Dedicated to my grandad, Samuel Matthew Read – aka Harry – I love you

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

1 Innocent As Snow

2 This Lonely River

3 Some Roses In My Cheeks

4 Redirected

5 The More I See The More I Want It

6 If I Was A Wishful Thinker . . .

7 A Righteous Way Of Getting Paid

8 A Pocket Full Of Green

9 Dreams Cannot Rescue Me

10 Even Angels Have A Past

11 This Crazy Life

12 Regret Ain’t Meant To Last

13 When You’re Not Here

14 When I Wake I Must Do More Than Exist

15 The Best Part Of Me

16 Chasing Demons

17 All Those Who Don’t Believe

18 I Can’t Hold My Breath That Long

19 So Many Miles From Here

20 Freefall

21 My Heart Has Had Enough

22 Life Is A Slow Dance

23 My Solitude Will Fade Away

24 Waiting For The Light

25 Where You Are, Can You See The Moon?

26 Just Me And My Thoughts

27 I Think I’m Gonna Fly

28 Gangster Or Spiritual Leader

29 It’s Good To See You Again Postscript

Picture Section

Postscript

Index

Acknowledgements

Picture Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

Innocent As Snow

When I was a little boy and had toothache, my grandad would lay his hand on my cheek and the pain would go away. I can still feel the roughness of his builder’s hands on my young face. His home, a flat in Crawford Road, Camberwell, south-east London was an emotional anchor for my childhood, one of the few constants in my early life, along with my twin brother Luke and my mum. We moved house so often, nine times in all. That flat was the only place that stayed the same. At that tender age, I knew so little of what lay ahead. No one could have possibly predicted I would lead a life as exciting, traumatic, extreme, painful, loving and rewarding as I have. There would be so many moments of such exhilaration that I felt as if I’d been blessed. There would also be several times when I would wish that Grandad could have laid his hands on me and made the pain go away. Back then, as long as the toothache subsided, I was happy.

For the first five years of my life, everything seemed normal. Mum and Dad had fallen for each other in, of all places, a hospital, when my mum and her sister Ann were visiting their gran. My parents were both very stylish, shared a passion for music and quickly fell madly in love with each other. My dad, Alan Goss, was a bit of a Mod and my mum, Carol Read, liked the way the Mods dressed. They were both barely into their twenties but the relationship was immediately very intense – so much so that less than a year after they first met, Mum accepted Dad’s proposal of marriage, at Christmas 1967.

Mum was the middle of three kids and, unusually, was exactly twelve years older than her younger sister, my Aunt Sally. There must be something in the family genes about babies arriving on the same day! Reading between the lines, I think Mum sometimes felt a little bit of a piggy-in-the-middle, with Ann being the first-born and Sally being the apple of her parents’ eye, the baby. But Mum never complained, ever. It’s just not her way. Besides, she was very close to both her parents. When her mum died, on Bonfire Night, 1971, my mum was devastated.

Grandad was bereft. His wife Win was everything to him. She was a very spiritual lady and their hearts were seamlessly dovetailed. Grandad’s full name is Samuel Matthew Read (which is where I get my Christian name) but most people know him as Harry. He was a gunner in the Second World War and his trade throughout most of his life was as a builder’s foreman. He’d planned on studying to become a surveyor but the army interrupted that; on his return from war, he found work in a trade desperate for labour to help rebuild the capital. Consequently, he worked on the construction of some of London’s many important buildings.

When he lost his wife, rather than disown his faith, Grandad leaned towards it. Although he was a bit of a ruffian, Grandad found that he had a gift and subsequently became a faith healer. Obviously, many people are sceptical of this whole subject, but I have seen what he is capable of with my own eyes. I could choose from scores of incidents to illustrate this. For example, many years ago, a man who’d heard about Grandad’s gift came to Crawford Road, explained that he had been diagnosed with brain cancer and given only three months to live. He asked only that Grandad help him to prepare for what was coming. Along with a friend, Grandad gave this man intense healing. One month passed, then two, then three and still there were no signs of this man’s physical or mental deterioration. Then the cancer started to regress. Eventually, the disease was just a single, small tumour which surgeons were able to remove successfully. That man is still alive to this day.

You can call that the power of the mind enhanced by positive energy if you like, but in essence that is what healing is. The fact is, this actually happened. It is also true that my toothache would miraculously dissipate when Grandad placed his hand on my cheek. But I don’t know how he brought my goldfish back to life one day! This fish was as dead as can be, completely still and I was crying my eyes out. Grandad went upstairs and gave it a little rub and next thing I knew, it was alive again. My cynical side might think he replaced it with a new one, the sleight-of-hand approach to faith healing! But it meant the world to me regardless.

Grandad can also do psychometry, whereby you give him an item – a necklace, ring, or a coin for example – and he will give you a reading from it. I believe that both my twin brother Luke and I have inherited some of these abilities. We can both do healing to a degree, and I definitely have psychic tendencies. Yet, if I had foreseen the life I was about to lead, I would not have believed it.

My father’s family situation was altogether different to my mother’s. His own father left the family home when Dad was just a little boy and his mum later remarried. His family lived in a council house in Dulwich but he never knew his father growing up (although he eventually went looking for him, more of which later). Unfortunately, once I reached the age of five, there were certain parallels in my own childhood with what my father went through.

Luke and I arrived on 29 September 1968 at Lewisham Hospital. It hadn’t been an easy pregnancy for my mum – at twelve weeks there was a concern about a possible miscarriage which required her to be hospitalized. We were born eight weeks prematurely and even after Luke was delivered from my mother’s womb, no one knew that she was carrying twins. In fact, they cut the umbilical cord after Luke was born, thinking that was that, but that meant I was inside my mum being starved of oxygen. Doctors later said that Luke and I had been curled up back-to-back and thus our heartbeats had been exactly synchronized. As my lungs did not inflate properly, I was a ‘blue baby’ so along with my brother I was rushed straight into an incubator and fed intravenously. The early arrival meant that we had no eyelashes or nails and were both worryingly underweight, coming in at just over four pounds each I was slightly heavier than Luke even though I was born eleven minutes later. Mum spent only ten days in hospital, despite it being a distressing birth, but she and Dad had to visit us in our little plastic hospital cocoons for some time – Luke for a month, myself for six weeks – before they could take us home.

Mum and Dad were living at 94 Tressillian Road, a one-bedroom flat in Brockley at the time, with Mum working as a hairdresser and telephonist and Dad working long hours within the souvenir supply trade. They had very little money and with Dad away working so much, Mum was faced with most of the day-to-day demands of looking after twins. Perhaps inevitably, the stresses and strains on this young couple gradually began to take their toll and erode that idealistic and exhilarating love they had felt when they first met. Dad left briefly when we were less than three years old, but he and Mum soon reconciled.

I’m not going to pretend that I have vivid memories of every house we lived in and every street on which I wandered as a child: I don’t. My mind is a scramble of different addresses, friends made then lost, countless new school gates and the repeated realization that we were moving once more and it was going to start all over again. What I do recall are certain events, particular moments of extreme clarity in that transient haze, like stark rays of sun piercing a mist. When I think of these moments, they are absolutely crystal-clear, as if I had lived them only yesterday.

One of my earliest memories is of a house in Bramdean Crescent in Lee, before I was even of school age. It was a three-bedroom terraced house with an extra feature – it was haunted. Mum hated it there because of this presence – a very dark spiritual energy – and eventually we left. We weren’t going to be one of those families in the horror movies where they check out the cellar and make friends with ghosts. It was very unsettling indeed.

