I clearly remember thinking about the handful of scenes we had left to shoot as we drifted down the huge sweeping staircase that had featured in the show so often – they would be the last things we’d ever do on Byker Grove. I was devastated. We were seventeen, and it felt like we were about to be tossed on the scrapheap. But then, just as we reached the bottom step, something happened that changed our lives for ever.
The door of Matthew’s office burst open, and he shouted after us, ‘Stop, stop! Telstar Records have just been on the phone, and they want to offer you a record contract.’
We couldn’t believe it and, in fact, at first, we didn’t believe it, we thought it was a practical joke – but he was for real.
‘Tonight I’m Free’ had been so popular on the show that a record company thought there was a market for what we had done and that there was a chance we could crack the Top 40.
Without that moment, and what it did for us, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
In short, it’s all Telstar’s fault.
PJ and Duncan the children’s drama stars were about to undergo a drastic transformation and become PJ and Duncan the pop stars.
It would be tough, though, and we quickly discovered our pop career wasn’t going to be easy – not for us, not for our families…
… and, most of all, not for the people who had the misfortune to buy our records.
But we were on our way to pop stardom, although it would still be another year before PJ and Duncan would ‘Get Ready to Rhumble’…
Chapter 7
By the autumn of 1993, we’d left Byker Grove. We knew Telstar wanted to release our track, but we still couldn’t quite believe it, so we took out a kind of insurance policy, a Plan B, just in case we didn’t end up releasing the record and becoming bigger than The Beatles.
Our Plan B was something that all great pop stars do at one time or another – we started a B-Tech in Performing Arts at Newcastle College. We were both still really keen on acting and we thought that, if the music didn’t work out, we’d complete our B-Tech and then, with any luck, go to drama school in London, then the BAFTAs, the Oscars and Hollywood. Either that, or we’d carry on crossing our fingers for a part in Spender anyway.
Telstar Records were as good as their word, though, and they did offer us a deal. We knew they had faith in us: they were confident we would deliver and convinced we were going to become icons of the pop world.
They were so convinced that they offered us a one-single deal. That’s right, folks, a deal to release one, whole single.
We might have been at college, but we still took time out from the important student stuff, like eating Pot Noodles and watching Countdown, to discuss the pros and cons of becoming pop stars. In fact, we did what any sensible adults would do in that situation and had a business meeting to discuss it. I can still picture it now: it was us two, sat in a big boardroom with bottles of mineral water and baskets of fresh fruit. Oh no, sorry, that’s right: we were in my Mini Metro with two cans of Fanta and a bag of Mini Cheddars.
And we had to make a decision – were we going to give it a go?
It was a pretty tough meeting, which lasted for one, maybe even two cans of Fanta.
We’d seen other soap stars move from TV to the charts, and it could be clichéd and cheesy, and we didn’t want that – after all, we had principles, we’d appeared at roadshows for Mizz and Fast Forward magazines, for goodness’ sake.
But then it dawned on us we had hardly any money and no career, so we decided to give our principles the same treatment as our empty bag of Mini Cheddars – and throw them out the window.
Telstar had noticed that acts like Will Smith and Kriss Kross had done well with hip-hop/pop crossover tracks, and they were convinced that was going to be the next big trend. They told us we could be a part of that, and we decided to take their word for it. After all, these people were seasoned music-industry professionals and they were obeying one of the first laws of pop music: ‘If you want hip-hop, go to a couple of lads from council estates in the west end of Newcastle.’
They told us that they knew the response to Grove Matrix on Byker Grove had been huge and viewers had written in asking where they could buy the single. Who knows, maybe you sitting there reading this on the train, or you in the bath or even you in your bed may even have written one of those letters. If you did, then our advice to you is simple: don’t ever admit it to anyone.
Something Telstar recognized was that, because kids had been watching us on TV for three years, we had something of a readymade fan base, and that gave us a head start. At least that’s what Telstar told us. We were still standing there saying, ‘Us? A single? Really?’
We also made a decision that would help us deal with life in the music business. We decided to treat it just like all the other acting jobs we’d had, or Byker Grove, as it was otherwise known. We weren’t real musicians, or trained singers so, in all honesty, we felt a bit like frauds. We were slightly embarrassed by the whole thing. We figured that, if we removed ourselves from it, it meant that when people ridiculed us, they would differentiate between our pop-star personality and our real personality.
We basically told ourselves we’d be playing the part of pop stars. Don’t get me wrong, I looked very like PJ, and Dec bore an uncanny resemblance to Duncan, but it helped us to draw a line between them and us.
The decision was made. There was only one problem: we had to be eighteen to sign the record contract, and Ant’s birthday wasn’t until 18 November. If you’re under eighteen, you’re a child in the eyes of the law (if not in the eyes of the bouncers at the Newcastle Mayfair) and, essentially, that meant you had to get your parents’ permission to be a pop star.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there was an actual contract that said, ‘I the undersigned hereby give my permission for my son to go on tour and be a pop star and that. Yours sincerely, Ant’s mam,’ but there were legal issues, and the alternative was our parents coming on tour with us.
