Matt Goss - More Than You Know

I should point out that at secondary-school age, I absolutely loved drama. Acting was my bug, not music. I desperately wanted to be an actor, even my work experience was at Windsor Theatre. For some reason, one of my first assignments from Windsor was to go into central London, by myself, and buy some blank bullets. That was pretty daunting!

It was always acting and, later, music for me. I just wasn’t interested in anything else, especially the sciences (although I loved biology). I hated physics. When I did the exam for physics I just put my name at the top of the paper and walked out. I knew I didn’t want to put myself through an hour and a half of stress – I wasn’t going to build rockets. The teacher actually shook my hand, he seemed to admire the fact that I knew what I wanted not to do.

Jane was always very encouraging and I was a good pupil – I suppose because I wanted to learn more and more and more. My application paid off when I won the lead role in a 1984 production of Cabaret . It was a big show, beautiful costumes, expert sets, you would never have known it was a school effort, Jane made such a perfect job of it. I was in my element on stage playing the German Master of Ceremonies at a prewar Berlin nightclub. I won a standing ovation and loved every minute of it – I am still very proud of that performance. It was the first time I really felt appreciated in that environment. It would have been odd to think that less than a decade later, I would be sitting in a hotel suite with Liza Minnelli herself, who had won an Oscar in 1972 with that very same musical . . . but more of that later.

It was my show-stopping performance in Jane Roberts’s production of Cabaret that brought me very directly to a crucial crossroads in my young life. Jane later took me to one side and said that there had been a scout from RADA at the show and if I wanted to, I could get invited to attend that very famous drama school (the following year I was in Sweeney Todd ). Yet, while on the one hand that was everything I ever wanted to hear, one aspect of the Cabaret show had really stuck in my mind, and that was how natural and comfortable it had felt being on stage singing. The way singing made me feel, the way it physically felt in my throat, I knew that was the way forward. It was a really stark contrast to anything I had ever done before – I loved acting and was good at it for my age, but the singing was on another level altogether. It just felt so comfortable, so natural.

It’s funny how your childhood can be such a mish-mash of memories and it is very telling which specific moments stand out. In view of our future careers, one moment in Collingwood was very significant. In the early Eighties, Two Tone had started to fade and several new bands were coming through. The Thompson Twins were really big news all over school and, indeed, the country as a whole. We’d all started buying music magazines and really getting into bands in a big way, so imagine the buzz when my mate won a competition in Smash Hits to go and actually meet the Thompson Twins . . . in New York!

I thought he was pulling my leg when he first told me. To secondary-school kids, it just didn’t compute, it was so fantastic. But sure enough he had won and was duly despatched on a Jumbo to spend time with the band. Then, as if that wasn’t startlingly brilliant enough, they ran a feature in Smash Hits showing him hanging out with the Thompson Twins in New York, inside limos, at the gig, backstage . . . we couldn’t believe our teenage eyes. We were saying, ‘It doesn’t get bigger than that, that’s it, he’s made it . . . we know him.’

What I didn’t know then, as I flicked through the pages of that magazine looking at the Big Apple, the music-biz glamour and the faces of this band that we all followed, was that only a handful of years later, Bros would be on the cover of the then-biggest-selling edition of Smash Hits ever.

FIVE

The More I See The More I Want It

The primal attraction I felt to singing during the performance of Cabaret wasn’t the first time I had ever thought of being in a band. In fact, Lukie and I had been in bands already. It was just that moment was when it became very clear that music was at my core, rather than acting.

By then, I’d been in and out of several bands, none of them particularly any more sophisticated than a thousand schoolboy groups. Luke had been playing drums for a while. He had an MPC kit, which was like a briefcase full of pads that you plugged in, it was a brilliant piece of gear. All credit to Tony, despite money not being exactly plentiful, he somehow managed to save £400 to buy Luke this first drum kit outright. I’d briefly dabbled with a saxophone but was never really very interested.

My very first band was when Dukus and I were twelve, with our mate Peter Kirtley. At that age you can be a bit of a wanker, and I’ll be honest, we only asked Peter to be in the band because his dad had some equipment. It was a decision of convenience, we needed instruments, he had them. I played monophonic keyboards – one finger – and sang. Luke played drums and we asked our new friend Craig Logan to join, because he had a bass guitar. We called ourselves Caviar. What a dodgy soul name! We didn’t have a clue what caviar was but we knew it was expensive, so we thought ‘job’s done!’ Then we found out it was fish eggs.

Caviar mutated through various combinations, and we joined other bands including one with two other brothers on guitars who were brilliant for their age. Luke was becoming well-known locally for his drumming so he was already in the band and had done a couple of gigs with them, but they didn’t have a singer. With my enjoyment of singing on stage in mind, I was keen to get involved, so I asked Luke if he could get me an audition. I turned up and started singing Paul Young’s big cover hit, ‘Wherever I Lay My Hat’ and after about three lines they said, ‘Fucking hell! You’re in!’ They were called Hypnosis. They gave me my first experience of singing live on stage in a band, and Luke was the one who arranged the audition, it was down to him. Hypnosis was destined not to last either. I really hope those brothers ended up in the music business because they were such good guitarists.

Then Luke and I left and started our own band called Epitoma. We’d picked up a Latin dictionary and found the word for abstract which was ‘epitoma’, but that sounded like some terrible disease. You can just picture a doctor saying, ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you’ve got epitoma.’ Eventually, we ended up settling on the name Ice. That was supposed to be an improvement.

God only knows how but we got a gig at some old working-class club where we were basically asked to play in front of a load of old grannies. We were on the same bill as a number of cabaret acts, but we were ‘the band’ and were really excited regardless. We rehearsed and talked about it for weeks. Ice’s live debut! We’d even got George Michael’s ‘Careless Whisper’ rehearsed perfectly. At the time, a local guy was ‘managing’ us, but when he went on stage to introduce us he said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please let me introduce you to . . . Pulse 2!’

He’d changed our bloody name without telling us, right before we went on stage!

We were fuming! I defiantly walked out on stage to a ripple of apathetic applause that would have barely registered on the massed hearing aids in the smoke-filled room. Resplendent in my long soul-boy hair, Duran Duran-esque suit and over-sized earrings, I could barely contain my anger when I said, ‘We’re not Pulse 2, we’re Ice!’

Like anybody gave a fuck.

Shortly after the debacle of Ice/Pulse 2, Craig, Lukie and I broke away and formed our own band as a trio. We heard about a band called Breathe who were really popular locally around Camberley. I loved the guy’s voice and they were doing quite well, then they actually had a hit, called ‘Hands To Heaven’. When that happened, we thought Shit! How many successful bands come out of the same small area like Camberley? They had changed managers and we found out about the one they had started off with, a chap called Tony. He lived on the Old Dean Estate so we bunked off school one day and went down there to see him. He was totally up for it. One of the first things he said was, ‘I am going to rent Concorde for you lads, fill it with record company executives, while you guys play in the aisle. It’s going to be massive!’ We were so excited.