In 1973, when Luke and I were heading towards our fifth birthday, we all went on holiday to Majorca. Put simply, this was the last time in my childhood that I remember feeling part of a family. My mum and dad just looked so good together. I thought my dad was incredibly handsome (and still do), with his dark hair and piercing blue eyes; Mum was beautiful, so fair-haired and with beautiful green eyes. Of course, during the holiday they acquired lovely sun-tans – the weather was amazing – so I have this overriding memory of them being very brown, healthy and just so good-looking. They were wearing Seventies gear that was the height of fashion and they looked extremely cool. I was bursting with pride.

I cherish so many good memories of that holiday. My parents would go out for dinner looking fantastic and come back full of chatter, having had a great night. I can still see myself running through the streets of Majorca with Luke, both of us holding Dad’s hands as he said, ‘You’ve got to see the bull in this shop! You’ve got to see this!’ When we got there, breathless and laughing, there was a huge stuffed bull from a local bullfight. It was quite scary, but it was so exciting as well for Dad to run with us all that way to make sure we saw it. That’s what dads do.

We stayed in a lovely villa. One night when Mum and Dad were out having a meal, there was a violent thunderstorm. I was upstairs, walking around in the dark looking out of the windows at the black clouds and torrential rain. Next thing I knew, I was lying winded on a bed downstairs. Luke was shouting out, ‘Matt! Where are you?’

‘I’m downstairs!’ I replied, totally confused. I hadn’t noticed the edge of a balcony and walked straight off, falling down a floor and on to a bed. We laughed so much.

I also squashed a cockroach with my bare feet, a big black cockroach, which was fairly unpleasant. Luke and I would play in the pool for hours – I had a Dumbo inflatable and Luke had a Mickey Mouse; I can still smell those rubber rings to this day. Silly memories, important memories. Family memories.

Reminiscing about that holiday, I can still sense the sun-tan oil in my nose, I can still picture Mum and Dad looking so bronzed and stunning, I can still feel the excitement and emotion of being a proper family welling up inside me. In my adult life, I have been fortunate enough to travel the world many times and enjoy some wonderful holidays, but that time in Majorca was easily one of the best holidays of my life.

Unfortunately, it was also to be my last happy memory of childhood for a while. Three weeks after we came back, my dad left home – for good.

Who knows what undercurrents had been bubbling between Mum and Dad in Majorca. They certainly did not allow any problems between them to spoil that fabulous holiday. In retrospect, that must have been very difficult for both of them and I am grateful that we were shielded in that way, even though it made what was about to happen back at home a very sharp shock.

I have a vivid memory of the night when my dad actually left. Mum sat Luke and me on the windowsill, and said, ‘Dad won’t be coming home, me and your dad aren’t going to be living together any more, he loves you deeply but . . .’ That was the beginning of a feeling of strangeness in my life.

From then on, my childhood felt somewhat transient, emotionally and physically. It was very disjointed and hard to feel connected to one place. To feel safe. That’s never changed, particularly with what I do for a living. I have such a need to feel safe in my life – but I don’t feel safe. I think this undercurrent started that night on the windowsill.

While we were in Majorca, I thought, This is so fantastic, I hope we can do this all again next year. That’s how you view things when you are so young. But it wasn’t to be. With Mum and Dad separated, there would never be enough money to take us away to such glorious places again. Even if there had been, that sense of family would not have been there anyway. It just wouldn’t have been the same.

I am so conscious of talking about these events, but I must preface it by pointing out it’s just one of those situations that happens in life; it’s nobody’s fault. Separation is not easy on anyone. Dads go through loss, mums go through loss, and husbands and wives go through loss. But purely on the level of being a child, the starkest realization was that we were not going to go back to Majorca next year after all. It’s also strange how after Mum and Dad separated, I became so much more aware of certain elements that I’d previously been blissfully ignorant of. Suddenly, school was full of other kids from broken homes, little people with secret histories.

By the time my parents separated, my father had been a policeman in the City of London force for over two years. He’d trained when Luke and I were two and a half, and even back then there were tensions between him and Mum. When we went to Majorca, we were living in a police house at 17 Priestley Road, Mitcham; that provided our family with a level of security that was very welcome. Unfortunately, the crumbling edifice of my parents’ marriage never matched the solidity of a safe, secure police house.

Separation and divorce were not looked upon in a very good light within the force, so it was an especially difficult time for both Mum and Dad. One unsettling memory I do have of the police house in Mitcham is that for a couple of weeks, a man stood outside our home. We were never sure of what was going on but it might possibly have been someone watching to see if Mum was living with anyone, because there are obviously rules about who lives in a police house. We reported this to the police, as did several neighbours. Sometimes this man would be sitting in a car and other times he would stand by our hedge reading a newspaper. We were only kids and it scared the hell out of us but it was especially disturbing for Mum.

My early childhood was painful, constantly seeing my mother in tears, genuinely aching. Every night she would come in to our bedroom and give us a kiss, then sing us to sleep, songs like ‘American Pie’ and ‘Fly, Fly Superbird’ – I can hear her singing them now. But then she would leave the room and we would wait for her to start crying. Many years later, I wrote a song which my mum doesn’t know about called ‘Ms Read’, her maiden name; ‘I can hear you crying Ms Read’. It was very sad to see her like that.

Mum always did her crying in private, and tried to shield us from as much as she could. We knew she was upset but we were only little and we didn’t always know how to approach her; all we really wanted to do was give her a cuddle and make her feel better.

The break-up of my parents’ marriage hit us very hard. Its effects manifested themselves in many ways. One night my mum went out of the front door to go to the phone box. It was dark, being around nine o’clock, and Luke and I flew into a blind panic. We screamed and screamed, tears pouring down our cheeks, and ran out of the house. Mum was really startled and said, ‘What’s wrong? What on earth is wrong?’ We’d thought she was going to leave us.

I can still feel the chill of the fear that I had, thinking she was not going to come back. It’s an awful memory. ‘Of course I was coming back, my loves. I’m just popping to the phone box.’ Mum was brilliant, she went back inside and zipped us up in our parka coats over our pyjamas and held our hands down to the phone box. She was smiling and being so lovely with us to cheer us up, but inside that must have been a terrible thing for her to see.

I don’t know how we got by. One afternoon, Luke and I wanted to do something but we had no money. We asked Mum but she said, ‘Look, I’ve got nothing,’ and she opened her purse to show us a single twopence coin. Then she went to the phone box and, as we followed her, it started raining heavily. We stood outside and watched Mum put the coin in to phone her dad – that was what calls cost in those days. We had to wait outside and watch Mum hunched over the phone, absolutely sobbing to her father. It was pouring down with rain by now and it was an awful moment. I just felt so useless.

But then, we looked down at the ground and there was a one-pound note, just lying there in front of us. That was a lot of money, a week’s food at least. A crumpled, green, old one-pound note. I picked it up and started banging on the phone box window. No answer from Mum. Again, Bang! Bang! Bang! Mum was still crying and shouted, ‘Hold on!’

So I did it again.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Finally, she looked round and there we were, standing in the teeming rain, proudly holding up this note. We didn’t say anything, just held it up. Mum looked at the money and then at our beaming faces and said, ‘I’ve gotta go, Dad!’

We ran home holding her hands, sprinted upstairs and put the note on the boiler, then just sat there, the three of us, waiting for it to dry. And as the dampness evaporated, the edges of the note started to curl up and there was another one stuck to it. It was one of the most insanely amazing moments ever. I just kept thinking, ‘You could buy two hundred Black Jacks with that,’ but in my heart of hearts, I knew that putting food on the table was more important.

Another time, my mum slipped a disc and my brother and I kept her alive on jam sandwiches for a week. She could not move out of bed, so we made her cups of tea and jam sandwiches. We were really proud of ourselves, looking after her when she was always so doting on us. Luke and I are her life, always have been, sometimes to the point where I feel guilty, she has put so much into us. She is my angel.

