More Than You Know

Grandad’s neighbour Rita had a daughter, Dawn, whom I fancied. I have to admit, though, I had an even bigger crush on her mum! I really used to fantasize about her – all I wanted to do was have my wicked way, even though at that age I am not sure I knew what that was! Dawn had been the first girl to let me put my hand down her knickers but Tony caught me doing it on the steps and made me come in and tell the whole family.

It was in Camberwell that a man tried to snatch me into a car. I can still see his face vividly, dark-haired and with a moustache. I often used to sit on a wall by the old people’s home at the top of Crawford Road. One day I was on there, just hanging out and being a seven-year-old kid really, when I heard a noise behind me. I looked round and saw this man reaching for me. Over his shoulder I could see his car parked by the grass verge with the back door open. I jumped off the wall – which was about ten feet above the pavement on that side – and ran all the way home. I won’t say it haunts me to this day, because it doesn’t, but at the time it scared the hell out of me.

I bought my first record at Crawford Road in 1978. It was Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’. I listened to it over and over and over again, until my brother started pleading with me not to play it any more. I loved that single. I was really intrigued by Ian Dury too, this man on the telly who, to a young boy with no knowledge of such things, looked like a cripple. I was fascinated by him, he just looked as if he was in pain. I heard people saying he had polio, which sounded like the bubonic plague or something to me – guaranteeing that I was always first in the queue to take the little cube of sugar dipped in polio vaccine. It sounds simplistic I know, but I was only a child. I didn’t stay a fan of the Blockheads for long, it was just that one moment, but your very first record is an important snapshot in your life.

The diversity of my mum’s and Aunt Sally’s taste in music rubbed off on me. There was a lot of rock in there, Cream, Free, AC/DC and so on, but Mum also loved artists like Roberta Flack. When The Fugees later covered ‘Killing Me Softly’, a definitive cover version if there could be such a thing, the memories came flooding back for me when I first heard it on radio. It was like a time warp. Sally would always be singing, as would my mum. Sally used to tell us all about the concerts she went to see. She had a lovely voice and it was great to hear Stones and Beatles songs when she belted them out. Whenever we’d visit Sally at her flat on the Peabody Estate on the Old Kent Road, I used to love singing with her. After a while, I began to try to out-sing her, that’s when I started to get that sensation that I could do anything with my voice.

I was heavily into Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson was a big favourite too. Like forty million other album-buyers, I was into Thriller, how could you not be? But for me Off The Wall was something special too. The songs were just monumental, and knowing that Rod Temperton, an Englishman from Cleethorpes, could write tracks like ‘Rock With You’ and ‘Off The Wall’ makes it even more incredible to me.

By the end of the Seventies, like so many other British kids, I was massively into ska. I was never really into punk, not least because I was just too young, but Two Tone fascinated me. In the space of two years it seemed bands like The Specials, The Selecter, Madness and The Beat dominated the school playgrounds of Britain. I was in one of those playgrounds and couldn’t help but be infected. It’s funny how adults theorize about genres of music – in the case of Two Tone they talk about how it perfectly captured the social tensions of Thatcher’s Britain, how it fused Jamaican ska with inner-city desolation and so on. I am aware of that now. Back then, it was so much more personal. It was a style of music and a sartorial choice that, for this eleven-year-old at least, was far more pragmatic than the pages of a broadsheet feature.

I had the full ska uniform: the pork-pie hat, Fred Perrys, Doc Martens, Sta-Prest shirts. We all did. Then there was the music. I adored The Specials, it was obvious Jerry Dammers was a genius. I had every Madness album. The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ is still one of my favourite songs ever. That song is always feted by critics for soundtracking the whole social polarization of Thatcher’s Britain, but for me and my mates, it was more about the death of ska – ironic since it was their most successful song and a Number 1 hit. We simply felt like saying, ‘No! Don’t say the clubs are closing down, because we are still dancing . . .’

The music was so deft too, so clever and that has stayed with me. It can be quite hard to splice elements of ska into my albums themselves, but if you go to one of my shows, you will find parts of the gig are drenched in ska and the crowd will be skanking away! Playing live allows you to do that, to break out of any pigeonholes that your records might be placed in. I think it surprises many people that my live set can include ska and Stevie Wonder but to me that is as natural as putting on ‘Superstition’ straight after ‘Ghost Town’. They are both phenomenal songs, that’s all there is to it.

While life in Crawford Road was heavenly to me, the time I spent with my dad was a little less straightforward. Not because of Dad, as we were always so excited to be going to see him, even though it wasn’t as often as we all would perhaps have liked. It was because he had remarried back in 1976, to a woman called Margaret and, inevitably, that complicated matters for everybody.

I wasn’t particularly fond of Margaret, to say the least. She never made me or Luke feel welcome, never made me feel at ease around my own dad. It was often the smallest things, like rationing how much ketchup we could have on our food, or how many biscuits we were allowed to eat. It was weird because Dad was always the one who would dunk two biscuits in his tea at the same time. We would look forward to having a cup of tea and biccies with Dad so this was all very suffocating. Margaret was really formal. She wasn’t off with us in front of Dad, but the most credit I would give her is to say she was polite. I always used to look forward to seeing Dad, of course, but I genuinely did not look forward to seeing Margaret.

