Duncan James - Blue - All Rise - Our Story

Duncan’s with his mum. It’s always been just the pair of them, and I’ve never seen a mother and son as close as those two. Tonight will mean as much to her as it does to him.

Lee’s laughing, dancing, surrounded by ladies, giving each of them his attention in turn. He doesn’t have a worry in the world, that one, and as another stunning girl goes up to give him a congratulatory hug, he looks over her shoulder and tips me a huge, happy wink.

So why do I say what I say next to my brother? Is it the roller-coaster ride we’ve already been on, the one quick year that’s seen us top the charts with our very first efforts, but also seen us come under attack, with astonishing abuse and even death threats? Or is it witnessing someone as armour-plated as Frank Skinner come unstuck when he least expected it earlier tonight? Is it the dark angel that sits quietly on my shoulder, and whispers tirelessly in my ear, as she always has since my childhood? Or is the overwhelming glamour of this night the proof I need that we are four very ordinary lads living an extraordinary existence for which we might not always be equipped? Tonight’s seen us join a brand new club, membership elite. Is it my imagination, or is life about to get a lot more complicated?

I should add I’ve also drunk rather a lot of the fine champagne on offer by this point, so chances are, I’m thinking none of the above, but something makes me turn to my brother and ask him, ‘Are you going to be there when this all disappears? Because it’s going to …’

I know, I know … how to stop a party in its tracks, right? And, to this day, more than a decade later, I don’t know where those dark thoughts came from. Because that night in February 2002 when we won our first Brit Award and were riding so high, I had no way of knowing what a path of highs and lows we were already on. It didn’t occur to me how much money would pass through our hands, how many millions of pounds we’d make for other people, while all four of us would end up scraping around to pay our bills. I couldn’t have guessed how much of our personal lives would become tabloid fodder for a press determined to bring us down, or how we would become accidental witnesses to tragedy, and then be engulfed in a media storm that nearly broke us before we’d begun. Nor did I realise how our friendships within the band would be challenged by living together in a bubble, and then having it burst when we least expected it.

All I sensed then, because my dark angel told me, was that we were a group of four young men who would in many ways be tested. And I was right.

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