One time when I was eight, I really needed my angel. For some reason, my knee had swollen up to quite a size, it looked very odd. They took me in for a check-up and said they would have to investigate further as it wasn’t clear what the problem was. I was taken to the local hospital and all sorts of doctors and people in white coats busied themselves around me. Eventually, they inserted a huge needle into my leg to scrape cultures off the kneecap. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to anaesthetize the kneecap because of the lack of muscle and the proximity of the bone to the skin, so I had no painkillers. I was in agony. To this day I have a very strong phobia about needles and I don’t think you have to be a psychologist to work out why.

Tests were done and I was told I’d have to stay in for ten days. One day, Mum came to visit and was talking to a doctor by my bedside when he asked her to go outside. Once they were out of the room, he talked to her in somewhat hushed tones. Mum came back in all teary, although desperately trying to look cheerful. I later found out that they suspected I had septic arthritis and among all the sheaves of paperwork Mum had had to sign and agree to, one had asked for her consent to amputate my leg. That’s a dreadful position for any parent to be placed in.

Fortunately, the swelling began to subside and it turned out that there was no lasting damage. Nonetheless, I had to sit there for ten days which, to an eight-year-old boy, seemed like for ever. My dad bought me a little wooden box that had a maze and some ball-bearings in it. It was like some Stone Age Gameboy, it predated hand-held computer games, but I bloody loved it, it was such a good present. I spent hours every day trying to get the little silver balls to tumble their way through the maze to the finish. That simple little toy got me through those ten endless days. I wish it had been as easy for Mum and Dad. Eventually I was sent home with a clean bill of health (a bout of measles had also sent me to hospital so I should have been used to it!).

There was still the fear within me though, a constant sleeping partner. One result of this was that I wet the bed up until I was in my early teens. I used to put three felt-tip pens vertically under my wet sheet to lift it off the mattress so it could dry, then I would try to sleep on the floor. When I heard Mum coming to my room in the morning, I would knock the pens away quickly so that when Mum felt the sheet it would be dry. There was so much fear. As trivial as it sounds, I truly believe in talking about this unwelcome habit – kids go through hell, the fear of not wanting to wet the bed so badly it makes them do it anyway.

Eventually, my dad took all the pressure off me and his intervention really helped. He told me to hit the pillow with my fist the number of times that coincided with what time I wanted to wake up and go to the toilet. I did exactly that, I woke up and went to the toilet when I wanted to and the next morning I hadn’t wet the bed. It took me a further two years to believe I had finally stopped.

When I try to claw back memories of that time, it all feels very musty to me, not lived in, painfully desolate. I don’t like remembering back then and I don’t get a nice feeling when I think of those early years. The house in Mitcham holds very little but cold memories for me. I didn’t wake up looking forward to the day, I genuinely didn’t. That’s a sad way for a young chap to feel.

I always used to like lying under things, tables, chairs, hiding. Always hiding. There was one particular table made out of a solid piece of wood and that was my favourite hiding-place, my sanctuary.

One Saturday, my mum’s sister got married and Lukie and me were asked to be pageboys. We were both so excited; we were given tuxedos and were even bought new shoes from Clark’s – they were expensive and it felt like we’d won the football pools because we were shopping there. It was a great day but when we came back to the police house, the back window was smashed and there was blood smeared on the remaining shards. Bloody fingerprints were on the window and the door handle. It was very frightening. We didn’t know if an intruder was still in the house and Mum was on her own with six-year-old twins. We anxiously walked in through the damaged door to find that every stick of furniture had gone. Everything – even my little table.

TWO

This Lonely River

Luke and I were eight years old when my mum met her future husband, Tony Phillips. Prior to that, she had been very considerate to us, she hadn’t really had any boyfriends, even though times had been very difficult for her and she must have craved adult company and support.

We were still living at the police house in Mitcham when we first started noticing the man who was making our mum smile again. For the initial few times, we only saw Tony briefly to say ‘Hello’. Over a few weeks, he started seeing Mum more often, and then one night we heard our dog Tiny barking frantically and realized that Tony was coming up the stairs. He calmly walked into our bedroom, introduced himself to us and – rather brilliantly – told us a story. Looking back, it must have taken some courage for him to do that and likewise for Mum to let him, but it was a lovely gesture and I can remember the tale as if he had only told it yesterday.

It was about a magnificent bird in a forest, the fastest and most beautiful bird of all, which for some reason had lost its feathers. The bird was very sad but all the other animals in the forest saw this and decided to collect together bits of their own feathers and fur for him. Tony told the story so well; I remember lying there entranced, desperately wanting to know the ending. Then, Tony explained, using honey from the bees the animals stuck this collection of feathers and fur on to the bird, which once more became the fastest and most beautiful creature living in the forest. It was a happy ending for the bird and I remember that moment, it was very peaceful.

It was such a simple and lovely story. It was a long time since we’d had a man come in and say goodnight to us. Tony is a peaceful and calm person, he doesn’t get fazed easily and it was the first moment for as long as I could remember where there was an element of order and peace in our life.

There was one aspect of Tony that was out of order, however, and that was the dodgy tartan trousers he used to wear (he knows I have to reveal that). At first he also drove a rather nice 7 Series BMW and then an E-Type (he owned a garage at the time), both of which were dream cars to us two boys, given how little money we had at home. One day Tony explained that regretfully he was short of money as well and would be swapping the BMW for a Morris Minor. That’s quite some leap backwards. So, after a brief flirtation with leather seats and sports trims, it was back to Skintsville in the Goss household.

Although Tony brought a sense of peace and calm to our house, I didn’t really feel any more secure. Unfortunately, he was going through a divorce, like Mum, so he had no money either. However, what he also brought into the house was Carolyn and Adam, his two children and, with their entry into my life, I have at times felt like the richest boy in the world.

When I first met Adam, he looked like a gargoyle: he had the biggest mouth. I used to think that he could swallow an apple whole. Over the years, his mouth has stayed pretty much the same size, but the rest of his body has caught up.

He was really only a baby when we first met, six years old. I don’t know how I can accurately explain my initial feelings towards them but he and Carolyn just fitted. We seemed tailor-made for each other. We never ever had any problems connecting. Two families colliding like that can produce a source of great tension, but with Adam and Carolyn there was only ever a tangible sense of gain when they came into my life. I thought ‘Wow! We have a bigger family now!’ It felt like we were a little bit less destructible.

With Adam, we felt very connected. He would always be pulling funny faces, keeping us laughing. Actually, back then he was very frail, he had really severe asthma, wheezing all the time and his health suffered terribly. However, this didn’t stop him playing around and being a lot of fun to be with.

There was also a swift emotional connection with Adam’s sister Carolyn. I’m quite a tactile person, Carolyn was too and she was very kind with it. She was such a beautiful person, even at the tender age of seven she wanted to do more for the world. She was very clever too – she went on to pass ten ‘O’ levels and three ‘A’ levels before lining up a university degree. They both reminded me of Tony. It might sound an obvious statement to make, but Carolyn was like a girl-version of Tony and Adam was simply a boy-version of Tony.

Previously, I’d felt quite vulnerable. We all did at times, me and Mum and Dukus, as I often called my twin brother (he would call me Maffy). When I say I felt vulnerable, that is not because of my dad not being there, it is just the way I felt. Then Adam and Carolyn arrived and I suddenly felt that there were a few more people in the gang, a bigger team, we were a little bit less vulnerable. I also sensed that Adam and Carolyn were, like me and Luke, rather weary. They had gone with their mother when she and Tony had split up and there had been much pain on both sides. Of course we were only young so we would still lark about, but there was definitely an unspoken acknowledgement of being a little bit bruised from the break-ups.

Divorce is just something that happens in life, you can’t say who’s right and who’s wrong. What you can say is it’s a fact that when parents split up, emotional upheaval is the inevitable result. Whether parents like it or not, such events do affect kids. It hurts them. They are not stupid, they want to do the right thing for their parents, be there for them and not whinge, but this also means that they have quite evolved feelings of pain and confusion.

