Ooh! What a Lovely Pair Our Story (10 page)

Oh no I wasn’t.

Oh yes you were. Sorry, force of habit. All the performances took place at a truly unique venue – the local mental health hospital, St Nicholas’s. The play was put on to raise money for the hospital, but you won’t be surprised to hear it didn’t go well. The plot would have confused most audiences so, for the fragile patients there, it was a tough watch. Ant came out as Captain Hook, shouting, ‘Aarrrggghh,’ which completely freaked them out. Before we knew it, we were longing for a return to the Munchkin City.

The most disconcerting thing, though, was that the audience also had a tendency to get up and wander around during the middle of the performance, which is really off putting when you’re on stage. The whole experience was just bizarre – both for the cast and, no doubt, for the audience.

All in all, we put their treatment back five years…

Chapter 8

Throughout our disastrous dabblings with the world of theatre, there was one thing that kept us going: 18 November. That was when Ant would turn eighteen and, in the eyes of the law, civilized society and, most importantly, Telstar Records, would become a man, which meant we could finally sign the record contract and start our new life as pop stars.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited about someone else’s birthday.

In the mean time, we kept going to college. It was important that we got an education and a commitment to college was a sign of that.

Oh, and we had nothing better to do.

Well,
I
had nothing better to do. The same couldn’t be said for Dec.

I’ll admit that I always took a ‘laid-back’ approach to college, and by ‘laid-back’ I mean I laid back on the sofa, watched daytime TV and didn’t bother going. Once we had the offer of the record deal, I wasn’t really into college.

He was never really IN college, never mind into it. He was supposed to give me a lift there and, most days, ten minutes after he was meant to be at mine, I’d get a phone call and hear the words I was dreading: ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it in today,’ so I’d have to run for the bus.

It takes a special talent to keep someone waiting
and
make them late without even leaving your front room.

What can I say? I have a gift.

During one of my rare appearances at college in the first term, the lecturer, Shirley, sat us and the rest of the class down and told us they were putting together an end-of-term show and that all the students had to take part. We
had
to do it, otherwise we risked failing the course. It was an old-time music-hall show, and it would go on tour around a collection of venues that are traditionally overlooked by plays, bands and comedians travelling the region – the old people’s homes of the North-east.

Yes, after terrifying the patients of St Nicholas’s mental health hospital, we were now moving on to the new task of scaring pensioners all over Tyneside.

We had to come up with an act and, as usual, we had no idea what to do, so Shirley suggested we did a double act. We both reacted in exactly the same way:

‘A proper double act? Us two? That’s never going to work.’

But, in the absence of any other credible ideas, we decided to give it a go. We put together a traditional old-time-variety double act. We may have wowed the BBC Club with the risqué love triangle that consisted of me, Ant and Mrs Jones, but this was a proper double act. Think Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, or Morecambe and Wise. Only nowhere near as funny.

The act itself was very simple: I’d stand on stage and try to read a poem and Ant would keep coming on and…

… interrupting.

I can still remember that poem now:

There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Kathmandu,

There’s a little marble cross below the town;

And a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of ‘Mad’ Carew,

While the yellow god forever gazes down.

And then I would come on and deliver my hilarious catchphrase: ‘What’s going on here then?’ Probably my finest moment in the act was when I walked on stage with a cabbage on the end of a dog lead. Dec would ask
me what I was doing with a cabbage on the end of a lead, and I’d reply, ‘Cabbage? They told me it was a collie!’, and walk off.

Admit it, you’re laughing, aren’t you? No? Well, the residents of those old people’s homes loved it, probably because the jokes were the only things older than they were.

We went all over the North-east with that show, and that was our first tour, long before we tasted life on the road as PJ and Duncan. I always thought we should have sold merchandise – a branded checked blanket perhaps, or slippers with our faces on but, strangely, no one else shared my vision.

They say, ‘What goes on tour, stays on tour,’ but on this occasion, I am prepared to do something those OAPs did every lunchtime: spill the beans.

One of the biggest problems was that, as with the mental hospital, the audience weren’t always 100 per cent focused on the show. They’d either get up and walk around or start talking to each other and, in their case, it was never a whisper. We were starting to think it might have been the quality of our performance: we’d often come a poor second to a plate of Rich Tea or a packet of Werther’s Originals.

There was one performance where we faced a particularly tough crowd. We were doing our act, and one of a gaggle of old ladies in the front row started making this mad sound at the most inappropriate moments. ‘Eee, eeee, eeee,’ she would cry, really loudly, again and again and again. We were in the middle of the cabbage-on-a-dog-lead gag and all we could hear was ‘Eee, eeee, eeee.’ It went on at intervals right until the end, and then we just couldn’t help it, we cracked up laughing. And once we started, we couldn’t help ourselves. The act stopped, the audience was silent, even the eee-ing had ceased. One of the other residents, who was sitting next to ‘eee woman’, seemed angry with us, and shouted at the top of her voice, ‘Hey, man, yous cannot laugh at her, she hasn’t got a tongue!’

Not our finest hour as a double act.

Finally, after a few more, less eventful, music-hall performances and even, in my case, a few days at college, the big day arrived – Ant’s eighteenth.

I had a party at a social club in Benwell, which is in the west end of Newcastle, on Joanne Street, as it happens, and quite a lot of the
Byker Grove
cast came, although if they were hoping for another singsong from the Munchkin City, they were going to be sorely disappointed. My family were there, too. Even more important than the party, though, was the fact that we could finally sign the record contract.