Luke and I were never rude to her. In fact, we tried hard with her but Margaret never made us feel loved or wanted. Nonetheless, I promise you, we were very well-behaved children. Dad insisted on that and Mum had raised us that way as well. Speak when you are spoken to or, if you have something you feel really strongly about, then you can speak up. Adults had the right of way in our house, and rightly so. I believe that is the best method with kids. So we were never rude to Margaret, but that didn’t change the chilly atmosphere.

One time, my dad pulled up at a petrol station to fill up the car and while he was paying at the counter, Margaret leant over the seat and said to us, ‘I’ll give you a pound if you tell me whether your mum is with anyone.’ We basically told her to stuff her pound, as politely as we could. When my dad got back in the car we said nothing. Neither did Margaret.

It wasn’t just us that were affected, my dad’s time with his boys was affected too. I remember being made to sit in the dining-room one night when all I really wanted to do was sit on the couch with my dad, my dinner on a tray, and watch TV with him. We weren’t allowed to, but you know what? I think Dad wanted to do that too.

I feel for my dad in a way on that level because if Margaret had made him happy then that would have been cool with us, but I never really had the feeling that she did. There was always an underlying atmosphere, it was really tiring. Then, one day when we were all on a day-trip to Blackpool, while visiting family in Preston, Dad suddenly stopped the car by the sea and said to Margaret, ‘You know what, Margaret? If you don’t want to spend time with my kids, if you don’t want to see the boys, then you’re not welcome when I bring my kids out. When are they ever rude to you?’

At that exact moment, I felt incredibly awkward because I feared Margaret would become even worse and really hate us in the future. But then – and I’m not going to lie – once I was over that initial spasm of fear, I was so happy inside that Dad had stuck up for us, his boys. I think that was pretty much one of the last times we hung out with Margaret.

A line of sorts had been drawn, but Margaret was obviously still there whenever we visited Dad. Every visit was tiring, we were drained by it all. We just wanted to see our dad and have a nice time. Even to the day that my dad and Margaret split up (they eventually divorced), we never had the feeling that she really liked us.

When they did separate, my dad was obviously feeling a lot of pain which wasn’t nice to see for two young boys. I’d seen Mum so desperately troubled by her marriage break-up but I’d never seen Dad upset like that and I really felt for him. Yet, to be brutally honest, part of me was quite relieved. We had, at best, a tense relationship with Margaret, and at such a young age there isn’t yet room for being gracious or magnanimous. You just want your dad.

My father leaving the family home paralleled what had happened to him when he was a boy. His own dad had left but, unlike my father, had not kept in touch with his growing son at all. Before he had split up with Margaret, my father’s mother died and Dad started to look into where his own dad lived, to try to reconnect with him and that estranged side of the family. In my book, that was a very brave thing to do. I admire him very much for making such an effort in very difficult circumstances. He managed to re-establish contact and for a few short years we were graced with a whole new strand to the family. Suddenly we had a new grandad, a new grandma, new cousins and aunties, we’d gained a whole new family seemingly overnight, it was just the most exciting thing. And this wasn’t like a fifth cousin four-times-removed – this was a legitimate, direct bloodline through my father.

However, so much of my life has pivoted around gain and loss, gain and loss, and this was to prove no different. When Dad and Margaret broke up – Margaret was having an affair – my father’s own dad, my newly discovered grandfather, took Margaret’s side. Yes, he sided with a woman he wasn’t related to and hadn’t known for very long against his own son. To me that was absolutely disgusting. Even if Dad had been mainly in the wrong (which as I understand it he wasn’t), you can’t take sides against your own. That’s his own son. I was incensed.

I don’t see that side of the family any more, their own actions have wrenched them back out of my life. I do see Dad’s sister and her family at gigs and on other occasions and they are all absolutely lovely, Janet, Sara and Mark. They supported my dad during that time. Janet sided with him, her brother – I have a lot of time for Janet. I have no negative feelings for my dad’s family. I would have loved nothing more than to have had a healthy, loving relationship with my new-found family but, as I am sure anyone would agree, my loyalty lies with my father. As for my dad’s dad? He can kiss my arse, I have no time or respect for him after what he did.

I know that episode broke my dad’s heart. To realize that he had grown so far apart from his dad that they could no longer even reach each other must have really hurt. What’s more, I know that it hurt my dad’s step-father, who in my mind and as my dad also realizes, is his real father. My dad now regrets searching for his biological father, but even more regrets the hurt it caused his step-father. I know my dad only considers himself to have one father and that’s Grandad Weston.

I have no time for what happened and probably remain more angry about it even than my dad does. He is quite philosophical when he thinks about it and seems to have been able to move on. It remains incomprehensible to me. You lose your son for many, many years, somehow that son plucks up the courage to come and find you and kick-start a relationship that time and circumstances threatened to have destroyed for ever, then you take the side of someone who is not even part of your direct family! The way that families behave sometimes is unbelievable to me.