When you put a couple of new kids into the mix, it can often polarize emotions and cause even more friction. However, for me at least, it created this strange reassurance that I wasn’t the only one feeling a little battered. Within a matter of a few weeks, whenever I knew Tony’s two kids were visiting I would be shouting, ‘Oh wow! Adam and Carolyn are coming round!’

And yet, for all the pain that Adam and Carolyn had obviously gone through, part of me was oddly glad that their parents had split, at least in the sense that it brought Tony to my mum. I couldn’t love Tony more. As a boy Tony was in a cast for two years from the waist down – the doctors didn’t know if he was even going to be able to walk again. He’s since had two hip replacements but has never moaned about his pain; that’s not his style. Tony is not the tallest man in the world but he has not a shred of a Napoleon complex about him. Although he is quite a small guy, mentally he is a rock. I am so lucky, he’s a great step-dad.

When my dad came to see us, I do remember some good times. We went down to the local swamp one afternoon and caught a load of frogs. We triumphantly took them back to the house and made a rock pool for them out of a plastic container, some stones and tap water. It was the summer of 1976, which was the hottest English summer for over two hundred years. There was something about that summer that seems to have stuck in the minds of many, many people. It wasn’t a good summer for my frogs, though. I went out to play one day and innocently forgot to top up their water. When I came back there were just these raisins with legs stuck to the rocks! There wasn’t a drop of water left, it had all evaporated, leaving behind this sorry collection of green Californian raisins with legs. I was gutted.

Like most young boys, we got up to lots of typically cheeky behaviour that warms my heart when I recall it. Just silly, innocent childhood stuff like kids do. I remember having a look at Jennifer-who-lives-opposite-the-corner-shop’s bum and front bum. She had one of each, we were amazed to learn. Me and Dukus hid in a wardrobe which had no doors, at the back of our garage, with Jen in the middle, and we showed her our bums and she showed us both of hers. Jen had her knickers down when my mum walked into the garage. All three of us stood stiff as a board, terrified that Mum would find us with Jen showing us her bits. Luckily, Mum left and we had got away with it.

There were two girls next door with whom we had a little bit of a schoolboy feel, but I wasn’t too keen because they had noses like rabbits. Worse still, they actually constantly twitched their noses like rabbits, it was very disconcerting for a little boy. Even now, when I think of them, I can’t remember what they actually looked like, I just remember thinking of them as rabbits. Proper rabbits.

Dukus and I would often throw darts the length of the playing field but one time I didn’t get out of the way quickly enough and it stuck in my rib. I went indoors and showed Mum. She just calmly pulled it out of me and said, ‘Go on then, carry on playing.’

We finally moved from Mitcham to a house in Herongate Road in Cheshunt, which Tony and Mum had managed to buy. Yet again Luke and I had to start another school, this time St Clement’s Church School. By then I enjoyed sports and particularly excelled at athletics, specifically the long jump, triple jump, high jump, javelin, discus, 800 m, 1500 m and the relay! I also played rugby (Luke and I were both second row) and a little bit of football. I went to gymnastics a couple of times but only to see the girls in their leotards. We both liked to trampoline into the pits but that was about the extent of our gymnastics career. I was very useful at rounders and that provided me with my biggest single sporting highlight of my schooldays. One sports day, my team was way behind when I came up to strike. I amazed myself and all my team by hitting eight consecutive rounders, one after the other. I just kept belting the ball for miles. As a result, we came from behind and won and the rest of the team carried me round the school playing field in celebration, chanting ‘Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? Matt!!!’ When you are just a kid, moments like that stay with you, it was really special.

They are particularly special when you are constantly struggling to lay down some foundations, to make friends and to settle in. St Clement’s was my third primary school so by then I was getting used to the stigma of being the ‘new boy’ all the time.

I think Mum has a bit of gypsy in her, she’s got that bug – her Granny Rampton was a Romany gypsy. I’ve never been one to complain to my parents, ‘Why did you do this? Why did you do that?’ I adore the ground my mum walks on. But I don’t think, given the choice, I would travel around so much if I had kids. Don’t get me wrong, we had an amazing upbringing, but I never had the chance to really connect anywhere, I never felt that anywhere was my home. I never felt particularly safe, there was an underlying sense of being afraid.

It wasn’t a physical fear of being bullied. Luke and I could look after ourselves in any schoolyard and we were never pushed about, it just didn’t happen. We both have that streak in us to be able to look after ourselves, and I am sure Luke felt that he looked out for me, and I felt that I did the same for him. I definitely had quite a few fights at school, but I also knew the law of the playground jungle and chose my fights with care, careful to realign my ‘rep’ every now and then with a choice new opponent! So, no, we were never bullied.

Yet I remember always being petrified walking into another new school. It was just so unsettling. I never had the same friends for very long, I would work at it and make some great friends and then we would move again – yet another new address. That was hard. It’s funny how you can crave what you don’t have. People often talk about travelling as the Holy Grail of a lifestyle. But for me, it’s really lovely when I hear people talk about their childhood home, the place where they grew up with a big garden and their friends round the corner. I can’t even fathom what that would be like as a kid, we just didn’t have that. It sounds idyllic.

Like millions of people who watched the hit TV show The Good Life, Mum and Tony wanted some of the same. It was very common where I was brought up in London for people to want to get out, to seek that cherished escape to the country. In addition to that impulse, Tony and Mum weren’t too happy with the schooling available to us in Cheshunt, so after a few months considering their options, they decided to up sticks and head for Cheddar in Somerset. They found a home with the delightful name of Jasmine Cottage in Tuttors Hill and that was where we set up home next. We would live there for one day short of a year, when we were eleven.

I hated it. Cheddar is not a great memory for me. We were both caught up in fighting a lot because we were from ‘The Smoke’. It was such a clash, us turning up with our Sta-Prest trousers, Doc Martens and waffle cardigans in this sleepy Somerset tourist destination; and it wasn’t just the kids down there who were worlds apart from us. I remember one day talking to the school games teacher:

‘Sir, you got any trainers, sir?’

‘Trainers?’ he replied. ‘What are trainers? We call ’em daps down ’ere.’

We might as well have been in a different country.

Starting Fairlands Middle School would have been difficult enough for any child, but having just moved to the area from a city exacerbated that ordeal a hundredfold. Much of the time, Luke, Adam and I hung out together, often nicking fudge from the local shop. I think it says a lot about a town that a shoplifter’s main bounty is fudge. One day we thought we’d up the ante a little bit so Adam nicked a Rubik’s cube, only to be caught almost immediately by Tony, who was distinctly not impressed. Tony marched Adam straight back to the shop and made him apologize on the spot. So now the outsiders had a serious lack of street cred. We still laugh about that today, although Carolyn was not very amused!

We did a bit of poaching for trout as well. We didn’t have proper fishing rods, just this solitary basic reel. We told our few mates to meet up one day and the five of us headed down to the river to take it in turns dangling the line over a bridge. The first boy quickly got a bite and began to pull the line out of the water when SNAP! it broke. The second guy stepped up to the plate and not ten minutes later the same happened again, he got a bite, he pulled on the line and SNAP! it broke. By now, being five young lads, we were thinking there was some kind of freshwater Jaws down there, we just had to catch it, the excitement was mounting. So I went and got the strongest fishing line I could find, thicker than a guitar string; I was thinking to myself, This stuff could lift a car, it is not going to snap on me. Sure enough, a few minutes after I gingerly dangled the line in the water, I got a bite. I am not joking when I say it was almost like cheese-wire cutting through my fingers. After a titanic struggle, I finally pulled this fish out of the water and it was a huge catch. To this pre-teen blond London boy, it looked like the mother of all trout. I was beside myself with pride and excitement and immediately started sprinting home – I knew that Tony loved trout and I was desperate for him to see it. On the way back, an American tourist stopped me in my tracks and said, ‘Hey man, I’ll give you fifty bucks for that,’ and I blurted out, ‘Oh no! I’m taking it back to Tony!’ and just carried on running without even breaking my stride.

