Dressed For Success
Magazine Source: Smash Hits!
Timeframe: 1998 (Christmas)
What do popstars get up to in the dressing room before they go on stage? If they’re anything like STEPS, they vandalise the place, scoff bunches of apples, and, um, throw up…
MINGIN’ FLOORS
“I’m not having it, there’s only three chairs!”
Claire STEPS is throwing a bit of a showbiz strop (except, of course, she’s only mucking about). She’s just walked into the dressing room in the Cardiff International Arena on the Smash Hits! tour and is noticing the lack of, well, anything, really. There’s a purple carpet, a grey dressing table… and that’s about it. Mind you, it’s positively luxurious compared with some of the places STEPS have been asked to get changed.
“There was a club the other night where the dressing room smelled of sick,” whispers Faye to hoots of “Ohh that was mingin’!” from her STEPS brothers and sisters. “You’d walk around in your socks and they’d end up brown!”
At this point, everyone starts to accuse Claire of being sick in the dressing room in the past. She denies these allegations hotly – it was a hotel floor she was sick on. “Claire was sick in our room and she didn’t clear it up,” elaborates H. “Then I got up in the middle of the night to go to the loo and I trod right in it.”
Oh-oh, now everyone is trying to outdo each other with vom tales! Lisa puked “all the way down the M4” last week, while poor old Lee gets travel sick. But enough of that and back to the dressing rooms…
PEOPLE WHO NICK YOUR HAIRSPRAY
Who for instance, is the worst person that STEPS have ever shared a dressing room with?
“Vanilla were really bad because they kept borrowing my makeup,” hoots an outraged Lisa.
“They’d go, ‘Got any ‘airsprayyyy'” chuckles H.
“Do you remember sharing with Damien? The bloke who did The Time Warp (dodgy hit from the musical Rocky Horror Show)?” enquires Claire suddenly. “He started doing Lisa’s hair! He’d go, ‘Look, you need a bit more oomph in it!'”
“Then he started backcombing it all up with hairspray and she ended up looking like Pebbles (from The Flintstones) with a big bouffant,” H summaries as everyone screams at the memory.
“I was nearly in tears,” pouts Lisa. “I was like, ‘You stupid man! Look what you’ve done to my hair!” Tragedy!
POP GRAFFITI
Do STEPS ever get embarrassed about taking their kit off in front of complete strangers?
“We’ve got all the tricks of the trade,” confides Faye. “Taking your bra off under your top, putting pants on top of pants…”
“At the start, we used to send the boys out of the room or get them to turn their backs,” remembers Claire, “but now we don’t care.”
In fact, there are more important things for everyone to be getting on with before a show, like vandalising the place for starters. “Everyone scrawls their name on the wall of the dressing room,” confesses H, “that’s how you see who’s been there before you.”
“We used to carry around a lot of promotional postcards and see who could stick them in the most obscure place,” remembers Faye. “We’d put them on the ceiling, or right at the top of the mirror.”
POSH BOUQUETS
If the band are lucky, they might get flowers before the show (though their celebrity fans, Denise Van Outen and Mel C, haven’t yet showered them with bouquets). “MTV once sent us baskets of flowers,” reminisces Claire. “They were really posh weren’t they?”
“Yeah they were,” Faye agrees. “They had apples in them and stuff, very modern.”
Some popstars demand all sorts of posh nosh in their dressing room, but STEPS are more modest – so long as they have Ribena, towels, water and the odd sarnie, they’re happy. “We’re not getting ridiculous,” says Lisa. “We’re not demanding champagne and all that…”
“But we might one day!”chuckles Faye.
Just ten minutes before they go on stage, the band will change into their stage wear, “so we don’t have pits that ming” explains H. Then they’ll jump around, excitedly wishing each other good luck.
“Even if we’re really, really, tired, the minute you go onstage, you just lose everything,” beams Claire, getting excited just at the thought of it.
“I’ve never not wanted to go on stage,” says Faye. “When you’re up there, you kind of think, ‘This is what I’m here for. This is what I’ve always wanted to do.’ We just love it so much- it’s our ultimate, favourite bit.”
In short, it’s worth putting up with a dodgy old dressing room any day!
How will you be celebrating New Year’s Eve 1999?
Lisa: (Humorously) We’re all going to perform a gig and we’ll get paid a millennium pounds to do it.
Claire: I don’t even know what I’m going to do tomorrow let alone New Year’s Eve 1999.
H: We’ll sing everyone into the Millennium Dome, because three of us live around the corner. (At this, they launch into Auld Lang Syne!)
What are your predictions for 1999?
Faye: STEPS are gonna rule, man.
Lisa: Someone said we were, “the band for the millennium!”
H: The Spice Girls will have a baby and I won’t. Faye will change her hair three times.
Faye: The next time you see me, I’m going to have my hair drastically different.