The first time I meet Steps, we’re stuffed into a corridor near the staff room of a branch of HMV in London’s Shepherd’s Bush. Amid an intoxicating plume of hairspray and perfume stand Ian “H” Watkins, Faye Tozer, Lee Latchford-Evans and Claire Richards, each dressed in various deeper shades of blue denim. In the middle of a quick headcount a toilet door flings open and out pops Lisa Scott-Lee, knocking me backwards into a rack of shelves stocked high with the recently re-released version of Steps’s comeback album, entitled Tears on the Dancefloor: Crying at the Disco. “I won’t shake your hand, it’s wet,” she trills. “It’s clean, though, don’t worry.”
They are here to do an old-school signing of an album re-package as if it’s still 1997, the year Steps launched with country-techno line-dancing novelty 5, 6, 7, 8. Post-Spice Girls boom, and with the laser-guided cynicism of ballad bores Westlife ruling pop, Steps – along with denim-clad, Irish leg-wigglers B*Witched – put the fun in late-90s dysfunctional pop. For Steps, it seems, the passage of time is irrelevant, proof that if you were never cool in the first place you can’t actually go out of fashion. At one point I wonder out loud if they’ve been cryogenically frozen for 20 years. “We have,” laughs Claire. “Obviously.”
Some fans have been queuing for six hours, while others have come in fancy dress (to be fair, it is late October and they had a Halloween party straight after). One notable fan is the shopping centre’s security guard Gary, a bulky fortysomething whose sniffer dog Dylan gives the whole event a sense of danger (he’ll later fart while having his picture taken with H. Dylan that is, not Gary).
This isn’t Steps’s first comeback, of course. In 2011 they took part in a surprisingly harrowing four-part Sky Living documentary that picked over the bones of their acrimonious split in 2001 (H and Claire sensationally quit the band at the end of an arena tour to form H & Claire, the duo). The documentary was followed a year later by an unloved Christmas collection, Light Up the World, before a brief hiatus to allow the nostalgia to settle in. As superfan Ross, 34, puts it as he clutches his CD: “There’s been enough time to celebrate what was and now we can move on to what is.”
The year 2017 represented Steps’ 20th anniversary as a band and kickstarted the most successful pop comeback since Take That. Here come the stats: the independently released Tears on the Dancefloor became their fourth Top 5 album, and its 104,000 sales made them the second biggest-selling independent act after Stormzy. The accompanying Party on the Dancefloor arena tour shifted more than 200,000 tickets, and while comeback single Scared of the Dark couldn’t add to their tally of 14 Top 10 singles, it did peak at No 1 on iTunes (a service that didn’t even exist first time around) and was hailed by Vice’s music channel Noisey as “a bombastic, Abba-referencing pop beast”.
“What’s Vice?” asks H when we all meet again the following week during tour rehearsals in a dance studio in north London. “Is it a gay site?” Forming a circle of chairs in the middle of a room strewn with their dancers’ discarded disco-ball helmets, I notice my chair has been placed in the middle of a square made of tape. What’s that for, I ask. “It’s a trap door for journalists,” laughs Lisa, the band’s matriarch and the one who seems to be relishing their comeback the most. We talk about the band’s beginnings and about how, after their successful auditions, they all went back to various parts of the UK and essentially became pen pals.
“We wrote to each other to try and get to know each other better,” says Lisa. “We had a couple of weeks’ rehearsals in Pinnacles, a sports centre in Epsom,” remembers Claire, the most self-aware Step. When they reconvened, they were signed initially for a one-song record deal, with 5, 6, 7, 8 being that one song. “Wasn’t it only for about £500?” asks Lee, the enigmatic one, who recently starred in an Edinburgh fringe play called Wolfboy, a “psychological sexual thriller”. “I thought it was £630,” says Faye, the dependable one, now thankfully without her blonde dreadlocks. They remember signing on the dole after performing 5, 6, 7, 8 on Blue Peter and their £50 a week wages. “Forty pounds went on my rent and then I’d have £10 to spend on potatoes,” remembers H in his children’s TV presenter voice.
