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| Luke Goss (from Bros) article mentions Morrissey |
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posted by davidt
on Thursday March 08 2001, @10:00AM
TrblLuvsMe writes:
Here's the pertinent bit:
The Independent (London), March 3, 2001
LUKE GOSS INTERVIEW; ALTERED EGO
E Jane Dickson
[snip]
He is quick to point out, though, that he has never known the hell of real addiction. After Bros broke up, he went through "a sort of breakdown" when he went on a bit of a bender, but he explains, "it was a very pressed sort of bender. We were very pressed boys. That was our image. We used to joke that Morrissey probably put as much time into looking creased as we did into looking pressed. And mine wasn't a creased bender. It was a very dignified and private bender, though I'm not sure that's the best sort to do because if you're going to have a bender you should probably have some fun on the way. I just locked myself away and hid. I was never addicted to drink. I was never addicted to drugs. All I did was try to escape for a while. I'd get up in the morning and try drinking beers, then I'd try smoking weed. Then I'd lock myself in the studio and write song after song, singing until my throat bled."
[end snip]
Here's the whole article in case anyone is interested:
(more)
Ten years ago the boy band Bros was torn apart by massive debts and sibling rivalry. And that, everyone thought, would be the last we'd hear of its two peroxide-blond brothers. But now Luke, the one that nobody even liked that much, is back and ready to become a Hollywood star.
Luke Goss looks sharp. From the diagonal slash of his cheekbones to the razor crease of his Nicole Farhi trousers, he seems entirely composed of points and planes, like a Braque drawing of a person. You could cut yourself on the tailoring of his Gucci leather jacket. His slanted blue eyes look like they have been carved in wax with a hot knife.
Dressed all in black, with a diamond cross winking on his bared, brown chest, Goss pauses for a beat on the threshold of the swanky Four Seasons Hotel in London's Docklands. There is a kind of theatrical nattiness to his outfit today. You wouldn't be surprised if he were to break into a Bob Fosse dance routine, there in the middle of the sliding doors, but it turns out he is just waiting for the nod, the barely perceptible signal from the uniformed doorman that Luke Goss is a somebody - not a celebrity, but a person of substance, a notable, a mensch.
"I walk in here and people are pleased to see me," he says. "They're nice to me; they know who I am. I walk down the street and there will be a bunch of guys, workmen in a van and it's, 'How are you, Luke? Good to see you mate.' I can't think of any group of people who aren't nice to me now."
Ten years ago, Luke Goss and his twin brother Matt, formerly known as Bros, couldn't walk anywhere without a phalanx of bodyguards fending off screaming, fainting female fans. With 13 top-10 hits in four years, songs like the virally insistent "WHEN will I, will I be FAMous?", "I Owe You Nothing" and "Drop The Boy", Bros, in their neatly ripped jeans, bandanas and matching brush cuts, were the prototype of the big-time boy band. In an era of conspicuous consumption, the teenage brothers consumed more conspicuously than most. A rumoured pounds 83,000 a year was spent on limousines, pounds 164,000 on clothes, pounds 117,000 on security. Then, overnight, or so it seemed, it all went wrong. Luke walked out of the band, and a spectacularly ill- advised management deal left Bros all washed up at 21 with pounds 700,000 of debt to remind them of their glory days. The public turned on the twins with a peculiar vengeance; jeering workmen followed them down the street, thrusting tenners in their faces. The national press ran editorials on the allegorical significance of their downfall. The boys had been well and truly dropped.
"It was the kind of animosity usually reserved for mass murderers", says Luke, examining his open palms for signs of blood, or possibly stigmata. "The only thing I can think - and I don't think about it now - is that, by the end, it was the Thatcher time when everybody was losing their money and there we were doing really well, and that just got up people's noses. We were the first Young Money band. People are very used to Young Money now. The whole music industry is Young Money. But we were the first and it didn't sit well at that time. People thought, 'You spoiled bastards, you cocky gits. Who do you think you are?' And," Luke asks, more philosophically than rhetorically, "who were we?"