It took at least ten minutes to run all the way back home. I burst into the kitchen and put this beast of a fish in the sink . . . and it was still alive! This thing just would not die. My grandad was there so he started smacking it over the head and still it wriggled around. I’m ashamed to say that in the end we just whacked it in the freezer. That did it. I still feel a bit guilty about that. We kind of murdered it, accidentally on purpose.

We had some bad luck with animals in Cheddar too. We had a goat called Mary. The back garden of Jasmine Cottage was about an acre, and was totally overgrown and covered in nettles and weeds. We brought in some electric ploughs and rotovators to remove it all but they just weren’t strong enough. Then we sent in Mary. Within a fortnight it was all gone. She would eat a mountain of nettles or weeds and look up as if to say, ‘Next!’

Tony loved Mary. Every morning he would go out to feed her, disappear for a good few minutes and he would have love in his eyes when he came back! I reckon there was a bit of a crush going on there, both ways! We would have goat’s milk on our cornflakes, too.

One day we came back from school to find a vet trying to save Mary’s life. She was pregnant and there had been complications which required a caesarean. The intervention was not a success and both Mary and the kid goat died. It was really gruesome and we were all devastated. Tony was gutted at the time but laughs now when he remembers trying to work out if you should bury a goat ‘horns up’ or not!

We also had a cat called Jessica, as well as two dogs, Bill and Ben, who would actually pull Luke and me along on our bikes and skateboards. Those dogs were gorgeous, and absolutely mad. We also had a beautiful Yorkshire terrier called James, the love of my mum’s life, but he was run over and poor Mum found him on a wall, just lying there dead, where someone had placed him after the accident. Mum was distraught. So for many reasons, Cheddar was not a beacon of happy memories for me.

It wasn’t all bad there, but the fleeting brighter moments were suffocated by missing London and not liking our peers. I pretty much kept myself to myself. Life there just didn’t feel right – it was a beautiful place, but the kids were just wankers to us because we were from London! However, one pool of happiness within the muddy water of life in Cheddar was Bridget, the prettiest girl in the school. One day I was leaving school for home when a girl came running up to me and said, ‘Matt! Matt! Bridget really likes you,’ and I said, ‘Who’s Bridget?’ At that moment, the school coach drove past and as it headed off slowly up the lane, I could see the whole back row were looking out of the window at me and this girl.

‘Bridget’s the girl in the middle,’ she said.

‘Bloody ’ell! That’s Bridget?!’ I was stunned. Everyone fancied this girl, she was gorgeous.

Bridget’s messenger friend immediately gave two thumbs up to the back of the coach and the entire row of girls just exploded. It was a surreal moment, because up until then I had just felt invisible, I didn’t think anyone had even noticed me. I was delighted.

Within a week, we were snogging in Farmer Giles’s barn (complete with my teeth-brace, which I had until I was sixteen). Luke was snogging some bird in there as well. To this day, there’s nothing like snogging when you are a young teenager, it was the best thing, and you’d snog like ten girls in an afternoon. Anyway, Farmer Giles was pretty notorious in the narrow streets of Cheddar for having a Morris Minor pickup with a man-eating German Shepherd dog prowling in the back. This animal would actually reach out and try to nip you as his owner drove past. Pretty quickly you’d learn to dive into a shop doorway if you heard the stuttering rumble of Farmer Giles’s Morris engine. This dog was the stuff of legend – I once saw half a Jack Russell that had been part-eaten by this dog.

We knew that we were in the lion’s den by snogging away in this barn, but we figured it was unlikely he’d come back while we were actually there. Wrong. Like startled rabbits, we all jumped to our feet in unison when we heard Farmer Giles’s van trundling into the yard and towards the barn. There was only one course of action – we scarpered. I vividly recall running at full pelt across a field, lips numbed from hours of snogging and legs chafed from hours of dry humping through jeans, with the giant German Shepherd rampaging after us, drooling at the prospect of a kill. Eventually, after what seemed like an interminable and enduring panic, Farmer Giles finally called his dog off the chase. It was one of the scariest moments ever, like some twisted horror-version of Last of the Summer Wine.

Luke and I weren’t the only ones who didn’t settle in Cheddar, Tony really disliked it too. Before a year was out, the decision was made to sell up and move out. I can’t say I was disappointed, even though the prospect of starting at yet another school wasn’t a bright one. I was just glad to be leaving. So we packed our suitcases, left Jasmine Cottage and headed back to London.

A few days after arriving back in the capital, I said to a kid, ‘You got any daps?’

‘What the fak are daps, mate?’ he said. ‘They’re called trainers up ’ere . . .’

THREE

Some Roses In My Cheeks

We’d sold Jasmine Cottage when we left Cheddar, but hadn’t yet bought a house back in London, so for about two months we lived in a caravan. I was just about to start secondary school, which is such a formative period of childhood, and here we were living in a caravan. I hated living on that site with its cold, concrete communal shower stalls and cramped spaces. Yet, even though I wasn’t a fan, I knew that we were only there because of circumstances, a moment in time, and my mum’s continued dedication to Lukie and me far outweighed any dislike I had of my temporary home. I could have lived anywhere as long as I was with Mum and Luke.

Looking back, knowing how hard life was for her at times, my mum was just a tower of strength. She would drive us ninety minutes to school in Camberley every day then just after lunch get back in the car to pick us up again. It was such an effort for her but she never batted an eyelid.

Unfortunately, my dad’s perception of the situation was different. He decided then that these were not the ideal circumstances for two children to be in and announced that he wanted custody of us. It was a heavy moment for my mum.

Dad was elusive at times when I was younger, or that’s what some of my memories tell me. I didn’t quite understand him then. It is hard for me to talk about these things because I love him so much and as adults we are great friends. He is sensitive to those difficult times, understandably, but I am often put in a position when I am asked questions about such things, so I will try to be as respectful as I can whilst still recounting the history.

As an adult, I can probably understand Dad’s perception of our temporary caravan lifestyle, his feelings came from the right place. But life’s not always about perception, it’s about finding out the facts, and certain situations are not always exactly how they appear. Despite how it might have looked, I loved my mum desperately, so I was essentially happy at the site and, although I didn’t like it on the surface, I didn’t feel any less safe because I was in a caravan. When the custody issue was raised, it was an intensely fearful moment for my mum, I know that now, but I don’t have explicit memories because I was only a kid. All I knew was that I was very happy as long as my mum was with me. So, when I heard I had to go to court, it was no problem. I just thought to myself, I will go and tell the judge how I feel, which is that I am not going anywhere. I love Dad but I do not want to leave Mum.

So that was what I did. Luke was exactly the same and there didn’t seem anything else to discuss. That’s as simple as it felt to me at the time. We were old enough at that point to say to the judge, ‘No, I want to live with my mum,’ and as I recall it, our frankness resolved the issue.

What I will say from that experience and having seen the effects of such predicaments on children and parents, is that if it is at all possible for couples who have separated to keep a line of communication open, even if it is formal rather than friendly, then please try to do so. After that issue was settled and we stayed with Mum, communications between her and Dad opened up a little bit – prior to that they had sometimes been quite constricted (it is strange as an adult to think they were once so deeply in love). Better communications in these circumstances will eventually benefit the children, no question.

As I’ve mentioned, while we were living in all these different places, the one constant that never wavered was my grandparents’ flat in Crawford Road, Camberwell, the one place that felt like ‘home’ to me as a kid. When I remember Crawford Road I think of white pepper. My grandad used to put stacks of white pepper on his roast dinner.

