Ooh! What a Lovely Pair: Our Story Read online

  I put my hands in my ears and started going, ‘La, la, la, la, la, can’t hear you.’

  I was furious. I quickly decided that actions spoke louder than words, and punched Dec in the chest.

  I was stunned, but I pulled myself together and came back with a move that Muhammad Ali would have been proud of, as I tried to knock Ant’s cap off. The problem was, I was so drunk that I only managed to catch the peak of it, which meant the only injury Ant sustained was a slightly wonky cap. Suddenly, an act of incandescent drunken rage had turned into a Chuckle Brothers sketch. Kim started shouting, ‘Break it up, break it up,’ and, of course, like all young lads, once we knew there was no chance of an actual fight, we started mouthing off to each other, doing what’s known as ‘giving it the big ’un’. Poor Kim was completely freaked out – she’d never been exposed to raw, graphic violence like this. Once the lift arrived at our floor, we all went to our respective rooms. I spent the next hour in mine trying to work out what the hell had just happened.

  The next morning – actually, later the same morning – I woke up after about an hour’s sleep, feeling remarkably good. Of course, that was because I was still drunk, but I was too drunk to know that at the time. I put on my Day-glo shirt and headed for make-up at the GMTV studio. When I arrived, Dec was already there, and the two of us sat side by side, not speaking to each other. Believe me when I say that a make-up room is one of the campest environments to try and maintain a moody, testosterone-charged silence in.

  By the time we had made our way to the set, both our hangovers were starting to kick in, and we were feeling truly awful. Over the years, a lot of people have speculated on the best cures for a hangover – a Bloody Mary, a fry-up, a strong black coffee – but I’m pretty sure no one’s ever suggested performing PJ and Duncan’s ‘Stuck On U’ live on GMTV in Torremolinos. It was the last thing in the world either of us wanted to do, and over that shared feeling of dread and embarrassment, we put our friendship back together. I turned to Dec just as the track was starting up and said, ‘Thank god we’re still pissed.’ We both started to laugh, did the song and, after that, we were mates again.

  And there you have it, that’s our only big fight. We did have an argument over a Who Wants to be a Millionaire? board game in the late nineties, but let’s not give you all the gossip at once.

  ‘Stuck On U’ was released in July 1995. We’d been away from the charts for almost six months and were genuinely worried people might not remember who we were. ‘Pop years’ are pretty much the same as dog years – six months in human time actually equals five ‘pop years’. We needn’t have worried though, the single got to number twelve, further proof that we still weren’t number-one material, but we were managing to stay out of the bargain bins – and that was good enough for us.

  In October, we released another single, ‘U Krazy Katz’. Despite our disastrous summer trip to Spain, Telstar’s promotional plans included another stab at world domination, and this time we were starting in Germany. At the time, it was considered the second biggest market in Europe for pop music, and Telstar seemed certain we’d do well there, sell millions of records and become superstars of German pop.

  A big German teen magazine had decided they wanted to do a feature on us and our home town of Newcastle. At the time, Newcastle United were doing well in Europe – which gives you some idea of how long ago this was – and there was a buzz about the city. They wanted to come over and do an article where we visited our old schools and the football stadium, and it sounded great. It meant invaluable exposure, some great PR and, most importantly, the chance to see our mams. Then, as always, came the twist: Telstar told us the magazine also wanted to do an ‘At home with PJ and Duncan’ photo shoot in the flat we shared in Newcastle. We calmly pointed out that we didn’t share a flat in Newcastle, but the record company didn’t seem too bothered – the whole thing was about the city, so we’d have to find a flat there and pretend we lived in it. When I look back now, I find it amazing we agreed to this, and that it was left to us to find a flat we could pretend we lived in. It was like they were trying to turn us into Britain’s first estate-agent pop stars.

  Finding a flat in Newcastle was going to be a very tall order and, eventually, we went to the only people we could rely on – our families. At the time, my mam’s boyfriend, Davey, who’s now my stepdad, had a flat he lived in with his son. Robbie and I talked Davey into letting us use it and I made him promise that he and Robbie would make themselves scarce when we went to do the shoot. The plan was to get there before the photographer and the journalist, give the place the onceover, litter it with a few personal possessions and make it look like we lived there. Of course, we never had time, and we all ended up arriving at once.