My mam might have been an accomplished actress by this point, but there was no way she was coming on the road with PJ and Duncan. Besides, who would cook Sarha’s tea every night?
So with ‘Tonight I’m Free’ already ‘in the can’, and time to kill before Ant’s birthday, we decided to carry on acting. That’s not a Carry On film, by the way, we actually just carried on acting.
Through Dee Wood of chaperone and log-cabin fame, we’d already started helping out backstage at the Tyne Theatre in Newcastle. We worked on The King and I and The Little Shop of Horrors. Dec would operate the follow spot. It must have been hard for a show-off like him to put other people in the spotlight. I used to work in the flies, high above the stage, which basically entailed dropping the scenery down when there was a scene change. It would all be attached to a rope on a kind of pulley system and, displaying the same dexterity I’d shown on my paper round, I would regularly get the rope length wrong, which meant the scenery would crash on to the stage and surprise the actors. It was another sign my future lay in performing, rather than behind the scenes. At the end of every night, we’d get a pay packet.
Well, by ‘pay’, I mean lager, and by ‘packet’, I mean pint glass. We got paid a pint of lager, that’s what I’m trying to say.
But we loved it. We loved being in and around the world of theatre, we loved the camaraderie and the crack with the stage crew and we loved a drink at the end of the night.
They were great lads, the crew, always making jokes: ‘You two idiots haven’t got a hope in hell of getting in the charts,’ ‘There’s more chance of Joan Collins playing centre forward for Newcastle United,’ that kind of thing. They were hilarious, they really were.
By now, we’d both worked out that, whatever happened, we wanted to be involved in performing somehow. It was really all we knew, and we felt very passionate about it, which meant a normal job was no longer an option. Oh, and there was also the fact that we’d already left school and had never done a proper da
y’s work in our lives.
Dee approached us one day with an exciting proposition. She asked if we’d like to be in a production of The Wizard of Oz. It was going to be on over the half-term holiday, and she thought that, as the two lads from Byker Grove, we’d really bring the audiences flocking in. Well, that and the fact there was nothing else to do during half term. So we agreed. It was only after we’d already promised to do it, that we got round to asking who was going to take which part. I can still remember that conversation with Dee:
‘So, who are we going to be? The Tin Man?
The Lion?
The Scarecrow?’
‘The Wizard himself, perhaps?’
‘Not quite,’ Dee said.
‘Ant’s going to be the Coroner of the Munchkin City, and Dec will play the Mayor of the Munchkin City.’
‘The what!?’
We immediately regretted signing up for it. It would be humiliating. If we wanted a venueful of people to roll in the aisles laughing at us, we could just sing to them. Things were also about to get a lot worse, because before we knew which parts we were playing, I’d told Nicola to come and see the show. She was really keen and told me she was going to bring all our mates from the cast of Byker Grove. I calmly tried to talk her out of it – ‘Please don’t come, I’ll do anything, I beg you’ – but she told me she’d already booked the tickets and was really looking forward to it. Little did she know her boyfriend was about to go from blind breakdancer to dwarf coroner.
On our first night, we walked out to see two whole rows in the stalls of the Byker Grove cast, including Rory, John Jefferson and Lyndyann, all killing themselves laughing. Our faces were going redder and redder with embarrassment, although fortunately, thanks to our already-painted-rosy, Munchkin cheeks, no one could see that. Their hilarity reached a crescendo as we belted out our only lines:
‘As coroner, I must aver/I thoroughly examined her/And she’s not only merely dead/She’s really most sincerely dead.’
Then I’d come in with, ‘Then this is a day of independence/ For all the Munchkins/And their descendants/Yes, let the joyous news be spread/The wicked old witch at last is dead.’
We then launched into a full-blooded song-and-dance routine of ‘Ding Dong, the Witch is dead, which old Witch? The Wicked Witch…’ By this point, rows F and G could hardly breathe for laughing. We weren’t going to be allowed to forget this one in a hurry.
I only wish we could have clicked our heels three times, said, ‘There’s no place like home,’ and ended up in Kansas City, or even back up the road in Fenham would have done – I just wanted to be anywhere but the Tyne Theatre.
Nicola and I split up not long after that. After many heartfelt phone calls, we realized it just wasn’t working out. I’ve spoken to her since; we’re still in touch and are still good friends but, at the time, it hit both of us hard, because we were each other’s first love and we’d been together for three years. We briefly dated again the following year but, again, called it a day. I don’t think the amount of time I was spending away from Newcastle helped. Having said that, she might just never have got over seeing me as that dwarf coroner.
