Ooh! What a Lovely Pair Our Story (15 page)

The awards were held on 20 February and were hosted by TV’s golden – or ginger – boy of the time, Chris Evans. Having been in the music biz for almost sixteen whole months by this point, we were pretty sure of one thing: when it came to winning a BRIT Award, we were a long shot but, you never know: we might just surprise everyone and take the title. Our management told us that, ‘The record company thought it would be a good idea’ if we did something that would get us some attention on the night, something that made a bit of a statement about PJ and Duncan – a statement that, for once, wouldn’t include the words ‘Geordies’, ‘pint-sized’ and ‘cheeky’. Telstar came up with a plan for us to make a splash – we were going to make a grand entrance by arriving in a mode of transport no one else would be using and that would guarantee press attention. We would turn up to the BRITS in an ice-cream van.

It’s hard to think of a worse idea than turning up to the BRIT Awards in an ice-cream van, but Telstar talked us into it, and the ice-cream van was booked. I doubt that was a difficult job; I don’t suppose there’s much call for ice-cream vans in the middle of February. The plan was we’d turn up in the ice-cream van, jump out of the serving hatch and have our photos taken, which would be hilarious and ‘crazy’. I still have no idea why it had to be an ice-cream van; none of our songs had anything to do with frozen desserts.

The night of the ceremony came around. It was being held in Alexandra Palace in North London. We were coming from a hotel in another part of London, and we told the record company there was no way we’d travel all the way there in the ice-cream van. After all, we had our dignity. Well, okay, we didn’t have any dignity, we just didn’t want to get cold. They arranged for a car to take us there – it wasn’t The Prev, it was probably in the car wash having the lipstick removed – and the plan was to wait until we got round the corner from the venue and then get out of the car and into the ice-cream van.

To make sure it arrived on time, the van set off early from the depot – sometime in mid-January I think and, as planned, we met it round the corner from Alexandra Palace. That’s when we faced our first problem.
What with the BRITs being a huge international music event and everything, the traffic was horrendous. We were in that van for ages, inching our way there. We’d had a few drinks back in our hotel before we left, and a few more in the car, all of which meant that we were both desperate for the toilet. It made a very slow journey very painful. I remember eyeing a few empty ice-cream tubs but resisted the temptation and, besides, it would all be worth it because, when we arrived, we were going to get so much press attention.

So although we were stuck in an ice-cream van, perched on a couple of boxes of cones, sweating our crushed velvet suits off and dying for the toilet, we were dead excited. It took what seemed like an eternity but, finally, we arrived at Ally Pally, ready to make our big entrance. The van pulled up, we clambered out of the hatch and jumped down, striking our best ‘wacky’ poses, only to find there was absolutely no one there. Not a soul. The journey had taken so long that all the celebrities had already gone in, the pit of paparazzi had emptied and the red carpet was actually being rolled up. The only people who saw our dramatic entrance were a few door stewards and the driver of the ice-cream van, and I think
he
was reading the paper.

We put it behind us, made our way inside, had a massive pee and took our seats. The ceremony itself was brilliant. Blur were the big winners that year. They won best album, video, British group and single, for ‘Parklife’. Finally, our moment arrived, the Best Newcomer category. They showed a bit of each nominee’s video, and a nice little cheer went up in the room for ours. Then it was time. The envelope was opened, I remember my heart beating in my chest harder and louder than it ever had done before and, although the sensible, rational part of me was saying, ‘We’re not going to win, we’re not going to win,’ there was still a mischievous voice saying, ‘Maybe. Maybe you’ve won it. It could happen.’ That’s how drunk we were.

Along with the three other bands in our category, the night ended in disappointment. Us, Echobelly, Eternal and Portis-head all left the BRITs empty-handed. As for the winners of the 1995 Best Newcomer Award, well, apparently they’re still together and they’re doing okay. They were a little band called Oasis.

