BRIAN MOUTHS OFF! (2001)

"Mel C is an idiot and Richard Ashcroft makes me want to cut my wrists"

When Brian Harvey admitted to taking ecstasy, questions were asked in the House. Four years on, the ex-East 17 front man still hasn't learned to watch his words.

Jessica Taylor never made it to the final five in ITV's Popstars series, though she did scramble into the last 10. During the staged press conference with which the docusoap intended to educate the wannabes in the manipulative ways of the media, poor Jessica admitted having once smoked a joint. And, boy, did the judges steam into her. One spliff could easily have become a full-on drugs habit as far as the tabloids are concerned, they sternly pointed out.

Out in the real Britain, you'd be struggling to find a 21-year-old who hadn't puffed on a reefer at least once - take, for instance, the three lads out of S Club 7, cautioned this week for smoking dope in the street. The pastel-coloured alternative universe of Popstars is lucky it never had to cope with Brian Harvey. Despite a successful career as the lead singer in roughneck boy band East 17, he would never have made it past the first hurdle: his mouth is far too big - and he's got a terrible habit of putting his foot in it.

Ask him about Popstars winners Hear'Say. "You can see they're all trained - say this, say that," he rages. "Sit in a house, don't use the phone, don't tell no one where you live. What is it - prison? It's pathetic. It's rubbish."

Harvey, on the verge of a solo comeback, singing US-style R&B, should know. He went through the pop mill with East 17, as their fusion of soul and rap earned them 12 top-10 hits in six years, with songs such as House of Love, Hold My Body Tight and It's All Over. Tony Mortimer, East 17's songwriter, even won an Ivor Novello award. Then in January 1997, during a drama that may have prompted the Popstars drugs paranoia, Harvey became the most notorious pop star in Britain when he told a radio interviewer he had once taken 12 ecstasy tablets and driven home. "If it makes you feel better, and gives you something to do at the weekend, and you go out and have a good time, I don't see why not, 'cos life's too short," he said.

Coming just a year after the highly publicised death of teenager Leah Betts, who died after taking an ecstasy tablet at home during her 18th birthday party, these comments provoked an extraordinary reaction. Fourteen radio stations around the country banned East 17 records, TV interviews were pulled, there were questions in the House of Commons. Even John Major weighed in, saying: "I regard any comments of that sort as wholly wrong."

East 17 sacked their singer. "Barmy Brian has virtually destroyed us," the band wrote in an open letter to the Sun. "It might as well have been me that gave Leah Betts the pill that killed her," says Harvey now. The interview cost him his career - though Mortimer himself had made similar comments in an interview with the Guardian Guide just weeks earlier. "If someone takes an E they're increasing their love, and that can only be a good thing," Mortimer had said.

Couple this with a headline-grabbing relationship with cocaine-addict former EastEnder Danniella Westbrook (the pair are still friends, though Harvey is married to former East 17 dancer Natasha Goldman) and a very public court case after an altercation outside a nightclub with two paparazzi photographers (Harvey won), and you would have to conclude that the man has a nose for trouble like Danniella has a nose for, well ... At London's swish Soho House members club, aggressively puffing on a Marlboro Light, an unshaven, blond-cropped and chirpily likeable Brian Harvey still hasn't learnt to keep his mouth shut. "The pop thing is going from bad to worse," he fumes. Mel C? "I think she's an idiot."

Geri Halliwell? "So you've got a few quid. Fucking shut up." Indie-rock soloist Richard Ashcroft? "You're making me wanna cut my wrists, mate." He claims that East 17 manager Tom Watkins, the high-camp impresario behind Bros and the Pet Shop Boys, set him up to fall over the ecstasy comments and he threatens, "I'd probably lay into him" if they met again. But a listen to the original interview with IRN reporter Anthony Simon indicates that Harvey talked himself into his own career grave. "All I said was, 'Have you read the comments Tony Mortimer's made - what do you make of that?' " says Simon now. "His response was, 'I've got to be careful what I say here, haven't I?' Then he proceeded to go off on one."

This is Harvey's second pop comeback - three members of East 17, without Tony Mortimer, made a doomed attempt in 1998, reaching number two with the single Each Time and releasing an album before being dropped by Telstar. So no wonder he's bitter. "Manufactured bands are a waste of time," Harvey rants on. "It's so corny. It's trying to have the public's pants down." Which might seem a bit rich coming from the lead singer of one of Britain's biggest-ever boy bands. East 17 were hardly the Sex Pistols. But Harvey begs to differ. "We were all mates. We pulled ourselves together. We went to school together. We wrote our own songs," he says. "There was no way we were going to be told what to wear, how to dress, how to act, what we could say."

East 17 always behaved more like a rock band than a boy band; during their comeback they spent one radio interview smoking extra-strong "skunk" weed. Harvey spent his teens going to raves - that's where he took all those Es. It's hardly Westlife.

