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FIVE

The More I See The More I Want It

The primal attraction I felt to singing during the performance of Cabaret wasn’t the first time I had ever thought of being in a band. In fact, Lukie and I had been in bands already. It was just that moment was when it became very clear that music was at my core, rather than acting.

By then, I’d been in and out of several bands, none of them particularly any more sophisticated than a thousand schoolboy groups. Luke had been playing drums for a while. He had an MPC kit, which was like a briefcase full of pads that you plugged in, it was a brilliant piece of gear. All credit to Tony, despite money not being exactly plentiful, he somehow managed to save £400 to buy Luke this first drum kit outright. I’d briefly dabbled with a saxophone but was never really very interested.

My very first band was when Dukus and I were twelve, with our mate Peter Kirtley. At that age you can be a bit of a wanker, and I’ll be honest, we only asked Peter to be in the band because his dad had some equipment. It was a decision of convenience, we needed instruments, he had them. I played monophonic keyboards – one finger – and sang. Luke played drums and we asked our new friend Craig Logan to join, because he had a bass guitar. We called ourselves Caviar. What a dodgy soul name! We didn’t have a clue what caviar was but we knew it was expensive, so we thought ‘job’s done!’ Then we found out it was fish eggs.

Caviar mutated through various combinations, and we joined other bands including one with two other brothers on guitars who were brilliant for their age. Luke was becoming well-known locally for his drumming so he was already in the band and had done a couple of gigs with them, but they didn’t have a singer. With my enjoyment of singing on stage in mind, I was keen to get involved, so I asked Luke if he could get me an audition. I turned up and started singing Paul Young’s big cover hit, ‘Wherever I Lay My Hat’ and after about three lines they said, ‘Fucking hell! You’re in!’ They were called Hypnosis. They gave me my first experience of singing live on stage in a band, and Luke was the one who arranged the audition, it was down to him. Hypnosis was destined not to last either. I really hope those brothers ended up in the music business because they were such good guitarists.

Then Luke and I left and started our own band called Epitoma. We’d picked up a Latin dictionary and found the word for abstract which was ‘epitoma’, but that sounded like some terrible disease. You can just picture a doctor saying, ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you’ve got epitoma.’ Eventually, we ended up settling on the name Ice. That was supposed to be an improvement.

God only knows how but we got a gig at some old working-class club where we were basically asked to play in front of a load of old grannies. We were on the same bill as a number of cabaret acts, but we were ‘the band’ and were really excited regardless. We rehearsed and talked about it for weeks. Ice’s live debut! We’d even got George Michael’s ‘Careless Whisper’ rehearsed perfectly. At the time, a local guy was ‘managing’ us, but when he went on stage to introduce us he said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please let me introduce you to . . . Pulse 2!’

He’d changed our bloody name without telling us, right before we went on stage!

We were fuming! I defiantly walked out on stage to a ripple of apathetic applause that would have barely registered on the massed hearing aids in the smoke-filled room. Resplendent in my long soul-boy hair, Duran Duran-esque suit and over-sized earrings, I could barely contain my anger when I said, ‘We’re not Pulse 2, we’re Ice!’

Like anybody gave a fuck.

Shortly after the debacle of Ice/Pulse 2, Craig, Lukie and I broke away and formed our own band as a trio. We heard about a band called Breathe who were really popular locally around Camberley. I loved the guy’s voice and they were doing quite well, then they actually had a hit, called ‘Hands To Heaven’. When that happened, we thought Shit! How many successful bands come out of the same small area like Camberley? They had changed managers and we found out about the one they had started off with, a chap called Tony. He lived on the Old Dean Estate so we bunked off school one day and went down there to see him. He was totally up for it. One of the first things he said was, ‘I am going to rent Concorde for you lads, fill it with record company executives, while you guys play in the aisle. It’s going to be massive!’ We were so excited.

For about two days.

