More Than You Know

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.