PREDATORY (1995)
East 17: they're hard, a touch spiritual and they're overdosing on Lemsip.
SECC, Glasgow (December 1st 1995)
"If you can't get over your illness, you've got AIDS, haven't you? So when I get over an illness, I'm happy, because it's reassuring," muses East 17's main songwriter, Tony Mortimer, acting the tactless lad one minute, spiritual adviser to the masses the next. This flu-bugged 24-year-old X-ray youth who sees music as more important than his two daughters, Atlanta and Ocean, and is thrilled the band are massive in Israel because it means "God is conscious of us" looks ill, overworked and underfed as the four-piece fight to maintain a pop career which has only stalled in America. "Vanilla Ice killed white rap over there," he laughs.
Mortimer is the driving force behind East 17's success, which adds up to half-a-dozen Top 10 singles in the UK including last year's Christmas Number 1 and Ivor Novello award winner, Stay Another Day, and three Top Ten albums. The contradictions of this op and hip hop fan are matched by the other three handicapping "geezers" in the band, Brian Harvey, John Hendy and Terry Coldwell. Their taste for swingbeat, jungle and garage house places East 17 at a bizarre junction where urban styles meet fully-fledged boy band hysteria.
The latter emotion rushed through the audience as the bassy rumble of a single sustained organ fuels the show's opening pseudo-religious, ecstatic mood at Glasgow's arena-sized SECC. When the group walk on to the set, which is decked out for the seasonal tour with fake Scandinavian ferns, they launch into It's Alright (a Number 3 single as far back as 1993), reassuring the hormonal mass that "dreams come true" and "everything's gonna be alright" over a rapid dance beat and ethereal piano flourishes. The slower, bump 'n' grind rap of Deep is more flirtatious as Mortimer lifts his shirt and strokes his stomach to the line "I wanna do it till my belly rumbles".
Although they'd broken into the charts a year earlier with the anthemic House Of Love, it was the slow, gyrating smooch of Deep in early '93 which established East 17 as a classic boy band with a fanbase consisting of pre-pubescent girls and gay men. Their in-yer-face homosexual manager and charming vulgarian, Tom Watkins, had already exploited this fertile commercial territory with '80s golden boys, Bros. In East 17 he homed in on a fresh angle, the rough trade appeal of four lads with light, drug-related form and street-based hip hop dance routines.
East 17 were initially dismissed as a manufactured outfit tailored by a music biz Svengali, but the truth is more a mixture of predatory business suss, opportunism and talent. Mortimer initially approached Tom Watkins as a solo rapper and dance (he made a one-off appearance in his latter role with Faith, Hope and Charity, who included TV presenter Dani Behr) but he was told to come back with a group. He roped in his mates, and they all returned as an all-singing, all-rapping boy band who took their place in the early '90s as Take That's main rivals.
As Harvey croons Hold My Body Tight the superficial differences between the two acts aren't that marked. Take That have also adopted a raunchier stage show in recent years and former group member, Robbie Williams relieved the lads true colours before leaving the band when he was accused by the tabloids of breaking up a two-child family. However, the toothy Manchester pop machine's move into g-strings and leathers seems like an awkward, well-mannered fumbling into "adult" entertainment, while East 17 swagger and leer with their tongues out and their flies undone. In a strange twist of usual North/South rivalry, East 17 are bullish and streetwise, closer in attitude to Oasis than Blur, despite the latter's dog track and boozer Parklife imagery. Walthamstow is their "manor" and any future slumming it in E17 by Blur is ill-advised. "You don't want to go down there on your own, not if you're called Blue," smirks macho Mortimer.
Meanwhile, the next trio of songs reveal fresh sides to East 17 which establish them as a more complex '90s act than their eight-legged, back-flipping contemporaries. They switch from the atmospheric Innocent Erotic to a garagey house anthem backed by six dancers, Got To Keep On, before launching into MF Power's Prince-like, glam-slamming thud with lines like "Don't try to step to the stage/I'm in a rage/Cut you down to the floor and make the front page". Those self-depreciating good boys, Take That, would rather give themselves a hernia than play with such vaguely threatening, bombastic imagery.
East 17 are more ambiguous, lapping it up like gods on stage while playing tribute to God through Mortimer's declamatory raps. "Even the walls of Jericho were brought down by music," he remarks at one point, typifying his zeal. As if to illustrate this point, he stretches out his arms in crucifix pose on stage during Thunder, slowly raising them until he gives a peace sign to the crowd. These spiritual declarations and manners from heaven appear freakish in the world of pop music and so too does the sight of seven-year-old girls contorting and twisting into warp speed dances to a jungle track, Let It All Go, which is sandwiched between the melodic rap of Do U Still and timely Slow It Down.
The trade-off of manic breakbeats with a stuttering rap oddly reminiscent of Bowie's African Night Flight, inspired the hyperactive audience to practically re-invent the genre. These four-foot-nothing limb shakers are actually dancing in time, tuning into a style which pulses at their own speed of life. This is also the point where Hendy and Coldwell hog the stage after stripping off their Dolce & Gabbana shirts during the previous number. Their tumbling, pumped-up routines highlight the listless, muted energy of main singers Harvey and Mortimer, who are both dosed up on anti-biotics and Lemsip.
Nevertheless, Harvey's voice still sounds honey-pastel sweet as he runs through the lazy dance shuffle of Around The World and his self-penned swingbeat track, Ghetto Love Thing. The sight of this squat, parka-friendly bloke is in marked contrast to his crisp singing, which is richer than any of the other frontmen and hints at longetivity for the group if their songwriting remains as impressive as their shared, song splice-up on Up All Night.
"It was a financial decision; we're a democracy and the others felt a bit left out," says Mortimer, who still writes all the singles.
Steam is another Prince-like assault on the audience but it's subtle in comparison to the simulated lightning flashes and power chords which herald their recent Top 5 single, Thunder. After Mortimer's saccharine Stay Another Day (partly written about the suicide of his brother) is ushered in with artificial snow flakes, the encores start with another meteorological God song, Let It Rain. Their debut single, House Of Love, closes the show, the juvenile, ravey love-in tonight packing the kids off to their parents with a lick rather than a lovebite.
"I've got the breath of a gorilla that's just given oral sex to a water buffalo," quips Mortimer, afterwards, apropos of nothing. "It wasn't that sexy tonight because there was a lot of young girls down at the front I didn't want to poison their minds with my desires. I'm used to looking at girls with crazy hormone levels but tonight I looked down at this really young person who was gazing at me like I'm Santa Claus. It's a nice little thing. It brings out the Michael Jackson in everyone."