Then we did our research and found out that the aisle on Concorde was barely wide enough to fit a snare drum in, let alone a complete band. The sheer joy of walking around school thinking, Yeah! We’re going to play Concorde! Yeah! only lasted forty-eight hours. That statement and idea was his crowning glory and his downfall all in one. That was one of our first experiences of managers.

One day we were practising and I’d just got my copy of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. When my mate Neil arrived to watch the rehearsal, I said, ‘Hey, listen Neil, I’ve written this new track, what do you think . . . ?’ and I started singing, ‘Looking out . . .’ reciting the words to what I knew was the classic Jackson track ‘Human Nature’. Neil’s eyebrows shot up and he was enthusing, ‘Fucking hell, Matt, that’s fucking wicked mate!’ We were actually writing material as early as then, but I must admit it wasn’t up to that standard!

One thing about being in a successful band is that it makes you pretty much unemployable. In my opinion, once you’ve topped the charts or, indeed, even been in the charts at all, you see things through such a specific, extreme lens. Afterwards, it’s like your retinae have been distorted and there’s no way of reverting to a more orthodox way of looking at life.

Before Bros, however, I did have aspirations for ‘normal’ jobs as well as being in a band. I thought about being a hairdresser as my mum had been. I’d read Vidal Sassoon’s life story about how he’d been discovered and made his mark, and I thought it was an amazing tale.

So I found myself a Saturday job in a local hairdresser’s. As a kid, you are always looking to get some money in – by now I was obsessed with fashion, and clothes were expensive. But, boy, did I have to earn my money at that salon. I will never forget the feeling of washing really thin, spindly, hairspray-drenched, granny’s hair. It was like trying to undo a knot in a really fine chain covered in sticky oil, it just felt wrong!

It was quite comical really what those old women used to do to their hair. I used to think about how they were going out with their formal blue rinses, feeling all spruced up and smart, but actually looking like ancient punk rockers.

I fancied my boss, she was really cute, but unfortunately there were other women with designs on my green gills. My nemesis at the salon was a German lady with a very strong Bavarian accent. She really took a shine to me and would storm into the salon saying, ‘Vere iz Matt? I like Matt. I vant Matt to vash my hair!’ As soon as I heard the door open and that commandeering voice say, ‘Matt! I vant Matt!’, I would cringe inside and no amount of pretending to clear up out the back would keep me out of her clutches. She insisted that I wash her hair every time and she would lie back in the chair and mumble, ‘Oooo, yah, yah, yah, ooo!’ It used to totally give me the creeps.

One Christmas the salon held a raffle to win – of course – a state-of-the-art hairdryer. As the young buck, I was chosen to pick the winning ticket and guess whose name I pulled out of that hat? Yes, the bloody German. I was horrified.

She came in for a haircut and was told that she had won the star prize. My boss said to her, ‘We have to tell you, Matt picked the winning ticket . . .’

‘OOOhhhhhh!!! Matt, I like Matt, I vant Matt, Maaatttt! I luv Matt!’

So that pretty much killed any remaining desire I had to be a hairdresser.

I also did a paper round, which might just be the worst job in the world. As any schoolboy or girl with the scars to show for it would know, you had to get up at the crack of dawn, trudge down to the newsagent’s and sling a bag of papers on your shoulder which felt like twice your own bodyweight. Before you left the shop the strap would be cutting into your shoulder so painfully it hurt even to move. Then you’d start the round and find that no matter which route you’d been given, there was always one house that was two miles out in the sticks which wanted just one bloody paper! By the time I got to school, I would desperately need to fall asleep. It was awful, I hated it.

I had a brief ambition to be a vet because, like many people, I love animals. I love being around them – my two dogs mean the world to me, but more of them later – and find cruelty towards animals deeply harrowing. I sometimes see those adverts on TV when they show abused ‘circus’ animals and it makes me want to be sick. For a while when I was a kid, I thought I wanted to be a vet, but then I found out you needed to study for many years which was not something I was prepared to do. People who do that and become vets are astounding.