Shortly after the BRITs, the PJ and Duncan adventure took a whole new twist, with a strange and unpredictable experience the record company called overseas promotion. Over the next few years, we were to get very used to punting our own unique brand of ‘pop with a smile on its face’ round the far-flung corners of the globe. We went round Europe, Australia and the Far East, and it was, at times, bizarre, surreal and insane – and that was just our choice of outfits. It was a great way to see the world. We saw TV studios in Germany, TV studios in France and even a radio station in Stockholm. It’s true what they say: travel really does broaden the mind.

We also learnt something about French pop-music policy. If you’re not, and I sincerely hope you’re not, a nineties-French-pop aficionado, you might not be aware of this, but 40 per cent of the songs played on French radio must, by law, be by French artists. It really is the law, and you go to pop-music prison if you break that law. After hearing that, our management had wisely decided that the chances of PJ and Duncan getting a look-in were about the same as me getting my stolen boxer shorts back. Then the record company got a call with news that surprised us all: ‘Our Radio Rocks’ was rocketing up the French charts. They told us to take our spectacular and visually stunning live show out there immediately, so Dec grabbed the CD, I dug out my favourite baseball cap, and we headed for the airport.

I’ve never understood why you have to promote something that’s already doing well, but ‘the record company thought it was a good idea.’ You can guess what’s coming next, can’t you?

We arrived in Paris, where we’d been booked to appear on the French equivalent of the
Smash Hits
Poll Winners Party. I can’t remember the
name of the event itself, it may have been Le Poll Winners Partie de
Smash Hits
– my French is a bit rusty. It was in a massive arena that had been filled with ten thousand French teenagers, and it was being broadcast live on French TV. It was the same mime and the same dance moves we’d done a hundred times to ‘Our Radio Rocks’, so we didn’t need any rehearsal, we were perfectly happy to just turn up and do it. We didn’t speak a word of the language, but these French pop fans knew how much our radio rocked, so what could possibly go wrong?

In a word: everything. We went on stage to the opening bars and struck our usual poses, ready to go into our normal radio-rocking routine. The song carried on playing and – there’s no other way to say this – it was a track we’d never heard in our lives. I felt sick. Our dance moves didn’t fit the music, the vocals had changed – the whole thing was our worst nightmare. The French TV producers had forgotten to tell us that the track that was doing so well in the French charts was the 12-inch dance remix. We were live in front of ten thousand screaming French teenagers and in millions of people’s homes, performing to a track we were hearing for the very first time. And, because it was the twelve-inch
extended
mix, it seemed to last about three and a half hours.

On the off chance that any of you lovely readers aren’t familiar with ‘Our Radio Rocks (The Loony Toons House Mix)’, then let me explain. As with most dance remixes, they’d stripped out almost all of the vocals, and when those vocals did come in, they were sampled and r-r-r-r-repeated, so they bore no resemblance to the original track. We quickly worked out that the best strategy was to keep the microphones clamped to our lips at all times, because we had no idea when the vocals would start or stop.

It was a disaster. Deprived of our usual routine, we ended up inventing dance moves on the spot, and we were both completely out of time with the music and each other. There were cameras pointed in our faces and we had no idea what to do, so we kept criss-crossing the stage to try and stop the
cameras following us. Vocals were coming in left, right and centre, and I was just thinking, ‘Is that me, or is that Dec?’ In a pop career full of unmitigated disasters, this was one of the largest-scale cock-ups of the lot. The whole thing made Truck Fest seem like a walk in the park. Or a walk in the field, which is actually what it was.

Usually, after a gig, you’d come off stage and the other bands would congratulate you on your performance. That night, no one even looked us in the eye and, if they had, they would have burst out laughing. Our French pop career began and ended that day.

Foreign promotion wasn’t all disastrous live performances though. Just like in the UK, we used to do days on end of interviews. They’d start at nine in the morning and finish at six at night, and you’d spend the whole time being interviewed, previewed and reviewed. Believe me, there’s only so long you can talk about what you do for a living. So, to keep ourselves amused, we started to make stuff up. For some reason, this tended to happen a lot in Germany. One interviewer asked about the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to me. I said to Dec, ‘Remember that time my trousers fell down on stage, and then I fell off the stage and then I landed on a fan without my trousers and ended up doing the rest of the gig in a pink tutu?’ After a while, delirium would set in and we’d say anything to try and make each other laugh. I’m not sure we made a very good impression.

