POP’S beloved boy and girlbands were sold as free-spirited, fun-loving kids enjoying a jet-setting life beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
But many of the teenagers plucked from obscurity in the 1990s – like tragic S Club 7 star Paul Cattermole, who was found dead aged 46 last week – struggled with fame.
A new book reveals how they suffered nervous breakdowns, ended up penni-less or got into fist fights.
Desperate to replicate the huge success of the Spice Girls, talented youngsters were lured into deals which left them with little aside from the suitcases they had travelled the world in.
Yet they left a huge back catalogue of beloved songs and incredible tales of success against all the odds.
Now the thirst for the manufactured pop of almost four decades ago is just as strong today, with Busted, Westlife, Hanson and B*Witched out on the road this year.
Read More on S Club 7
And S Club 7 have vowed to go ahead with the planned 25th anniversary tour to pay tribute to their much-loved bandmate.
In Reach For The Stars, by Michael Cragg, the singers, songwriters and managers of famous acts reveal what it was really like to be turned into global celebrities overnight.
- Reach For The Stars: 1996-2006: Fame, Fallout And Pop’s Final Party, by Michael Cragg, is available now, £25.
5ive
FAME arrived too fast for boyband 5ive, who encountered mental distress and fist fights in four years together.
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Founded in 1997, the group included J Brown, Scott Robinson, Abz Love, Ritchie Neville, a Nirvana fan who didn’t like pop music, and Sean Conlon, who was just 15.
But Scott says it was the speed of their success that doomed them to failure, with the band coming to blows as their egos clashed.
They also didn’t realise that under the deal they had signed, all the expenses – including the plush house they were being put up in – were being deducted from their earnings.
Their manager Chris Herbert admits the five young men were “burnt out” by being pushed on to a US audience at the same time as they were attempting to get noticed in the rest of the world.
Sean suffered a nervous breakdown and had to leave.
He reveals: “Simon Cowell was quite bitter about it back then. I think he looked at me like, how could I not appreciate everything ? But I just needed a little bit of help.”
And Scott was left in tears having been forced to perform on TV when his newborn son was in intensive care.
He said: “I remember a call when I was at the hospital looking after him saying, ‘You’ve got to go on CD:UK and perform,’ and I was like, ‘I couldn’t give a f***, I’m not doing it.”
Atomic Kitten
THE Liverpool girl group were formed around Kerry Katona whose ambition at the time was to be a Page 3 model.
The trio was put together by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark’s singer Andy McCluskey in 1998.
Kerry, who was only 17 at the time, was recommended to Andy by a pal.
He recalls: “Within 60 seconds she goes, ‘Do you want to see me photos?’, and she gets out her topless photographs.” Andy admits that Kerry couldn’t sing, but felt sure, with two strong singers alongside her, that Atomic Kitten would be a hit.
Secondary school pupils Liz McClarnon and Heidi Range were chosen, but Heidi left while rehearsing the debut album and was replaced by Natasha Hamilton.
The book reveals the precarious nature of being in a manufactured pop group.
Atomic Kitten was on course to be dropped by their label due to poor record sales when Kerry decided to quit in 2001 after falling pregnant with Westlife star Brian McFadden’s baby.
Natasha asked Jenny Frost to step in for a TV performance of their fifth single Whole Again which went to No1.
Success, though, meant that management was unwilling to give Natasha the time off she needed in 2003 while suffering from postnatal depression.
Natasha claims: “It was very much, ‘The show must go on regardless, we don’t really care what’s wrong with you’.”
She quit the group, which reformed in 2012.
Blue
IMAGE is everything in the pop world, which can be very cruel if you don’t fit in.
When Blue formed at the start of the new millennium, they were a five-piece consisting of Lee Ryan, Antony Costa, Duncan James and two now-forgotten singers called Richard and Spencer.
The contract was about to be signed when someone from the record label decided that the other two weren’t quite right for the project.
They were dropped and Simon Webbe was brought in to create the four-piece that everyone knows so well.
But Antony also struggled to match the high expectations of the cruel business.
He was sidelined by magazines, which refused to put him on their cover because he supposedly wasn’t handsome enough.
Antony says: “I felt like I was an easy target. I wasn’t the blond haired, blue-eyed boy or the one with the big muscles and the six pack and the chiselled jaw.”