  It was a two-bedroom place, and we started by giving them the guided tour. I walked into Davey’s bedroom and said, ‘This is my room.’ It was quite obvious that was a lie. There was a wardrobe with suede jackets and Kicker boots in it, and the decor, from the bedspread to the wallpaper, said one thing: ‘I’m a middle-aged man and I last decorated this room in the 1970s.’ I could see they were already starting to smell a rat. Before they could ask me any questions, I said, ‘Come on, let’s get you a drink. Dec, put the kettle on.’

  I should add that the kitchen is not Dec’s natural habitat. As I’ve mentioned already, even beans on toast pose an insurmountable challenge to him. And don’t worry readers, that epic tale is now just a matter of pages away.

  I really think you’re overselling that beans-on-toast story… Before I could even make the tea, they said, ‘Where is your room, Dec?’ That was a question that spelt trouble, because I’d never been to the place in my life. Behind their backs, Ant was pointing to the left in an attempt to let me know which room was ‘mine’. It was like a French farce, with a couple of German pop journalists in the middle of it. I tried to act confident and said, ‘My room? It’s just down here. Follow me.’ I opened the door to ‘my’ room, and there it was. A He-Man bedspread, Airfix planes hanging from the ceiling and a toy castle on top of the chest of drawers. The journalist took one look at the room, one look at me, and said, ‘This is not your flat, is it?’

  We’d messed up France with the dance remix, and now we were never going to make it in Germany. After this fiasco, there’d be no more interviews, no more photo shoots and no more TV in the land of sausages and sauerkraut. It was another country off the list when it came to foreign promotion.

  We were over the moon.

  Chapter 15

  After October had seen ‘U Krazy Katz’ storm to number fifteen, November marked the release of Top Katz, the album, which was a whole different kettle of fish. That went to number eleven. Never worried about overexposure, we also released a third single, ‘Perfect’, and no, before you ask, it wasn’t a cover of the Fairground Attraction classic, it was another ballad. This one reached number sixteen, which showed we were nothing if not consistent.

  But releasing an album paled into insignificance next to our other big project. After living in each other’s pockets for five years, we decided to take the plunge and move in together. Telstar agreed to rent a flat for us, because apparently that’s what happens when you’re a pop star, and it seemed like a great idea to me and Dec – we were best mates and we were inseparable. Besides, Telstar told us they couldn’t afford two flats.

  One of the great things when we first moved down to London full time was the anonymity. It was almost as if people didn’t have a clue who we were. Our flat was in Fulham, and it’s not uncommon for there to be pop stars, actors or celebrities knocking about in West London, so we got a lot less hassle than we ever did anywhere else. Having said that, people were a lot less friendly. You couldn’t just walk into any pub and have a chat with the landlord (obviously we tested that theory with dozens of boozers, just to be on the safe side). The other problem was our accents, which were stronger back then. If you ordered a drink with a Geordie accent in West London, you’d often get situations li
ke this:

  ‘Can I have a Coke please?’

  ‘A cork?’

  ‘A Coke.’

  ‘A cork?’

  ‘A Coke.’

  ‘A cork?’

  ‘Forget it, I’ll have an orange juice.’

  I’m sorry; I can’t have that, that’s simply not true. You would never order soft drinks in a pub. The stuff about accents is right though.

  We were delighted to leave the hotel and get our own place. This was perhaps the one and only instance where on hearing the sentence ‘The record company thinks it’s a good idea’ we wholeheartedly agreed.

  The flat was great, but we didn’t have a lot of room. You could definitely have swung a cat in there, but I wouldn’t have tried to swing any bigger animals. One bedroom was much smaller than the other, so we tossed a coin to see who got the bigger room, which I still say was a very unfair way of deciding.

  Dec lost the toss…

  I was devastated. I still say it should’ve been best of three.