You’d think after The Wizard of Oz experience we’d have learnt our lesson about performing in plays, but there were still a few more theatrical disasters to come. That autumn, Dee decided to put on a specially written pantomime. Christmas was still a few months away, but Dee always did like to get things organized early. It was called ‘Strike in Pantoland’ and, although we had insisted on better parts in this one, it still had – well, let’s just say it had complications.
The idea behind the pantomime was that all the panto characters had started industrial action and gone on strike. At this point, if someone had shouted, ‘Where’s your career?’, the answer would have been, ‘It’s behind me.’ I was Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk and Ant was Captain Hook from Peter Pan.
Oh no I wasn’t.
Oh yes you were. Sorry, force of habit. All the performances took place at a truly unique venue – the local mental health hospital, St Nicholas’s. The play was put on to raise money for the hospital, but you won’t be surprised to hear it didn’t go well. The plot would have confused most audiences so, for the fragile patients there, it was a tough watch. Ant came out as Captain Hook, shouting, ‘Aarrrggghh,’ which completely freaked them out. Before we knew it, we were longing for a return to the Munchkin City.
The most disconcerting thing, though, was that the audience also had a tendency to get up and wander around during the middle of the performance, which is really off putting when you’re on stage. The whole experience was just bizarre – both for the cast and, no doubt, for the audience.
All in all, we put their treatment back five years…
Chapter 8
Throughout our disastrous dabblings with the world of theatre, there was one thing that kept us going: 18 November. That was when Ant would turn eighteen and, in the eyes of the law, civilized society and, most importantly, Telstar Records, would become a man, which meant we could finally sign the record contract and start our new life as pop stars.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited about someone else’s birthday.
In the mean time, we kept going to college. It was important that we got an education and a commitment to college was a sign of that.
Oh, and we had nothing better to do.
Well, I had nothing better to do. The same couldn’t be said for Dec.
I’ll admit that I always took a ‘laid-back’ approach to college, and by ‘laid-back’ I mean I laid back on the sofa, watched daytime TV and didn’t bother going. Once we had the offer of the record deal, I wasn’t really into college.
He was never really IN college, never mind into it. He was supposed to give me a lift there and, most days, ten minutes after he was meant to be at mine, I’d get a phone call and hear the words I was dreading: ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it in today,’ so I’d have to run for the bus.
It takes a special talent to keep someone waiting and make them late without even leaving your front room.
What can I say? I have a gift.
During one of my rare appearances at college in the first term, the lecturer, Shirley, sat us and the rest of the class down and told us they were putting together an end-of-term show and that all the students had to take part. We had to do it, otherwise we risked failing the course. It was an old-time music-hall show, and it would go on tour around a collection of venues that are traditionally overlooked by plays, bands and comedians travelling the region – the old people’s homes of the North-east.
Yes, after terrifying the patients of St Nicholas’s mental health hospital, we were now moving on to the new task of scaring pensioners all over Tyneside.
We had to come up with an act and, as usual, we had no idea what to do, so Shirley suggested we did a double act. We both reacted in exactly the same way:
‘A proper double act? Us two? That’s never going to work.’
But, in the absence of any other credible ideas, we decided to give it a go. We put together a traditional old-time-variety double act. We may have wowed the BBC Club with the risqué love triangle that consisted of me, Ant and Mrs Jones, but this was a proper double act. Think Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, or Morecambe and Wise. Only nowhere near as funny.
The act itself was very simple: I’d stand on stage and try to read a poem and Ant would keep coming on and…
… interrupting.
I can still remember that poem now:
There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Kathmandu,
There’s a little marble cross below the town;
And a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of ‘Mad’ Carew,
While the yellow god forever gazes down.
And then I would come on and deliver my hilarious catchphrase: ‘What’s going on here then?’ Probably my finest moment in the act was when I walked on stage with a cabbage on the end of a dog le
ad. Dec would ask me what I was doing with a cabbage on the end of a lead, and I’d reply, ‘Cabbage? They told me it was a collie!’, and walk off.
Admit it, you’re laughing, aren’t you? No? Well, the residents of those old people’s homes loved it, probably because the jokes were the only things older than they were.
We went all over the North-east with that show, and that was our first tour, long before we tasted life on the road as PJ and Duncan. I always thought we should have sold merchandise – a branded checked blanket perhaps, or slippers with our faces on but, strangely, no one else shared my vision.
They say, ‘What goes on tour, stays on tour,’ but on this occasion, I am prepared to do something those OAPs did every lunchtime: spill the beans.
One of the biggest problems was that, as with the mental hospital, the audience weren’t always 100 per cent focused on the show. They’d either get up and walk around or start talking to each other and, in their case, it was never a whisper. We were starting to think it might have been the quality of our performance: we’d often come a poor second to a plate of Rich Tea or a packet of Werther’s Originals.
Ooh! What a Lovely Pair: Our Story Page 7