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On the road with East 17

 

Mutual hatred. Brushes with death. Imprisonment, spiritualism, and bitter wrangles over money. After all they've been through, can one-time boy-band sensations East 17 finally get their act back together? Guy Adams reports

 

Published: 28 February 2007

In the mid-1990s, two boy-bands battled for the hearts, minds and pockets of Britain's teenagers. One was Take That, a group of squeaky-clean lads with high cheekbones and nice haircuts who sang songs that your Mum liked. The others were East 17.

 

Brian, Tony, John and Terry were four urchins who came from the wrong side of Walthamstow. Real fans preferred to call them E17. They shaved their heads, and had tattoos, and were a lot, lot cooler that the nancy boys of Take That. In the great five-year battle that dominated British pop, East 17 were also on the winning side. Their music was sharper and more streetwise. It was infused with hip-hop and R&B, and sold by the bucketload: 20 million records across Europe, compared with Take That's paltry 19 million.

 

Then, everything went wrong. In 1997 East 17 split, following a wholly self-inflicted and explosive row over drugs and money. It was a controversy that kept the tabloid press in headlines for months, and was even raised by John Major at Prime Minister's Question Time. It remains one of the greatest break-ups in pop history. Then, even the red-tops got bored.

 

Today, East 17 are the forgotten boys of modern pop culture. Brian Harvey, Tony Mortimer, John Hendy and Terry Coldwell have largely disappeared. They went solo, but no one noticed. They reformed, then split up once more; again, barely a flicker of interest. Since their split, they've become a sort of by-word for troubled minor celebrity.

 

Until now, that is. Today, East 17 have reformed once more for a final shot at the big time. Thanks to a bizarre series of projects, Brian, Tony, John and Terry may be about to affect an unlikely return to pop stardom.

 

Helping them on their way this morning, at a press conference in central London, Brian Harvey will be unveiled as one of six musicians bidding to be Britain's entry in the Eurovision Song Contest. Until now his involvement has been secret, but he's expected to become the bookies' favourite for the high-profile job. And next month, Channel 4 will screen East 17: The Reunion, a documentary charting the band's rise and fall, and their subsequent attempt to re-launch. It was a similar TV show in 2005 that sparked Take That's triumphant recent comeback.

 

Meanwhile, three of the boys are pounding the club circuit of their native South-east in an effort to rekindle the band's glory days. They're about to return to the studio, and will release a new album later this year.

 

Off stage, several intriguing sub-plots are also bubbling away. Brian, John and Terry are skint, having made only a pittance from their nine years at the top. Tony, who wrote the songs, is worth millions, and never has to work again. As a result, they don't get on, and have severe differences over The Reunion, which details how Mortimer left the original reformed East 17 last year after being involved in a punch-up with Harvey when the group were on the brink of signing an exciting new record deal.

 

So today East 17 are struggling to get by in an industry where they're past their sell-by date. It's also an industry where people who c**k things up don't always get a second chance, and East 17 have a habit of doing just that. But they are back on the road, and going to give it one last shot.

 

It's gone midnight by the time Brian, John and Terry emerge on stage at Essex University's students' union on the outskirts of Colchester to a barrage of shrieks, screams and, yes, flying underwear. Dry ice fills the room, music booms over the sound system, and they launch into their opening number: an old favourite called "Steam".

 

A sell-out crowd of 1,700 sweaty undergraduates have gathered to drink, dance, and (by way of a bonus) witness the latest episode in one of pop's most colourful soap operas.

 

East 17 give notice that they're about to raise the roof with a signature tune: the Ivor Novello-winning Christmas classic "Stay Another Day". That song was a belter. It beat Take That to the festive No 1 slot in 1994, and stayed there for seven weeks. Even now, it's one of the greatest ballads of its era. Everyone knows it, everyone loves it, and everyone sings along to it.

 

As the boys leave the stage with 1,700 drunken cheers ringing in their ears, it feels like the clock has been turned back. For a brief moment, it's almost as if the past 10 years never happened, and we were finally glimpsing the squandered potential of a forgotten legend. A legend that was East 17.

