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The Guardian
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘If Jesus and Buddha had our work schedule, they'd have fallen out too': boyband Five on bullying, Britney and their blockbuster return
In September 1998, amid a rocketing pop career that would end up with every one of their 11 singles reaching the UK Top 10, British boyband Five went missing. They were due to visit the US, where the lascivious When the Lights Go Out had got huge, but Five – Ritchie Neville (curtains), Scott Robinson (spiky hair), Abz Love (hats), Sean Conlon (baby-faced), and Jason 'J' Brown (eyebrow ring) – had other ideas. 'We decided we wanted a couple of days off,' says Scott, now without spikes and sporting a thick salt-and-pepper beard. 'So we booked our own flights back to the UK.' Rather than visit family like everyone else, J returned to the band's shared house in Surrey. 'There were fans camping outside, literally in tents on the little lawn,' he says, shaking his shaved head, now minus the eyebrow ring. 'We needed to decompress – we were losing our minds. But all I had was people shouting through the letterbox at me for three days.' Whenever he wanted food he had to crawl from the living room to the kitchen on his stomach. 'Then they started turning against me: 'We know you're in there! We bought your album! You owe us!'' It was an intense time, and of all the returning bands from pop's Y2K zenith, Five seemed the least likely to reform with their original lineup. By the release of 2001's Let's Dance, the band's third and final UK No 1 single (after 1999's effervescent Keep on Movin' and 2000's Queen collaboration We Will Rock You), Sean had left, depressed and exhausted. With talk of mental health and duty of care nonexistent, the rest of the band were told Sean had glandular fever, and he was replaced in the song's video by a cardboard cutout. Scott was also at breaking point, having recently pinned their label boss Richard Griffiths against a wall. Rumours swirled of physical fights backstage at ITV show CD:UK, and big studio bust-ups. Scott and Sean both accused J of bullying. In the recent BBC documentary Boybands Forever, Ritchie, an emotional Scott and a haunted-looking Sean made being in Five sound like torture. For a while they pushed the limits of numeracy, retaining their name as the lineup went down to four, then three. The trio version of Five – Scott (who sometimes also performed as 'a one-man Five'), Ritchie and Sean – even released an album, 2022's Time, and toured the nostalgia circuit. Now, on a mild spring day, under a wooden gazebo in the garden of a west London pub, everyone's acting as if nothing happened. Suspiciously white teeth glisten and banter fills the air like Lynx. A 25-date arena tour is planned for later this year. 'When I get back in the room with these dudes,' J says, 'that real youthfulness is still there in all of us.' As drinks are delivered, I ask how on earth this reunion happened. 'This is the first time we've all been truly aligned,' says Sean, now a youthful 43. 'Where it just feels right.' They met up at a rented house just outside Birmingham towards the end of 2023. Apparently, nothing about reuniting was on the table. 'It was about being friends again,' Scott says. 'Reconnecting.' Some people, I say, may assume it was also about the money. 'Absolute bullshit,' says Ritchie, his curtains drawn up into a small mohawk. 'If we wanted a cash grab we would have done it 15 years ago. By going back into the public domain as the five of us and confronting our fears, our demons, both individually and collectively, it's a genuine healing process.' Abz, wearing a hat emblazoned with the word 'icon', picks up the theme: 'This is bigger than us. We've all had our moments, absolutely, but it has to happen. There's nothing stopping this.' To prove his point, he says he'd do the tour for nothing. 'That's on record!' Scott says, laughing. 'We hadn't been in the same room for 20-odd years,' continues Ritchie, who briefly emigrated to Australia after the band fell apart. Back then, he says, he was 'living like a ghost. I didn't want to be Rich from Five any more, I just wanted to be Rich from Birmingham.' An intriguing mix of new-age deep thinker and Hugo Boss-clad Alan Partridge, Ritchie quickly understood that he couldn't outrun his past. 'I heard Dave Grohl talking about how, after Kurt passed away, he'd gone to some mountains in Ireland to get his head together,' he explains. 