Illustration by Esme Blegvad
This article originally appeared in VICE UK.
Ben Adams was the singer and main heartthrob in boyband A1, who topped the British charts in the late 1990s. He told Hannah Ewens all about his time as the number one crush of teenage girls across the land.
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Boy bands work because they’re a young girl’s first taste of fancying or falling in love with a guy. That’s exactly why record companies put together a good-looking bunch of guys, regardless of how well they can sing, or whether they can write songs. They’ll sell. Any band pooh-poohing their female fans should remember they wouldn’t even be a band without them. They’d be working in Tesco.
I was only 16, doing GCSEs, when we were put together by a management company. I always had those curtains. I’d never let stylists touch my hair ever because they’d always make me look awful. I have curly hair, so it was hard to maintain, but once the record company realised it was really popular with girls and in these teen mags, they wouldn’t let me cut it off. Suddenly other boybands and people like Nick Carter started getting it. I was stuck with that sodding haircut for years.
When we started getting attention from girls and fans it was quite easy to deal with really, because we never really had any contact with normal human beings. We were literally just working all the time in a little bubble. We weren’t in any place for any length of time. From flight to flight, hotel to hotel. Nothing felt real. I had a very strange life growing up. I think if I’d have had time to do normal things, it might have sunk in a bit more what girls said about us or about me.
We’d be walking through a crowd and instead of asking for an autograph they’d be trying to rip pieces of our clothes or our hair – anything so they could take a piece of us away with them.
There were many times meeting fans when we just thought, “Fucking hell, this is out of control.” We had kids that were so desperate to see us that they were actually self-harming outside the hotel to try to get attention so we’d go down and say, “Stop this, you can’t do this.” Even when they were hurting themselves, the security people were saying, “You cannot go down and do that because then everybody will start doing it as a way to get you to come and talk to them.” There were a lot of moments that were very odd.
It didn’t matter where we were because crazy stuff happened everywhere. Screaming girls just wanted a piece of you – literally. We’d be walking through a crowd and instead of just trying to ask for an autograph, they’d be trying to rip pieces of our clothes or our hair or anything like that, just so that they could take a piece of us away with them.
Girls died because they wanted to see us so badly. This terrible thing happened the first time we went to Indonesia. We didn’t know how big we were over there. A signing in a record store was arranged and we were expecting about 2,000 people to turn up, and I think something crazy like 20,000 turned up, so the security obviously weren’t equipped for that volume of people. There was a mad rush as soon as we arrived. Two girls got squashed against the glass and subsequently died. As soon as the security got wind of it, they took us out immediately. Of course, then as we were leaving there was a big stampede to try and get out of the shopping mall, and around to the bus where we were. Another two girls got trampled to death on the escalators.
I would think: is this screaming actually for me or is it for anyone? Who knows.
You can never mentally deal with something like that. Luckily I had three other guys to help as we were all going through the same thing. Our goal was just to make music, not to harm anyone. I couldn’t help but think that if we weren’t there it never would have happened. It wasn’t our fault, but I couldn’t understand it at the time. I still don’t know how I feel. We took a long time off after that – about a year – and went to counsellors to try to process what happened in a reasonable way.
Playing arenas after that break, I’d sit there and look at all the people and think, “Fucking hell, anything could happen.” It’s kind of in your control but at the same time, completely out of your control. You look at screaming female fans and think, if they weren’t screaming for us, it’d be for Westlife or Five or One Direction or whoever the latest boyband is now. Fans are very loyal but also bounce from band to band. I would think: is this screaming actually for me or is it for anyone? Who knows.
A1 in 2010, via
When I was back in the UK, I used to live alone in Battersea, opposite Battersea Park, and I had people camping out in the park with binoculars trying to look through my windows. Of course, if you see me in a TV show or out and about, that’s totally fine to come and say hi or ask for a picture, but that made me feel like I was living in a goldfish bowl. I would only be really horrible to people if they rang on my doorbell because otherwise they’d tell their mates, “Oh, it’s fine, go around to Ben’s, he’s really nice.” When people went around to Mark’s (Read, A1) house, his parents would invite them in for a cup of tea. I didn’t want it to get worse so that was how I dealt with it.
Labels thought that if the fans knew you had a girlfriend it would affect record sales, so you couldn’t hold hands with girls or be seen with them.
The whole thing definitely affected my relationships. It’s different nowadays but record companies wouldn’t allow you to have a girlfriend publicly, so I always used to have girlfriends – long-term girlfriends for a year, two years – and we couldn’t hold hands in public. Or if they came to concerts they’d have to sneak in the back door. Labels thought that if the fans knew you had a girlfriend it would affect record sales. They’d be like, “Well he’s unattainable now so we don’t like him any more.” Girlfriends would really have to be tolerant to be put in the corner like that. It was better to just be single. It was very easy to find girls and have one night stands every day of the week and have amazing fun. But not to find someone you could trust.
We were in A1 for about five years, so I was probably only 21, 22 when the band finished. I looked at my diary that day and was like, “Shit, the rest of my life is blank.” It was almost like being retired at 22. I’d lost mates over the period because we had nothing in common any more. Back then there was no social media so it was easy to fall off the face of the earth. I kept myself to myself and didn’t really go out that much. Today I do reunion shows with A1, write for artists and I’m working on a musical. It’s thanks to those fans I can still be keeping my fingers in so many pies. But at that time I was a bit lost. I started a small, insular life from there.
@benadamsuk and @hannahrosewens
More on boybands and childhood fame:
My Brother Was In a Chinese Boyband