Next up for me was some really hard graft at a car-valeting business run by my brother’s girlfriend’s brother. Luke worked there as well for a while. Who says nepotism doesn’t benefit people? Well, it didn’t do me any favours . . . I was paid fuck all, just over ten pounds a day I think it was, to clean five cars. The business would make well over eighty pounds for those same vehicles. It wasn’t easy work either; one day I fainted in the back of a car from the fumes of the cleaning products. Valeting firms use a spray paint to make the wiry carpets in car boots crisply black again, but it is so unhealthy. I remember working away with this veil of fumes around my head, then waking up and it being half an hour later.

The sole highlight was when a beautiful Ferrari came in one day. I jumped in and drove it past my old school, thinking, ‘I gotta get one of these!’ But that was scant relief from what was a pretty horrid job. Shortly after the drive in the prancing horse, I said I thought I deserved a pay rise, suggesting maybe if I did six cars a day my boss could pay me what he made on the last car. I did get a pay rise . . . by two pounds a day. I left soon after.

In a way, that was probably the best thing he could have done, because after that I realized the band was the only way forward for me and we really cracked on.

We all agreed to leave school so that we could pursue the band with more focus and energy. The day came and Luke and I left school, excited at the prospect of effectively being in the band ‘full time’ with no distractions (I’d passed a few ‘O’ levels). That was quite a risk in a way but we had the courage of our convictions. However – eventually – Craig admitted to us that he hadn’t left school after all, that his parents insisted he had to stay on for another year before he could work on the band (he was a year younger than us). I think in a way they thought that would probably be the end of the band.

Instead of replacing him immediately, as most kids with grand aspirations would have done, we chose to wait for him – for a year. During those fifty-two weeks, Lukie and I rehearsed and played, organized band practices around Craig’s school schedule and essentially put our life on hold so that we could stay loyal to him and keep him in the band. We never batted an eyelid, he was our best mate, he was in the band and we were going to wait for him.

He was virtually living around our house anyway. Mum looked after him as if he was one of her own. We would often go into London clubbing and Mum would always help all of us dress, Craig included.

At the time and certainly in the light of later events, people have often asked me, ‘Why wait for him?’ The best analogy I can offer is this. If you imagine two people walking down a country lane and it’s frightening and dark and there isn’t a light for miles. If you are with your brother, it’s a bit creepy, you’re a bit scared. You put your best mate in the middle of it, and it becomes an adventure, a laugh. That’s what Craig was, he was that implant that we needed as brothers. So we waited for him.

Luke’s girlfriend at the time, Lorraine, had a nice big house and was quite wealthy. This was useful because her mum, Norma, was very cool and said we could use her living-room for band practice, which on reflection was very generous. She fed and watered us in this lovely house, which was very kind. My brother’s girlfriend was pretty tasty and had cute friends, her mum was tasty as well, so it was a good period of band practice, of which I have very fond memories.

Bass, drums and vocals was an unusual format for a band so young as us. We rehearsed very hard, working whenever we could. We were an odd blend of ska and soul; I was heavily into The Specials but also loved performers like Frankie Beverly and Maze – the song ‘Joy And Pain’ still sends me straight back in time to snogging girls at the school disco.

Things took a promising turn when we started rehearsing at the house of a man called Bob Herbert, who was the father of Luke’s latest girlfriend. He looked very young for his age, was cool, fun and full of ideas. He later went on to manage The Spice Girls for a while and his son Chris is also a very successful band manager. He was in the accountancy business and had had some dealings with the Three Degrees. At the time, however, he was just starting out in management, so we were the guys on whom he was testing his ideas – not in any manipulative way at all, he was always very gracious and genuinely enthusiastic about what we were doing. He had a summerhouse in the back of his garden by the pool and that’s where we used to rehearse.