 

Brian, Tony, John and Terry were born and bred in Walthamstow, a working-class area of London sandwiched between the East End and the commuter belt, which boasts a famous greyhound track and not a lot else.

 

Tom Watkins, a former manager of Pet Shop Boys, created the band to showcase the talents of Mortimer, a local singer-songwriter whose demo tape had fallen into the right hands. Their name was derived from the local postcode.

 

Speaking from his home in Walthamstow this week, Brian Harvey, now 32, recalled how Mortimer's schoolfriend John Hendy was recruited to provide backing vocals. He and Coldwell, who are three years younger than the others, were originally hired as dancers.

 

The East 17 "brand", so to speak, was based around a streetwise alternative to squeaky-clean boy-bands. They spoke in a broad Essex drawl, but retained big enough eyes and sufficient charm to be pin-ups.

 

From the start, it worked. East 17 looked trendy, sang competently, and boasted an inventive musical repertoire. Their debut single, "House of Love", sold 600,000 copies in 1992. The first album, Walthamstow, was a No 1 hit in 1993.

 

Although Mortimer was always the "brains" of the group, the one who wrote all the songs, adolescent audiences were quickly drawn to Harvey, a gifted vocalist, who adopted a cheerfully rebellious attitude to the boy-band genre's sacred cows.

 

Under Harvey, East 17 weren't afraid to swear, or smoke, or have girlfriends. They were cool. "It just clicked for us," Brian recalled. "We were young, we didn't have a clue what we were doing, but we just got lucky.

 

"Back then, as a kid, you made a choice of who you liked, and it was either us or Take That. And if you liked East 17, it showed you knew what was going on, you were clued up, had better taste in music."

 

But Harvey's rebellious streak was at the heart of the group's downfall. Having helped them to a second hit album, Steam, in 1994, followed by a third Top 10 success, Up All Night, the following year, he met his Waterloo in a disastrous radio interview at the end of 1996.

 

Asked about the drug ecstasy, which had recently caused the death of teenager (and East 17 fan) Leah Betts, Harvey announced laddishly that it was "safe" and made you "a better person". The interview is still seen as one of the great acts of commercial suicide.

 

The subsequent media firestorm saw Harvey plastered across the front pages for several weeks before being sacked from East 17. The affair also turned him into an old-fashioned tabloid hate figure - a sort of "cocaine" Kate Moss of the late 1990s. In the years that followed, he also endured a messy relationship with the soap star Daniella Westbrook, and a failed marriage to a dancer called Tash Carnegie.

 

More pressingly, Harvey's volatile nature began landing him in court. In 1993, he'd been fined for possessing cannabis. In 1998, he was fined £1,000 for kicking a photographer. In 2002 he was jailed for 56 days for breaching an injunction taken out by his estranged wife.

 

There were other disasters. In 2001, he needed plastic surgery after being attacked with a machete outside a Nottingham nightclub. In 2004, he quit I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here following a row with Janet Street-Porter.

 

The final indignity occurred during June 2005. In circumstances that remain unclear, Harvey managed to fall out of his Mercedes while reversing, and run himself over. He suffered a broken legs and pelvis, damaged ribs and a crushed lung. "I spent three months in hospital; I couldn't even wipe my arse," he said.

 

Today, Harvey can still sing beautifully. He carries himself cockily, and he remains outspoken and prone to occasional bouts of self-destruction. But he's short of cash. Although he inherited the former home of his grandparents (who bought him up from the age of 10), he's forced to supplement his musical earnings with work as a plumber.

 

Asked about his forthcoming comeback - in both East 17 and on Eurovision - he smiles. "It's weird, man. I've had a weird life, and I don't want to end up on the dole. I'm fed up with the plumbing. And I think it would be good to be a little pop star again." If there's any justice in the world, he ought to succeed.

 

The fact that Brian even needed to go into plumbing is because he earned so little from East 17. The only one of the four who came away singing was Tony Mortimer, who, along with Watkins, made the lion's share of profits from their success. He lives behind the security gates of a mock-Tudor pile on the edge of the green belt.