Speaking in a high-light patter, with his shaved head and honed physique, Luke Goss, at 32, comes over as an oddly winning cross between Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle and a kung fu sage. "When I left Bros," he goes on gnomically, "I had to be the man I am. What I can't do is have anyone, either single or plural, fall in love with something that isn't the pH7 of me. I am very candid, I'm very warm and I'd like to think I'm very wise too. You have to be wise, because if you're going to be that candid, you have to be subconsciously observing 24/7."
Luke, you understand, has been to Hollywood. After a decade working in rep theatre (most notably playing Danny in the stage show of Grease to packed houses of former Brosettes) and making quietly credible television performances (he has a part in Sky 1's flagship drama The Stretch alongside Leslie Grantham and Anita Dobson), Luke has broken into the big time once more. Two Hollywood movies, Zig- Zag and Blade 2: Bloodhunt, both starring Wesley Snipes, are in the can, and this week sees the launch of Two Days, Nine Lives, a low-budget independent film by British director Simon Monjack.
Set in a fictional high-class addiction clinic, Two Days, Nine Lives shatters any illusion of rehab as a fashionable activity for bored socialites. Luke plays Saul, a major music producer and psychotic speedball freak. He is properly scary in a role which is at least as challenging for the audience as it is for the actor. It would surely be easier, given his looks and history, to go down the matinee idol route, but Luke is committed to a more creative use of his personal history.
"To play Saul, I had to go to a very dark place," he explains. "What I went through - the cacophony of adulation, people revering you one minute and hating you the next, living on these extreme peaks - has given me a wonderful palette of emotion that I can use as an actor. With a lot of actors it's substitution - you know, you pretend your dog's died so you can cry - but with me there is no substitute, no safety net. I have the ability to act that kind of pain because I have never forgotten any of it."
He is quick to point out, though, that he has never known the hell of real addiction. After Bros broke up, he went through "a sort of breakdown" when he went on a bit of a bender, but he explains, "it was a very pressed sort of bender. We were very pressed boys. That was our image. We used to joke that Morrissey probably put as much time into looking creased as we did into looking pressed. And mine wasn't a creased bender. It was a very dignified and private bender, though I'm not sure that's the best sort to do because if you're going to have a bender you should probably have some fun on the way. I just locked myself away and hid. I was never addicted to drink. I was never addicted to drugs. All I did was try to escape for a while. I'd get up in the morning and try drinking beers, then I'd try smoking weed. Then I'd lock myself in the studio and write song after song, singing until my throat bled."
Meanwhile, as the press printed ever more lurid tales of his degradation, Luke was besieged in his Surrey bungalow by die-hard Brosettes chanting their loyalty to the fallen idol.
"I would read in the papers that I was living in a tent somewhere or shacked up in a mobile home in Gosport, and there I was in this five-bedroom house set in three acres of land, unable to leave because of the fans. I remember not being able to heat the house because, with all the fans waiting there, I couldn't go out to chop wood for the fires. Now I would just chuck on a tight T-shirt, hose the fans down and say, 'Chop me wood, Baby.' That would be fun," says Luke, stroking the polished instep of his Oliver Sweeney shoes, "that would be aesthetically pleasing."
Back then, it was hard to see the bright side. To make matters worse, his brother Matt, always the more popular twin, had been whisked off to Los Angeles to cut a solo album.
"When you're twins, you spend your entire life being compared to the other," says Luke. "I was grumpier, not quite as flamboyant as Matt and probably generally less appealing. Living with that constant comparison gives you this almost overpowering desire to be an individual, not to be individually powerful, but just to feel that someone understands who you are as a human being, independent of the brother, the band and the hype."
