I Owe You Nothing

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Luke Goss and Jean Ritchie 1993

Luke Goss and Jean Ritchie assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780586218631

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008235413

Version: 2016–11-21

Dedication

To Shirley

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Chapter 1 Break My Silence

Chapter 2 Just Another Tear

Chapter 3 Leave Me Alone

Chapter 4 Try

Chapter 5 Chocolate in the Box

Chapter 6 When Will I Be Famous?

Chapter 7 Madly in Love

Chapter 8 Too Much

Chapter 9 It’s a Jungle Out There

Chapter 10 Sister

Chapter 11 Shot in the Back

Chapter 12 Cat Among the Pigeons

Chapter 13 Money

Chapter 14 Shocked

Chapter 15 I Quit

Chapter 16 Tears On My Pillow

Chapter 17 I Owe You Nothing

About the Publisher

I picked up this book to read with a mixture of emotions. It is Luke’s book, Luke’s story, but it is also to a large extent my story. Luke and I are brothers, twins, best friends and, until recently, we were also partners in Bros. Many of the things that happened to Luke happened also to me. I could not help wondering how he would tell our story, how he would deal with the triumphs and traumas of our career. I put the book down, having read it from cover to cover, with a feeling of overwhelming pride that he has written about his life – and my life – so sensitively and well. The book has revealed depths in Luke that even I, who have been so close to him all our lives, did not know he had. He has told the story of Bros brilliantly, and he has also told of his personal life with tenderness and compassion. It is, I believe, a great book.

Matt Goss

Foreword

I’m sure most autobiographies are written to set the record straight, to tell the true story and put right the popular misconceptions. Mine is no exception. As you read this book I hope you will begin to know and understand me better and see beyond the two-dimensional image created in the Bros fame days.

I realize that changing people’s perception of me will be a very high wall to climb, but if this book helps you to see me and my work, be it music or otherwise, through different eyes, then I shall be happy.

This book is about the real me.

In hope,

Luke Goss

CHAPTER ONE

Break My Silence

The whole of terminal three at London’s Heathrow Airport was in chaos. Three thousand young girls blocked the ramps, the escalators, the whole concourse. The police outriders who were escorting our limo piloted us to a side entrance, and we clambered out. Immediately our five burly bodyguards linked arms in a ring around us, and around the seal of their muscular biceps came another ring, of twenty-five policemen.

We paused for a second, a last moment of sanity before the girls spotted where we were. I breathed deeply and psyched myself up, like a runner before a race or an actor before going on stage. Then a scream arose, and the shriek was taken up and sustained by three thousand adolescent voices. The force of several hundred girls running at speed hit the outer wall of our defences, but they held firm, and slowly but surely we were edged through the tide of yelling fans, across the terminal to the customs gate.

It was 23 October 1988, and the madness and mayhem of Brosmania was at its height. A year earlier, nobody had even heard of us. Yet on that day, as Matt, Craig and I left Britain to start a world tour, we could be forgiven for thinking that every teenage girl in the country was there to wave us off. As far as my eyes could see, there were excited, clamouring faces and arms outstretched towards us.

Then, just as suddenly as we had been besieged by them, the fans were cut off from us as we made the quantum leap into the comparative calm of the airport departure area. A thick belt of uniformed police prevented the madness pursuing us. We were on our way.

As we dozed, played video games and watched films on the twenty-seven-hour flight, I remember wondering what kind of reception we would get in Australia. We were on our way to the other side of the world, a place we had never been to before, where we knew nobody. Perhaps, in contrast to the crazy struggle we’d had to get to the plane, we would be disembarking like ordinary passengers, queuing to get through immigration and waiting to pick up our bags off the carousel. Perhaps life would be back to normal.

But when the plane touched down, before anyone could get off, a posse of airport security men got on. They told us to stay where we were while the rest of the passengers were cleared. Then steps were wheeled up to the plane and as we reached the top of them I was hit by two waves: a wave of heat, even though it was only seven thirty in the morning, and a wave of noise, as a huge cheer went up from the five thousand fans who were waiting for us. It took a moment or two for my eyes to focus in the clear, bright light. Below us, at the bottom of the steps on the tarmac, was a line-up of about a hundred and fifty airport staff waiting to meet us. Held at bay by security men were fifty journalists and photographers. And in the background was a blurred sea of screaming faces.

