Baby oil to dad bods: Blue on sixth album in 20 years and playing drag queens: ‘We’re like boomerangs’-Simon Gage-Entertainment – Metro

From left, Lee Ryan, Antony Costa, Duncan James, and Simon Webbe of the band Blue (Picture: PR)

The last time I interviewed hit-making boy band Blue, they were doing a ‘naked’ shoot and Lee Ryan and Duncan James were wearing nothing but skimpy underpants, were greased up with baby oil and were grinding into me as I got ready to talk to them, just to get me flustered. It worked.

Now they’re back in the room – well, Simon Webbe, Duncan and Antony Costa are as Lee is still on paternity leave in Spain, where he lives, before he has to absent himself from his new baby for the upcoming arena tour.

This time round the boys – men! – are more respectably dressed in an office at their record company with not a whiff of baby oil but with the same cheeky, naughty, ‘in it for the laughs’ attitude that made them one of the best-loved boy bands of the 2000s – their first hit, All Rise, making the top five in 2001. And they were huge!

Quite apart from the 11 hits, the three Number Ones and the 16million record sales there was Eurovision, the Queen’s Jubilee, collaborations with Elton and Stevie Wonder… there was even a question about them and a subsequent discussion on a recent Only Connect, the quiz show for brainy people.

They may have started 20 years 
or so ago – ‘That’s longer than most marriages!’ laughs Antony – but their relevance is still clearly massive. And now they’re back!

‘We never went away!’ says Antony, when you ask how it feels to be back together with a new album, a funky meets soulful offering called Heart & Soul, and the upcoming arena tour. ‘We’re like boomerangs. For us, it’s like brothers that you’ve loved and respected all your life. And we know how to give each other space.’

The album was born out of a session at a Swedish songwriting camp – like speed-dating for singers and writers – where the songs they came up with were so good that they decided it had to be an album. But this was before Covid, which meant making the album was different to anything they’d done before.

Blue at the 2002 Brit Awards (Picture: Alastair Grant/AP/AFP via Getty Images)

‘Back in the day,’ says Antony, the chattiest of the group, ‘it would be us in a studio working on harmonies, giving notes to each other, but with this we went in blind, trying to blend your voice with the other lads. Surreal but those were the rules in lockdown.’

As far as going back on stage is concerned – and they’re big stages – it’s scary but, as Simon says, they’ve never really stopped. ‘We go around the world gigging,’ he says, ‘but a full focus on an hour-and-a-half show in big venues is going to be daunting.’

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But the people in the audiences for their shows are not necessarily who you might expect, with Antony saying he gets a lot of blokes saying they brought their girlfriends almost as cover, as if liking Blue was a guilty pleasure.

‘I get a lot of straight blokes coming up to me going, “Legend, mate! I grew up with your music! Shake my hand,”’ says Duncan who is now openly gay. His coming out started with him revealing himself to be bisexual – because he’d had a child – but it was a clear case of ‘bi now, gay later’ as he is now, in his words, ‘full gay, baby’.

Blue 20 years later at Mighty Hoopla Festival (Picture: Joseph Okpako/WireImage via Getty Images)

‘The only thing coming out changed was the roles I was getting offered in musicals,’ says Duncan, who went on to have a glittering post-Blue career up to and including celebrity Gogglebox with Denise Van Outen.

‘I went from playing the boyfriend to playing drag queens, which was great. They were seeing me in roles they never would have seen me in before.’

The reason he gives for not coming out earlier, 20 years ago when Blue were first setting out with songs like Too Close, Fly By and One Love, was that ‘we had a predominantly female fanbase… and were in a multimillion-pound business and I was scared that my coming out would dampen the business for the boys.

‘You don’t want to be the one to nosedive the band so it was easier to just keep my mouth shut.’

Lee also later spoke about having dated men, saying on Good Morning 

Britain, ‘I think a lot of people are a lot more liberal, which is great for 
our society.’

Suited and booted for Break My Heart video in 2013 (Picture: Ollie Millington/Getty Images)

But that’s all water under the bridge and here we are 20 years later, all members now fathers – Simon has a daughter of 26 and an 18-month-old boy, Antony a daughter of 18 and two little girls, Lee four daughters between 14 and the newborn and Duncan a girl of 17 – and ready to do it all again.

‘We might be a bit rusty,’ says Antony of introducing moves to the arena shows. ‘You might hear some creaks…’ Simon slaps his belly adding, ‘And we’ve all got dad bods.’

That certainly doesn’t seem to be the case, but there’s only one way to prove it. And it involves baby oil.

The album Heart & Soul is out now. The 20th Anniversary Tour starts at Motorpoint Arena, Cardiff on December 4, officialblue.com

MORE : Blue’s Duncan James confronted by fan who claimed he got her pregnant: ‘I’m gay – it ain’t me’

MORE : Blue star Duncan James performs in striking drag to raise money for cancer research

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