Ooh! What a Lovely Pair Our Story (9 page)

‘Good idea,’ we said. ‘We look forward to working with them next year – we can show them the ropes, give them a few tips – it should be fun.’

He looked at us with a pained expression and explained that PJ and Duncan wouldn’t be coming back. They were too old for a show about a youth club; this was the end of the line. Matthew told us he’d argued with the BBC, he’d tried to keep us, and had even suggested a spin-off show, but the big cheeses at the Beeb had quickly spotted the shortcomings of a drama about a blind boy and his heartbroken best mate. There would be a few more scenes in this series, and then PJ and Duncan would leave the show. I was stunned at the news, and I started to feel sick.

We were both in shock. Matthew shook our hands, wished us luck and thanked us for taking it like men, then we left his office. We walked down the corridor together, side by side and in total silence, past the production offices, which were still buzzing, full of staff and crew getting on with their jobs, oblivious to the fact that our world had been shattered.

I clearly remember thinking about the handful of scenes we had left to shoot as we drifted down the huge sweeping staircase that had featured in the show so often – they would be the last things we’d ever do on
Byker Grove.
I was devastated. We were seventeen, and it felt like we were about to be tossed on the scrapheap. But then, just as we reached the bottom step, something happened that changed our lives for ever.

The door of Matthew’s office burst open, and he shouted after us, ‘Stop, stop! Telstar Records have just been on the phone, and they want to offer you a record contract.’

We couldn’t believe it and, in fact, at first, we
didn’t
believe it, we thought it was a practical joke – but he was for real.

‘Tonight I’m Free’ had been so popular on the show that a record company thought there was a market for what we had done and that there was a chance we could crack the Top 40.

Without that moment, and what it did for us, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

In short, it’s all Telstar’s fault.

PJ and Duncan the children’s drama stars were about to undergo a drastic transformation and become PJ and Duncan the pop stars.

It would be tough, though, and we quickly discovered our pop career wasn’t going to be easy – not for us, not for our families…

… and, most of all, not for the people who had the misfortune to buy our records.

But we were on our way to pop stardom, although it would still be another year before PJ and Duncan would ‘Get Ready to Rhumble’…

Chapter 7

By the autumn of 1993, we’d left
Byker Grove.
We knew Telstar wanted to release our track, but we still couldn’t quite believe it, so we took out a kind of insurance policy, a Plan B, just in case we didn’t end up releasing the record and becoming bigger than The Beatles.

Our Plan B was something that all great pop stars do at one time or another – we started a B-Tech in Performing Arts at Newcastle College. We were both still really keen on acting and we thought that, if the music didn’t work out, we’d complete our B-Tech and then, with any luck, go to drama school in London, then the BAFTAs, the Oscars and Hollywood. Either that, or we’d carry on crossing our fingers for a part in
Spender
anyway.

Telstar Records were as good as their word, though, and they did offer us a deal. We knew they had faith in us: they were confident we would deliver and convinced we were going to become icons of the pop world.

They were so convinced that they offered us a one-single deal. That’s right, folks, a deal to release one, whole single.

We might have been at college, but we still took time out from the important student stuff, like eating Pot Noodles and watching
Countdown
, to discuss the pros and cons of becoming pop stars. In fact, we did what any sensible adults would do in that situation and had a business meeting to discuss it. I can still picture it now: it was us two, sat in a big boardroom with bottles of mineral water and baskets of fresh fruit. Oh no, sorry, that’s right: we were in my Mini Metro with two cans of Fanta and a bag of Mini Cheddars.

And we had to make a decision – were we going to give it a go?

It was a pretty tough meeting, which lasted for one, maybe even two cans of Fanta.

We’d seen other soap stars move from TV to the charts, and it could be clichéd and cheesy, and we didn’t want that – after all, we had principles, we’d appeared at roadshows for
Mizz
and
Fast Forward
magazines, for goodness’ sake.

But then it dawned on us we had hardly any money and no career, so we decided to give our principles the same treatment as our empty bag of Mini Cheddars – and throw them out the window.

Telstar had noticed that acts like Will Smith and Kriss Kross had done well with hip-hop/pop crossover tracks, and they were convinced that was going to be the next big trend. They told us we could be a part of that, and we decided to take their word for it. After all, these people were seasoned music-industry professionals and they were obeying one of the first laws of pop music: ‘If you want hip-hop, go to a couple of lads from council estates in the west end of Newcastle.’

They told us that they knew the response to Grove Matrix on
Byker Grove
had been huge and viewers had written in asking where they could buy the single. Who knows, maybe you sitting there reading this on the train, or you in the bath or even you in your bed may even have written one of those letters. If you did, then our advice to you is simple: don’t ever admit it to anyone.

Something Telstar recognized was that, because kids had been watching us on TV for three years, we had something of a readymade fan base, and that gave us a head start. At least that’s what Telstar told us.
We
were still standing there saying, ‘Us? A single? Really?’

We also made a decision that would help us deal with life in the music business. We decided to treat it just like all the other acting jobs we’d had, or
Byker Grove
, as it was otherwise known. We weren’t real musicians, or trained singers so, in all honesty, we felt a bit like frauds. We were slightly embarrassed by the whole thing. We figured that, if we removed ourselves from it, it meant that when people ridiculed us, they would differentiate between our pop-star personality and our real personality.

We basically told ourselves we’d be playing the part of pop stars. Don’t get me wrong, I looked very like PJ, and Dec bore an uncanny resemblance to Duncan, but it helped us to draw a line between them and us.

