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High 5ive reliving the fan love on tour

High 5ive reliving the fan love on tour

Whether you recall every move of that poolside dance in Got the Feelin' or just used to rock a pair of snap-side Kappa pants, there's few 90s boy bands as evocative as 5ive. Five kinds of boys to fill the hearts of five kinds of squealing girls, the band was short-lived but never wanting for fresh looks.

Sean Conlon, meanwhile, hated all his looks. "I looked like a flaming idiot," he laughs, 16 years after the band's creation as the male version of the Spice Girls. "We were all such different characters but they all wanted us to blend in."

The round-faced, sun-kissed baby of the group is now 32 years old. Sadists might want to hear about a washed-up child star on the other side of the phone, gulping the morning's second serving of whisky mixed with his tears. But Conlon is pleasantly grounded. "Between 15 and 20 years of age, I was a child. I never had a chance to discover who I was," he concedes. "So when I left the band I just did normal things, growing up."

Conlon didn't participate when the group made their first attempt to reunite in 2006. Of rehearsing again with members of the group that should be known as 4our (Jason "J" Brown is not joining the others on tour), he maintains that it was uncomfortable at first.

"The routines were initially a huge shock. I am 32, of course, I never expected to do this again," he says. "I also never thought I would enjoy it again.

"The first show we did in London, what shocked me was how normal it felt. I enjoyed it as much as I did all those years ago. I felt more normal there on stage than in the years in-between."

He refuses to dish the dirt on his fabled feud with Brown (the one that "rapped"), and there's little point drilling him for gossip about Ritchie Neville's short-lived relationship with actress and singer Billie Piper. "There were obviously positive and negative points," Conlon says of 5ive's time in the sun. "We were kids, thrown into an extreme situation. A lot of current artists are PR-trained, they've all been to stage school. Some of them are not quite as organic as us; we were picked off the street. We sort of just let it rumble."

While being poached by Simon Cowell based on how good you'd look is far from organic, there's a lot of truth in Conlon's words. Although he wishes One Direction "the best of luck", his undertone can't mask the fact that there's a good dash of not taking themselves too seriously separating 5ive from other boy bands.

It is difficult to imagine One Direction having members who call themselves "Abz Love", or moving as seamlessly and cheekily in their clips from summertime sports to cavorting with cyber-goth dominatrix. "People thought there was some magic formula but we were just ourselves," Conlon says.

While many of their fans have swapped their inflatable backpacks for burp cloths, 5ive will be offering 1997 authenticity when the Big Reunion tour hits Australia this month.

"The tour was a risk and we feel so fortunate that it's happening to us and that people are liking it," Conlon says. "I remember when we did the very first gig at (the Hammersmith Apollo in February), there was something I found so interesting. I went outside and I was speaking with some of the fans. There were groups of people who hadn't seen each other for 12 years. It was a reunion for them and a reunion for us. People are having their own journey within our journey."