Currently starring in Evita, Marti Pellow of boy band Wet Wet Wet tells Stefanie Marsh about early fame and drug abuse
WET Wet Wet was once so famous, its songs so ubiquitous, singer Marti Pellow’s cocksure grin so alluring to the teenage girls of Britain, that when a bandmate let it slip to a journalist that “Marti despises Sweet Little Mystery, the “story” became front-page tabloid news. Was it true?
Pellow considers this question from the vantage point of a man now 27 years older than when the song became the band’s second mega-hit (the first was Wishing I Was Lucky in 1987), with the wisdom that comes from having emerged from Clydebank a huge star and, later, of having overcome the entrenched alcohol and heroin addiction that had accompanied his ostensibly charmed life.
“I can now look back and say, ‘You know, it was a good pop song at that time and place in my life’,” says Pellow, skinny, funny, bespectacled. “Is it my favourite Wet Wet Wet song? No.” (That would be either Julia Says or Gypsy Girl.)
Wet Wet Wet is still the most successful band to come out of Scotland and it is true that some of its inescapable little ear worms would, after a time, begin to grate on the ears of even the Wets — Pellow, Tommy Cunningham (drums), Graeme Clarke (bass) and Neil Mitchell (keyboards).
MOVIES AND MUSICALS
The year 1994 was a particularly difficult year in this regard. Four Weddings And A Funeral came out, with Wet Wet Wet’s cover of the Troggs’ Love Is All Around on its soundtrack, with the result that the song spent 15 weeks at No. 1 in the charts.
“I remember being in the cinema,” says Pellow, smiling fondly. “Ashton Lane, in Glasgow — a beautiful wee cinema — and a clip came up for Four Weddings. The guy sitting behind me said, ‘Not that f***ing song again’. I turned round and looked at him and said, ‘Imagine how I feel’.”
Pellow is now 49 and still joined at the hip with Eileen Catterson, a former Miss Scotland, his girlfriend since the early 1990s.
In the interim he has carved out a reasonably successful second career as a solo artiste (applying his burnished soul-pop tones to MOR versions of Wet Wet Wet songs and covers of Al Green, the Pretenders and Radiohead) and a very successful third career in musical theatre (Chicago, The Witches Of Eastwick, The War Of The Worlds).
He is currently starring in the West End, opposite Madalena Alberto in Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita, as Che, the narrator and male lead who was played in the original production by David Essex. Pellow glowers broodily and handsomely from the posters that are starting to proliferate all over central London.
He came to Rice’s attention inadvertently in 2008: Rice’s daughter was a Wet Wet Wet fan and “when they went on family holidays, she’d play us in the car. He called me when he was doing Chess with the Abba boys and offered me a part. It was a baptism of fire — I was on stage 10 days later (in Rice’s revival of Chess at the Albert Hall).”
DARK DAYS OVER
It is somewhat astonishing that he’s done so well and has emerged such a likeable, interesting character, considering his dark days. He says himself that he was “a raging addict” for many years. The story of the epiphany that saved him at 33 is worth retelling.
“I was driving in London and it was a beautiful sunny day. Suddenly the traffic slowed and almost drew to a halt. I got out of my car and saw a man lying on the ground. He had on a suit that must have been nice at one point but it was raggedy. He was bust. And all the cars were moving around him,” he recalls.
“I lifted him up and put him on the side of the road — and saw myself. I thought, ‘There you go. Game over. Time to change. Simple’. I was using. I was an addict and it was time.”
Not for the first time he checked himself into rehab, but this time he meant it. “I had a good clear-out. Everything changed,” he says.
Pellow, who was born Mark McLachlan, met his three bandmates at Clydebank High School. He would spend most of his time either practising with his band or listening to music.
His father was a builder who expected his son to be a builder too. “My father thought: Where’s this coming from? So there was concern. He was a roofer. It’s all he knew. He told me, ‘I know a man who could get you a job as a roofer. I don’t know a man who could get you to play Madison Square Gardens’.”
WET WET WET
Nevertheless, the Wets ( the name derives from a Scritti Politti lyric) were not to be put off. “We lived and breathed that band and woe betide anyone who said it would be any different,” says Pellow.
They signed to Polygram in 1985. Their first manager binned Wishing I Was Lucky but his replacement released it as a single. It reached No 6. The first album, Popped In Souled Out (1987), followed.
Suddenly becoming very famous felt confusing to Pellow. The rules of engagement had changed. “You’re a beer drinker and suddenly you’re on a champagne income. Suddenly you’re in the south of France and you’re going, ‘That’s Elton John and Omar Sharif’.”
What did success feel like? “We were so happy,” he says.
His father loved Pellow being a sex symbol because, apparently, father and son bear a striking resemblance. His mother loved it, “because she’d spent five years getting her hair done every Friday with a woman next to her who was babbling on about her son getting his first mortgage and a Ford Escort”.
“She would ask, ‘What’s your Marti doing?’ And (mum) would say: ‘Oh, he’s just been writing a song called Angel Eyes and I think it’s going to be a hit record’.’ When we had our first No. 1 album and single at the same time, my mum got a T-shirt made and went to get her hair done in it: ‘See, that’s my boy’.”
SOULFUL STAR
It’s very strange thinking back to how clean-cut and innocent Pellow seemed back then, an unlikely addict. And while members of “harder” bands admit to having, in part, fictionalised their autobiographies to give them more edge, the Wets had the opposite problem.
How does he feel now?
“I feel I can bring more to the table and engage more. You get your s*** together. And you just enjoy the bad days a bit better than you used to. You’re surrounded by people who you love and care for. You have a home, not a house.” (Or two. He and his partner live in London and Memphis.)
When Popped In Souled Out was released, there were critics who huffed that its title was an insult to soul music. Does he think of his music as soul?
“Of course it’s soul,” he says. “Soul is a funny word. Aretha Franklin’s got soul. Frank Sinatra’s got soul. Al Green’s got soul.”
Does he have soul? “I have the fire in my belly. It comes from a place of honesty. This is what I do and I do it to the best of my abilities. I love it, I hate it. I am all the things that an artiste is.” The Times