Steps should never have worked. For some reason 5, 6, 7, 8 – a summer novelty song with a beach-based line-dancing video – was chucked out in November 1997, the band’s hard work eventually pushing it to its No 14 peak. It was enough to get them a second single, a cover of Bananarama’s No 71 smash Last Thing on My Mind. The Steps version broke the Top 10 and suddenly people started paying attention. But it was their third single, the glorious One for Sorrow, that cemented their pop phenomena status. A not-exactly-subtle-let’s-be-honest unofficial reworking of Abba’s The Winner Takes It All, its legacy has endured – it was re-released in late 2001, while recently a video of some Steps fans singing and dancing along to it in a Leeds car park went viral. “It was the first time it was our own song, it wasn’t a novelty record at all,” says Claire. It helped, too, that it had an instantly familiar dance routine involving some basic counting and rudimentary arm choreography (a Steps staple).
The song was kept off the No 1 spot by the Manic Street Preachers’ cheery If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next, a chart war that has thankfully left no enduring scars. “I met him the other night actually,” says H brightly. “James Dill Bradford [sic]. Lovely guy. He asked for a picture with me! I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’” The band also reminisce about another pop run-in, one involving Westlife and some throwaway comments about comparative chart sales from Claire. “[Westlife’s manager] Louis Walsh went on the radio and was fuming about it,” she says, still shocked. “I remember him coming on to me at the Brits,” says H, to a chorus of “Sorry?!”. “Not coming on to me,” he clarifies. “But he said” – and there’s a dodgy Irish accent for this next bit – “‘What have you been saying about my band?’” Were they ever hungover on morning TV, I ask. “Oh, hell, yes,” they shout in unison. “After we won our Brit award [for best-selling live act 2000] we had to do [Saturday morning show] SM:TV the next day,” says Claire. “I remember going to bed on an hour’s sleep and feeling completely awful.”
Success had brought with it internal conflicts, however. In 1999, Steps supported then-label-mate Britney Spears on her North America tour, with the band traversing the country in a tour bus. Well, the band minus H, who flew on Britney’s private jet. “No one wants to sleep on a bus!” H says by way of explanation. “I do suffer with insomnia, I do,” he adds, when he notices the exaggerated eyerolls. So what happened on the plane? “You know what? Britney was so knackered she’d just sleep a lot. I was mainly chatting with her mum.”
While these little arguments were maximised on the 2011 documentary, the band seem much more at ease now, joking about the tensions that bubble up when you spend so much time with the same people. We talk about One for Sorrow-gate, ie the fact that the song featured sole lead vocals from Claire, a move that unsurprisingly made the others feel like spare parts (in 2015 Claire put a solo acoustic version of it on her SoundCloud). “Years ago it was difficult when somebody was given more [lines],” says Lisa, “but how I look at it now that I’ve had kids and grown up, I’m proud of the vocal and it’s a great song. I’m proud that she’s in our band.”
The mood is cosy and friendly. “Steps is not just about who is the lead singer,” adds H. “Everybody brings something different to the party, and it wouldn’t work if one of us left.” “Or two!” says Lisa suddenly, the reference to H and Claire’s shock departure 17 years ago sucking the air out of the room as she walks off to get a bottle of water. H lets out a forced “Ha ha”, Claire looks at the ground and Lee mumbles a sarcastic, “She’s not bitter.” “We can laugh about it now,” Lisa says, taking her seat again. “It was painful at the time but we’ve got over it. Just about.”
No one laughs.
The Steps split in 2001 was front page news, with one Sun headline screaming, “We’ve had enough of being naff.” While it was announced on Boxing Day, H and Claire informed the band they were leaving on 22 December, the last date of that year’s Gold Tour in support of their million-selling greatest hits collection. Fans accused them of one last money grab after the band had spent most of that year denying the split. To be fair, three of them didn’t know it was coming. In fact, Lee didn’t believe it at the time. “I was like, ‘They’ll change their minds,’” he says sweetly. “I remember you saying, ‘See you in January,’” says Claire. “I woke up the next morning thinking, ‘I’m not in a pop group any more,’” adds Lisa. “I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have the guys. It was really scary.” Did you miss each other? “Not initially,” she says. “H and Claire went off to form a duo, so there was the three of us who were like, ‘What the fuck happened?’”