  The main thing is you’ve put it behind you.

  As soon as we moved into the flat, we decided to decorate it. To most people, that would have meant a trip to B&Q or Homebase, but not us. We went to the local newsagents, bought a copy of that week’s NME, which had three free posters in it, of Supergrass, Oasis and Black Grape, put one in the hall, one in the kitchen and one in the front room, then sat back, had a can of lager and admired our handiwork.

  I could’ve done with a fourth poster, because my room was a right state. It had pink curtains and two single beds pushed together. And people think pop stars live in luxury. These days, my life is very different and my bedroom is a million miles from that one – I’ve got three beds pushed together now and blinds – pink, obviously.

  That flat very quickly became an absolute tip and, before long, it was filthy. I don’t think we bought a single cleaning product in the entire year we were there. At one point, we started to wonder if Men Behaving Badly was a documentary based on our lives.

  Lisa would tidy up when she came round, but we didn’t even have a Hoover, so she would go round picking stuff up off the carpet – bits of food, fluff – I’m ashamed to say she was the human Hoover back then.

  We spent most of our time doing what any sane twenty-year-olds with their own flat in London would do – drinking cans of lager and watching our favourite TV shows. Tuesday night was always the high point, because that was The X-Files and The Fast Show, although we also watched the consumer-affairs programme, Watchdog. Give us a break; there was no such thing as satellite TV in those days, okay? One week, Watchdog did an item about sofas that broke fire regulations. Lynne Faulds Wood, the presenter, explained that if a sofa didn’t have a particular tag, then it wasn’t flame retardant and that made it a fire hazard. We both got up off the sofa – it took something special to make that happen – and immediately checked the sofa. There was no tag: we were living with a fire hazard. This was a serious issue, so serious, in fact, that it took almost thirty seconds for us to order another takeaway and forget all about it.

  We survived almost exclusively on takeaways in that flat, although we weren’t complete idiots when it came to food. We still managed to maintain a strict and balanced diet. It went like this: curry, Chinese, pizza, fish and chips, then curry, Chinese – you get the picture. I once ate so much I was physically sick. That’s how good life was back then. Our new-found independence did have one other profound effect on our lives. We put on two stone each.

  Eating so much junk food was the closest we got to an Elvis phase and, if you look at photos of us from around that time, well, let’s just say we were both carrying a bit of extra timber, which wasn’t good news, because chubby pop stars sell even fewer records than skinny ones. Having said that, we didn’t spend all our time in the flat. Hey, we were two young lads living in swinging nineties Britpop London, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, so we decided to go out into the big bad world and get stuck in. ‘Getting stuck in’ mainly involved going to an old mans’ pub at the end of our road. It was called the Prince of Wales, was run by Irish Vince, and had regulars like Chinese Pete. Not everyone who drank there had their nationality at the front of their names – we weren’t English Ant and English Dec – but for some people it just seemed fitting.

  We loved the Prince of Wales. It was full of men in their forties and fifties. They had no idea who we were, and it was a beer-serving, salty snack-selling slice of heaven. Chinese Pete ran the chicken and rib takeaway next door, which meant our balanced diet now included a fifth dish to fall back on. It wasn’t long before we were invited to lock-ins, where Chinese Pete would pop next door and bring loads of chicken back to the pub. So we’d sit in the pub with a load of middle-aged men, eating free chicken and ribs. To borrow a catchphrase from our favourite TV show of the time, ‘We were very, very drunk.’

  It might sound like fun, but life in the new flat wasn’t always a bed of roses. Let’s just say there was an inevitable period of adjustment.

  Too right there was – Dec was impossible to live with at first, mainly because he’s the least domesticated man in the history of western civilization. There are tribes living in mud huts on the Amazon who know more about housework than Declan Donnelly. For a start, he would pee all over the toilet seat, and he’d leave the lid off the margarine.

  Not the lid off the margarine? I’m no better than an animal.

  His clothes would pile up in the corner of his room, and I had to show him how to do everything, from how to work the washing machine, to – and this is no lie – how to wash up. I mean, how do you get through the first twenty years of your life without being able to wash up?

