This was meant to be one of the best nights of Frank Skinner’s career, and just another evening out for the four of us. But the Fates, it seems, have other plans.

I’ve always loved Frank, and he’s definitely looking the part for one of the biggest jobs of his life – hosting the music industry’s most important event of the year, broadcasting live to millions of viewers at home, as well as entertaining us lot sitting in front of him. He bounds onto the stage at the start, smiling like the cat that got the cream, ready with a good joke to share. Sure enough, when he undoes his jacket, there it is – a big shiny Union Jack tie and shirt underneath. Not quite as stunning as Geri Halliwell in THAT dress, but still, pretty funny.

Sadly for Frank, it turns out that is to be his best moment, and we watch him bumble his way through the next two hours. His one-liners are falling on stony ground, while his co-host, Zoe Ball, stands beside him, looking increasingly unhappy. Frank will say later he was dying inside, this was the worst gig he’s ever done, one he will never, ever repeat – which is a shame as, only a few yards away at one of the tables, the four of us are having a whale of a time.

DUNCAN

This is actually one of Blue’s first proper grown-up nights out. The band’s only been together for a few months, and most of our evenings tend to end up in clubs where … well, let’s just say the wine might not be as good as at the Brits and the floor’s definitely a lot dirtier. And the places we hang out, you certainly don’t get to see Anastasia duetting with Jamiroquai, the first act on tonight’s bill. We all grew up watching these awards on TV, so when our record label told us we’d been nominated for the Breakthrough gong, there was only a pile of dust where we’d been standing; we’d already gone to pick out our suits.

LEE

The two best things about tonight – wearing a great suit, and the fact that we already know we’re not going to win. I’m not being falsely modest here, check out this list of our fellow nominees … our great mates Atomic Kitten, Starsailor, Mis-Teeq, So Solid Crew, Turin Brakes, Tom McRae, Zero 7, Elbow. Not enough talent on that list for you? Oh sorry, I forgot to mention Gorillaz in there as well. See what I mean?

So we’re not feeling any pressure, the wine’s flowing and we can revel in sitting in our glad rags at one of the top tables, gazing at proper stars like Kylie Minogue and Sting, laughing with – mostly at – Frank Skinner, and generally pinching ourselves.

SIMON

You know what, Frank’s actually pretty funny up there – but the four of us have always been easy to please. So we’re giggling our way through the night, while our glasses continue to be filled by an invisible hand. In fact, we’re having such a good time we almost miss our category being announced, until Trevor Nelson comes on stage to present the award: he looks the business.

ANTONY

Suddenly everything slows, and it feels like someone has turned the volume right down in this giant arena. Trevor slowly opens the envelope, and, is it me, or has the whole room gone completely still? It feels like five minutes, but it’s probably only a couple of seconds before he says one word, ‘Blue.’

DUNCAN

Now it’s a blur of hugs, the four of us jumping up and down, somehow making it onto the stage, gazing out at a sea of faces. I’m completely tongue-tied, but I’m in front of the microphone, so I mumble something about thanking the record label. Then Antony takes a turn, and he thanks the fans – I wish I’d done that first. Somehow, he always finds it easier to come up with the patter.

LEE

I’m gazing at the Award in front of us, and I’m remembering those days at school, when a teacher told me, ‘You’ll never make it as a singer.’

Then I start jumping up and down in the background – there’s always one!

SIMON

Cameras are flashing from every direction as we head backstage to more hugs. Everyone looks genuinely happy for us. It’s a myth that nobody gets on in the music industry. There are some great people if you know where to look, and we’ve been lucky.

DUNCAN

The Westlife boys are the first to come up to us, which means a lot. And then, wow … I’m dreaming! It’s Kylie, the princess I had on my wall back in Devon when I started dreaming about all of this. I can’t wait to tell my mum.

LEE

I’m laughing because Antony’s looking at the award in his hand and I’ve spotted him tearing up – he thinks no one’s noticed.

ANTONY

Lee gets a bit weepy, which is fair enough – he’s the youngest.

SIMON

I’m thinking, is this really happening? We’re just four silly lads in borrowed suits.

ANTONY

Half an hour later and we’re making our way into the after-show party in Knightsbridge. It’s only 11 miles from where I grew up in Edgware, but we could be on a different planet. The club’s party planners have gone overboard, and we walk along a stunning glass bridge, decked out with candles and coloured lights. More cameras flash as we get to the door – there are people everywhere. I can see my mum standing next to Duncan’s – two familiar faces at the centre of all this alien glamour, bizarrely the most surreal sight of all.

DUNCAN

I go straight over to see them. I’ve already phoned my mum from the car, but seeing her is what brings home just how special this all is. She whispers in my ear about how proud my grandparents would be. We lost them both within the last two years, and I give her another hug. But this isn’t a night to be sad.