'He saw this young Irish lad walking along wearing a T-shirt with Kurt Cobain's face on it, and he was like, 'I'm never going to escape it, I need to go back and face the music.' That's how Foo Fighters were born.' Five, he says, are 'kind of similar: you try to resist it, and it just persists. Fortunately or unfortunately, what we did was big and successful enough that we can't escape it, and we have embraced it.' The reunion was 'very beautiful', Sean says. 'I can speak for myself and J: we were really close – we shared a room the first time around – so to have that many years apart, not speaking, was like this massive dark cloud.' He holds out his hands, as if cradling it, but the others are fooling around. 'I'm holding a dark cloud, actually!' he says, trying to bring order. 'Hold on to it, Sean!' laughs Abz. 'Then let it rain.' Sean was only 15 when he left home and moved into the group's riotous shared house in Surrey. J was 23. During their appearance on ITV series The Big Reunion in 2012, Sean revealed that J once told him he had hated him from the moment he first heard him sing. J says he wasn't aware at the time that Sean and Scott saw his behaviour as bullying. 'When I was scared, I'd peacock and puff my chest out and shout loud,' he says, and he was scared most of the time. 'Sometimes it would be taken as funny. But I was older, I was physically bigger, so if I'm stood there in front of these guys screaming, then younger dudes are going to feel overwhelmed. I realise why that was taken the way it was.' 'We've not brushed things under the carpet,' Sean continues, looking at J. 'We didn't get in a room and pretend nothing's happened. We're known for being the rowdy Five, but we're actually five sensitive souls. We speak very openly with each other.' Increasingly famous, perpetually exhausted and innately rebellious, Five were never built to last. Created in 1997 by father and son management duo Bob and Chris Herbert – who had auditioned, nurtured and then lost the Spice Girls to rival managers – and signed by Simon Cowell, the plan was to create the antithesis of sensibly attired Irish stool-botherers Boyzone – and, later, Westlife. 'Boyzone were going to bring you a bunch of flowers and Five were going to fuck you against a wall down the side alley,' Chris Herbert told me in 2023. 'We were handpicked to be a harder-edged band,' says Ritchie. 'They literally said 'just be yourselves'.' J smiles: 'They got a little bit more than they bargained for.' There was rivalry with Westlife, who were also A&R-ed by Cowell: 'We got Westlife so drunk once,' Ritchie says, 'they were running as fast as they could into a brick wall.' They were also terrible neighbours, as evidenced by their appearance on ITV's Neighbours from Hell. One night, after a launch party for unlikely label-mates Wu-Tang Clan, they returned home, having had 'a few sherbets', and decided to put up a 3ft poster of the rappers on the living room wall, using a pan for a hammer. 'In a terrace house,' J says. 'With the neighbours next door. With a baby.' They're adamant that parts of their reputation have been exaggerated ('We weren't fighting every day,' sighs Ritchie) and they were more prone to heated arguments than physical fights. 'I did kick Rich in his arse once,' J says, 'and felt really bad as soon as I did it.' So bad, in fact, that he bought Ritchie a present to say sorry. 'His mum called my mum and said, 'You need to have a word with your son, he's run up and booted my Rich right in his backside.'' Everyone laughs. 'None of us five have ever stood and swung or thrown a punch at each other,' J continues. 'That's what's got to me over the years, reading a lot of the stuff. Yes, there were people screaming. Scott and I used to be in each other's faces, because I had a temper. We used to butt heads.' 'I'd never let anyone know I was feeling intimidated,' Scott says. 'If J was shouting at me, I'd go, 'Come on then.'' 'Put it this way,' Ritchie says, 'if you put Jesus and Buddha in a room and gave them the work schedule that we had, I guarantee they'd fall out.' While their British contemporaries were launched first in Europe, Five were immediately pitched as a global act. 'Backstreet Boys had hit massively in the States,' says Ritchie, 'so while we were releasing our first single, Clive Davis' – the industry legend behind dozens of stars from Janis Joplin to Alicia Keys – 'signed us in America. We tried to break the whole world in two years.' Abz, the quietest of the bunch, compares working in Japan to Sofia Coppola's film Lost in Translation: 'The loneliness, that hotel nothingness.' America was briefly theirs for the taking. When the Lights Go Out was a hit, they had their own Disney special and Cowell was lining them up with big-time producers and songwriters. While they all concede that Cowell was an amazing A&R, he was also what Ritchie calls 'a proper winker'. Winker? 