Steps interview: ‘We all know how dark it can be at the bottom’
“If you’d have told me 23 years ago, we’d be sat here together with a Number Two album, we would have laughed at you,” says Ian Watkins, one fifth of disco-pop juggernaut Steps and known to everyone as H for ‘hyperactive’. “Some people still think we’re a novelty act. But we’re always in on the joke. That’s what people don’t get.”
In 2020, Steps are having the last laugh all over again. It’s two decades since I first interviewed them in their dressing room at BBC’s underwhelming The Saturday Show and they just don’t make pop groups like Steps any more. Now, even winners of The X Factor need to look like rock stars, appear to write their own songs and insist it’s all about the music, man.
Yet despite a bitter split in 2001, various reality show appearances and dance routines that have barely changed since the Nineties, Steps have brazenly carried on regardless. Their now-grown up fans have stayed loyal too: their latest album What the Future Holds breezed into Number Two earlier this month while next year’s huge arena tour is selling fast.
“Once we’d had a couple of hits and sold a couple of million albums and a couple of million concert tickets, we would have quite liked a little bit of recognition from the industry,” Claire Richards tells me. “I do remember a time when all I wanted was to be in All Saints and have everyone think we were cool, but nobody ever did. And now, I suppose the fact we weren't cool means that we never went out of fashion.”
Today, H, Claire, Lee Latchford-Evans, Lisa Scott-Lee and Faye Tozer are chatting together over Zoom but from their own separate homes after finishing morning workouts and school runs. All in their forties and with seven children between them, they are witty and articulate, more thoughtful than you would expect and far more relaxed than they ever seemed in those frantic, exhausting early days when they now estimate they worked incessant 18-hour days for five years. Not bad for a band originally put together by producers Barry Upton and Mike Crosby and manager Tim Byrne to release just one single, the teeth-grindingly perky 5, 6, 7, 8.
“None of us knew then it was all an idea to make line dancing cool,” H says with a chortle.
“We didn’t succeed, did we?” Claire adds.
“We went to Number One in Australia!” H says. “And Belgium. Everybody thought we were the novelty act of the year and we signed on a one-single deal. Most bands sign for three or four albums. Then we did so well, we were able to renegotiate and get a better deal.”
They were eventually snapped up by pop impresario Pete Waterman, who famously introduced them to the media at an early showcase performance as “Abba on speed”. The band groan.
“I really don’t like that saying,” Faye winces.
“I wish he hadn’t said that because it’s come back to haunt us,” Lisa says.
“Anyway,” H says, “it’s more like glucosamine and cod liver oil these days.”
By the time the band split five years later, they had notched up 13 consecutive Top Five singles. They toured the US with Britney Spears, had dolls made in their image (“Last time my daughter had a sort out, it was in the bag to give away,” Claire says) and whole-heartedly embraced a punishing schedule that saw them release four multi-platinum albums in just four years.
“Pop stars moaning today?” Lee says. “They don't know they're born!”
“We all got into this business because we had a dream of some sort and that is always different to the reality,” says Claire. “It isn’t really what you think it’s going to be. And you either learn to live with it and find a way of coping, or you don’t.”
They remain grateful they didn’t have to do it all under the unforgiving microscope of social media.
“I don't know if I would have coped very well actually,” says H, who came out as gay in 2007 and later made history as one half of the first same-sex couple on Dancing On Ice. “I was very much in the closet. And I would have had a lot more people trying to out me, and I wasn't ready to come out so I think I would have been in quite a dark place.”
The end, inevitably, was abrupt and messy. Shortly before Steps played the final date of their 2001 greatest hits tour, broadcast live on Sky, H and Claire handed a resignation letter to their bandmates. It was three days before Christmas.
“It was a shock,” Faye says. “It hadn’t felt like things were crumbling before that at all. We were at the top of our game.”
“We’d worked non-stop for nearly five years and been pushed from pillar to post and I was still quite young,” Claire remembers. “I still lived with my mum and dad and I hadn’t worked out who I was and how to deal with certain situations. Rather than stepping away and saying ‘I need a break’, my solution was to say ‘I’m leaving’.”
“I remember standing backstage when we finished. The curtain went down and everybody was crying,” says Lee. “The fans didn’t know but we all realised that after what had happened it was probably the last gig. I remember not believing it because there was nothing going wrong really. I didn’t know how Claire and H felt inside.”
“I really felt like I just couldn’t do it anymore,” Claire admits. “The thought of going to work every day… Now I’d probably be taking medication for anxiety but back then, there wasn’t really anything like that.”
Relations soured further when Steps’ management continued working with H and Claire and the duo released a single together within five months of the band’s split.
“That was really painful,” Lisa says. “We thought they wanted to leave because they didn’t want to be in the music industry any more. But obviously things had been going on behind the scenes and that’s why we felt so betrayed. That was difficult, I can’t say it wasn’t.”
“Everything had been taken away from me,” Lee adds. “Suddenly there was nobody there to guide me. I felt like oh, okay, I’ve been kicked to the kerb, what am I going to do next?”
Various individual projects followed including singles, West End theatre stints, reality TV and a particularly ill-advised MTV show following Lisa’s attempts to make it as a solo artist in 2005.
“I was flattered to be offered it and I was very na?ve,” she says now with unflinching honesty. “When I look back, I just feel sad for myself. I didn’t have the support of a good manager, the contract was flawed, it was terrible. People come up to me all the time and mention it and I just wish they’d all forget it because it was quite a painful thing to go through.”
The cameras were there again to capture the band reforming for an arena tour in 2011, filming an uncomfortable fly-on-the-wall documentary in which the band finally discussed the way Steps had ended.
“We’d been in contact with each other a bit, on and off, before then but we’d never confronted each other,” Faye says. “It was always the elephant in the room and we’d just talk about weddings or children or whatever. It was something we really needed to do.”
“It was still very raw,” Lisa says. “We’d had those questions for 10 years and we needed to know the answers in order to move on and do what we’ve gone on to do.”
It took another five-year break before Steps figured out how be more than just a nostalgia act. No labels were interested so the band released 2017’s gloriously high-energy Tears on a Dancefloor themselves, becoming the year’s second biggest-selling independent act after Stormzy (“See? We are cool!” they cackle). Major label BMG duly snapped them up to release the follow up, What the Future Holds, preceded by the dramatically glossy single of the same name written by pop megastar Sia.
“We were told she wrote it for herself then decided it wasn’t for her because it was a bit too poppy,” Claire explains. “It was at her suggestion that we try it. And thank God she did because it was the catalyst for the whole album, so we’re immensely grateful. Obviously if she came to our O2 show and performed with us, we could say thank you then. I think that’s called cosmic ordering isn’t it? Just putting it out there…”
Next year, there will be no early-morning alarm calls, no relentless slog around the rest of the world and definitely no dolls. Covid-permitting, Steps will play their shows, enjoy their time together and then go back to their own lives. But this time, they’ll stay in touch because they want to.
“It’s not smooth sailing every day,” Lee admits. “There’s going to be ups and downs but we’re always there for each other now. We know what it’s like to be at the top and it’s exciting and fun and glamorous. But we all know how dark it can be at the bottom as well.”
“Before,” Claire says, “it was absolutely everything. If something went wrong within that world, everything fell apart. It’s a privilege to still be able to do this now we’re older and a little bit wiser.”
Steps' new album What The Future Holds is out now. Tickets to their 18-date What The Future Holds UK arena tour in Nov/Dec 2021 are on sale now
