Five star Ritchie Neville has given an eye-opening account of what life was really like as part of the chart-topping boyband.
Formed in 1997, the five-piece, styled as ‘5ive’, were famous for singles such as Got the Feelin’, When the Lights Go Out and Slam Dunk (Da Funk).
Neville - who is one of many former boyband stars taking part in new documentary Boybands Forever made by Louis Theroux’s production company Mindhouse - was just 17 when he responded to an advert in The Stage newspaper and was subsequently picked by Spice Girls creator Chris Herbertto be in 5ive.
Positioned as the “bad boys” of pop, fame came quickly for the band and while he acknowledges they got to do “some fantastic things”, things were not always as great as they seemed.
The documentary features archive footage of them getting mobbed by fans, something which became a regular occurrence.
Opening up to The Guardian about that time, Neville - now 45 - says a moment that sticks in his mind was when he was 17 or 18 and a woman who looked to be in her late 30s asked him for a picture.
He told the publication: “While we were doing the picture, she just grabbed me down there like it was perfectly normal. I was like, ‘What are you doing?’” It became one of numerous occasions he was groped, he says, sometimes while performing. “The thing is, a lot of guys would be like, ‘What I wouldn’t give for that!’ But it’s not always pleasant, if you don’t ask for it. It’s like, ‘Why are you doing that? Please don’t do it again.’”
Discussing their treatment further, Neville said they had just “two days off in two years” while starting out and were only paid £100 a week to begin with, even after their songs such as Everybody Get Up began to shoot up the charts.
He also recalled the time he got chickenpox while touring Australia and New Zealand.
While a doctor had recommended he flew home to his parent to recover for two weeks, he claims a label representative tried to shrug it off saying: “Doctors over-exaggerate, don’t they?”
He went on to claim that “they wouldn’t give me my passport to fly home”, resulting in fellow band member Scott Robinson stepping in.
“Scott had to go in and nick my passport and just hand it to me and bundle me in a taxi at four in the morning. At the time, I didn’t think that much of it. Now, that’s an encroachment of power, isn’t it really? It’s almost imprisonment,” he said.