LEE

I have to say, considering what a brain-ache we’ve been for our management on occasion, they know how to put on a party for us. They’ve been very generous tonight; the champagne is on tap, and I mean that literally, there it is in the middle of the bar. The music’s loud, and everyone in the room wants to congratulate us, praise us, take our photo, introduce us to someone else. Those other, cooler boys in school we always wanted to be? That’s us. Will I remember any of this in 16 years time? Possibly not. How can my ego withstand all this? I’ll worry about that tomorrow.

SIMON

The night goes on, and some time later, I spot my brother Duane over by the bar. He’s standing by himself, looking neither elated, nor jaded, by all this euphoric frenzy around him. Instead he looks bemused. I head over to him and for a few moments, neither of us says anything. Instead I join him in contemplating the scene, as if from outside looking in.

There’s Antony, the one I met last but now spend the most time with. He’s usually the most wary one in the band, the one reminding the rest of us not to count our chickens, that we have to read the small print – ‘Baby steps, people’ – but tonight he’s as happy as the rest of us, standing in the middle of his huge family, making them laugh with his impressions.

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.

CHAPTER 1

‘ALL RISE’

Beginnings, Meetings, Becoming Blue

19 May 1999 – Granada Studios, Manchester

ANTONY

Simon Cowell’s voice had that special tone to it even then, like he knew something the rest of us didn’t. We were nine lads who thought we pretty much knew it all, waiting to go on stage, sing live on air and make a little bit of pop history, being plucked for stardom on … This Morning. As you do. But, as we stood behind the curtain listening, and he started spelling out his expectations, we all started to go a bit quiet, and even that joker I’d just met, little Lee with his fringe, stopped horsing around for a minute. Suddenly, it had all got a bit serious.

Lovely Caron Keating, a very familiar face who’d been extremely nice to all of us since we’d arrived that morning, had asked Simon Cowell exactly what he was after. Without hesitation, he explained, ‘There’s got to be a chemistry there, you’re trying to find people with star quality. All of these guys, I presume, can sing and dance, but that little extra something …’

No pressure then, lads, and if we’d known who he was, or would go on to be, we might have been even more nervous. But Simon Cowell wasn’t Simon Cowell back then; he seemed like just another music industry exec. in a baggy, checked shirt, with a big grin and a pretty special haircut. It was Kate Thornton sitting next to him who was actually more intimidating; after all, Smash Hits was our Bible growing up and she’d been its editor. And, never mind all that, we were about to appear on This Morning, the show we’d all watched for years, as it set about creating its very own boy band.

We’d all got through previous auditions to get this far, but this was different: we’d be singing live on TV, no backing track, no musicians, just our voices in all their naked glory … or instantly apparent lack thereof.

Despite Simon Cowell’s certainty that day about exactly what it was he was after, it seems only right to point out that it was actually Kate Thornton who first mentioned the phrase that would go on to launch a billion-dollar franchise on both sides of the Atlantic and would turn Simon into the global TV powerhouse he became. She said: ‘It’s an indefinable X factor that sorts out the wannabes from the superstars and that’s really what we’re looking for.’

Bang! See what I mean about falling into history? Little did we know … It’s really hard with hindsight to say if any of those waiting behind that curtain had that ‘je ne sais quoi’ they were going on about, but it was a motley crew indeed. There were some faces I already knew, and others whose paths would later cross ours for years to come. There was Declan Bennett, 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 was my favourite – I had a poster of her on my wall. No, I’m not expecting this to surprise you. The benefit of hindsight, eh?

Ours was a pretty religious household – my first performances as an altar boy remain among my best work – so I thought I’d pulled a masterstroke with the first ever record I bought. How could Grandma object to Enigma with all that Gregorian chanting at the beginning? I did get to play it a couple of times before it was whisked away.

The only thing more glamorous to me at the time than organ bashing at the garrison was Butlins, where my mum took me on holiday when I was little. Hi-de-Hi was my favourite television programme, and I was in love with Su Pollard. I adored the Redcoats and was determined to be one myself. And I managed it, reader, signing on for singing duty with Haven Holidays in Bridport and staying for a year. I loved it, especially dressing up as a cat and singing ‘Memory’. Fine times!

As with the others, The Stage magazine was my Bible, and I used to audition for anything I spotted. I was pretty lucky, getting into two bands in swift succession, which meant moving to London.

The first was a boy band called Volume 5, which, you’re right, sounds like a hairspray. We lived in Oxford Street in bunk beds in our manager’s apartment, and were – how to put this nicely? – shit. But we were all together and the most exciting thing we ever did was turn on the Walthamstow Christmas Lights.

My next band was Tantrum, three boys and two girls, built on the whim of a rich man who wanted us to sing songs for his girlfriend. There were some familiar faces in the auditions – Myleene Klass made it to the shortlist – as well as in the final line-up. Among us was Rita Simons, who played Roxy Mitchell in EastEnders, Ziggy Lichman, who went on to be in the band Northern Line, before turning up as Zac in Big Brother, and a bloke called Jonas. Years later, I turned on Channel 5 one day and there he was, reading the news. It’s a comfortingly small world.