  Well, I think I can be excused for the first five years – you don’t let toddlers wash up – and then, well, I quickly worked out that I had six brothers and sisters and a mum who would get there before me.

  Even the washing-up pales into insignificance compared to the first time Dec tried to ‘cook’ beans on toast. I think most people reading this book will agree it’s not a complicated recipe. In fact, it’s not even a recipe but, to the galloping gourmet here, it was a major project. I walked into the kitchen one night and, straight away, I was met with a sight that shocked me – Dec had managed to open a tin of beans and get them into a pan without losing any of his limbs which, by his standards, was like cooking a six-course meal on top of Mount Everest. But then he looked at me, then looked at the beans and uttered the immortal words, ‘What do I do with these?’ A few suggestions sprang to mind, but I won’t repeat them in print, so I told him to just heat them up and put them on the toast. He looked at me as if I’d just suggested rubbing them into his hair, and then he said, ‘Don’t be stupid, you’ve got to cook them properly – how will I know when they’re cooked through? I don’t want to catch salmonella…’ I tried to stay calm and told him the clue was in the title – they were BAKED Beans, they’d already been cooked and he was just warming them up, but he wasn’t having any of it. He took one more look at the pan and made a big decision.

  I rang my sister and asked her how to cook beans on toast. She told me exactly the same thing Ant had. Much to Ant’s annoyance, I decided to believe her, and it’s been my signature dish ever since. I know what you’re thinking, lady readers: I’m a real catch, aren’t I?

  Of course, while we were living in the flat, one constant remained – we were out and about promoting our records, and the record company had a whole new way to push our music on to an unsuspecting public: competitions. There’d be ‘Win a signed CD’, ‘Win a telephone call’ or, by far the worst, ‘Win lunch with PJ and Duncan’. They would be run by magazines like Just 17 or Smash Hits, and would always strike fear and dread into our hearts. It’s true what they say: there really is no such thing as a free lunch. They were some of the most painful meals of my life, and I’ve had breakfast with Terry from East 17.

  The lunches were always in London, at Planet Hollywood or the Hard Rock Café, basic
ally anywhere that served burgers, chips and fizzy drinks – me and Dec insisted on it. The winning fan would turn up, usually very nervous, with a friend there for moral support, and it would be up to us to make conversation. It was like a two-course version of the girls in my mam’s kitchen. We’d have to make all the running, so we’d open with the very original question, ‘How are you?’, followed by the classic ‘Which school do you go to?’ The waiter would come over to take our order and we’d always say, ‘No starters, let’s skip straight to the mains, shall we?’ We were determined to get in and out as quickly as possible.

  There was one exception though, a lunch we had with two fans who weren’t nervous at all, mainly because they didn’t give a toss about PJ and Duncan. This girl had been bought lunch with us by her dad at a charity auction. She turned up at Planet Hollywood with her friend and, pretty much immediately, we could tell she really wasn’t bothered. They looked even more bored than we did. I was tempted to say, ‘Look, you’re both clearly not arsed and we’d rather be somewhere else, shall we just call it a day?’, but we stuck it out to the bitter end, all the way through the ice-cream sundaes.

  Away from the embarrassment of lunch with fans, we found sanctuary in our flat in Fulham. We kept ourselves to ourselves and didn’t really know any of our neighbours, apart from an Australian bloke who lived upstairs. His name? Peter Andre. These days he may be better known as Jordan’s one-time other half but, back then, he was a fellow pop star and, apart from the deafeningly loud R’n’B he used to play, Peter was the perfect neighbour. We’d often bump into him in the foyer of an evening – he’d be off to the gym for a swim and a workout and we’d be on our way to the Prince of Wales for eight pints and a bucketload of free meat. Looking back, that was another warning sign we weren’t cut out for pop stardom. Peter was working out to keep his six-pack stomach in shape, while all we could think about was Chinese Pete’s six-pack of chicken wings. The fact that the record company put us in a flat with a gym was a hint that we never really took.