'He had it down to a fine art,' J explains. 'In meetings, there would be a brief moment where if the other four weren't looking, he'd shoot you a quick wink.' The chosen member would then assume they were the special one. 'That's what it was saying: 'You're my boy,'' continues Ritchie. 'You'd get outside and go, 'How many winks did you get?'' You sense the winks may have dried up after Five were offered the chance to record … Baby One More Time before Britney Spears, but instead called what became one of the biggest pop songs of all time 'fucking wank' in front of its creator, Max Martin. They also turned down an early version of Bye Bye Bye, which later helped 'NSync compete with Backstreet Boys. 'We would have done it in a different way,' J says of the Britney classic, 'but it just wasn't our thing. It didn't feel right.' Scott senses an opportunity for some banter: 'Or in the exact same way but with Rich in a skirt.' He chuckles, imagining a shot-for-shot remake of the video. Ritchie has clearly heard this line before. 'Why is it always me in a skirt?' he harrumphs. 'You've got pretty legs,' J concludes. Sean sits quietly, waiting for the banter bus to pull over. I tell him he seems much more confident now. 'I'm actually here this time,' he says, smiling. 'Before, I was overwhelmed. I had too much emotion, too much stimulation, and I just couldn't process it. I was 15.' He had assumed that everyone else in pop was happy, that they knew what they were doing, that they could handle it. He didn't realise the rest of his own band often felt the same way he did. 'I felt very isolated – I didn't feel like [they] were going through that. I felt like I was the only one. The bond was there [between us], and the deep love, but not the communication.' Having been through the boyband wringer, they 'resonate' with acts that have arrived in their wake. Years ago at a festival, Ritchie bumped into Richard Griffiths, who was then managing One Direction. 'I said, 'How do they still look fresh?' We always looked absolutely done in,' Ritchie says. 'He went, 'Well, we've learned from your generation of bands how far you can push people.'' Griffiths' company Modest! now manages Five. 'I keep complaining to [them], saying can we work more, can we do more,' says J. That doesn't include new music, though, at least not yet. 'Never say never,' they say, but the focus is on the tour. Talk turns to the death of Liam Payne. While Scott says they share a history as boyband members, Sean is clear that they didn't know him and to compare the two situations would be 'superficial'. He says he's not sure about the suggestion there should be a minimum age limit for prospective pop band members. 'Every child is different. My mum and dad had to make a judgment call on whether I did it and I would never change it in a million years. I was meant to go through it and that's why I'm here now.' As they finish their drinks, Ritchie suddenly spots a robin. 'That's Derek,' he says. I laugh, thinking he's just named it randomly. 'I'm not even joking, it's Derek. That's my dead stepfather.' Suddenly, in unison, the band start singing, before holding up their glasses: 'Cheers, Derek!' They seem happy back in their Five bubble; older and wiser, but still teenagers somehow. 'All I ever wanted was to be happy in this formation of Five,' Scott says. 'I've already got that and we haven't stepped on stage yet. So when we're doing a promo day, I'm excited that I'm going to see the boys.' 'We're enjoying ourselves,' says Sean, a man reborn. 'We're having the time of our lives.' Five's UK and Ireland tour begins 29 October at Utilita Arena, Cardiff
The Independent
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Five on Nineties boyband stardom: ‘It doesn't matter how many No 1s you get, it ain't worth that'
