Matt Goss - More Than You Know

As for other teenage boys, one of the most important things in life was girls. Lukie and I have never done badly with girls. Luke dated prettier girls than me but I was more shy in that area. As we grew up, he went for a different type of girl, ones that would drive cars and stuff like that, which when you are a teenager is a defining element of your personality to other kids. I still had plenty of little romances though. There was a girl called Caroline whom I really liked when I was fourteen, but she moved to America and I was heartbroken. Caz was lovely, she wasn’t the prettiest girl in the school but to me she had the sweetest way about her (her best friend was Luke’s girlfriend, that’s how it was in those days!). Then I dated a girl called Cindy who still to this day is one of the loveliest girls I’ve ever met. She was my first love. Her parents worked for an oil firm and they had a lovely house on the Wentworth estate by the golf course. She was American and unfortunately she too moved back to the States. She was just so gentle, an earth angel.

I lost my virginity to Cindy. I was sixteen, quite late for a guy I guess. That first experience of making love was quite amazing for me. We’d heard all these stories that you had to use lubrication, so I covered my knob in after-sun lotion. From that shaky start, it was actually wonderful, not the horror story that many people experience! Afterwards, we both just smiled and smiled for hours. That is a great memory, although one that inevitably comes with a certain whiff of after-sun.

Those secondary school and teenage years can be so influential on your personality. For example, I have a real fear of sirens. If I hear a motorbike rev in a certain way, it will give me an absolute chill. Part of me sometimes wonders if I grew up during air raids in a past life. More specifically, while I was at Collingwood, we had a couple of incidents with sirens that, looking back, must have had quite a lasting effect on me. The school was near to Broadmoor hospital which over the years has housed notorious individuals such as the Yorkshire Ripper. Every Monday escape sirens would go off to test the system – this unnerving sound was strangely reassuring to locals because it meant that everything was working. Religiously, every Monday, this siren would howl across the area.

However, at the back of your mind, next to the face-at-the-window and the bogey-man-under-the-bed, you knew that if a siren went off on any other day then there could be someone out there that you really didn’t want to meet.

On one particular day, I was out on a school cross-country run, trekking through the woods near to Broadmoor. I was on my own thinking of nothing much when I heard the siren. The sound registered in my ear and a split second later I thought to myself, It isn’t a Monday . I shit myself. I started thinking, Maybe they have just found him, or has he been gone for half an hour on the run . . . ? By the time I’d run another mile, I was convinced I was about to stumble across some mass murderer. Obviously I didn’t, but I felt a panic that stays with me to this day.

Another time while I was at Collingwood School the four-minute nuclear warning went off. It sounds bizarre but it is true. Camberley was one of the few places in Britain where the nuclear warning signal actually went off accidentally. This blaring siren was absolutely everywhere, yet you couldn’t tell exactly where it was coming from. It was almost as if it was inside your brain rather than coming in through your ears. After four minutes of that, I was ready to explode myself!

We were in school at the time and it was such an extraordinary circumstance to find yourself in. We were in woodwork and the teacher, Mr Linnell, was usually a grumpy old bastard. However, when the siren went off, he had this really peaceful look on his face. Mr Euston was the same – he had a cool swagger about him like Lee Majors from The Six Million Dollar Man and he also seemed strangely serene that day. Even now I think they knew more than we did.

The headlines on the local papers the next day said, ‘Camberley Plays It Cool With Four-Minute Warning.’ Funnily enough, we still have the tray that Luke was making in that very woodwork class. Mum still uses it for tea. This tray is indestructible. If a nuclear bomb had obliterated Camberley that day, I am certain that in among the fall-out and hinterland of atomic waste, Lukie’s tray would have been on the floor, right at the centre of the explosion, unscathed. Ten out of ten, Goss.

To any secondary-school pupil, teachers can provide both the best and worst moments of your time in class. I think it was our English teacher Ms Funnel who wore fishnets, that was fantastic. One time she climbed on my desk to open a window with her fishnets on, I remember that very clearly! But the best teacher was Ms Sinkovich who, for some reason, used to play an accordion while wearing very short skirts, which to a hormonally-charged teenage boy was definitely a nice bonus.

Mr Brooks was a great biology teacher, phenomenal. To this day, I still remember every valve in the human heart and how it all works, solely because of him teaching us so well. He was cool with it too. One day, a mate of mine dropped a condom on the floor. I don’t really know why we had them at that age because we’d have only lasted ten seconds had we caught sight of a naked woman anyway. This condom went ‘SPLAT!’ on the classroom floor. A hushed nervousness fell over the room, you could almost hear people thinking, Oh my God! Mr Brooks is going to go mad! Sure enough, Mr Brooks saw the condom, but simply crouched down, picked it up, said, ‘I’ll save this for later’ and promptly put it in his pocket and carried on teaching.

Another nice memory (albeit earlier at St Clement’s) is that of Mr Bromley and the eclipse. He had a really great way about him, he was a very knowledgeable, gentle but very firm teacher. While he was teaching us, there was a solar eclipse which we all watched; rather than just make an afternoon of it and then forget about it the next day, Mr Bromley said, ‘When there is another eclipse, let’s meet on the top of Box Hill.’ I thought that was an amazingly thoughtful thing for a teacher to say to his class. It would be lovely if that sentiment could be in all classrooms, that kind of foresight.

I don’t know if Mr Bromley would even remember saying that, but when it came to the eclipse in 2002, I was in LA and I thought about him all day, wondering if he was sitting on Box Hill all those thousands of miles away, and indeed if anyone else was sitting with him.

Without doubt the person I have the fondest memories of is Jane Roberts, my drama teacher and someone I still hold dear to my heart. I would love to get back in touch with her. She was so different to your normal drama teacher, and absolutely brilliant at her job. Jane gave me a lot of confidence in myself as a performer. She used to say, ‘You have something special about you, you’ve got what it takes,’ and constantly encouraged me. In fact, I would say that she is the reason that I was able to pursue my career as I did, she gave me that confidence. I absolutely trusted her judgement one hundred per cent so when she said I had what it takes, I believed her and my confidence surged.

Despite what people may think, I have never been a confident person. As I have grown older, I have become a more self-assured man, but on a vanity level I am not confident. I don’t want that to change. I have always had an absolute dislike for arrogance. In the Bros years, the press would often say we were ‘brats’ or ‘arrogant’ and those words really stung. I would be devastated if someone said that about me. I find arrogance so boring, so uninteresting. I love kindness, respectful people; life is too bloody short to be around arrogance. Jane knew the difference between arrogance and confidence and she instilled some of the latter in me, for which I will be eternally grateful.