With cash in the bank, legions of female fans and enough booze to sink a rugby tour, the boy bands of the late nineties seemingly had it all.
All just teenagers when they were catapulted to fame, people couldn’t get enough of their catchy pop tunes and heavily-choreographed routines.
For a time, no uni night out was complete without busting a move to 5ive’s Everybody Get Up or 911’s Night to Remember.
But behind the scenes things were far from rosy. Over-worked and exhausted, the groups were plagued by in-fighting, addiction, depression and mental breakdowns.
Here’s the tragic tale of what happened next to the curtain-haired poster boys…
5ive
5ive stormed the charts with their catchy pop (Image: GETTY)
Between 1997 and 2001, bandmates Ritchie Neville, Sean Conlon, Scott Robinson, Jason ‘J’ Brown and Abz Love sold 10million records worldwide.
But the pressures of fame cracked the group wide open and sparked a toxic torrent of drug abuse, mental illness and even a suicide attempt.
First, Sean, now 39, suffered a nervous breakdown and secretly quit the band in January 2001.
Ritchie, 41, claimed the management didn’t tell them, and when Sean appeared as a cardboard cut out in the video for Let’s Dance, they thought he was off with glandular fever.
The band went their separate ways after Sean quit (Image: GETTY)
Speaking on ITV’s The Big Reunion in 2013, Sean said: “I remember looking in the mirror and thinking to myself, ‘Who is that?’ I didn’t know myself and I just had the strongest feeling that no matter what happens no matter how much money they throw at me I’ve got to find Sean. Otherwise I make thousands of pounds but I’d be spending it all on therapy.”
J, too, suffered a mental breakdown while they were making the video for Don’t Wanna Let You Go, and told the show: “I had chronic insomnia, I was on the edge.”
The 44 year old had previously suffered from depression and hit rock bottom one night when he took an overdose in an attempt to end his own life.
Jason ‘J’ Brown declined to rejoin the band for The Big Reunion
“I tried to finish myself off. When I came round, the feeling was panic, and I realised the level of desperation I’d fallen into to contemplate that,” said the star, who refused to rejoin his bandmates for the reunion.
As for Abz – real name Richard Breen – he was so distraught over their split that he spiralled into addiction, suffering psychosis and ‘seeing the devil’.
“I didn’t want the band to split at all. I was lost, they were my lifeline. I didn’t have any friends or family at the time. I started hanging around the wrong people, paying people to be my friend,” the 41 year old told Loose Women in 2018.
“I met the devil and it looked like me. I don’t know what it was, I was so far off. I remember my heart palpitations felt like they were punching through my chest into the mattress.
Abz retreated to a farm in Wales (Image: BBC2/WENN)
“It happened twice, and the voice said ‘One more time, one more time and we’re gonna take you.’ It wasn’t exactly like that but I knew then I had to sort it.”
Desperate to get healthy, he fled to Wales and bought a farm, but in 2015 he made headlines by trying to sell his BRIT Award on eBay to buy soil and gardening tools.
Ritchie, meanwhile, escaped for a new life in Australia while Scott Robinson retired for life as a house-husband.
911
Spike Dawbarn, Lee Brennan, Jimmy Constable made up 911 (Image: Getty)
Lee Brennan, Jimmy Constable and Simon ‘Spike’ Dawbarn scored a slew of hits with tracks like Bodyshakin’ and Night to Remember before the wheels came off in 2000.
Burned out by the constant workload, Jimmy, 48, descended into alcoholism, infamously appearing drunk on SM:TV Live, while Spike, 46, was struck down with agoraphobia following an attack.
“I couldn’t leave the house,” he told the Big Reunion. “I was getting all this attention, but I’m very private, and I didn’t feel worthy of it.
The trio continue to perform together (Image: Manchester Evening News)
“It’s still there. I still get embarrassed.”
For Lee, 46, his unhappiness showed itself as a destructive fixation on his looks.
He explained: ‘I was being obsessive about the way I look. I just couldn’t cope with it.
In the end, Lee and Spike decided to call it a day and left a devastated Jimmy to break the news during an interview with Chris Moyles on Radio 1.
Jimmy Constable struggled with alcohol, drugs and depression (Image: WENN)
“I didn’t have any time to get my head around it,” he said.
“I had a lump in my throat saying it, then we came out of Radio 1 and the other two guys went to the pub. I got in my car and took off and I never saw them for two years.”
Things only got worse from there on in. Jimmy’s girlfriend left, he crashed his car and lost his hair to stress-induced alopecia.
“I lost the plot – depression, alcohol, contemplating suicide,” he previously told the MEN.
“It was all I ever knew for five to six years and then suddenly you realise it’s all gone.
“It’s that sudden change of lifestyle. You get up on stage and have all that adoration and then you wake up and realise all the people on the other end of the phone all the time weren’t really friends.”
His issues saw him appear on the Jeremy Kyle show in 2013 and Loose Women in 2017.
These days, the trio are back touring, but when Covid-19 forced them to delay their dates, Jimmy took a job driving for the ambulance service.
Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