We had travelled 12,000 miles and nothing had changed except the weather. My main emotion was one of excitement and pleasure. We were a pop band, I’d been working hard and planning a pop career since the age of twelve, and there was no way I wasn’t going to be pleased and excited by success. But there was also a now familiar sense of unreality about it all. When we got to our plush Sydney hotel and switched on the television, one of the main items on the news was a film of our arrival. I watched myself coming down the steps of the plane and thought: Wow, this is incredible, I’m world-famous. But at the back of my mind there was the niggling question: Surely there must be more important things happening in the world to put on the news bulletins?

Although we’d had nearly a year to get used to it, it was a weird feeling, getting your head round the kind of adulation and fan-worship we encountered everywhere we went. I really had thought that once we got out of Britain, out of our own backyard, we would find ourselves back to ‘normal’ again. But watching that television news, I knew there was no more ‘normal’ for me. And there hasn’t been. For the last five years I have been on a crazy roller coaster, with tremendous highs and terrible lows. I have had no experience of ordinary life. I am not complaining: I would not change my experiences for anything. But I would like people to understand just how surreal it has all been.

I have been screamed at hysterically by girls of all ages, some as young as eleven and twelve. I have been spat at, punched and jeered at, for no reason that I can come close to understanding. Bros has generated adulation – and hatred. There has been very little indifference and even less genuine respect. Yet what have we done? We made some successful records, brought a lot of pleasure to a lot of kids. We hurt nobody, certainly never intentionally. Yet our fall from success has been greeted with the kind of gloating glee that is normally reserved for the arrest of a mass murderer – and that has been even harder to get my head round than the scale and suddenness of our success.

I hope that by writing this book I am going to help myself – and others – come to terms with the strange Bros phenomenon and the whole phenomenon of the pop business that created it. It was just an episode in my life, not my whole life. There was a time pre-Bros, and there is going to be a long, productive and successful time post-Bros, for both me and my brother Matt. But before we can get on with this next stage, I want to lay to rest some of the myths about Bros.

The popular ideas about us are that we are a pair of arrogant spendthrifts who ran through millions of pounds on extravagant living, that we ditched our mate Craig from the group, that neither of us had a thought in our heads save how to be hyped into yet more success, that we were an artificially created band who didn’t even perform on our own records, that we quarrelled and split up acrimoniously.

Every single one of those ideas is wrong.

First of all, let’s go back to the beginning and get the gynaecological bit over. I obviously don’t remember a great deal about being born – but my mum and dad both have vivid memories of it all.

They had friends round to dinner the night Mum went into labour with me and Matt, two months before we were due. She had no idea she was expecting twins. When her waters broke at the dinner table she didn’t know what it was and didn’t want to embarrass anyone, so went into the bedroom and mopped up with a few towels. At three o’clock in the morning of 29 September 1968 the pain was so bad that my dad sent for an ambulance to take her to Lewisham Hospital, and fifteen hours later I emerged first into the world. I was bald, had no fingernails and weighed four pounds two ounces.

Even at that stage, nobody knew there was another baby to be born. It was my dad who first sussed it. When the nurse was telling Mum to bear down because the afterbirth was very high, he said, ‘You’d better be quick, there might be another one in there.’ It was a jokey remark, not a deep premonition. But when the midwife put her ear-trumpet to Mum’s stomach, she looked up in alarm: there was another heartbeat in there.

Mum was delirious and in great pain, but she remembers the sudden panic. ‘I took one look at the instruments coming towards me and closed my eyes tight,’ she says.

Dad is the one who really remembers what happened. ‘The nurse looked startled when I joked about another baby, but as soon as she detected the heartbeat all hell broke loose. Suddenly there were doctors and nurses everywhere. I stood in the corner, trying to look inconspicuous, pretending I was a drip-feed. But when the doctor spotted me he said, “You – out!” and ordered me through the door.

‘I tried to peep in and see what was happening, and nearly got my nose caught in the door as it was shut firmly. It seemed to take an eternity, but in reality it was very quick. Officially, Matthew is eleven minutes younger that Luke, but I think it was actually less than that. It was quite hairy: the staff appeared to be panicking and all rushing about. Both the babies needed special care, and incubators were rushed to the delivery room. I had seen Luke immediately after he was born, but I didn’t see Matthew until later.’

Mum remembers that Matt was very blue when he was born, because his lungs had not inflated. Although he was two and a half ounces heavier than me, he was even more delicate because he had had a more difficult birth.