 

The group's break-up affected Mortimer badly. He suffered eating disorders and agoraphobia, and has aged less kindly than his former colleagues. He also became interested in spiritualism. A visit to a medium was behind the group's most recent reunion. "I asked the question, 'Will I ever perform again?'" he says in The Reunion. "She said, 'Yes, I see you on stage, and there's four of you performing.'" That gig went ahead, in Shepherd's Bush last year. But as the documentary will show, East 17's comeback was marred by an enduring problem: a personality clash between Mortimer and Harvey.

 

Back in the 1990s, this clash caused the tensions in the group that eventually contributed to their breakdown. "Tony loathed Brian," recalls Watkins. "He wouldn't even travel in the same car as him." Today, the same animosity remains. They shared a stage at last year's concert, but behind the scenes were barely speaking. Then the two became involved in a punch-up at a business meeting last summer.

 

With the record label Warner looking to discuss a possible comeback deal, Mortimer called a meeting of the band. Harvey, who is often disorganised, arrived an hour late. Recollections of what occurred next differ. Brian says: "I walked through to say hello, and he came walking straight up to me. I thought he was going to say something funny, but he didn't. He hit me."

 

Mortimer, for his part, recalls: "He's done my nut in. So he's walked in, and I've gone CRACK. Well actually, I didn't. I said 'Why am I waiting for you?' He went 'Wot wot wot?' So I hit him." Either way, punches were thrown, Brian got injured, and Mortimer was forced to resign from the reformed East 17. He again disappeared from view, and refused to discuss current plans this week.

 

"There's my vision and there's Brian's vision," Mortimer explained at the time. "That's two polarities that were always working against each other. And it just feels to me that I don't fit into the band. I've just got to hold my hands up and wish them the best. That's the mature thing to do."

 

For Tony Mortimer, with his fortune and his mock-Tudor mansion, pulling out of East 17's current revival was a lifestyle choice. The other members of his former band don't have that luxury.

 

Although the band generated tens of millions of pounds in record sales and endorsements, Brian, John and Terry were paid just a small weekly salary for their pains. The rest went to their manager and record label, or was funnelled into songwriter's royalties. "Tony ended up with £8m," recalls Coldwell. "I had to sell my home because I couldn't afford it. I never had the sports cars or any of that. In fact, I earned more money selling my house when I got divorced than I ever did in eight or nine years at the top."

 

Today, Terry lives in a flat near Walthamstow with his girlfriend and new baby, Brooke. He travels to East 17's gigs two or three nights a week in John's Citroën Berlingo van, with a ladder on the roof. "We were young and naive, and nobody told us how the business worked. We didn't know what was going on. We got paid £125 a week. The way I see it, others did well out of the band's success, and we were left with nothing," he says.

 

John is also anxious not to repeat the same mistakes. Following East 17's break-up, he was forced to remortgage the house he shares with wife and daughters. "Don't get me wrong. I love singing. I love walking out there and performing. But this game can kick you in the teeth and it can let you down. So there's this little doubt in my head telling me not to make a mess of things this time," he says.

 

So for Terry and John, making East 17's comeback work means everything. "We're doing two or three gigs a week," adds Terry. "It's going well. People can laugh and belittle us, but it's great promotion. We're doing a thousand people at each gig, and always stay behind to sign autographs and have a chat with the fans. The promoters love that.

 

"It only takes a fraction of them to buy our stuff and we're well away. You only need to sell 20,000 or 30,000 singles to be at No 1 these days anyway."

 

With Brian's assault on the weird world of Eurovision, the boys also hope to cultivate their long-held popularity in Eastern Europe. In the early 1990s, following the fall of Communism, East 17 were one of the biggest things in pop. They are still good box office behind the former Iron Curtain, and at Christmas were invited to play at the official national concert to celebrate Romania's accession to the EU.

 

"We thought it would just be a club PA," recalls Terry. "Then we turned up and it was this massive stadium in front of 20,000 people. When Communism ended, we were one of the acts that brought their society into Western pop culture, so there were all these 60-year-old men singing East 17 songs. It was brilliant."

