wanted to hear, one aspect of the Cabaret show had really stuck in my mind, and that was how natural and comfortable it had felt being on stage singing. The way singing made me feel, the way it physically felt in my throat, I knew that was the way forward. It was a really stark contrast to anything I had ever done before – I loved acting and was good at it for my age, but the singing was on another level altogether. It just felt so comfortable, so natural.

It’s funny how your childhood can be such a mish-mash of memories and it is very telling which specific moments stand out. In view of our future careers, one moment in Collingwood was very significant. In the early Eighties, Two Tone had started to fade and several new bands were coming through. The Thompson Twins were really big news all over school and, indeed, the country as a whole. We’d all started buying music magazines and really getting into bands in a big way, so imagine the buzz when my mate won a competition in Smash Hits to go and actually meet the Thompson Twins . . . in New York!

I thought he was pulling my leg when he first told me. To secondary-school kids, it just didn’t compute, it was so fantastic. But sure enough he had won and was duly despatched on a Jumbo to spend time with the band. Then, as if that wasn’t startlingly brilliant enough, they ran a feature in Smash Hits showing him hanging out with the Thompson Twins in New York, inside limos, at the gig, backstage . . . we couldn’t believe our teenage eyes. We were saying, ‘It doesn’t get bigger than that, that’s it, he’s made it . . . we know him.’

What I didn’t know then, as I flicked through the pages of that magazine looking at the Big Apple, the music-biz glamour and the faces of this band that we all followed, was that only a handful of years later, Bros would be on the cover of the then-biggest-selling edition of Smash Hits ever.