Are you sure you want to be famous?

by Alex Kadis Take That's biographer

LIFE must seem great for Gareth Gates and Will Young, the two remaining contestants of Pop Idol. After the final result is announced on Saturday evening, for one of them at least life will change forever. It will seem as if all his Christmases have come at once. But fame is a double-edged sword, and by the time you've realised this it's too late to do anything about it.

Sure, there are plenty of pros.

Who wouldn't want to make friends with other famous people (no doubt Sir Elton John and his partner David Furnish will crop up somewhere), attend parties and premieres, receive fan mail or go to the best restaurants? Life becomes bigger, and doors you never knew were there are opening all the time.

An advance from the record company gives you cash you've never seen before and it feels like freedom. But fame is complex and never how people imagined before they were famous.

Perhaps the easiest comparison to make would be Take That, as they were possibly more in the public domain than any other group in recent times.

Although their fame took longer to earn compared to the meteoric speed of Gareth's or Will's, Take That's recognition still had an overnight quality to it and they suddenly found themselves in the media spotlight, unable to live ordinary lives. As a journalist for Smash Hits, I started to cover their career very early on and, as the years went by, I saw fame take its toll.

Being a pop star is incredibly hard work. The record company will have invested a lot of money in you and it will want to make a profit. You will be expected to deliver time and time again.

There will be gruelling promotional and recording schedules, video and photo shoots. You will be expected to do the impossible: please all of the people all of the time.

It is exhausting. Behind the scenes most of the busier stars are often lethargic, lacklustre and frankly miserable. Already, Gareth has prematurely disembarked from his battle bus due to exhaustion and migraines, with orders to rest, and this is only the beginning.

A music journalist told me recently of a time at an MTV awards where she observed Robbie Williams getting outrageously drunk just hours before he was due on stage with the rest of his group. "It was funny to watch because he was pretty raucous and was flirting with the attendant supermodels.

future His people were panicking, trying to get him to see sense. But it was also sad because they weren't listening to his needs. He had been on the road for months and he was at the end of his tether then he fell over and cut his head.

Later he was on stage with three stitches and a smile. It broke your heart."

East 17's career paralleled Take That's, and front man Tony Mortimer recalls those times clearly. "The immediate thing you notice is that time is no longer relevant. You travel to so many different countries and go through so many different time zones that the whole promotional experience is a blur.

And you have to stay inside, so you never know if it's night or day. I stopped wearing a watch eventually."

Most of us love talking about ourselves, but when it is your job it becomes boring and it makes for a very one-dimensional existence. The gruelling schedule of interviews and photo calls soon loses its charm. No wonder

so many pop stars end up misbehaving in an interview or walking out of a photo shoot over a seemingly ridiculous issue.

Mortimer says there are other more sinister drawbacks to the constant exposure. "Although you love it at first, you start to get a different perspective of yourself because you are always looking at yourself from the outside - you see your picture everywhere, you reread everything you've said, and it's horrible."

Stars work very hard at building their fan base but they don't always realise that they are building a prison, too. Mark Owen, who was always the most popular member of Take That, eventually had to move out of his parental home because of the fans who kept constant vigil outside. I saw the mayhem for myself. There were thousands of girls crushing towards the small terraced house, banging on doors and windows and slowly dismantling the street for souvenirs. The police were redirecting traffic at the end of the road while Owen and his parents sat smiling gamely inside with the curtains drawn and the phone off the hook. IT is perhaps your old friends and family who suffer most, and this hurts.

No matter how good your intentions, you cannot mix your school friends with your famous friends. They have nothing in common and don't want to know each other.

At some point, most pop stars suffer from low self-esteem.

Living up to people's expectations is not as easy as it might seem and vanity is a necessary evil.

When you could be photographed at any time, you simply cannot afford to turn up at an airport at 6am looking a fright.

But eventually, of course, the slippery slope beckons. No one can be number one forever. The relegation from A list to "Darius who?" can be cruelly swift.

Despite protestations to the contrary, stars are acutely aware of their shelf-life but not always sure of when to call it a day.

Although Gareth and Will seem to be very grounded people, so far they have only flirted with fame.

The real thing is yet to come.

Copyright 2002
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.