Summer 1998: Five are top of the album charts and have just released the video for their new single ' Everybody Get Up '. In it, pupils rebel against a boring exam; they whack their rulers in unison against desks to summon the five bad boys every teacher and mother of girls should be terrified of. 'Ha ha!' Jason 'J' Brown laughs as he leads the boys in, wearing a hat to show he's the eldest. Spiky-haired, chain-wearing Abz Love, the naughtiest one, turns off the power to the room. Then in comes the blond one, Ritchie Neville, along with gobby Scott Robinson (who throws an evil little grin to the other lads) and baby-faced Sean Conlon (obviously the sensitive one). Each has a different role within Britain's biggest new boyband, but their joint identity has been crafted to appeal to teen girls for whom the other boybands seem too wet, too girly. Three years and 11 Top 10 singles later, it will all be over. Today, the grown adult members of boyband Five are running an impromptu massage parlour. Scott stands over a seated and blissed-out Ritchie, giving his shoulders a kneading. This has piqued the interest of Abz, who wants in on the action; Scott dutifully obliges. J and Sean watch on amused. 'We don't need more stress,' Scott will say, almost sternly, in his gruff Essex accent in a few minutes' time. Despite their mischievous image, this was a very stressed-out boyband – ill, in fact, from the 24/7 pressurised schedule of travelling the world promoting hits like the optimistic jam ' Keep on Movin' ' and rap-rock Queen collaboration cover ' We Will Rock You ' to insatiable fans. If they're doing this again as a manband, it has to be different. They're no longer in their teens, but their forties – now in age-appropriate smart-casual black outfits (plus what feels like emotional armour in the form of immovable dark sunglasses for Abz). As Sean puts it, 'We've got communication now; before it was all lad banter.' Just a few months ago, I watched Five members in the recent BBC docu-series Boybands Forever, which chronicled the dark side of being in a 1990s British boyband. It's odd, given Scott's tears on the show over his appalling experience of fame, to have them here sitting around a boardroom table in an office just off Oxford Street, grinning and cracking jokes. There's a boyish hyperactivity in the air, a distinct disbelief that all five of them are in the same room again to promote their band's reunion tour. Before I can ask my first proper question, conversation descends into comparing notes on whose fault it was that they broke up in 2001. A neutral statement at the time gently said the band could 'no longer do justice' to their fans or each other. In reality, they were all having a mental health crisis on some level or another. In Boybands Forever, the cause of the split is wrongly framed as being a result of Scott's breakdown, though Scott says he is unbothered by the edit because he's always felt deeply responsible for the breakup. Sean leans over the table to more clearly face Scott, who is sitting next to him, and tells him that that's crazy, because he has always carried the blame on his shoulders. 'I was the first one to fall,' Sean insists. 'When we did [chart-topping 2001 single] 'Let's Dance', we were at the beginning of the promotion of the album [Kingsize] and it's not an ideal time to have a breakdown from the record company's point of view at all.' They all laugh grimly. Sean remembers it quite vividly. 'J came up to me and he said, 'You're not right mate. I really think you need to get some help.' I don't want to get emotional…' his eyes start to water during this retelling, and Scott gives him a thumping pat on the back. After that intervention, Sean had a brief break from the band to get counselling and their team told the world that he was resting up from glandular fever. The band had to film the 'Let's Dance' video without him; a cardboard cut-out of Sean bobs up and down in the background. Shortly after this, while Sean was absent, Scott marched into the record label's office and got into an escalating physical fight with one of their team who refused to let him quit the band, pinning him against a desk. Simon Cowell had to intervene, nearly punching Scott. Following that was a meeting between Scott and the band while they were getting ready for a Top of the Pops performance; Scott had planned to tell his friends and bandmates he was going to leave. 'You came in and lost the plot, crying your eyes out – I mean that weeping where someone can't actually speak,' Ritchie says to Scott, performing the heaviness of those sobs. 'Me and J went out in the corridor and I said, 'It's done, ain't it?' Because nothing is worth that, it doesn't matter how many No 1s you get, it ain't worth that.' But all five of them were emotionally and mentally suffering. 