The doctors explained to Mum that we had been lying back to back in her womb and that our heartbeats had been synchronized, which was why they had failed to detect that there were two of us. It was the next day before she was taken in a wheelchair to see us in our incubators. She could not feed us herself, we had to be tube-fed straight into our stomachs.

‘I loved them desperately from the moment I saw them,’ she says. ‘I know the experts say that mothers need to touch their babies to bond with them – well, it’s not true. I was longing to hold them, but even though I wasn’t allowed to it certainly didn’t stop me loving them. It was such an intense emotion it hurt.

‘They were in incubators next to one another, alike as two peas in a pod. But even then I could see a difference between them. Matthew had a rounder face than Luke, he was tubbier even though they were so tiny.’

When Dad saw us in the incubators his main feeling was pride. ‘I felt so incredibly proud of them – and yet at the same time I felt a fraud, because I didn’t seem to have done much. I felt so sorry for my wife Carol: she’d had a difficult pregnancy and a difficult birth, and I seemed to have got off very lightly. Just looking at them lying there, so small and yet perfect, I was amazed that it was anything to do with me.

‘I remember someone asking me if I had insured against having twins, and I felt insulted – as though having twins was a disaster, like a flood, to be insured against. But I must admit the money would have come in handy!

‘I don’t really think I did have a premonition about twins, but I can remember waiting inside the hospital once while Carol was attending an antenatal class and fantasizing about the possibility. For some reason I thought if one was a boy and one a girl I would phone Carol’s parents and tell her mum that she had a grandson and her dad that he had a granddaughter, and leave them to work it out for themselves. I never thought about two boys.’

If they had thought about two boys, they might have had another name ready. They had chosen my name before the birth: Luke Damon. If I’d been a girl I would have been Rebecca! They weren’t ready with another boy’s name, and it was Mum who chose Matthew Weston when the registrar called at the hospital to register the new babies.

Dad remembers her telling him about it when he visited her in hospital. ‘Carol told me she had named the second baby after her father, who everyone called Harry. I said, “Harry? You called him Harry?” She shook her head and I remembered that her father was also known as Sam. Harry and Sam are fashionable names now, but they weren’t then and I wasn’t keen on either of them. But she shook her head again – her father’s name is actually Samuel Matthew, and it was Matthew she had chosen, to my relief.

‘Then she said she’d given him a second name after my father. “Denis?” I asked, because that’s my stepfather’s name, and I didn’t like that much. No, Weston, she said – that’s his surname. I liked that, and unbeknown to us both at the time my real father also has Weston as his second Christian name, so it worked out fine.

‘It was only afterwards that I realized Luke and Matthew together made us sound a very Biblical family, which we weren’t. But I liked both the names very much.’

So that’s how my brother and I were launched on the world.

It was the week that Mary Hopkin hit the top of the charts with ‘Those Were the Days’ – and they certainly were for my parents. Coping with one baby is difficult, but twins are a nightmare.

But to understand anything about anybody, you have to go back a long way before their birth. How any of us ends up is influenced by a great many factors, but our parents have the most crucial role to play …

My mother, Carol, was born in Peckham, south-east London, in 1946. Her father Harry, my granddad, was in the building trade: the war had interfered with his studies to become a surveyor, but he ended up as a building-site foreman. My grandmother, Win, worked in a variety of different jobs, usually as a shop assistant.

Harry and Win’s home had been blown up during the war, and afterwards Harry made such a stink that the housing department of the local council found them a prefab – he threatened to pitch a tent for his family outside the council offices if they didn’t get a home.

‘Prefabs’ were prefabricated buildings that were put up hastily all over the country after the war, to help with the massive housing problem caused by the population bulge. Lots of men, like my granddad, came back from fighting and didn’t waste any time before having families. They’d given seven years of their lives to their country, and they weren’t prepared to wait any longer, certainly not until the government got around to building enough houses for them all.

Prefabs were far from being shanty-style houses, even though they were put up very quickly and didn’t have traditional brick walls. They were warm – they had central heating before it became standard in British houses – and they came fully equipped with fridges and cookers, back in the days when fridges were luxury items. So my nan and granddad were very happy there with their two daughters – my auntie Ann was born within a couple of years of my mum.

When my nan was thirty-nine she had another baby, as much to her astonishment as everyone else’s. My aunt Sally was born on my mother’s twelfth birthday, and because of that my mum has always regarded her as a bit special.

‘I thought she was my own personal present, an extra-special birthday gift,’ says Mum.

