We are lucky to get a second chance

There weren’t many boy bands bigger than Five in the late 1990s.

But at the height of their popularity in 2001, they dramatically called it a day as the stress and pressure of fame and a relentless schedule took its toll on them all.

Now, decades later – and to the joy of millennials – Scott, Ritchie, J, Sean and Abz are back.

“It was too fast. Too fast,” Abz tells me, while Ritchie explains, “It was like being strapped to a rocket.”

“I think I was in survival mode for five years because I don’t remember anything,” adds Sean, who was just 15 when the band was formed.

25 years after they started out together, they invited me to their rehearsal studio before their upcoming tour.

And it’s clear they’re much more comfortable this time; J says they feel “extraordinarily lucky” to have had a second chance.

The band sold more than 20 million records in the late 1990s and early 2000s with songs like Keep on Movin’ and Everyone Get Up.

But reuniting after more than 20 years is not without risks. Tickets for Oasis’ stadium tour may have sold out in seconds, but others weren’t so lucky.

Scott said all five of them stayed up the night before their reunion was announced.

“I called my wife, Kerry, in the middle of the night and asked, ‘What if no one cares? What if we think it’s going to be this big of a deal and everyone leaves?'”

But luckily the band’s fans were interested and the band’s arena tour in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand was almost sold out.

“We knew we did a good job, but I don’t think we realized how well our youth did and how much we impacted some people’s lives and how much they loved us,” Ritchie says.

Another thing the group was unsure of was the possibility of singing and dancing together again.

Sean explains: “We sold out a tour without even knowing it [we could do it]. We believed it but we had to go into rehearsals to really find out, but we can confirm it’s still there!”

The band are all in their 40s now but had barely left school when they formed. Frankly, it was a very challenging time.

“We started this business at a very young age and thought we had won the lottery and all our dreams had come true,” Ritchie tells me. “In many ways it did, but in some ways it became a psychological nightmare. [there were] Many things happened that we did not expect.

“We would wake up on a tour bus and wonder not what country we were in, but what continent we were in?”

J agrees: “There are a lot of blank spots in our memories and we talked about it and came to the conclusion that everything happened so fast and we were in flight or fight mode throughout the whole thing. It was like you were being chased by something.”

After being apart for so long, I want to know who took the first step towards possibly reuniting.

Scott says not even being in the same room with his four former bandmates for more than 20 years haunts him.

“I called Abz and I hadn’t talked to him in 10 years and one of the first things he said to me was, ‘It’s so nice to hear your voice.’ So we just got together; it wasn’t about a tour, it was about being friends again.

“Nobody outside of this bubble knows what we’re going through,” he adds.

The person who knows most about what Five is experiencing is Robbie Williams, who was a member of Take That before finding success as a solo artist.

Five performed Keep On Movin’ with him at one of his shows in London this summer.

Ritchie said he had “artist insecurity” and was afraid the crowd wouldn’t know who they were, “but it all worked out.”

Sean added that Robbie “knew everything we’d been through” and the six of them sat and chatted for two hours.

As for Five’s emotional trauma, Scott says Robbie told them it was like “carrying around a big bag of rocks and having to empty it every day.”

For J, the whole experience of returning to the band is “the antithesis of what was before.”

“The people we’re around, how we’re managed, how we’re looked after, which is the most important thing. We were there last time too, but people were kind of learning on the job.”

Now they’ve made peace and reunited, but would Five go back in time and do it all over again?

Abz says he’ll do it “but in a different way”, while Ritchie laughs: “I’d love to do it with that mindset, because I’d be checking the accounts a lot more!”

Five: Still Moving is on BBC iPlayer from Tuesday 28 October. The five begin their tour in Cardiff on Wednesday 29 October.