In that flat I saw my mum happy, her mood would change when she got there and so that was uplifting for us too. I would love going round to find my Aunt Sally at home. Even though Sally was a gardener at Buckingham Palace, she used to dress a bit like a hippy and always had an afro comb which she would be pulling through her hair. She would buy a new pair of gleaming white plimsolls, come straight home and bury them in the garden for an hour. As a little kid, I was absolutely bemused, but now I understand that she wanted them to look worn-in.

Grandad’s neighbour Rita had a daughter, Dawn, whom I fancied. I have to admit, though, I had an even bigger crush on her mum! I really used to fantasize about her – all I wanted to do was have my wicked way, even though at that age I am not sure I knew what that was! Dawn had been the first girl to let me put my hand down her knickers but Tony caught me doing it on the steps and made me come in and tell the whole family.

It was in Camberwell that a man tried to snatch me into a car. I can still see his face vividly, dark-haired and with a moustache. I often used to sit on a wall by the old people’s home at the top of Crawford Road. One day I was on there, just hanging out and being a seven-year-old kid really, when I heard a noise behind me. I looked round and saw this man reaching for me. Over his shoulder I could see his car parked by the grass verge with the back door open. I jumped off the wall – which was about ten feet above the pavement on that side – and ran all the way home. I won’t say it haunts me to this day, because it doesn’t, but at the time it scared the hell out of me.

I bought my first record at Crawford Road in 1978. It was Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’. I listened to it over and over and over again, until my brother started pleading with me not to play it any more. I loved that single. I was really intrigued by Ian Dury too, this man on the telly who, to a young boy with no knowledge of such things, looked like a cripple. I was fascinated by him, he just looked as if he was in pain. I heard people saying he had polio, which sounded like the bubonic plague or something to me – guaranteeing that I was always first in the queue to take the little cube of sugar dipped in polio vaccine. It sounds simplistic I know, but I was only a child. I didn’t stay a fan of the Blockheads for long, it was just that one moment, but your very first record is an important snapshot in your life.

The diversity of my mum’s and Aunt Sally’s taste in music rubbed off on me. There was a lot of rock in there, Cream, Free, AC/DC and so on, but Mum also loved artists like Roberta Flack. When The Fugees later covered ‘Killing Me Softly’, a definitive cover version if there could be such a thing, the memories came flooding back for me when I first heard it on radio. It was like a time warp. Sally would always be singing, as would my mum. Sally used to tell us all about the concerts she went to see. She had a lovely voice and it was great to hear Stones and Beatles songs when she belted them out. Whenever we’d visit Sally at her flat on the Peabody Estate on the Old Kent Road, I used to love singing with her. After a while, I began to try to out-sing her, that’s when I started to get that sensation that I could do anything with my voice.

I was heavily into Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson was a big favourite too. Like forty million other album-buyers, I was into Thriller, how could you not be? But for me Off The Wall was something special too. The songs were just monumental, and knowing that Rod Temperton, an Englishman from Cleethorpes, could write tracks like ‘Rock With You’ and ‘Off The Wall’ makes it even more incredible to me.

By the end of the Seventies, like so many other British kids, I was massively into ska. I was never really into punk, not least because I was just too young, but Two Tone fascinated me. In the space of two years it seemed bands like The Specials, The Selecter, Madness and The Beat dominated the school playgrounds of Britain. I was in one of those playgrounds and couldn’t help but be infected. It’s funny how adults theorize about genres of music – in the case of Two Tone they talk about how it perfectly captured the social tensions of Thatcher’s Britain, how it fused Jamaican ska with inner-city desolation and so on. I am aware of that now. Back then, it was so much more personal. It was a style of music and a sartorial choice that, for this eleven-year-old at least, was far more pragmatic than the pages of a broadsheet feature.

I had the full ska uniform: the pork-pie hat, Fred Perrys, Doc Martens, Sta-Prest shirts. We all did. Then there was the music. I adored The Specials, it was obvious Jerry Dammers was a genius. I had every Madness album. The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ is still one of my favourite songs ever. That song is always feted by critics for soundtracking the whole social polarization of Thatcher’s Britain, but for me and my mates, it was more about the death of ska – ironic since it was their most successful song and a Number 1 hit. We simply felt like saying, ‘No! Don’t say the clubs are closing down, because we are still dancing . . .’

The music was so deft too, so clever and that has stayed with me. It can be quite hard to splice elements of ska into my albums themselves, but if you go to one of my shows, you will find parts of the gig are drenched in ska and the crowd will be skanking away! Playing live allows you to do that, to break out of any pigeonholes that your records might be placed in. I think it surprises many people that my live set can include ska and Stevie Wonder but to me that is as natural as putting on ‘Superstition’ straight after ‘Ghost Town’. They are both phenomenal songs, that’s all there is to it.

While life in Crawford Road was heavenly to me, the time I spent with my dad was a little less straightforward. Not because of Dad, as we were always so excited to be going to see him, even though it wasn’t as often as we all would perhaps have liked. It was because he had remarried back in 1976, to a woman called Margaret and, inevitably, that complicated matters for everybody.

I wasn’t particularly fond of Margaret, to say the least. She never made me or Luke feel welcome, never made me feel at ease around my own dad. It was often the smallest things, like rationing how much ketchup we could have on our food, or how many biscuits we were allowed to eat. It was weird because Dad was always the one who would dunk two biscuits in his tea at the same time. We would look forward to having a cup of tea and biccies with Dad so this was all very suffocating. Margaret was really formal. She wasn’t off with us in front of Dad, but the most credit I would give her is to say she was polite. I always used to look forward to seeing Dad, of course, but I genuinely did not look forward to seeing Margaret.

Luke and I were never rude to her. In fact, we tried hard with her but Margaret never made us feel loved or wanted. Nonetheless, I promise you, we were very well-behaved children. Dad insisted on that and Mum had raised us that way as well. Speak when you are spoken to or, if you have something you feel really strongly about, then you can speak up. Adults had the right of way in our house, and rightly so. I believe that is the best method with kids. So we were never rude to Margaret, but that didn’t change the chilly atmosphere.

One time, my dad pulled up at a petrol station to fill up the car and while he was paying at the counter, Margaret leant over the seat and said to us, ‘I’ll give you a pound if you tell me whether your mum is with anyone.’ We basically told her to stuff her pound, as politely as we could. When my dad got back in the car we said nothing. Neither did Margaret.

It wasn’t just us that were affected, my dad’s time with his boys was affected too. I remember being made to sit in the dining-room one night when all I really wanted to do was sit on the couch with my dad, my dinner on a tray, and watch TV with him. We weren’t allowed to, but you know what? I think Dad wanted to do that too.

I feel for my dad in a way on that level because if Margaret had made him happy then that would have been cool with us, but I never really had the feeling that she did. There was always an underlying atmosphere, it was really tiring. Then, one day when we were all on a day-trip to Blackpool, while visiting family in Preston, Dad suddenly stopped the car by the sea and said to Margaret, ‘You know what, Margaret? If you don’t want to spend time with my kids, if you don’t want to see the boys, then you’re not welcome when I bring my kids out. When are they ever rude to you?’

At that exact moment, I felt incredibly awkward because I feared Margaret would become even worse and really hate us in the future. But then – and I’m not going to lie – once I was over that initial spasm of fear, I was so happy inside that Dad had stuck up for us, his boys. I think that was pretty much one of the last times we hung out with Margaret.

A line of sorts had been drawn, but Margaret was obviously still there whenever we visited Dad. Every visit was tiring, we were drained by it all. We just wanted to see our dad and have a nice time. Even to the day that my dad and Margaret split up (they eventually divorced), we never had the feeling that she really liked us.