'We should have had six months off,' says Ritchie. It's a shame, J adds, that the industry didn't recognise they were struggling and support a hiatus; if they had, they might have been able to have a much longer career. 'It's taken us 25 years – I'm not even joking – literally 25 years to be able to even get my head around it,' adds Ritchie. 'It's almost like we've been traumatised,' says Sean, as if coming out of a daze. 'No, we are traumatised,' says Ritchie, with a look directly at me. What they're traumatised from is worth examining. Their young lives changed overnight in 1997 after they successfully auditioned in an open-casting call for a boyband with 'attitude and edge'. They were signed by Simon Cowell and RCA there and then. Their eclectic pop sound was a new blend of US hip hop, provided by rappers J and Abz, and spikier boyband pop, crooned and sung by the other three. They were thrown together to live in the same house by their management, but their ages meant that Sean, the youngest at just 15, was cohabiting with J, who was about to turn 21. ('So that gives you a gauge of the age [we were] and what was going on in the house – and we kind of ran riot…' J says ominously, which I assume means casual sex and partying.) Five were instantly famous, their debut album not just No 1 in the UK but seriously successful on a global scale. Fans camped out all around the madhouse, so the band felt constantly observed; they'd often do an 'SAS job' and pretend to be out, just creeping around in the dark to get some 'mental headspace', says Richie. Enjoy unlimited access to 100 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music Sign up now for a 30-day free trial It sounds like the female attention warped their young minds with paranoia (bar Abz, who grins like a sated cat about the never-ending line of girls: 'It was good to me, and I enjoyed the process'). At the very start, the rest of them loved it, too. But it quickly became tiresome when they craved normal life, without being mobbed by fans; in a pre-internet era, they couldn't even buy their family gifts for Christmas. 'It made me feel really weird because I'd think all the other people in the street were thinking, 'Look at this idiot, who does he think he is?'' J says. Sean agrees, 'You got scared that people thought you were arrogant.' Then Ritchie adds about the touching and grabbing: 'I didn't know if somebody was overstepping – obviously certain boundaries, I did – but if somebody's taking the p***, I didn't have a good gauge of what that was.' I went through the whole [experience] with chronic insomnia, from about three months after it all kicked off Five's Jason 'J' Brown I see how Scott became the 'main one' in Five's episode of the BBC series. He's clearly the storyteller of the group, and goes into great detail recalling those incidents that forever altered his psyche. There was the occasion Five were in a Tokyo hotel after mini-disc players had just gone on the market. Scott desperately wanted one, as well as the experience of going into a shop with his own money and choosing it. He told the two security guards outside his hotel door that he was popping out to buy one but they said he had to be accompanied by five bodyguards. Fans mobbed him and the bodyguards almost immediately, ripping at their clothes. 'I go into the shop and I'm looking for about a minute and then the fans, they're not trying to be rude, they're not trying to break things, but they're so excited that they broke the shop windows to get to me. And the shopkeeper went, 'Just take it, just take it!' So I didn't pay for it, and then I cried in my room because I had stolen this thing. But I had been told to steal it. And I just sat there and I cried. And I went, 'It's not the one I wanted.' I cried myself to sleep.' They'd constantly wake up and not know which continent they were on, having to look out the hotel or car window for clues. J in particular suffered with this. 'I went through the whole [experience] with chronic insomnia, from about three months after it all kicked off,' he remembers. 'Most nights I was getting maximum three-and-a-half-hours' sleep. Sometimes I'd go four or five days on an hour and a half, and then have to get up at five in the morning and film a new video.' It had a diabolical compounding impact on his mental, emotional and physical health. The band is keen to impress on me that it wasn't all doom and gloom; there were moments in this slog that shone through, including No 1 singles and playing Rock in Rio to an audience of half a million people. The subtext seems to be that the joy came from the band's togetherness, away from the individual members feeling alone in the madness. After the band broke up, Scott got married to his partner the very next day, a straight life swap for stability with his wife and future family. The others fell apart without that structure. 