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