Happily, someone turned up. Shirley Lewis was a backing singer on Bros's first album. She had sung with George Michael, Elton John and Luther Vandross. Luke was 18 when he asked the 27-year-old Shirley out, and was mightily relieved when she only drank Perrier water. (Matt's date asked for Champagne and cleaned him out for a month). But the presence of a steady girlfriend, let alone an older woman with a child from a previous relationship, went down badly with the fans, and Luke was under pressure to dump Shirley for the sake of sales. "One night my manager said to me: 'If that fucking girl gets in the way of my boys any more, I'll get her fucking run over,' says Luke, knuckles clenched at the memory. "Well, I crossed the room at a very fast pace and put his neck against the wall. So you can understand that Luke Goss was not popular with the executives. One of the top people from the record company called me in and suggested, in a more civilised way, that I see less of Shirley. I said, 'Listen, my friend, if my career is so unstable that my having a girlfriend shakes the foundations, then I have no career.'"
Prophetic words, but Shirley stuck around for the bad times, sometimes crying with Luke, sometimes punching him. The couple married in 1994 and although Luke is grateful for her unswerving support he is keen to point out that he wasn't such a bad bargain: "When I met Shirley, I was like, 'God I don't need this. I can have sex with a different woman every day of the week. I can go mad.' I was a pop star and that surely has to be one of the perks. The last thing I needed was to fall in love. Shirley's wonderful and I'm not demeaning what she did in any way, but what you have to understand is that I'm a very loving man, I'm a very open human being and that's the man she's lived with for 14 years. Shirley's adored and cherished. She's waited on 24 hours a day. So, heroic as her staying with me might seem, the really hard bit for Shirley was watching the man she loved being crucified and dragged naked over broken glass 24 hours a day."
In the end, it was up to Luke to get himself out of his dark place. "One morning I looked in the mirror and the person there was fat and beaten- looking. I didn't like him at all." He signed up for a gym and, lacking funds for a therapist, purged his soul in an autobiography, I Owe You Nothing, which, neatly enough, paid off a large part of his debts.
"I would advise anyone to put pen to paper if they're having a hard time," he says. "It's a very healing process, a kind of catharsis. It's like like sticking a hose up your arse until the shit comes out of your ears, your eyes, your mouth, your nose ... "
It's an arresting image, but Luke is already working on his next metaphor. "Writing your life story is like someone going in and sanding you down, filling the cracks and re-varnishing you ... " Funnily enough that is exactly what Luke Goss looks like, he looks re-varnished (Californian teak), rejuvenated, ready for anything. His needs are few. For all the hype, he insists he was "never as spendy as they made out". He has never seen the need for more than two cars; ideally he'd like a Bentley Convertible for "bumming around in" and a Ferrari for best, but for the minute he's making do with a Porsche. He flies a Piper Warrior single prop plane and enjoys the odd weekend in Paris with the misssus when he might sink a good bottle of red wine, but these days his chief stimulant is work.
He can wish Matt - now pursuing his music career in LA - well without feeling the pinch of comparison. "Now we have separate professions," he says, "the brother bit is back on track. I can just be a fan without feeling I'm doing myself down." Most importantly, perhaps, Luke can now remember his time with Bros without rancour or self-reproach: "Anyone who can get on a private Lear jet to a gig in a country you've never even been to before, knowing that you're going to land at the other end with a police escort and three limousines, and knowing that you will be whisked wherever you want in the most convenient and comfy fashion - anyone who can do that without feeling some kind of schoolboyish excitement is a fucking arsehole," he says, and you can't help warming to his honesty.
The arse and its functions are becoming something of a leitmotiv with Luke. Asked to sum up his new, positive-thinking philosophy, he thinks hard and shoots his black silk cuffs. "What I have learned," he says, in full grasshoppa mode, "can be said in one sentence. You don't have to be an arsehole to be successful."
But it helps, Luke, it surely helps. E
'Two Days, Nine Lives' will be released on 9 March.
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