'Jesus, straight after the band, for three years I was sat in a living room, frozen, drinking too much, completely lost,' says Ritchie. 'I used to say, 'I feel like I'm a rowing boat in the sea with no oars or sail.'' Sean compares their situation to being in early retirement. 'I had that at 20 years of age: I had some money in the bank and enough not to work,' he says. 'In your mind there was no Everest, because whatever I do it's not going to be bigger or better than Five. And you've still got an ego and want success at that age, so it's a really troubling, conflicted time.' What was unique about Abz's situation is that he was the only one who didn't want the band to end. His turbulent life after the split is well documented in the media: drug addiction, isolation and paying for friends; bankruptcy; suicidal ideation; going cold turkey. 'I thought we went hard in the band – I went rock and roller after the band… that life just pulled me in,' he says. Five tried to reunite a few times to varying degrees of success. In 2020, when Scott, Ritchie and Sean got back together and went on This Morning, viewers made predictable jokes like, 'They should change their name to Three.' Clearly, it needed to be a cultural moment like this, in which, they collectively insist, no one is being dragged along, more reluctant than the others; they're all hungry for a proper second chance. We internalised that attitude, thinking, 'Oh, we're not really doing anything meaningful, it's not impacting anyone's life, it doesn't really mean anything, it's not real music.' Five's Sean Conlon It wasn't until they were approached by Louis Theroux's production company to make Boybands Forever that they all started to consider what a reunion could look like. Scott booked an Airbnb and the members met, hung out, shared some drinks and laughs, and decided the time was right. Scott reached out to Simon Cowell about the physical scuffle (no hard feelings there, he insists) and much to their amusement, the guy at the label that Scott fought with, Rob Wicks, is now their new manager. Abz has been more reserved for most of our interview, content to let the others speak, but when he is finally nudged into talking he focuses on the positive, the present. 'What I feel like I want to say is how proud I am of these guys and how brave they are to put themselves into this environment again,' he says in his strong London accent. They've reassessed their music – the same music they used to apologise for in the pub when men approached them to ask, 'Aren't you those guys from that boyband?' or began singing 'Keep on Movin'' to them. 'The industry's attitude towards this 90s era of pop was, 'It's bubblegum pop, it's not going to last, it's superficial,' especially after the wave of indie bands before that,' explains Sean. 'We internalised that attitude, too, thinking, 'Oh, we're not really doing anything meaningful, it's not impacting anyone's life, it doesn't really mean anything, it's not real music.' It also ties back to why we were so overworked and stressed – because of that mindset. The focus was on making as much money as possible and moving as quickly as we could. At the time, no one would have expected that, 25 years later, there would still be interest in the band and our music.' Now any personal embarrassment over their music has gone; all say they love it and find it joyful and unique. It's made them view their fans in a completely different way as well. 'I can see that the fans are really genuine, it did touch them,' Sean adds. 'Because I used to be like, 'Why are they going mad about that song when it's not that great?'' Unless Calvin Harris calls them up and asks if they want to make a 'summer banger', they're probably not going to make new music. 'A lot of times, people don't want that, do they?' says J, pragmatically. 'They want to hear all the bangers they remember.' The focus is entirely on having the most fun as possible at reunion shows they promise will be like a giant school disco. 'It's about the hits, the tour, reconnecting,' lists Sean. Then Scott says, unironically, 'Keep on Movin'.' One of them adds, 'Tickets out now.' It's been nearly a quarter of a century but they still remember the game that the pop machine requires – this time they're prepared to play it.