About the same time Sally was born, the family were moved by the council to a maisonette in Camberwell Green, because the prefabs were being pulled down. Tower blocks were put up in their place – soulless, miserable places compared to the prefab community, where everyone had taken a pride in their home and where there were annual competitions for the best gardens.

Because my grandmother worked, my mum and her sisters were largely brought up by their grandmother – my great grandmother – a smashing old lady I remember from my own childhood.

Mum stayed at school until she was fifteen and a half, when she left to take up an apprenticeship at a hairdresser’s. She had learned shorthand and typing at school, and her teachers had wanted her to stay on and take exams, but she was set on leaving and starting work.

My dad, Alan Goss, was born in a stately home. But there was no silver spoon in his mouth – his mother had been evacuated there for the birth to get away from the bombing raids on London. Dad is two years older than my mum, and he, too, comes from south-east London. His mother was sent to Luton Hoo, a stately home belonging to the Wernher family (relatives of the Royal family) in the Bedfordshire countryside near to Luton, a week or so before he was born. It was used as a maternity home for mothers from areas where there was a high risk of bombing. The London hospitals were overstretched dealing with casualties from the raids, and, besides, it was safer for the mothers and newborn babies to be out in the country.

After he was born, my dad and his mother went to live in Norfolk, where his father was stationed with the RAF. My grandfather was a technician who became an expert in the development and use of X-rays (after the war he stayed on in the RAF, and many years later worked for British Aerospace until his retirement). My grandparents and my dad lived in the village of Horsford for the last year of the war. Dad was a sickly baby and everyone was very worried about him for a few months because he did not feed well. But he survived, which is more than his parents’ marriage did: after the war his mother brought him back to Walworth and he never saw his real father until many years later, not until after his mother had died.

Life in a single-parent family was not easy, even though my grandmother received a maintenance payment from my grandfather every week. It was twelve shillings (6op), which was not a bad amount immediately after the war but one which never increased, despite inflation. So my grandmother worked as a typist to support herself and my dad. They lived in a one-bedroom flat in a house without electricity, only gas lights. There was no bath, so my father was taken to Manor Street baths for a weekly wallow, and the rest of the week his mother stood him on the kitchen table and scrubbed him down.

He was introduced to music at an early age. His mother took him with her to her favourite ballets and to a concert by Edmundo Ross at the Albert Hall. She didn’t trust babysitters, so she always took him along. He remembers buying his first pop record – a Little Richard EP, when he was twelve – and having to go round to his cousin’s house to play it, because without electricity he couldn’t plug in a record player. He had a good singing voice, singing in the South London Schools Choir, until his voice broke.

When Dad was thirteen his mother remarried. His new stepfather was Denis Weston, who worked with his mother at the local electricity board. They all moved into a council flat in East Dulwich, where my father could play his records! Dad left school at sixteen with only one O level, GCE Art: he admits that, like his sons, he wasted his time at school and didn’t enjoy studying. He was good at art, but nobody encouraged him to take that any further. His only other interest was cars, so he became a trainee motor mechanic at a local garage. After a year he was transferred to the reception desk because he was good at handling customers. Three years later, dissatisfied because he wasn’t progressing fast enough, he left and joined the London Electricity Board for a short spell. Ten years after leaving school he had been through ten different jobs, including two jobs as a sales rep, one selling tyres and the other selling hosiery.

‘I wanted to go into car sales but there were no openings. I was young and naïve – I expected everything to happen quickly, I wasn’t prepared to wait. I was seriously planning to emigrate to Australia, but I met a girlfriend who changed my mind about that.’

Whilst he was in his teens Dad taught himself to play the harmonica and the guitar. By the time he was twenty the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were dominating the charts, and Dad was singing with a band, or a group as they were called in those days. It was a group which never had a name, and they only played one gig – disastrously. They used to practise at the Heal’s furniture store canteen, because the lead guitarist worked there. They were booked to fill in when the main group took a break during a dance at the Heal’s social club, in Kent. After watching the main group fail to get anybody up on their feet to dance, Dad knew they were on to a loser.

By then he was going out with Mum, and she and the girlfriend of one of the other members of the group gamely danced the whole time they were playing, although they were the only ones on the dance floor. Dad now admits this might have had something to do with the fact that they were dreadful.

It was in 1967 that my mum and my dad met; she was just twenty-one and he was twenty-three. Regardless of all that was to happen later between them, they were very much in love at the beginning – in fact, it was almost love at first sight. My mum was visiting her gran in hospital. As she walked down the corridor with her sister she saw Dad coming the other way, and they fancied each other instantly.