Bros – ‘When Will I Be Famous?’

13 February 1988

Time hasn’t been kind to Matt and Luke Goss. Their 2018 behind-the-scenes reunion documentary After The Screaming Stops, featuring their total lack of self-awareness and conkers-are-still-legal-awareness, made them a laughing stock. That’s a pity, because they have an interesting story to tell: teen hysteria, family tragedy, follow-up failure, and (as the title suggests) what they did next. The documentary hinted that they still haven’t processed just what they lived through in 1988-89. Let’s not forget bass player Craig Logan, not in the documentary, who left at the height of Bros-mania due to illness.

Bros’s hits haven’t aged well either. Mostly this is because the songs weren’t good to begin with. ‘When Will I Be Famous?’ is probably the best of them. It tries for Pet Shop Boys-style late-’80s social commentary, with references to reading Karl Marx and being super-ambitious. However, Matt delivers the would-be wry lines with total blankness, as if he is skimming a phonetic transcription of a foreign language text, and his unappealingly shrill and whiny voice makes it all hard to decipher anyway. As for the track itself, the verses have a cocky urgency, that chorus is strong, and bringing in a key change by means of a tempo change to three-four time is certainly a baller move, but it didn’t appeal to me greatly then and I can’t say I like it any more now. Their teen-idol status papered over something that becomes clear when you re-listen to their songs and watch that documentary: the two Gosses just aren’t very likeable. Maybe Craig, who found success managing Pink, was the one who got the lucky break.