The band were rarely out of the headlines due to their party loving and bed-hopping.
Antony recalls Lee letting off a fire extinguisher in a bar where Newcastle United were celebrating their Christmas party and Alan Shearer was in attendance.
He says: “They tried to do us for the dry-cleaning bill but Lee ended up paying it all, I think.”
Blue went their separate ways for various solo deals in 2005 before reforming in 2011 to represent the United Kingdom in the Eurovision song contest.
S Club Seven
DESPITE enjoying four No1 singles and selling more than ten million albums, there was a never-ending demand for more hits.
After the final album failed to make the Top spot in 2003, the group split up.
Their main singer, Jo O’Meara, says: “If you didn’t get No1 it was classed as a failure. When you think back at artists who were dropped when they only made top 20. . . it’s harsh.”
But for her it was the departure of Paul Cattermole in 2002 that was the “beginning of the end”.
She reveals: “When Paul left we did go on for another year but it wasn’t the same.”
Paul wanted to pursue his true musical dreams by forming a heavy metal band called Skua with his old school pals.
S Club 7 were often treated like employees, expected to sing the songs and appear on the TV programmes chosen by their management team.
They only received one week off a year, got up at 4am to start filming and slept between interviews.
While they sold millions of records, the band members claimed they only took home £150,000 annually.
Paul ended up bankrupt and fellow bandmate Hannah Spearritt was left homeless last year.
But Bradley McIntosh, who had just been sacked by Pizza Hut when he joined S Club in 1998, did escape the tyranny of the routine.
Producer Simon Ellis recalled having to hunt him down at a nightclub when he was supposed to be recording a new song.
He said: “He pitches up with this carrier bag full of beer and goes into the vocal booth.
“He was out of there by 2am and went back to the club. Great.”
Steps
The competition to be the next Spice Girls was so intense in the late 1990s that wannabe singers were desperate to get signed.
Ian “H” Watkins from Steps says: “Everyone was auditioning for either girl bands or boy bands.”
The five members of Steps accepted the first deal they were offered - because it was the only one on the table.
They had been touted as a line-dancing Mixed Spice and it hadn’t gone down well with record labels.
Simon Cowell turned down the act but Pete Waterman signed them.
Most of the band couldn’t even afford a mobile phone, H was on the dole and Claire Richards lived with her parents at the start.
It was 18 months before they saw any real money in their bank accounts, with most of their earnings going on expenses.
Claire says: “The outfit I wore in the ‘5,6,7,8’ video was the one I wore for every single club gig for months and months.
“You could probably smell me coming most of the time. When we got Top Of The Pops we begged them, ‘Please please please can we have a new outfit.’”
Claire was often up until 2.30am in the recording studio. She worked so hard that her mum worried she was taking drugs to stay awake.
But in the long run, performing on a budget paid off, because Steps ended up with more money from record sales.
The group, which also consisted of Lee Latchford-Evans, Faye Tozer and Lisa Scott-Lee, had two No1 singles and sold 22million albums worldwide.
Spice Girls
Scary, Sporty, Posh, Baby and Ginger Spice became the biggest British female group of all time when their debut album shifted 23million copies.
But before they were international jet-setters the five performers had to fend for themselves in a rented house in Maidenhead, Berks, and rehearse in a church hall.
Baby Spice Emma Bunton reveals: “Mel B used to cook corned beef and rice, which was a step up from my beans on toast. We used to make Victoria clean the bathroom.”
Their original manager, Chris Herbert, claims Geri was “a bit of a wooden horse” when it came to dancing during those early days.
And Mel C reveals that she got too drunk when invited to the Brit Awards prior to releasing their mega-selling debut album Spice in 1996.
She admits: “There were words between myself and Victoria. I think I told her where to go.”
Geri also claimed that Posh Spice, aka Victoria Beckham, “just wasn’t there” during the recording of their most famous single Wannabe.
For Mel C one of the toughest parts of being in a group put together by a management company was having to pretend to be someone she wasn’t.
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She didn’t appreciate the Sporty tag and grew tired of the commercial side of the business.
But the biggest tensions were with Geri, who quit to go solo in 1998.
Emma, who was close friends with Ginger Spice, says: “I just felt like she’d left me.”
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