When they did separate, my dad was obviously feeling a lot of pain which wasn’t nice to see for two young boys. I’d seen Mum so desperately troubled by her marriage break-up but I’d never seen Dad upset like that and I really felt for him. Yet, to be brutally honest, part of me was quite relieved. We had, at best, a tense relationship with Margaret, and at such a young age there isn’t yet room for being gracious or magnanimous. You just want your dad.

My father leaving the family home paralleled what had happened to him when he was a boy. His own dad had left but, unlike my father, had not kept in touch with his growing son at all. Before he had split up with Margaret, my father’s mother died and Dad started to look into where his own dad lived, to try to reconnect with him and that estranged side of the family. In my book, that was a very brave thing to do. I admire him very much for making such an effort in very difficult circumstances. He managed to re-establish contact and for a few short years we were graced with a whole new strand to the family. Suddenly we had a new grandad, a new grandma, new cousins and aunties, we’d gained a whole new family seemingly overnight, it was just the most exciting thing. And this wasn’t like a fifth cousin four-times-removed – this was a legitimate, direct bloodline through my father.

However, so much of my life has pivoted around gain and loss, gain and loss, and this was to prove no different. When Dad and Margaret broke up – Margaret was having an affair – my father’s own dad, my newly discovered grandfather, took Margaret’s side. Yes, he sided with a woman he wasn’t related to and hadn’t known for very long against his own son. To me that was absolutely disgusting. Even if Dad had been mainly in the wrong (which as I understand it he wasn’t), you can’t take sides against your own. That’s his own son. I was incensed.

I don’t see that side of the family any more, their own actions have wrenched them back out of my life. I do see Dad’s sister and her family at gigs and on other occasions and they are all absolutely lovely, Janet, Sara and Mark. They supported my dad during that time. Janet sided with him, her brother – I have a lot of time for Janet. I have no negative feelings for my dad’s family. I would have loved nothing more than to have had a healthy, loving relationship with my new-found family but, as I am sure anyone would agree, my loyalty lies with my father. As for my dad’s dad? He can kiss my arse, I have no time or respect for him after what he did.

I know that episode broke my dad’s heart. To realize that he had grown so far apart from his dad that they could no longer even reach each other must have really hurt. What’s more, I know that it hurt my dad’s step-father, who in my mind and as my dad also realizes, is his real father. My dad now regrets searching for his biological father, but even more regrets the hurt it caused his step-father. I know my dad only considers himself to have one father and that’s Grandad Weston.

I have no time for what happened and probably remain more angry about it even than my dad does. He is quite philosophical when he thinks about it and seems to have been able to move on. It remains incomprehensible to me. You lose your son for many, many years, somehow that son plucks up the courage to come and find you and kick-start a relationship that time and circumstances threatened to have destroyed for ever, then you take the side of someone who is not even part of your direct family! The way that families behave sometimes is unbelievable to me.

Fortunately for Dad, there was a fantastic new wife around the corner. Her name is Helen and Dad married her in 1996. I honestly think that at that time in my dad’s life, she was the best thing that could have happened to him. She is the same age as me (so well done Dad!) but she has an old soul, and I mean that as a great compliment. She has not only made my dad younger, but conversely she has made him older as well, made him more peaceful. She is a very gentle person and that has definitely rubbed off on my father. Helen is very considerate, very loving, she makes my dad happy. She is a tiny, petite woman who looks even younger than she is and, being the same age as Luke and I, we have great fun calling her step-mum! She cringes but it is hilarious. She’ll return the fun by putting her arm around me and saying, ‘You’re my step-son!’ I am really glad that Helen is in my dad’s life, she is a lovely lady.

FOUR

Redirected

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.

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.

SIX

If 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.

SEVEN

A Righteous Way Of Getting Paid

August 1987 saw the release of our debut single, ‘I Owe You Nothing’. The song was already being played repeatedly in certain cool clubs so hopes were high for the actual chart.

It peaked at Number 74.

It seemed to matter very little. In the post-Millennial pop climate, many labels might have abandoned ship at that point, but fortunately for us – and Sony in the end – our record company was undeterred. Our second single was pencilled in for October.

Even after the disappointing chart placing for our debut single, the fever swelling around Bros seemed to increase. When our follow-up single was issued, ‘When Will I Be Famous?’, everything changed. Normal was a word I would no longer be able to use in my life. We were told we might go in at Number 40.

‘Maybe, Matt.’

‘When Will I Be Famous?’ mid-weeked at 41 so we knew we had a chance. Back then you had to sell thousands of records just to get into ‘the Forty’. To me, Number 40 would have been an incredible achievement; after all, we were a completely new band. I remember lying in my bedroom on a Sunday night with my mate Lloyd – Luke was downstairs – listening to the chart countdown, as we had done for most of our lives. Before, we’d have been listening to see if The Specials or Police had charted and where. Now we were waiting for Bros, it was the most extraordinary feeling of disbelief and anticipation.

‘And at Number 40 . . .’

. . . it wasn’t us.

It was Simply Red with ‘Ev’ry Time You Say Goodbye’.

It was just the most awful feeling.

They played that record and we were barely listening, we were so deflated. Then the DJ said, ‘Number 39, they’ve done it, it’s Bros!’

We all just went nuts, Luke ran in and we were going crazy. All I remember was jumping up and down in a frenzy, swearing in excitement, hugging each other. We were inside the UK Top Forty! It didn’t make sense, it was amazing. We’d charted. It was a quite phenomenal moment.

And it just got better. As Brosmania started to break on the unsuspecting shores of British pop, the single stayed in the Top Forty for nearly four months. Eventually, it reached the giddy heights of Number 2.

In one sense, when ‘Famous’ hit Number 2, we were dumbfounded. By then, however, Brosmania was in full flow (an alternative name, ‘Brosteria’, was less popular). When I try to analyse why the hysteria surrounding Bros was so intense and so sudden, I still can’t put my finger on it. Yes, we were good-looking boys, we’d had a Number 2 single, we had a great album coming out and we were working very, very hard promoting the band. But there were certainly plenty of good bands who were getting far more press than us – at that stage anyway – who were much less fawned upon. When the mania first exploded, we’d only really had one published piece of high-profile press, a brief interview in Smash Hits. People often ask me why it took off like it did and I can truly say I don’t know. Bros had a natural, massive momentum, which is quite rare I think. There was just something magical about what was going on.

There were a couple of watershed moments when you could visibly see the hysteria cranked up a gear. One of those was playing a PA at Busby’s in Tottenham Court Road, but perhaps the biggest single event that seemed to have a massive effect on our popularity and profile was when a gentleman called Michael Metcalf gave us a slot on the TV show The Roxy. We were waiting anxiously to get The Roxy and then finally it came in. That programme and Michael in particular took a gamble when Tyne Tees announced they would be doing a special on us. I remember being at a Sony/CBS conference doing some meet-and-greets when someone took me to one side and said, ‘You have to go now, you’ve got The Roxy!’ We were absolutely mobbed just trying to walk into the TV studios and looking back at the video footage, you can see we are beaming. It was a pivotal moment and we knew it. Yet even that hysteria was nothing compared to the frenzy that erupted after our performance of three songs was broadcast, along with some interviews. After The Roxy, there was no stopping it.

To this day one of the cameramen from The Roxy tells the story that when he thinks of that show, the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He was stunned by the hysteria and likened it to the mass adoration he had also witnessed when he filmed The Beatles back in the Sixties. He wasn’t comparing us to The Beatles – of course not – but he said that our fans’ behaviour was identically, inexplicably insane. It wasn’t just the fans screaming at the limo or at the stage door. Within what seemed like a few weeks, we began to notice blatant manifestations of our popularity. It was a steep learning curve for us and it never plateaued.

