We actually asked to be put into separate classes at school when we were thirteen; that was a very big step for us, because until then we had never been apart for such long hours on a regular basis. We both felt we needed more time away from each other, and we developed separate groups of friends for a while.
There is also a physical disadvantage in being twins: we knocked hell out of each other as kids. Because we were the same size and weight we were evenly matched in fights, and because we are equally pig-headed neither of us would ever give in, so we slugged each other as hard as we could for as long as we could. We both have scars on our bodies to prove it. Had one of us been a year or two older, we would perhaps still have fought, but never for so long or so hard. As we got older we agreed not to be so rough: our fights in recent years may have involved a bit of pushing, but we don’t hit each other any more.
The advantages in being a twin are obvious. From birth onwards I had a constant, close companion. There was always a friend of my own age to play with, someone to get into trouble with, an ally against the adult world. When we were unhappy, it was shared, and we could give each other support. I know that Matt and me have a means of communication that does not rely on speech. We feel things for each other even when we are thousands of miles apart, and when we are together we often only have to glance at the other to know what he’s thinking. My Mum will probably hate to read this, but I know that if I was in an aeroplane that was about to crash, the two people I would think about would be my girlfriend Shirley and my brother Matt.
It may sound a contradiction of everything I have said about the quest for individuality, but being a twin certainly gets you noticed. It gives you, from birth, a title. The new teacher will go home after her first day in front of the class with only a few pupils firmly fixed in her mind: the twins will always be among those she gets to know first. In other words, the struggle for individuality was between me and my twin, not between us and the rest of the kids. We were designated as special and different from birth, and we liked that.
We had the usual fun and games that twins enjoy. We used to deliberately confuse teachers, usually when they were trying to punish one of us. We would go out of the class to the toilet and when we came back in we would sit in each other’s chairs, that kind of silliness. It was always easier to get into trouble: when Matt suggested something wicked it was like suggesting it to myself, he was so much part of me, and because there were two of us we could always egg the other one on to mischief. But in a way we could get away with more – twins are expected to be ‘double trouble’. That expression and ‘as like as two peas in a pod’ are so familiar, you simply learn to put up with hearing them. I wouldn’t mind a tenner for each time they’ve been said about us.
Occasionally we could even confuse our mum, especially at night when we would change beds. But she always sussed us pretty quickly. Both Mum and Dad knew us apart automatically, not just by looks but by personality. We are very different people, however alike we look. I am much more practical, down-to-earth, self-sufficient than Matt. He is a dreamer, more relaxed than me. My family and friends tell me I’m deeper than he is: I think about things more. He takes what comes. We’re both impulsive and mad, but I’ve always been more sensible than he is. He’s likely to want to do really crazy things that could end in total disaster, and I have to restrain him. You can see the differences in our personalities when you look at the words we write for songs: his are more lyrical, more descriptive; mine are simpler, more direct.
I have always assumed the role of older brother. Studies of twins have shown that it is very common for one of them to take on a surrogate mother role with the other. It isn’t necessarily the one who was born first who does this, but in our case that’s the way it has worked. As a child I saw it as my job to look after Matt, to protect him. I was always, physically, ahead of him. Dad remembers us cycling down the road on our little bikes when we were four, the first two-wheelers we ever had, and I suddenly put my feet up on the handlebars. Three days later Matt did it. That was a pattern that would be repeated many times. I was also a bit ahead of him physically in another way: girls. We both had girlfriends from an early age, but I was the first to get into sexual relationships.
There is a deep underlying rivalry between us but it is softened and reduced by the great love we have for one another, which means that we genuinely both want only good things to happen for the other. In other words, neither of us wants to do well at the other’s expense, but we still want to do as well as each other. It was characterized in my early relationships with girls: whenever I went out with a girl I always had to ask her if she fancied my brother. I needed to know. We were, after all, alike to look at, so I felt that if she wanted me she probably also wanted him. I needed reassurance that it was something individual about me that she found attractive. Of course, in those early schoolboy – schoolgirl relationships that are over after a couple of days, looks are probably the most vital ingredient, and so it often happened that girlfriends were passed between us: I stole his girlfriends and he stole mine.
Having a twin who looks like you is not as hard to cope with as many people might think: and that’s because to us, and to those who are close to us, we don’t look alike at all. We are the same height now, six feet two inches, but Matt is more heavily built than me; he weighs a stone more than I do; he has a rounder face than mine: he looks more like our father and I look more like our mother.
Occasionally, looking at photographs, I realize how alike we are, but the rest of the time I see the differences rather than the similarities. I have always believed he is better looking than I am. At school I was the one with the skinny legs, and I was convinced girls would fancy him more than me.
Until we were twelve there was an easy way to tell us apart: I was the one with the sticking-out ears. I had serious jugs; I made Prince Charles look streamlined. I always had my hair long to cover my ears until eventually I had an operation to pin them back. At one school sports day I remember an older girl shouting out to me ‘Cheers, big ears’, which upset me so much that I ran off the track and all the way home. It was then that Mum agreed to fix up the operation privately, because I was so self-conscious about them, but in the nick of time we received an NHS appointment from the local hospital. They had to take cartilage out of my left ear to put in my right, which was the more prominent. Afterwards my ears were badly bruised and a lovely colour combination of yellow, mauve, brown and black for a few weeks.
Our singing voices are very different, but that owes more to the influences in our music than to nature. Matt has cultivated a higher voice because he admired Michael Jackson. I have always preferred a soul sound, deeper than his. But if our singing voices are different, our speaking voices are identical. Even our nearest and dearest have trouble recognizing which one of us is on the other end of the telephone. We used this to great advantage as teenagers, chatting up each other’s girlfriends shamelessly.
In the final analysis, I would not swap having Matt as a brother for anything. But I do not like being pigeonholed as ‘a twin’, and in my experience being a twin is jam-packed with insecurities.
I have Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal to thank for the year I spent living in Cheddar, in Somerset. The Good Life, a television series in which they played a married couple who gave up their nine-to-five existence to run a smallholding, was a great hit in our household, particularly with Mum. When Tony’s property maintenance business collapsed, she persuaded us all that we should opt out and move to the country. The attraction was to be self-sufficient, and it certainly looked fun on telly. I had always lived in or near to London, but I was only eleven at the time and the prospect of moving did not bother me: we’d already lived in quite a few different houses.
Mum and Tony took off for a week of house-hunting and, with a loan from Tony’s father, who was