As solo careers spluttered into life their paths crossed again. “I texted H on one of our birthdays,” Lisa remembers. “I said, ‘I missed how you made me laugh.’”
There’s a pause. “She’s regretting it now!” honks Claire. “We were at Myleene Klass’s party, weren’t we?” Lisa continues, looking at Claire. “You were on the other side of the bar, and I said to my husband, ‘I’m going over to speak to her,’ and he was like, ‘Are you sure? Will she speak to you?’ Then we just went over and had a massive hug.” By the end of 2002 H & Claire were over, their three Top 10 singles not enough to stop the album charting at No 58 and them being dropped. “At the end of all that I just completely lost the plot,” Claire says. In 2003, Lisa launched her solo career, scoring a No 6 hit with Lately (“No 4 in the midweeks,” she adds helpfully), before embarking on an MTV fly-on-the-wall documentary in 2005 called Totally Scott-Lee (subtitle: “Desperately seeking fame”), the narrative drive being that Scott-Lee had to score a UK Top 10 with the single Electric or she’d quit the music industry. It peaked at No 13. The documentary has since been hailed as a lost classic, with some of its lines – most notably the desperate, endearingly clueless “But I’m B-List at Capital” – becoming shorthand for never giving up.
“I just wish it would go away,” Lisa huffs when I bring up the show. “I’m a performer, that’s all I want to do. It wasn’t about me trying to be a big solo star. It’s weird because when we do our signings now, people have T-shirts on with this B-List at Capital thing, which I don’t understand,” she says, genuinely perplexed.
Unsurprisingly, given the ironic reappraisal of a distorted documentary that celebrated her failure, Lisa is over the moon at Steps’s comeback success. She agrees that they’re basically acting as if it’s still the late 90s.
“When we were working on this new album, I said I feel like I’ve woken up in 1997. We go back to our old roles, don’t we? It’s funny.” In fact, every detail of the comeback is based around this idea of picking up where they left off, to the point where even today’s political quagmire is brushed aside as though we’re still in New Labour’s heyday (“No politics in Steps world,” says Faye in a school teacher’s tone when I ask about Brexit). It’s there, too, in the ludicrous key change of Scared of the Dark and the knowingly tacky video for recent single Dancing with a Broken Heart (Mad Max with a TK Maxx budget, basically). The dance routines are back, of course, but so are the proper, universal pop songs collected from some of pop’s best songwriters via a brief that their manager tells me included “drama, lyrics about heartbreak, huge strings, key changes. Tears on the dancefloor, basically”. In fact, when the first mixes started arriving, the band sent them back and asked for them to be more Steps. “We said, ‘It doesn’t feel like us – it needs to be more anthemic, bigger choruses,” says Claire. “We needed the key changes,” adds H.
Every single dopamine-rush-inducing key change was given an airing in November at London’s 20,000-seater O2 arena. Like Steps in general, the show – which closed with them skipping around a giant three-tiered wedding cake in all their finery for Tragedy – is gloriously naff, intermittently awkward and spectacularly uncool (at one point Lee and H cover Despacito), but at the heart of it all is something undeniably pure.
There’s a lovely moment during new song Neon Blue. “Come out, come out, and dance with me,” they sing, in what’s supposed to be the nightclub portion of the show, “if you’re down, it’s a remedy.” In an occasionally over-intellectualised pop world dominated by algorithms, the return of Steps feels refreshingly unpretentious; a call to arms from an unlikely comeback we didn’t know we needed. “That’s what we’ve always wanted to do – get people back on the dancefloor,” says Faye. Mission accomplished.
Steps tour from 26 May to 10 July, starting at Whaddon Road Stadium, Cheltenham