We’d got a lawyer to look at it, and he’d recommended that we didn’t sign. He said it wasn’t particularly lucrative or creatively liberating and, on the whole, it looked like a pretty bad contract. However, he also said that he’d completely understand if we did sign. That was the kind of sharp-minded legal genius we’d paid good money for. The thing was, it was the best offer on the table, because it was the only offer on the table. Plus, we’d waited months for this moment, so we decided to sign. A milestone like that deserves plenty of fanfare, and an extravagant location where you can put pen to paper. Unfortunately, we didn’t get either of those things. We signed it in Dave Holly’s office.

By this time, Dave had moved premises to a new office opposite the central station and above the Baker’s Oven, a baker’s in Newcastle – he was obviously splashing out with the money we were earning for him – so we signed our lives away and celebrated with a cheese pasty and an iced finger. We were now officially recording ‘artistes’, and ‘Tonight I’m Free’ was scheduled for a Christmas 1993 release. We’d been given permission to miss college when we had music work to do, so we immediately organized performances and promotion to try and get people to buy the single. It was time to hit the road – again.

Our first ever gig as PJ and Duncan was at the Birmingham Dome on the
TV Hits
Roadshow.

We’ve all seen pop stars travelling in limos and being flown around in helicopters, so as we sat in a packed train carriage on the 2.38 from Newcastle to Birmingham, we couldn’t help wondering if there’d been some sort of mistake. It was just the two of us – no burly bodyguard, no record-company assistant, no tour manager, no nothing. Just us with our leather Head bag and a change of clothes. Still, we might not have had an entourage, but we definitely felt we were going places.

And the first of those places was Birmingham New Street station.

We arrived there, jumped in a taxi and turned up at the stage door with our CD in our bag and said, ‘Hello, er, we’re here to sing?’

We were only doing one song that particular evening because, well, we only had one song. We were sharing the bill with a couple of solo acts and a group called Menergy.

They were a bunch of ex-male strippers.

They were men with energy.

They were Menergy.

Backstage beforehand, we got chatting to all the other bands, bombarding them with questions about how they were feeling, and if they were nervous too. The thing that struck us was how calm they all seemed and, in Menergy’s case, how much baby oil they were getting through.

I suppose they’d done it so many times before. We, on the other hand, were completely new to all this.

Eventually, our big moment arrived and, in the last few seconds before we went on, I remember thinking, ‘Well, this is it, we’ve got to just do it now.’

We gave the CD to the sound engineer and told him it was ‘track one, full mime’, words we would come to use many, many times over the next few years. The nerves had really taken hold by now. We hadn’t done any rehearsing, because we were just going to do the routine we’d done on
Byker Grove,
which hadn’t been that long ago, but now we were beginning to wish we had. It sounded like there were thousands of people in the venue. We were young, we had no experience and we had absolutely no
idea what to expect. In spite of all of that, right there and then we set sail on a voyage of pop discovery that would last far too long.

As we stepped on to the stage, the whole place went bananas. It was incredible! Before we’d even opened our mouths to start miming, the crowd was screaming and, for once, it seemed to be the good kind of screaming. Because
Byker Grove
had been so popular and our parts had become so big, there was clearly this recognition between the audience and the two of us. We couldn’t believe it.

We did the song, but the whole thing was just a blur, it was over in a matter of minutes – two minutes and forty-three seconds, to be precise. As an added bonus, we didn’t hear ‘Eee, eee, eee’ once.

We came off stage on a complete high, unable to fully comprehend what had just happened to us and how well it had gone. We spent most of the train journey back talking it all over. The venue, the crowds, Menergy’s outfits…

We treated ourselves to a burger each and just buzzed all the way home.

From the gig, not the burger.

We got back to Newcastle, and it felt like our lives had changed overnight. We were eighteen, and we were pop stars. But we didn’t celebrate, we didn’t get drunk, we just went home and had an early night. Not necessarily because we wanted to…

… but because we had to do our double act at another old people’s home the next day.

The music-hall tour hadn’t finished, and we’d made a commitment, so we got out the dog lead and the cabbage, and off we went.

We were leading a bizarre double life of musical-hall double act by day and fledgling teen idols by night, although the audiences for both gigs had a lot in common: they both liked screaming, eating sweets and, occasionally, someone would wet themselves.

Our second gig was in Stockton-on-Tees, near Darlington, and we
knew this one was a big deal, because East 17 were headlining. When we were on stage, there were girls fainting and crying. This was pop hysteria at its finest.

Slowly but surely, we were growing into the roles of pop stars. At first, I wasn’t sure how to act before and after the songs, or even during the song. But before you knew it, you’d be striking those boy-band poses you’d picked up from somewhere.

Probably from East 17…

Next was the Hammersmith Palais in London, and the hysteria seemed to really go up a notch. There were security guards pulling girls out of the crowd, and at first I thought, ‘They seem very keen to leave,’ but then I realized they were fainting with excitement at seeing PJ and Duncan. It was a strange feeling but, if I’m honest, it was also a real thrill.

And after the gig, we just couldn’t get out of the venue.

The doors were locked.

I’m joking. We couldn’t get out because there were so many girls at the stage door. They had to use extra security to get us into the car. If there’s one thing you need when you’re faced with a small group of pop-crazed fourteen-year-olds, it’s half a dozen security guards, preferably with extensive military experience. Trust me, those girls could get very, very vicious. And they seemed like proper fans – they knew our real names, they’d read interviews with us in magazines. It felt, for the first time, that the attention was focused on us two. We weren’t holding on to the coat tails of a bunch of male strippers like Menergy. Besides, holding on to Menergy’s coat tails was usually a mistake – they were attached with Velcro and came off at the drop of a hat.