We bought a Breville toaster and a large amount of cheese and bacon sandwich spread, the sort that comes in tubes with the most peculiar taste combinations imaginable. That was our ready-made sustenance for weeks while we rehearsed furiously, five hours a day and more. There was something about that time that felt safe to me, it was a secure environment. Pretty quickly we changed our name to Summerhouse.

I wrote one of my first songs in that summerhouse – it was called ‘Pyramids’. How incredibly Eighties to write a song about the pyramids! It was all about the mists of time and God knows what else, heaven knows why I chose to write about that. There was also a song called ‘Mystery Lady’ which actually wasn’t too bad, but unfortunately we brought that relatively promising track down a level or two in quality by recording what can only be described as probably the worst video of all time. It was just one shot of us in a big room, wearing really dodgy suits and long mullet haircuts, with plumes gushing out of a smoke machine that was being operated by Bob who, unbeknown to him at the time, was just about visible pushing the button on this contraption in the corner of the shot. It was just hilarious.

Our rehearsal space took a turn for the worse when Bob bought an old house for development and said we could have free rein to practise in there. On the surface this sounded great, but when we got there it was like something run by Norman Bates. The abandoned house had no windows in most rooms, was soaking with damp and was so cold we all huddled up in huge jackets and Lukie had to play the drum pedals in thick socks. My mum went mad when she learned we were spending a lot of time in there. Still, it was as close as we ever got to playing the working men’s club next door, which resolutely refused to book us. Maybe it was when we changed our name to Gloss, and they were worried about introducing ‘Matt from Gloss!’ So it was back to the summerhouse for more baconspread sandwiches.

It was actually a really lovely time and I have to say Bob was instrumental in that final stage of the band before we were discovered. If I am honest, in terms of feeling like you were making serious progress towards a record contract, there were undeniably times when you couldn’t help but feel we were just the band at the end of the garden. But Bob was vital, no doubt.

Perhaps the most significant thing Bob did was introduce us to Nicky Graham, a record producer who had worked with Barbara Dickson, The Nolans and Andy Williams. Nicky came down to see us play a show in April 1986 in Lightwater, just off the M3, liked us and thought there was something to work with. That was, essentially, the moment we started to go overground.

Unlike a lot of bands of that age, we were ‘discovered’ and that’s the way I think it should be done. We did not audition for the parts in front of a panel. We were a bona fide gigging band, albeit a little inexperienced and rough around the edges, writing songs and practising like crazy. A known producer came to see us play and it was in a live environment, raw as you like, and we impressed him. After a few conversations, Nicky asked us if we would like to meet a manager he knew of in London, a chap called Tom Watkins, who happened to manage the Pet Shop Boys. We were seventeen.

We left Bob Herbert’s management after about a year but not necessarily because it wasn’t happening fast enough – we didn’t know what ‘fast’ was. We just felt we needed to move on. Then when we were told we were going to meet Tom Watkins, it was such a culture shock. Literally, on the way to the meeting we were thinking, Fuck! This is the manager of the Pet Shop Boys! The first time we met him was at his own very lovely flat in Blackheath. That initial discussion went well and further meetings were arranged.

Even knowing what I know now, and however difficult the later days of Bros proved to be, I still maintain that going to meet Tom, talking about the band and possible record deals and all that flurry of activity that kicked off shortly after Nicky spotted us was a fantastic, exciting, unbelievable time. We were so young and here was one of the industry’s biggest managers talking to us across a desk in a swanky West End lawyer’s office. It was hard not to be dazzled.

I genuinely have amazing memories of those times, even though they happen to be the days that would mould certain future events. However, I can’t sit here and write my autobiography and feel negative and weird about experiences that, at the time, were nothing but exhilarating. Maybe I’m too philosophical. I don’t know, maybe I’m naive. Whatever the cause, that’s how I see those events, it was the stuff of dreams.