The decision was made. There was only one problem: we had to be eighteen to sign the record contract, and Ant’s birthday wasn’t until 18 November. If you’re under eighteen, you’re a child in the eyes of the law (if not in the eyes of the bouncers at the Newcastle Mayfair) and, essentially, that meant you had to get your parents’ permission to be a pop star.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there was an actual contract that said, ‘I the undersigned hereby give my permission for my son to go on tour and be a pop star and that. Yours sincerely, Ant’s mam,’ but there were legal issues, and the alternative was our parents coming on tour with us.

My mam might have been an accomplished actress by this point, but there was no way she was coming on the road with PJ and Duncan. Besides, who would cook Sarha’s tea every night?

So with ‘Tonight I’m Free’ already ‘in the can’, and time to kill before Ant’s birthday, we decided to carry on acting. That’s not a Carry On film, by the way, we actually just carried on acting.

Through Dee Wood of chaperone and log-cabin fame, we’d already started helping out backstage at the Tyne Theatre in Newcastle. We worked on
The King and I
and
The Little Shop of Horrors.
Dec would operate the follow spot. It must have been hard for a show-off like him to put other people in the spotlight. I used to work in the flies, high above the stage, which basically entailed dropping the scenery down when there was a scene change. It would all be attached to a rope on a kind of pulley system and, displaying the same dexterity I’d shown on my paper round, I would regularly get the rope length wrong, which meant the scenery would crash on to the stage and surprise the actors. It was another sign my future lay in performing, rather than behind the scenes. At the end of every night, we’d get a pay packet.

Well, by ‘pay’, I mean lager, and by ‘packet’, I mean pint glass. We got paid a pint of lager, that’s what I’m trying to say.

But we loved it. We loved being in and around the world of theatre, we loved the camaraderie and the crack with the stage crew and we loved a drink at the end of the night.

They were great lads, the crew, always making jokes: ‘You two idiots haven’t got a hope in hell of getting in the charts,’ ‘There’s more chance of Joan Collins playing centre forward for Newcastle United,’ that kind of thing. They were hilarious, they really were.

By now, we’d both worked out that, whatever happened, we wanted to be involved in performing somehow. It was really all we knew, and we felt very passionate about it, which meant a normal job was no longer an option. Oh, and there was also the fact that we’d already left school and had never done a proper day’s work in our lives.

Dee approached us one day with an exciting proposition. She asked if we’d like to be in a production of
The Wizard of Oz.
It was going to be on over the half-term holiday, and she thought that, as the two lads from
Byker Grove,
we’d really bring the audiences flocking in. Well, that and the fact there was nothing else to do during half term. So we agreed. It was only after we’d already promised to do it, that we got round to asking who was going to take which part. I can still remember that conversation with Dee:

‘So, who are we going to be? The Tin Man?

The Lion?

The Scarecrow?’

‘The Wizard himself, perhaps?’

‘Not quite,’ Dee said.

‘Ant’s going to be the Coroner of the Munchkin City, and Dec will play the Mayor of the Munchkin City.’

‘The what!?’

We immediately regretted signing up for it. It would be humiliating. If we wanted a venueful of people to roll in the aisles laughing at us, we could
just sing to them. Things were also about to get a lot worse, because before we knew which parts we were playing, I’d told Nicola to come and see the show. She was really keen and told me she was going to bring all our mates from the cast of
Byker Grove.
I calmly tried to talk her out of it – ‘Please don’t come, I’ll do anything, I beg you’ – but she told me she’d already booked the tickets and was really looking forward to it. Little did she know her boyfriend was about to go from blind breakdancer to dwarf coroner.

On our first night, we walked out to see two whole rows in the stalls of the
Byker Grove
cast, including Rory, John Jefferson and Lyndyann, all killing themselves laughing. Our faces were going redder and redder with embarrassment, although fortunately, thanks to our already-painted-rosy, Munchkin cheeks, no one could see that. Their hilarity reached a crescendo as we belted out our only lines:

‘As coroner, I must aver/I thoroughly examined her/And she’s not only merely dead/She’s really most sincerely dead.’

Then I’d come in with, ‘Then this is a day of independence/ For all the Munchkins/And their descendants/Yes, let the joyous news be spread/The wicked old witch at last is dead.’

We then launched into a full-blooded song-and-dance routine of ‘Ding Dong, the Witch is dead, which old Witch? The Wicked Witch…’ By this point, rows F and G could hardly breathe for laughing. We weren’t going to be allowed to forget this one in a hurry.

I only wish we could have clicked our heels three times, said, ‘There’s no place like home,’ and ended up in Kansas City, or even back up the road in Fenham would have done – I just wanted to be anywhere but the Tyne Theatre.

Nicola and I split up not long after that. After many heartfelt phone calls, we realized it just wasn’t working out. I’ve spoken to her since; we’re still in touch and are still good friends but, at the time, it hit both of us hard, because we were each other’s first love and we’d been together for three years. We briefly dated again the following year but, again, called it a day. I don’t think the amount of time I was spending away from Newcastle
helped. Having said that, she might just never have got over seeing me as that dwarf coroner.

You’d think after
The Wizard of Oz
experience we’d have learnt our lesson about performing in plays, but there were still a few more theatrical disasters to come. That autumn, Dee decided to put on a specially written pantomime. Christmas was still a few months away, but Dee always did like to get things organized early. It was called ‘Strike in Pantoland’ and, although we had insisted on better parts in this one, it still had – well, let’s just say it had complications.

The idea behind the pantomime was that all the panto characters had started industrial action and gone on strike. At this point, if someone had shouted, ‘Where’s your career?’, the answer would have been, ‘It’s behind me.’ I was Jack from
Jack and the Beanstalk
and Ant was Captain Hook from
Peter Pan.