The Westlife boys are the first to come up to us, which means a lot. And then, wow … I’m dreaming! It’s Kylie, the princess I had on my wall back in Devon when I started dreaming about all of this. I can’t wait to tell my mum.
LEE
I’m laughing because Antony’s looking at the award in his hand and I’ve spotted him tearing up – he thinks no one’s noticed.
ANTONY
Lee gets a bit weepy, which is fair enough – he’s the youngest.
SIMON
I’m thinking, is this really happening? We’re just four silly lads in borrowed suits.
ANTONY
Half an hour later and we’re making our way into the after-show party in Knightsbridge. It’s only 11 miles from where I grew up in Edgware, but we could be on a different planet. The club’s party planners have gone overboard, and we walk along a stunning glass bridge, decked out with candles and coloured lights. More cameras flash as we get to the door – there are people everywhere. I can see my mum standing next to Duncan’s – two familiar faces at the centre of all this alien glamour, bizarrely the most surreal sight of all.
DUNCAN
I go straight over to see them. I’ve already phoned my mum from the car, but seeing her is what brings home just how special this all is. She whispers in my ear about how proud my grandparents would be. We lost them both within the last two years, and I give her another hug. But this isn’t a night to be sad.
LEE
I have to say, considering what a brain-ache we’ve been for our management on occasion, they know how to put on a party for us. They’ve been very generous tonight; the champagne is on tap, and I mean that literally, there it is in the middle of the bar. The music’s loud, and everyone in the room wants to congratulate us, praise us, take our photo, introduce us to someone else. Those other, cooler boys in school we always wanted to be? That’s us. Will I remember any of this in 16 years time? Possibly not. How can my ego withstand all this? I’ll worry about that tomorrow.
SIMON
The night goes on, and some time later, I spot my brother Duane over by the bar. He’s standing by himself, looking neither elated, nor jaded, by all this euphoric frenzy around him. Instead he looks bemused. I head over to him and for a few moments, neither of us says anything. Instead I join him in contemplating the scene, as if from outside looking in.
There’s Antony, the one I met last but now spend the most time with. He’s usually the most wary one in the band, the one reminding the rest of us not to count our chickens, that we have to read the small print – ‘Baby steps, people’ – but tonight he’s as happy as the rest of us, standing in the middle of his huge family, making them laugh with his impressions.
Duncan’s with his mum. It’s always been just the pair of them, and I’ve never seen a mother and son as close as those two. Tonight will mean as much to her as it does to him.
Lee’s laughing, dancing, surrounded by ladies, giving each of them his attention in turn. He doesn’t have a worry in the world, that one, and as another stunning girl goes up to give him a congratulatory hug, he looks over her shoulder and tips me a huge, happy wink.
So why do I say what I say next to my brother? Is it the roller-coaster ride we’ve already been on, the one quick year that’s seen us top the charts with our very first efforts, but also seen us come under attack, with astonishing abuse and even death threats? Or is it witnessing someone as armour-plated as Frank Skinner come unstuck when he least expected it earlier tonight? Is it the dark angel that sits quietly on my shoulder, and whispers tirelessly in my ear, as she always has since my childhood? Or is the overwhelming glamour of this night the proof I need that we are four very ordinary lads living an extraordinary existence for which we might not always be equipped? Tonight’s seen us join a brand new club, membership elite. Is it my imagination, or is life about to get a lot more complicated?
I should add I’ve also drunk rather a lot of the fine champagne on offer by this point, so chances are, I’m thinking none of the above, but something makes me turn to my brother and ask him, ‘Are you going to be there when this all disappears? Because it’s going to …’
I know, I know … how to stop a party in its tracks, right? And, to this day, more than a decade later, I don’t know where those dark thoughts came from. Because that night in February 2002 when we won our first Brit Award and were riding so high, I had no way of knowing what a path of highs and lows we were already on. It didn’t occur to me how much money would pass through our hands, how many millions of pounds we’d make for other people, while all four of us would end up scraping around to pay our bills. I couldn’t have guessed how much of our personal lives would become tabloid fodder for a press determined to bring us down, or how we would become accidental witnesses to tragedy, and then be engulfed in a media storm that nearly broke us before we’d begun. Nor did I realise how our friendships within the band would be challenged by living together in a bubble, and then having it burst when we least expected it.
All I sensed then, because my dark angel told me, was that we were a group of four young men who would in many ways be tested. And I was right.
Beginnings, Meetings, Becoming Blue
19 May 1999 – Granada Studios, Manchester
ANTONY
Simon Cowell’s voice had that special tone to it even then, like he knew something the rest of us didn’t. We were nine lads who thought we pretty much knew it all, waiting to go on stage, sing live on air and make a little bit of pop history, being plucked for stardom on … This Morning. As you do. But, as we stood behind the curtain listening, and he started spelling out his expectations, we all started to go a bit quiet, and even that joker I’d just met, little Lee with his fringe, stopped horsing around for a minute. Suddenly, it had all got a bit serious.
Lovely Caron Keating, a very familiar face who’d been extremely nice to all of us since we’d arrived that morning, had asked Simon Cowell exactly what he was after. Without hesitation, he explained, ‘There’s got to be a chemistry there, you’re trying to find people with star quality. All of these guys, I presume, can sing and dance, but that little extra something …’
No pressure then, lads, and if we’d known who he was, or would go on to be, we might have been even more nervous. But Simon Cowell wasn’t Simon Cowell back then; he seemed like just another music industry exec. in a baggy, checked shirt, with a big grin and a pretty special haircut. It was Kate Thornton sitting next to him who was actually more intimidating; after all, Smash Hits was our Bible growing up and she’d been its editor. And, never mind all that, we were about to appear on This Morning, the show we’d all watched for years, as it set about creating its very own boy band.
We’d all got through previous auditions to get this far, but this was different: we’d be singing live on TV, no backing track, no musicians, just our voices in all their naked glory … or instantly apparent lack thereof.
Despite Simon Cowell’s certainty that day about exactly what it was he was after, it seems only right to point out that it was actually Kate Thornton who first mentioned the phrase that would go on to launch a billion-dollar franchise on both sides of the Atlantic and would turn Simon into the global TV powerhouse he became. She said: ‘It’s an indefinable X factor that sorts out the wannabes from the superstars and that’s really what we’re looking for.’
Bang! See what I mean about falling into history? Little did we know … It’s really hard with hindsight to say if any of those waiting behind that curtain had that ‘je ne sais quoi’ they were going on about, but it