Beyond Brother Beyond…
Brother Beyond frontman Nathan Moore, talks to Carol Wilson about Top of the Pops, fame in France, walking the red carpet and his new life in the Ribble Valley
Nathan Moore remembers exactly where he was the moment he found out that his band, Brother Beyond, had missed out on the UK charts’ number one spot.
“I was at the Notting Hill Carnival, in a shop and the charts were on the radio, and I heard ‘At number two…it’s Brother Beyond!’ and I was like, ‘How’s that happened?’” Nathan was shocked by the outcome as their hit single, The Harder I Try, had been number one in the daily listings the whole of the previous week.
But he has his own theories as to why Phil Collins pipped them to what would have been their only number one hit single. A Groovy Kind of Love was the soundtrack to the film Buster, in which Collins had a starring role, so he narrowly beat Brother Beyond to the top spot.
“We expected to be number one,” says Nathan. “We kept asking ourselves, how can we be number one up until Saturday and then on Sunday lose by 200 sales? That’s all we got beaten by.
“There probably wasn’t a financial gain to be made from being number one, but it’s history. What was number one this week in 1988? It’s the number ones of the last 30 years that are remembered, not the number twos. In that sense you miss out.
“We were number one in Ireland though. I’ve got that to hang on to.”
As one quarter of four-piece Brother Beyond in the late 80s and early 90s, Nathan rubbed shoulders with Take That, Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan and Bros, to name just a few.
After the band parted amicably, he joined Worlds Apart in the mid-1990s and became hugely famous in France, featuring on talk shows alongside Brigitte Bardot and Jean Claude van Damme and walking the music awards red carpet with Celine Dion.
These days you can find him having breakfast in Clitheroe, training at Harris Fitness in Barrow or cycling through Gisburn Forest.
The Londoner has also revived his pop career, still touring with Worlds Apart and hosting 80s/90s nights under the Brother Beyond title, but he has left behind the hustle and bustle of city life and settled in a semi-rural spot in the Ribble Valley, with his wife Donna and their teenage son Nico.
“I love performing. I had 10 years of nothing, no phone calls, after it ended, but you just leave it like an old fossil and then dig it up a few years later and it’s got a bit of value and people want it. And now, I’m really quite busy. But it suits my life, I take Nico to school in the morning, I’ve got my weeks kind of free, I help Donna with her business, Host Your Home. She drives that but I can be the maintenance man if anything needs doing and I turn up with my toolbox,” says Nathan, 59.
“I occasionally get recognised, but I don’t really want to be. I want to live a life. When I go into London I want to go on the Tube, I want to be amongst people. I like people.
“I’ve been friends with some really famous people. When Michelle Collins was at the height of her fame as Cindy in Eastenders we’d go out in London for dinner and it was horrendous with people shouting ‘Cindy!’ every few steps.
“I had it after we first appeared on Top of the Pops with Brother Beyond.
“Top of the Pops was the dream. The ultimate. But the next day I was walking down Oxford Street and that was my Cindy from Eastenders moment!
“Everybody watched Top of the Pops back then. In 1988 we had four channels and you tuned into the same thing, so six to eight million people watched it.
“Everybody was whispering, ‘there’s that guy from that band Brother Beyond’. So I sort of did become famous overnight.
“Once you’ve done that you’re in every magazine, No 1, Smash Hits and because I was the frontman I would do things like Jackie and Just 17.
“It’s a buzz to a young man, but it goes away, it does end, because that’s pop.”
Nathan still gets the thrill of performing though, through solo gigs at hotel and hospitality events and festivals – his next one being Music in the Park at Leyland’s Worden Park on 26th May, where he is hosting a one-day festival of 80s music that features Jason Donavan, Sonia and Rowetta and is headlined by Billy Ocean.
“My life balance is great. I live a pretty normal life, I’m sort of famous in a field in the middle of nowhere sometimes, doing a Let’s Rock festival.
“The weekend after Music in the Park I’m doing Irlam Live with Holly Johnson and Liberty X.
“There I’m somebody to quite a lot of the people. Great. But Monday I’m back shopping at Tesco.
“I never thought when I lived in Islington for 30 years that I would end my life in Lancashire, in the wet north.
“But life is good. It is a great place to live and it’s my home now and I’m very happy here.”
