‘If Jesus and Buddha had our work schedule, they’d have fallen out too’: boyband Five on bullying, Britney and their blockbuster return

After being fast-tracked to stardom, the bad boys of Y2K pop butted heads and burned out. They explain how they faced their demons for an arena-sized reunion – and why Simon Cowell was ‘a proper winker’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!’” Continue reading...

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