We were in school at the time and it was such an extraordinary circumstance to find yourself in. We were in woodwork and the teacher, Mr Linnell, was usually a grumpy old bastard. However, when the siren went off, he had this really peaceful look on his face. Mr Euston was the same – he had a cool swagger about him like Lee Majors from The Six Million Dollar Man and he also seemed strangely serene that day. Even now I think they knew more than we did.
The headlines on the local papers the next day said, ‘Camberley Plays It Cool With Four-Minute Warning.’ Funnily enough, we still have the tray that Luke was making in that very woodwork class. Mum still uses it for tea. This tray is indestructible. If a nuclear bomb had obliterated Camberley that day, I am certain that in among the fall-out and hinterland of atomic waste, Lukie’s tray would have been on the floor, right at the centre of the explosion, unscathed. Ten out of ten, Goss.
To any secondary-school pupil, teachers can provide both the best and worst moments of your time in class. I think it was our English teacher Ms Funnel who wore fishnets, that was fantastic. One time she climbed on my desk to open a window with her fishnets on, I remember that very clearly! But the best teacher was Ms Sinkovich who, for some reason, used to play an accordion while wearing very short skirts, which to a hormonally-charged teenage boy was definitely a nice bonus.
Mr Brooks was a great biology teacher, phenomenal. To this day, I still remember every valve in the human heart and how it all works, solely because of him teaching us so well. He was cool with it too. One day, a mate of mine dropped a condom on the floor. I don’t really know why we had them at that age because we’d have only lasted ten seconds had we caught sight of a naked woman anyway. This condom went ‘SPLAT!’ on the classroom floor. A hushed nervousness fell over the room, you could almost hear people thinking, Oh my God! Mr Brooks is going to go mad! Sure enough, Mr Brooks saw the condom, but simply crouched down, picked it up, said, ‘I’ll save this for later’ and promptly put it in his pocket and carried on teaching.
Another nice memory (albeit earlier at St Clement’s) is that of Mr Bromley and the eclipse. He had a really great way about him, he was a very knowledgeable, gentle but very firm teacher. While he was teaching us, there was a solar eclipse which we all watched; rather than just make an afternoon of it and then forget about it the next day, Mr Bromley said, ‘When there is another eclipse, let’s meet on the top of Box Hill.’ I thought that was an amazingly thoughtful thing for a teacher to say to his class. It would be lovely if that sentiment could be in all classrooms, that kind of foresight.
I don’t know if Mr Bromley would even remember saying that, but when it came to the eclipse in 2002, I was in LA and I thought about him all day, wondering if he was sitting on Box Hill all those thousands of miles away, and indeed if anyone else was sitting with him.
Without doubt the person I have the fondest memories of is Jane Roberts, my drama teacher and someone I still hold dear to my heart. I would love to get back in touch with her. She was so different to your normal drama teacher, and absolutely brilliant at her job. Jane gave me a lot of confidence in myself as a performer. She used to say, ‘You have something special about you, you’ve got what it takes,’ and constantly encouraged me. In fact, I would say that she is the reason that I was able to pursue my career as I did, she gave me that confidence. I absolutely trusted her judgement one hundred per cent so when she said I had what it takes, I believed her and my confidence surged.
Despite what people may think, I have never been a confident person. As I have grown older, I have become a more self-assured man, but on a vanity level I am not confident. I don’t want that to change. I have always had an absolute dislike for arrogance. In the Bros years, the press would often say we were ‘brats’ or ‘arrogant’ and those words really stung. I would be devastated if someone said that about me. I find arrogance so boring, so uninteresting. I love kindness, respectful people; life is too bloody short to be around arrogance. Jane knew the difference between arrogance and confidence and she instilled some of the latter in me, for which I will be eternally grateful.
I should point out that at secondary-school age, I absolutely loved drama. Acting was my bug, not music. I desperately wanted to be an actor, even my work experience was at Windsor Theatre. For some reason, one of my first assignments from Windsor was to go into central London, by myself, and buy some blank bullets. That was pretty daunting!
It was always acting and, later, music for me. I just wasn’t interested in anything else, especially the sciences (although I loved biology). I hated physics. When I did the exam for physics I just put my name at the top of the paper and walked out. I knew I didn’t want to put myself through an hour and a half of stress – I wasn’t going to build rockets. The teacher actually shook my hand, he seemed to admire the fact that I knew what I wanted not to do.
Jane was always very encouraging and I was a good pupil – I suppose because I wanted to learn more and more and more. My application paid off when I won the lead role in a 1984 production of Cabaret. It was a big show, beautiful costumes, expert sets, you would never have known it was a school effort, Jane made such a perfect job of it. I was in my element on stage playing the German Master of Ceremonies at a prewar Berlin nightclub. I won a standing ovation and loved every minute of it – I am still very proud of that performance. It was the first time I really felt appreciated in that environment. It would have been odd to think that less than a decade later, I would be sitting in a hotel suite with Liza Minnelli herself, who had won an Oscar in 1972 with that very same musical . . . but more of that later.
It was my show-stopping performance in Jane Roberts’s production of Cabaret that brought me very directly to a crucial crossroads in my young life. Jane later took me to one side and said that there had been a scout from RADA at the show and if I wanted to, I could get invited to attend that very famous drama school (the following year I was in Sweeney Todd). Yet, while on the one hand that was everything I ever wanted to hear, one aspect of the Cabaret show had really stuck in my mind, and that was how natural and comfortable it had felt being on stage singing. The way singing made me feel, the way it physically felt in my throat, I knew that was the way forward. It was a really stark contrast to anything I had ever done before – I loved acting and was good at it for my age, but the singing was on another level altogether. It just felt so comfortable, so natural.
It’s funny how your childhood can be such a mish-mash of memories and it is very telling which specific moments stand out. In view of our future careers, one moment in Collingwood was very significant. In the early Eighties, Two Tone had started to fade and several new bands were coming through. The Thompson Twins were really big news all over school and, indeed, the country as a whole. We’d all started buying music magazines and really getting into bands in a big way, so imagine the buzz when my mate won a competition in Smash Hits to go and actually meet the Thompson Twins . . . in New York!
I thought he was pulling my leg when he first told me. To secondary-school kids, it just didn’t compute, it was so fantastic. But sure enough he had won and was duly despatched on a Jumbo to spend time with the band. Then, as if that wasn’t startlingly brilliant enough, they ran a feature in Smash Hits showing him hanging out with the Thompson Twins in New York, inside limos, at the gig, backstage . . . we couldn’t believe our teenage eyes. We were saying, ‘It doesn’t get bigger than that, that’s it, he’s made it . . . we know him.’
What I didn’t know then, as I flicked through the pages of that magazine looking at the Big Apple, the music-biz glamour and the faces of this band that we all followed, was that only a handful of years later, Bros would be on the cover of the then-biggest-selling edition of Smash Hits ever.