When you are being feted to such a degree, you realize very swiftly that you have a very immediate and powerful influence over your fan base and beyond. Needless to say, that is why we were always so anti-drugs. On a more superficial level, the strangest things can remind you that you are being watched every second of every day. I soon learnt to be careful what I said in interviews. Thousands of fans are waiting on your every word and casual comments in front of a journalist can have repercussions for years. For example, I used to love Caramac and I made the mistake of saying that in one magazine. A much bigger belly and a few hundred spots later and I’m praying, ‘No more Caramac guys! Please!’ To this day, one girl will still bring me a few Caramacs whenever I do a show. It’s delicious, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a bit like the first drink you get drunk on – if I smell Pernod-and-black I gag, and Caramac is starting to have that effect.

The famous Bros Grolsch bottle tops on the shoes was a funny example of that. I was bored one day and was playing about with some bottle tops that were lying around, and for some reason I whacked them on my shoe. It wasn’t premeditated in any way, just something to do really.

Three days later, I was driving down Kensington High Street when I saw a girl walking past with Grolsch bottle tops on her shoes. I blinked and shook my head, almost cartoon-like, to make sure I had seen correctly.

I had.

Putting it down to some one-in-a-million coincidence, I carried on driving. Fifty yards further on, I saw another girl wearing them, then another and another. It was just crazy, and quite a shock to see the impact my supposedly insignificant fashion decision had made.

Even today, not a twenty-four-hour period goes by without someone mentioning those Grolsch bottle tops. But do you know what? Grolsch never even sent me so much as a single bottle. They never phoned, wrote or got in touch! I was later told their sales had gone up by a third. Cheers!

It wasn’t just the bottle tops that these kids copied. Suddenly, everywhere you looked there were ripped jeans, Harrington jackets, cropped haircuts, Doc Martens decorated with watches or playing cards, you name it, if we wore something, within hours it was on the street. A new breed had arrived: Brosettes.

And there were millions of them . . .

I used to drive over Hammersmith flyover frequently, and as I sped into London, I would always look down from my concrete vantage point and take in the sight of what was then known as the Hammersmith Odeon. It was such a huge venue, just under 4000 people and only the really big bands could fill it. I had been to my first-ever concert there, to see Depeche Mode, one of the biggest bands on the planet. To me, in a new band only just signed, the prospect of playing there seemed an unattainable dream.

Then our management phoned us with news of the schedule for our first tour. They reeled off a list of venues which didn’t really register that much to me, to be honest. Then they said . . .

‘In London you will be doing Hammersmith Odeon . . .’

‘What? You’re kidding me?’

‘Er, twice.’

It was just hard to believe the words I was hearing . . . two nights at the Odeon!

A day later they phoned back. ‘Matt, hi, listen, both Odeons have sold out. You’re now doing four nights.’

By now I was in seventh heaven.

The phone rang again. ‘Sorry, Matt, I forgot to mention, we’ve added a Wembley Arena date too.’

I knew things would never be the same again.

Arriving for that first Wembley Arena performance and seeing the empty venue, just contemplating how many people would have to leave their homes to fill it, was a phenomenal feeling. Doing that show with my brother made it extra special. It was such a milestone, but the speed of Bros’s rise to major fame was so rapid that there were so many milestones. They came so thick and fast that it was hard to actually see them as landmark moments. Signing with Tom. Signing with Sony. The first Top Forty. Our first big show. Five Hammersmiths. That Wembley Arena. Our first Top of the Pops. Being on the front cover of NME. Our first TV interview, switching Radio 1 on to the FM frequency . . . it was endless.

Every time we played a gig or released a record, the hysteria we witnessed was more extreme than the last time, even though we’d thought it had peaked back then. It hadn’t. It was hard to believe, but we were in the process of becoming chart regulars. Eventually we would go on to notch up eleven Top Thirty singles and three Top Twenty albums.

The debut album Push was released in April of 1988. By mid-afternoon on the Monday of release, we were told the record was on target to sell 150,000 copies on that first day alone. That was gold in less than twenty-four hours, halfway to platinum. When the sales figures were tallied up on Saturday evening, we’d shifted over 300,000 copies, that’s platinum in less than a week. Only a new instalment of the mega-hit compilation album Now That’s What I Call Music managed to keep us from debuting at Number 1. Push went on to spend fifty-four weeks in the UK Top Forty – more than a year – and notched up over 5.5 million sales worldwide.

Calm is not a word you could use to describe the scenes on Oxford Street when we agreed to do a store signing to promote our hit single, ‘Drop The Boy’. For a start, 11,000 fans turned up. Central London was gridlocked and it made the evening news. They showed clips of snaking lines of police, two or three deep, arms locked, straining to hold back the massed ranks of Bros fans. It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime, insane moment, but Bros was already becoming a byword for generating such frenetic behaviour.

When we came to leave the shop, it was a security nightmare, so my press officer Jo put my by-now-famous red jacket on and a towel over her head, then plunged out into the hysteria, diving into the limo through a sea of grabbing hands. While the fans were distracted, we were bundled into a black police riot van which headed off the wrong way down Oxford Street at what felt like 80 mph. As we looked back at the swarming hordes, we saw four teenage girls who had rumbled our escape plot. They were wide-eyed and racing after the riot van, unable to run as fast as they obviously wanted to because they were carrying something large and black.

It was the door to our limo – they had ripped it clean off its hinges.

We were used to getting hefty bills for dents in limos, that went with the territory, but this was something else. You quickly learn to take certain precautions when you know fans will be somewhere on any given day. We would remove our jewellery or loose clothing, tuck everything away, otherwise it would just be shredded off us – after all, if these fans could rip a door off a car . . . so there was often a real sense of personal danger. Of course, I loved it, although I always found it frightening leaving a venue, not for myself but because I felt a genuine fear that kids might be knocked over by the car or the crowds.

Many times you’d feel a searing pain on your head just as you heard a girl screaming, ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it! I’ve got his hair!’ and you’d be thinking, Yes, and half my bloody scalp as well! It was funny, Brosettes were like a bloody army, they were proper hardcore, a force to be reckoned with! When you had three or four thousand of them turn up . . . you were in trouble!

Did I find it oppressive or claustrophobic? Not one bit. What’s not to love about doing a job that is so different to what is considered ‘normal’? What’s not to love about your life being absolutely barmy?

Inevitably, a few fans crossed the line into rather more unsettling areas. We had our share of death threats. Plenty in fact – that’s not some perverse pop star bragging, just an observation that this sort of behaviour goes with the job. We had a few letters from jealous boyfriends and over-obsessive fans, every band I know gets that, but it can still be a bit freaky. However, one series of letters was particularly chilling. I received four death threats in four separate letters, each mailed from the four most extreme points of the compass in the UK. These letters told me how the writer was going to kill me and when they were going to do it. We’d had threats before but there was something about the way these letters had been written – and the elusive nature of the premeditated mailing from four distant postcodes – that made it all seem a little too thorough. I said to my dad, ‘Look, I wouldn’t normally bother you with this but . . .’ so he had a look at what had been going on. He became concerned when it transpired there were no fingerprints on any of the four letters – nothing.

There was an interval of about two months from the letters being sent to when they said I would be killed. It turned out that on this particular day we were due to fly out of Heathrow, not an ideal location in which to keep a low profile. We arrived at the airport encircled by ten bobbies, with a further inner cordon made up of ten of our own security. I knew it was serious when they insisted I wear a bullet-proof vest. That was a very uneasy experience. Until you put a bullet-proof vest on in genuine fearful circumstances, you don’t think of such things, but I can tell you that your arms immediately start to feel big and your head seems enormous (and your balls feel massive!). Everything is exaggerated, you are like some cumbersome, over-sized target. Then your mind starts to interfere, making you think, What about my throat? What about my eyes? But the considered approach is that you protect the ‘vital organs’ and hope they don’t put a bullet in the brain.

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