 

And if everything goes according to plan, if Brian's Eurovision plan works out (at the very least his popularity there might garner the UK votes from the Eastern bloc), and if their album gets made, it may not be the last stadium that East 17 grace in their extraordinary careers. Provided they don't c**k it all up again, that is.

 

Boys done good

 

New Kids on the Block

 

True believers still call them NKOTB, and recognise their role as founding fathers of the modern boy-band movement. The five-piece group, formed in Boston in 1984 by producer Maurice Starr, went on to sell more than 70 million records.

 

They hit the big time with "Hangin' Tough" and dominated the charts for a decade. The group split in 1994, after out-growing their teenage audience. Jonathan is now an estate agent, Jordan, Joe and Danny have had failed solo careers, and Donnie is an actor.

 

Boyzone

 

The Irish impresario and X Factor star Louis Walsh founded Boyzone in 1993 and launched them on a week-night broadcast of The Late Late Show. Unfortunately, his band's five members - Keith, Mikey, Ronan, Shane and Stephen - didn't know any songs by this stage, and were forced to mime to a pre-recorded track. No one was fooled.

 

Nonetheless, they had four No 1 albums between 1995 and 2000, when Ronan Keating, the group's most talented member, left to pursue a solo career.

 

Their subsequent fortunes have been mixed. Stephen Gateley is a West End star and gay icon. Keith Duffy is a soap actor. The others earn a shilling as jobbing music producers, or on reality TV.

 

Westlife

 

Originally, they were a poor man's Boyzone. But under the watchful eye of Louis Walsh, Westlife have managed a staggering 14 No 1 singles (only Elvis and The Beatles have had more). Originally a five-piece, they were reduced to four when Brian McFadden - the well-lunched ex-husband of Iceland icon Kerry Katona - quit in 2004. The group are still on the road, and their Love Tour hit Australia last month. They specialise in cover versions of romantic ballads, and appeal to both hankie-stuffing mums and their teenage daughters.

 

In an eerie parallel of Boyzone, lead singer Mark Feehily came out of the closet in August, saying: "I'm gay, and I'm very proud of who I am."

 

Take That

 

From 1991 to 1996, Jason, Mark, Howard, Gary and Robbie dominated the charts. They were formed by producer Nigel Martin-Smith, who noted that Britain's adolescent girls lacked home-grown male pop talent to support, and their debut album Take That & Party went to No 2. Everything Changes and Nobody Else were No 1s, and by the mid-1990s they were described as "bigger than The Beatles". Then Robbie Williams decided he fancied a bit of hard living and quit to go solo, becoming one of the biggest-selling artists ever. The others' solo careers fared less well, but last year saw a hugely successful reunion tour and another chart-topping album, Beautiful World.

 

Busted

 

Three posh boys from Uppingham became international superstars when they signed a record deal, and then discovered an exotic way of jumping, while playing guitar. Between 2001 and 2005, James Bourne, Charlie Simpson and Matt Willis had eight Top 10 singles and two studio albums, which both went to No 2. Simpson was also named "sexiest man alive" by Cosmopolitan in 2003 and 2005. They split after an attempt to "take" America in 2005. Simpson quit to join a rock band, Fightstar. Bourne has a punk outfit called Son of Dork. Willis, meanwhile, is a solo artist and winner of the most recent series of I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!

 

Five

 

Properly spelt 5ive, these five hunks were thrown together in 1997 by the team that created the Spice Girls. They were always a poor imitation of their female inspirations, but still managed to shift 20 million records - with 11 Top 10 singles and four Top 10 albums - after launching their career as a warm-up act for the US boy-band 'N Sync. In the ensuing four years, they recorded such classics as "Slam Dunk (Da Funk)" and "Everybody Get Up", which boasts a chorus based on the bold claim that "5ive will make you get down now".

 

In September, four of the original band members - Jason, Abs, Richie and Scott - announced that they are re-forming, under a name that is now misleading; the fifth member, Sean, has gone solo.

Edited February 28, 200718 yr by Dino

yayeast 17 have reunited for the 2nd time

hopefully they'll get along alot better this time around ^_^

east 17 willnever happen i think

east 17 willnever happen i think

 

yeah maybe they just need to get along well with tony

which seems to be the problem at the moment