It was 23 October 1988, and the madness and mayhem of Brosmania was at its height. A year earlier, nobody had even heard of us. Yet on that day, as Matt, Craig and I left Britain to start a world tour, we could be forgiven for thinking that every teenage girl in the country was there to wave us off. As far as my eyes could see, there were excited, clamouring faces and arms outstretched towards us.
Then, just as suddenly as we had been besieged by them, the fans were cut off from us as we made the quantum leap into the comparative calm of the airport departure area. A thick belt of uniformed police prevented the madness pursuing us. We were on our way.
As we dozed, played video games and watched films on the twenty-seven-hour flight, I remember wondering what kind of reception we would get in Australia. We were on our way to the other side of the world, a place we had never been to before, where we knew nobody. Perhaps, in contrast to the crazy struggle we’d had to get to the plane, we would be disembarking like ordinary passengers, queuing to get through immigration and waiting to pick up our bags off the carousel. Perhaps life would be back to normal.
But when the plane touched down, before anyone could get off, a posse of airport security men got on. They told us to stay where we were while the rest of the passengers were cleared. Then steps were wheeled up to the plane and as we reached the top of them I was hit by two waves: a wave of heat, even though it was only seven thirty in the morning, and a wave of noise, as a huge cheer went up from the five thousand fans who were waiting for us. It took a moment or two for my eyes to focus in the clear, bright light. Below us, at the bottom of the steps on the tarmac, was a line-up of about a hundred and fifty airport staff waiting to meet us. Held at bay by security men were fifty journalists and photographers. And in the background was a blurred sea of screaming faces.
We had travelled 12,000 miles and nothing had changed except the weather. My main emotion was one of excitement and pleasure. We were a pop band, I’d been working hard and planning a pop career since the age of twelve, and there was no way I wasn’t going to be pleased and excited by success. But there was also a now familiar sense of unreality about it all. When we got to our plush Sydney hotel and switched on the television, one of the main items on the news was a film of our arrival. I watched myself coming down the steps of the plane and thought: Wow, this is incredible, I’m world-famous. But at the back of my mind there was the niggling question: Surely there must be more important things happening in the world to put on the news bulletins?
Although we’d had nearly a year to get used to it, it was a weird feeling, getting your head round the kind of adulation and fan-worship we encountered everywhere we went. I really had thought that once we got out of Britain, out of our own backyard, we would find ourselves back to ‘normal’ again. But watching that television news, I knew there was no more ‘normal’ for me. And there hasn’t been. For the last five years I have been on a crazy roller coaster, with tremendous highs and terrible lows. I have had no experience of ordinary life. I am not complaining: I would not change my experiences for anything. But I would like people to understand just how surreal it has all been.
I have been screamed at hysterically by girls of all ages, some as young as eleven and twelve. I have been spat at, punched and jeered at, for no reason that I can come close to understanding. Bros has generated adulation – and hatred. There has been very little indifference and even less genuine respect. Yet what have we done? We made some successful records, brought a lot of pleasure to a lot of kids. We hurt nobody, certainly never intentionally. Yet our fall from success has been greeted with the kind of gloating glee that is normally reserved for the arrest of a mass murderer – and that has been even harder to get my head round than the scale and suddenness of our success.
I hope that by writing this book I am going to help myself – and others – come to terms with the strange Bros phenomenon and the whole phenomenon of the pop business that created it. It was just an episode in my life, not my whole life. There was a time pre-Bros, and there is going to be a long, productive and successful time post-Bros, for both me and my brother Matt. But before we can get on with this next stage, I want to lay to rest some of the myths about Bros.
The popular ideas about us are that we are a pair of arrogant spendthrifts who ran through millions of pounds on extravagant living, that we ditched our mate Craig from the group, that neither of us had a thought in our heads save how to be hyped into yet more success, that we were an artificially created band who didn’t even perform on our own records, that we quarrelled and split up acrimoniously.
Every single one of those ideas is wrong.
First of all, let’s go back to the beginning and get the gynaecological bit over. I obviously don’t remember a great deal about being born – but my mum and dad both have vivid memories of it all.
They had friends round to dinner the night Mum went into labour with me and Matt, two months before we were due. She had no idea she was expecting twins. When her waters broke at the dinner table she didn’t know what it was and didn’t want to embarrass anyone, so went into the bedroom and mopped up with a few towels. At three o’clock in the morning of 29 September 1968 the pain was so bad that my dad sent for an ambulance to take her to Lewisham Hospital, and fifteen hours later I emerged first into the world. I was bald, had no fingernails and weighed four pounds two ounces.
Even at that stage, nobody knew there was another baby to be born. It was my dad who first sussed it. When the nurse was telling Mum to bear down because the afterbirth was very high, he said, ‘You’d better be quick, there might be another one in there.’ It was a jokey remark, not a deep premonition. But when the midwife put her ear-trumpet to Mum’s stomach, she looked up in alarm: there was another heartbeat in there.
Mum was delirious and in great pain, but she remembers the sudden panic. ‘I took one look at the instruments coming towards me and closed my eyes tight,’ she says.
Dad is the one who really remembers what happened. ‘The nurse looked startled when I joked about another baby, but as soon as she detected the heartbeat all hell broke loose. Suddenly there were doctors and nurses everywhere. I stood in the corner, trying to look inconspicuous, pretending I was a drip-feed. But when the doctor spotted me he said, “You – out!” and ordered me through the door.
‘I tried to peep in and see what was happening, and nearly got my nose caught in the door as it was shut firmly. It seemed to take an eternity, but in reality it was very quick. Officially, Matthew is eleven minutes younger that Luke, but I think it was actually less than that. It was quite hairy: the staff appeared to be panicking and all rushing about. Both the babies needed special care, and incubators were rushed to the delivery room. I had seen Luke immediately after he was born, but I didn’t see Matthew until later.’
Mum remembers that Matt was very blue when he was born, because his lungs had not inflated. Although he was two and a half ounces heavier than me, he was even more delicate because he had had a more difficult birth.
The doctors explained to Mum that we had been lying back to back in her womb and that our heartbeats had been synchronized, which was why they had failed to detect that there were two of us. It was the next day before she was taken in a wheelchair to see us in our incubators. She could not feed us herself, we had to be tube-fed straight into our stomachs.
‘I loved them desperately from the moment I saw them,’ she says. ‘I know the experts say that mothers need to touch their babies to bond with them – well, it’s not true. I was longing to hold them, but even though I wasn’t allowed to it certainly didn’t stop me loving them. It was such an intense emotion it hurt.
‘They were in incubators next to one another, alike as two peas in a pod. But even then I could see a difference between them. Matthew had a rounder face than Luke, he was tubbier even though they were so tiny.’
When Dad saw us in the incubators his main feeling was pride. ‘I felt so incredibly proud of them – and yet at the same time I felt a fraud, because I didn’t seem to have done much. I felt so sorry for my wife Carol: she’d had a difficult pregnancy and a difficult birth, and I seemed to have got off very lightly. Just looking at them lying there,