Fortunately for Dad, there was a fantastic new wife around the corner. Her name is Helen and Dad married her in 1996. I honestly think that at that time in my dad’s life, she was the best thing that could have happened to him. She is the same age as me (so well done Dad!) but she has an old soul, and I mean that as a great compliment. She has not only made my dad younger, but conversely she has made him older as well, made him more peaceful. She is a very gentle person and that has definitely rubbed off on my father. Helen is very considerate, very loving, she makes my dad happy. She is a tiny, petite woman who looks even younger than she is and, being the same age as Luke and I, we have great fun calling her step-mum! She cringes but it is hilarious. She’ll return the fun by putting her arm around me and saying, ‘You’re my step-son!’ I am really glad that Helen is in my dad’s life, she is a lovely lady.

FOUR

Redirected

Luke and I were as one back then. When you are floundering for foundations, you look to the constants in your life. I had my mum, there was Crawford Road and there was my beautiful twin brother. Luke was my saving grace, he was one of the reasons I could feel safe. We were young twins with strong personalities, so of course we would fight but we would always have a good time together. When I think of Luke back then, my face just cracks into a big smile, and I end up laughing. He was a hilarious physical comedian as a kid, always mucking around, a typical drummer I guess! I used to love how he made me chuckle, I’d be crying and aching on my sides, breathless from laughing. We did have other friends though, which was healthy. I like having best mates; I know hundreds of people, but I only have a couple of best mates. At Collingwood, I would befriend a boy who was my best mate through all of secondary school and on through the madness of the Bros years, a great guy called Lloyd Cornwall.

We went to Collingwood Secondary School in Camberley, south London, a year later than everyone else because of our stay in Cheddar, so not only was it yet another new school but by the time we arrived, most kids had gravitated towards certain friends and cliques had already been formed. However, we were into cool music and quickly became popular at the new school, which was a nice feeling. One of our new mates in that first year at Collingwood was a quite academic boy whom we met in the school dinner queue. His name was Craig Logan.

As for other teenage boys, one of the most important things in life was girls. Lukie and I have never done badly with girls. Luke dated prettier girls than me but I was more shy in that area. As we grew up, he went for a different type of girl, ones that would drive cars and stuff like that, which when you are a teenager is a defining element of your personality to other kids. I still had plenty of little romances though. There was a girl called Caroline whom I really liked when I was fourteen, but she moved to America and I was heartbroken. Caz was lovely, she wasn’t the prettiest girl in the school but to me she had the sweetest way about her (her best friend was Luke’s girlfriend, that’s how it was in those days!). Then I dated a girl called Cindy who still to this day is one of the loveliest girls I’ve ever met. She was my first love. Her parents worked for an oil firm and they had a lovely house on the Wentworth estate by the golf course. She was American and unfortunately she too moved back to the States. She was just so gentle, an earth angel.

I lost my virginity to Cindy. I was sixteen, quite late for a guy I guess. That first experience of making love was quite amazing for me. We’d heard all these stories that you had to use lubrication, so I covered my knob in after-sun lotion. From that shaky start, it was actually wonderful, not the horror story that many people experience! Afterwards, we both just smiled and smiled for hours. That is a great memory, although one that inevitably comes with a certain whiff of after-sun.

Those secondary school and teenage years can be so influential on your personality. For example, I have a real fear of sirens. If I hear a motorbike rev in a certain way, it will give me an absolute chill. Part of me sometimes wonders if I grew up during air raids in a past life. More specifically, while I was at Collingwood, we had a couple of incidents with sirens that, looking back, must have had quite a lasting effect on me. The school was near to Broadmoor hospital which over the years has housed notorious individuals such as the Yorkshire Ripper. Every Monday escape sirens would go off to test the system – this unnerving sound was strangely reassuring to locals because it meant that everything was working. Religiously, every Monday, this siren would howl across the area.

However, at the back of your mind, next to the face-at-the-window and the bogey-man-under-the-bed, you knew that if a siren went off on any other day then there could be someone out there that you really didn’t want to meet.

On one particular day, I was out on a school cross-country run, trekking through the woods near to Broadmoor. I was on my own thinking of nothing much when I heard the siren. The sound registered in my ear and a split second later I thought to myself, It isn’t a Monday. I shit myself. I started thinking, Maybe they have just found him, or has he been gone for half an hour on the run . . . ? By the time I’d run another mile, I was convinced I was about to stumble across some mass murderer. Obviously I didn’t, but I felt a panic that stays with me to this day.

Another time while I was at Collingwood School the four-minute nuclear warning went off. It sounds bizarre but it is true. Camberley was one of the few places in Britain where the nuclear warning signal actually went off accidentally. This blaring siren was absolutely everywhere, yet you couldn’t tell exactly where it was coming from. It was almost as if it was inside your brain rather than coming in through your ears. After four minutes of that, I was ready to explode myself!

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.