Growing up with his single mother on London's rougher fringes - Tottenham and Walthamstow included - Harvey first blagged his way into a studio session that talented fellow local Tony Mortimer had arranged. Together with the other two E17-ers, John Hendy and Terry Coldwell - the pair who stood at the back making inexplicable hand movements - he and Mortimer had hung around a row of derelict East London shops called the Bosh. Somehow Mortimer got a tape of three of his songs to Tom Watkins. Somehow they'd ended up in Watkins's palatial London home, being told they could become famous. "As far as I was concerned, I'd never met a gay person before in my life," Harvey recalls. "He's very gay. I'm 16. I went to his house and I'm just giggling." But Watkins talked business sense. "I thought to myself, 'This geezer's all right.'"

London Records put up the money for the three songs to be properly recorded. Next thing the four likely lads knew, they'd recorded an album and it had gone straight to number one. The hits kept coming. There was another hit album. The good times rolled. The only problem was, while Tony Mortimer, as songwriter, was rolling in cash, the other three weren't quite as wealthy. Harvey tells a story that vividly illustrates this contrast. He describes the three non-writing members of East 17 leaning on the back ledge of the Toyota people-carrier they used to travel in, looking enviously at the car cruising behind - a gleaming new Mitsubishi jeep with glittering 18-inch-rim alloy wheels, driven by its proud owner, Tony Mortimer. "I looked at John, 'He's a cunt, isn't he?' And we was laughing. 'It must be nice,' and we was, 'Yeah ...'"

Five or six years down the line, you can still hear the yearning in his voice. So did he make any money? "I'm talking every bit of money that's ever come through, about a mil. Whenever I got a big lump, I made sure I put most of it down on me flat or me house. If it was £15,000, I would put five in me bank account and the other 10 I would put on that."

According to Harvey, the underlying reason why he was sacked from East 17 is the same reason we're here now: because he didn't really want to do boy-band pop any more, he wanted to do R&B. "What did Tom [Watkins] tell me? 'No one likes white people doing black people's music, babe.'" Of course, Harvey didn't help matters by not turning up for appearances, threatening to resign and declaring on stage at Sheffield Arena to a stunned teenage audience: "I've never been on stage so out of my face." However, on this occasion, the Svengali was to be proved wrong, and the wayward singer right. The syncopated, staccato sound of futuristic American soul has long since taken over both British and US pop charts. When E17 - they slimmed from "East" 17 to an irony-free "E17" for the comeback - returned, they were already heading towards a Stateside sound.

Last autumn Harvey guested with the UK garage act Truesteppers - whose other star guest vocalists have included Victoria Beckham. Now he has travelled even further down that route, recruiting American producer Sprague Williams, who worked with the American vocal R&B act Blackstreet, and the rapper Lie (from the notorious Los Angeles rap label Death Row, which also housed Snoop Doggy Dogg) for a sound that is convincingly jerky in its rhythms and heavy in its bass. "I've just gone in the direction where I feel more comfortable. The market has changed. You can be more credible now."

His single Straight Up No Bends is a pop-R&B compromise, but sample tracks from his forthcoming album, such as the lively Alone - full of harmonic, dramatic choruses - and the chintzy ballad Solo ("Solo as in going solo, Solo as in So Low"), have more in common with teen-friendly R&B acts like Dru Hill than Westlife. There's even a song about an internet romance, called Love on the Line ("It just seemed like the trendy thing to do"). And a cheeky bad-boy personality like his is much more likely to gel with the grittier worlds of R&B and garage than it is with Hear'Say's Von Trapp Family pop. Even if his stubbly pout on the single sleeve is more Sid James than Puff Daddy.

Brian Harvey has a habit of bouncing back from disaster. After the E17 comeback had failed, it was the Sunday People's turn to put the boot in. "I used to be a pop chart superstar. Now I've lost my home, car and I can't even afford a mobile phone," declared a headline last May, after bailiffs turned up at his flat to reclaim his £80,000 V-reg Mercedes. "I felt like I was being taught a lesson for something," he recalls. "Nobody wants to sign you, you're 200 grand in debt. What do you do, man?" But Harvey's pugilistic optimism has led him here, to London's most salubrious celebrity hangout. "Something is telling me this is the best move I'm gonna make."

Last week, during a frequently incoherent appearance by Danniella Westbrook on Channel 4's Priory show, his name came up again. But mention of her name has Harvey's PR stepping in to insist: "We can't go there." I just wanted to know, I say, whether you really did tell her that you and she were the Posh and Becks of your day. "I did say that," he smiles. "But we never made any money out of it - whereas they did. They've caned it, haven't they? Good luck to 'em."

Another tabloid soundbite. It seems Brian Harvey can't help but live his life in headlines.