who used to be in a band called Point Break before he later turned up as Charlie Cotton, Dot’s grandson, in EastEnders. Another lad was Andy Scott-Lee, who later appeared on Pop Idol and made it all the way to the final. His sister Lisa was also in Steps. Those wannabe tiers of the pop industry made for a small world in those days, with everybody knowing everybody else, usually from queuing up for hours together at different auditions. Two people stood out for me. One was a lad from Exeter called Will Young, who seemed pretty confident in two vests and big trainers. He stood up tall and looked everyone straight in the eye, and he sang an excellent version of ‘I’ll Be There’, getting his voice nearly as high as Michael Jackson’s. The other one was that joker I told you about, a bloke called Lee Ryan, who I had a laugh with, talking about our favourite TV programmes. He had blond curtains for a haircut, and was wearing a suit! He looked like a dodgy best man or a car salesman, and that suit was easily two sizes too big for his adolescent frame. He told everyone he was 16, but I wasn’t exactly sure about that.
LEE
Okay, so I was actually 14, but I always liked a suit. For this audition, I’d chosen an impressive silver number, only slightly too large, that I’d found in a Greenwich clothes shop. Funnily enough, behind the counter that day had been one Dave Berry, later to follow his own star in the entertainment industry.
I hadn’t actually applied for this audition myself, it had been my Aunty Joan who’d sent my demo off on my behalf, and she’d fibbed about my age. But I’d been to stage school so I wasn’t nervous about performing at all, so I was getting ready to sing ‘Swear It Again’ by Westlife. Out of everyone there, I got on best with Antony – we didn’t stop talking, and he was making me laugh, which is pretty much all that matters at that age, right? Then he went on before me, and I heard them ask his name, and he said, ‘Michael from Edgware’ and I thought, ‘Hold on a minute, is anyone here actually telling the truth about themselves?’
ANTONY
To this day I can’t explain what happened there. The only reason I can think of is that my chosen song was ‘Outside’ by George Michael, and I got a bit tied up in knots. Anyway, I started singing. No, YouTube doesn’t lie … Yes, I was wearing a shirt long enough to be a nightdress, and white baggy chinos. And if that look was a bit too ordinary for the judges, they couldn’t fail to be bowled over by my enthusiastic headshakes and some serious thumb action. All those hours in front of the mirror had not been wasted.
Except they had! At the end they called out some names, and you may be amazed to learn that neither the thumbs nor the rest of my performance made the cut. Lee did get through (as did Will Young), so I wished him luck, we swapped numbers and said we’d stay in contact.
LEE
Nothing much happened with the band, although it obviously planted a seed in Simon Cowell’s brain. The whole idea of forming a boy band live on TV like that hadn’t been done before, but he saw all the potential, took that concept and ran with it. We just happened to be there on day one and become his accidental prototypes.
More significant for me that morning, as it turned out, was making a friend of Mr Antony Costa. We stayed in touch, more than you’d expect teenage blokes to bother, really, keeping tabs on each other’s progress, sharing tips for auditions, having a laugh. And then, two years later, I got a phone call, and it seemed our paths were about to cross once more …
ANTONY
Have I mentioned George Michael already? He was my hero, the backbone of my musical education growing up – him, and Cabaret, naturally. I was pretty ordinary at everything at school – the teachers knew it, I knew it – but I didn’t mind, because that was the musical they put on one year – a bunch of 14-year-old North Londoners acting out the tale of a 1930s’ Berlin nightclub against the background of the Nazis’ rise to power. It seemed completely normal at the time. Not sure I got every single subtext in the story, but I certainly caught the singing bug, and that was it, I’d found my thing.
Occasionally, I could be prised out of the house for a football match with my mates, but otherwise, I spent all my downtime hollering into my hairbrush in front of the mirror. Of all the stars of the day, for me it was always George, which, as a fellow Greek lad from North London, seemed only right and proper. Which meant that the locals in pubs around Edgware, Stanmore and Barnet were treated to more than their fair share of ‘Faith’ and ‘Father Figure’ when I turned 17 and started my own tribute act. Yes, you read that correctly. And if you should have happened into Edgware’s Masons Arms of a Friday night around that time, you would no doubt remember being treated to the sight of a wobbly but keen singer in the corner – double denim and aviator glasses, the works.
By then, I was always reading The Stage, and always gigging. I saw it as my apprenticeship. It’s all changed now, of course – these days, you can go on X Factor and, if you play your cards right, become a star overnight. That’s obviously great, a massive shortcut, but if you don’t have to put in the hard yards to learn your trade, I’m not sure you appreciate success in the same way when it does come. And you’d definitely miss out on the fun of the early days. Come on, who wouldn’t want to wear double denim, singing to seven people, and possibly a dog, in the Masons Arms of a Friday evening?
For me, if the wind was blowing in the right direction and blew some generous types through the doors, I’d make £50 for my pains and I thought I was winning. And then I got blown in a fortunate direction myself. I used to like practising my new songs by doing karaoke, which was how I ended up in a bar called The G-Spot in Golders Green. They had karaoke every Friday, and this bunch of lads I’d never heard of used to turn up for the same reason. I’ll be honest, I thought they were all a bunch of berks, ripping their tops off and posing around, but one of them was always polite and much nicer to me than the rest.
DUNCAN
My friends in North London always suggested we went to The G-Spot on Fridays, because that was karaoke night. And we’d be there, hanging out, and there was this lad called Antony doing his thing, and they just weren’t sure about him. I really liked him, used to talk to him whenever I saw him, but they thought it was weird, him turning up every week with his dad.
ANTONY
My dad used to come with me because I couldn’t drive. I was still only 17. My whole family knew what I wanted to do, and as far as my dad was concerned, if it meant I wasn’t hanging round street corners and starting trouble, he’d support me in all of it.
He even bought me a PA system for my birthday – a microphone, amp, sound-desk, the works – and started doing the sound for me whenever I got a gig. Bless him, he was absolutely useless, but we did have a laugh.
DUNCAN
I used to like that about Antony and his dad, the idea of them sticking together. I used to watch them joking, trying to work their equipment, and, in fact, it touched me more than he would have realised, because I’d grown up without a father, and I’d recently lost my grandfather, who’d always played that role for me.
My mother brought me up on her own and she was away a lot, working shifts as a nurse, so I spent huge amounts of time with my grandparents. Grandpa was the most important man in my life growing up, so I was lucky he was such a special person. He’d been a colonel in the army before he retired and became a music teacher, so as well as everything else he did for me, he introduced me to music. We lived in Blandford Forum, an old army town, and every weekend, Grandpa would play the piano in the church at the garrison, and I got to go with him. For a seven-year-old, it was the highlight of my week, driving up to the gate, where the guards in uniform asked to see Grandpa’s pass, which said ‘lieutenant colonel’. Then they saluted him, raised the barrier and we were through. It was unbelievably cool, and then I’d sit next to him in the church, while he played.
I’d played the piano myself since I was four, he made sure of that. But despite Grandpa instilling his own love of tunes in me, I wasn’t really allowed pop music in the house – Grandma said it used to hurt her ears. We had a really old stereo, and I used to sit tucked away in the corner, hoping she wouldn’t notice I was listening to the Top 40 with headphones on. Kylie Minogue