I was in Tantrum for a year, and we got paid a weekly wage. But we soon realised it wasn’t going anywhere, and both my grandparents died during that time. We all knew it was time to move on.

With the money my grandparents left me, I was able to put a deposit on a house in East Finchley and buy myself a bit of time to come to terms with my grief over losing those people so dear to me in such swift succession. I worked as a barman at the Old White Lion in the evening, while by day I was a perfume salesman, standing in the door of Selfridges and spraying people as they walked in. Those two jobs meant I had time to carry on going to auditions in between, and one of those auditions was for a brand new band being put together by someone who sounded like he knew what he was doing.

LEE

Daniel Glatman was a bit of a geek (sorry, Daniel, but you were), very young, but definitely a man on a mission. As he later told it to us, he walked into the record label’s offices, announced, ‘I want to put a boy band together,’ and the boss at the time, Hugh Goldsmith, replied, ‘Okay, go find them, bring them back, and here’s £10,000.’ Why can’t everything in life be that simple? It was only later Daniel revealed to us that what had actually happened was that he’d somehow blagged his way into Hugh’s office, talked a good game until he was blue in the face and eventually been given three months to put a band together, or he’d have to pay the money back.

I’d grown up going to performing arts schools, good ones like Sylvia Young’s Theatre School and the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, thanks to my mum. She had spotted my singing potential very early on, and she’d been keen to give me the best possible chance at a creative future. I was pretty fortunate in that way – one day, she even spotted me doing my homework, told me to stop because she said it was more important that I learned the harmonies to ‘Endless Love’. It turned out she was right. Years later, I ended up sharing the stage with Lionel Richie, singing another one of his classics, ‘Easy’, so I guess my mum pushed me in the right direction, encouraging my love for all things Motown.

Something else she passed on to me was being a big softy even as a teenager – I once gave away a pair of new shoes to a bloke at a tube station and my mum didn’t even tell me off – but I was also pretty headstrong, certain that I knew it all. I’d walked out of school aged 15, thinking I’d learned everything I was going to need – somehow, I had a good idea that algebra wasn’t going to feature largely in my future. I wasn’t afraid of work, and used to make my money with all sorts of jobs – on a stall, on a roof, anything to make a pound note. But the musical seed had been sown, and I also used to go every week to the newsagent to pick up my copy of The Stage.

It’s so strange to talk about, now everything and everybody is available on the internet, but back then, if you didn’t have an agent, reading the ads at the back of The Stage was the only way to spot what was going on, and for management and record labels to find you. That’s how bloody old we are!

DUNCAN

I’d sent in a picture and a demo tape, and was invited in to meet Daniel. He was young but looked older, and seemed intent on doing well in the industry.

People seemed to be trickling in and out all day. I got up on stage and sang ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’ by Elvis, and then channelled my inner Redcoat with Michael Ball’s ‘Love Changes Everything’. Not perhaps the most cutting-edge choices, but hey, I got a call back and was invited to a singing lesson, where I spotted my old pal Antony, and met Lee again. We’d crossed paths at a previous audition but hadn’t really talked.

My first memory of Lee that day was of his massive, brick-sized phone, and he was arguing with somebody on it. That call obviously ended badly, and he went bonkers, head-butted the phone and then threw it on the floor, where it smashed into a million pieces. He stared at it for a minute, then he looked at me and said, ‘Can I borrow your phone?’ I guess he started as he meant to go on.

He was very smartly dressed, though – I’ll give him that – all nice jeans, smart black shoes, Ben Sherman shirt … My influences had been my skateboarding pals back in Devon, so I had a bit of a baggier thing going on.

LEE

Duncan had on some truly dodgy shirts. He was a bit of a hippy back in those days and his dress sense was terrible – who wears tracksuit bottoms to an audition? Has it improved now? I’m always optimistic. With Dunc, though, it was all about the hair. There was loads of it, hanging over his face, as this little pretty boy was sitting in the corner. He looked a bit stand-offish, but he was probably just shy. And he wouldn’t lend me his phone.

ANTONY

Daniel was happy that Duncan and I already knew each other, so that worked in our favour, and we were the first two to be picked. Then he asked Lee to join, plus two other blokes, Richard and Spencer. Richard was actually one of the lads Lee and I had met during our appearance on This Morning. As well as sharing that strange baptism of fire, he was friendly, very funny, and we all got on well with him. Spencer was a bit more competitive, and, being young lads, we butted heads with him occasionally. Don’t get me wrong, he was a nice enough lad, but we just never really clicked.

DUNCAN

The three of us became really tight with Richard. One of the best times was when we spent a weekend at his family home in Westbeach, where we went out together on jet skis, sang karaoke in a local bar and his mum cooked us all lovely food. They couldn’t have been more welcoming, and Richard was incredibly good fun, really engaging. But I can’t say we connected with Spencer in the same way. However, despite most of us getting on so well, it just didn’t work. Something about that line-up simply didn’t feel right, but none of us said anything, until the day came for us to sign our contract with Virgin Music [10 September 2000].

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