After a few more weeks of European promotion, we went back home to start a new chapter in our careers. And if there’s one thing a new chapter in our career deserves, it’s a new chapter in this book. So what are you waiting for? Go to the next page and get started.

Chapter 13

1995 was shaping up to be our busiest year so far. So busy it felt like the expression ‘kick-bollock scramble’ had been invented just for us. With such a heavy schedule and hardly a day to ourselves, it became increasingly clear what we had to do – star in our own eight-part TV series for Children’s BBC while simultaneously trying to keep our pop career afloat.

Those guys at Zenith Productions had finally made some progress with the TV-show idea. They said they were ready to pitch – telly speak for ‘desperately try and flog’ –
The Ant and Dec Show
to the BBC. This was incredibly exciting; we’d always felt more at home on the small screen. Plus, making a TV show might mean slowing down our musical output, which would be good news for people with ears everywhere. It turned out we were wrong: it just meant doing a TV show and our second album at exactly the same time.

As you’d imagine, it was important to get the TV show right. It was the BBC, and our big chance to add another string to our bow, so we spoke to the record company, cancelled our press commitments, cleared our diaries and managed to free up a whole afternoon. We spent that afternoon in the Drill Hall, an old theatrical venue in North London, where we filmed a few sketches that had been written for us, using only an old video camera and, of course, our sparkling wit and repartee. The idea was to produce a short tape of the funny bits from this session and send it to Children’s BBC. I imagine that tape lasted around thirty seconds.

Ant doesn’t remember that day at all, but I suppose that’s understandable: people often blank out traumatic or embarrassing moments in their life. I don’t remember much either, but I do recall telling a joke to camera at the end of the day, and the BBC decided they wanted to make the show partly because they loved it. It was completely unsuitable for kids’ TV, but it had made them laugh. This was the joke that sealed the deal:

I stayed in a hotel last night, and in the next room was James Bond. My friend asked me how I knew it was James Bond, and I said, ‘Because all I heard all night was a woman shouting “Oh, Roger, more! Roger, more! Roger, more!”’

And they say TV is full of stupid people. Next thing we knew, it was March, and we were off to the BBC to make our own show.

We turned up at that famous old building in White City and were made to feel at home immediately. Little did we realize that this was the start of what became our full-time career. We discovered we had a natural talent for hanging round TV studios trying to make people laugh and eating free sandwiches. It was the first step on the road to becoming TV presenters and playing heightened versions of ourselves. We were still Ant and Dec, but everything was a bit ‘bigger’ and more exaggerated, because we were on the telly. It’s a strange way to earn a living when you think about it. It wouldn’t work with other jobs. You can’t imagine a traffic warden jumping around saying, ‘Welcome to the double-yellow line. Tonight,
you
could win a parking ticket,’ but that’s what you do on telly. Most people you see present an extreme version of their personality, although there are exceptions. There are people who are just as unpleasant on screen as they are off it. Not that we’re naming any names, Mr Cowell.

There was some debate about what we were going to call this show. It isn’t an issue for most people on telly. Once they had Jeremy Kyle on board, I can’t imagine it took too long to decide on
The Jeremy Kyle Show,
but for us it was never that easy. In
Byker Grove
and as pop stars, we were PJ and Duncan, but our real names, as our more observant readers will have noticed, are Ant and Dec. We were never keen to be
called PJ and Duncan as pop stars, but Telstar had insisted on it, and being in the middle of a performing arts B-Tech at Newcastle College at the time of that conversation, we weren’t exactly in the strongest bargaining position. The names caused us problems for years, especially when we did foreign promotion and the audiences had never even heard of
Byker Grove.
You won’t be surprised to hear that the everyday story of a youth club in the North-east of England wasn’t a big hit on German TV. Now, all we wanted was to be known by our real names. After all, we’d had nearly twenty years’ experience using them, and it seemed a shame to waste it.