Anne's Song (14 page)

Look at his muscles on his u-huh
He's got legs that go up to his u-huh
Does he want to a-ha?
Course he wants to a-ha

Equally ludicrous was this:

A crazy fling
A moonlight dance
Next July, we fly to Mars
We run away from every day
As we play among the stars

I don't know what it was about the Japanese and the Nolans, but it seemed we could do no wrong in their eyes. The following May, we appeared on a BBC television show called
Noel's Addicts,
hosted by Noel Edmonds. The idea was that a member of the public was questioned on their specialist subject. On this occasion, the BBC had flown a young man over from Japan to answer questions on us. They were so obscure that my sisters and I didn't know the answers to most of them, but it wasn't a problem to the young Japanese guy: he answered every one correctly.

The previous year, we'd been delighted to be booked to perform at the Sandcastle, a famous swimming pool complex on Blackpool's south promenade, where Keith Harris and Orville were top of the bill. Keith struck me as a bit remote at that time and it wasn't until we later went on the road with him that I got to know the real man. He was kind and funny; he made us laugh all the time as he drove us from gig to gig.

Our brother Brian had recently married a lovely girl called Lindsay, a dancer I'd worked with in panto at Liverpool. When Linda had left the group to pursue a solo career and her husband Brian had stopped acting as our tour manager, my brother Brian gave up looking after the merchandising side of our group and became tour manager. Lindsay was now working at a local private school, teaching dance and keep fit, but she agreed to help us choreograph some new routines for the summer show at the Sandcastle.

We'd been rehearsing for a couple of weeks with Lindsay and opening night was the following week, but Brian turned up one dav to tell us that Lindsay wasn't feeling well enough to work. She was having trouble shaking off a heavy cold. The problem persisted, and then Lindsay started experiencing trouble breathing when she was lying down, so Brian called a doctor. He diagnosed a virus and prescribed a course of antibiotics. Two days later, when she'd failed to respond to the drugs and was throwing up black bile, the decision was taken to admit her to hospital, just as a precautionary measure, while they got to the root cause of her illness. She was well enough to get there under her own steam and yet, incredibly, devastatingly, she died two days later. She was just twenty-six. The diagnosis was that a massive viral infection had attacked her heart. The tragic loss of such a beautiful, vibrant young woman rocked everyone who knew her. Brian was beside himself with grief, utterly inconsolable.

It was well nigh impossible for us to get back to our work with any conviction or enthusiasm. The numbers Lindsay had choreographed were dropped from the show; their inclusion would have been too painful. Later on in the summer, and as a tribute to Lindsay, we did reinstate her dance steps, but they were a daily reminder of our talented sister-in-law, much loved, much missed.

Towards the end of that summer of 1991, and after the tragedy of losing Lindsay, Amy, who was now ten, became ill. It started with her inability to keep any food or drink down. Initially, Brian and I weren't worried – children are often sick and then right as rain the next day – but the situation was complicated by the fact that Amy is phobic about vomit, hers or anyone else's.

The result was that she then wouldn't eat or drink anything, for fear she'd bring it all up again. I bought her all sorts of pops and cordials to tempt her. Eventually, she did drink one of them – and promptly threw up. She started to look terrible – drawn and deathly white – so we took her to the A&E department at Blackpool Victoria Hospital. A young doctor examined her and concluded it was no more than a viral infection. We returned home with Amy, much reassured.

The next day, she collapsed. We rushed her back to A&E and this time she was taken straight on to an emergency ward where a consultant saw her almost immediately. After a moment, he turned to me angrily. Why had I left it so late to bring her in? I explained about the previous day's visit and he gave the staff a severe dressing down for sending her home in the first place. Amy, meanwhile, was put on a drip and underwent any number of tests. It turned out that she was almost 50 per cent dehydrated. They kept her on a drip for a week.

Brian and I worked a kind of shift system so that one of us was always with Amy. After performing in the show at the Sandcastle, I'd go straight to the hospital where I stayed with her all night. Brian would be at home looking after Alex, and then he'd arrive in the morning and sit with Amy all day. The young doctor who'd originally examined her was full of apologies. As it was, she didn't suffer any lasting effects from her condition and after a week she'd bounced back to her normal, healthy self.

My professional life, although very different now from those years of being a pop star, suited me rather better. My sisters and I were able to accept individual invitations for one-off gigs, and spend much more time with our loved ones in between. Brian was still working on the insurance side of the commercial estate agency, a job he enjoyed although he hadn't got any qualifications at that stage.

We were still big in Japan, though, and made another visit there in 1992, mostly to promote our latest album. We did do one TV show which I shan't easily forget. We were rehearsing our song when we began to notice that all the cameras seemed to be very near to the ground. I whispered to one of my sisters, 'The viewers are going to be able to see right up our skirts.' It turned out, of course, that that was the precise intention. Without realising it, we were about to appear on a soft porn channel. As I was the eldest, my sisters elected me to go and complain to the producer, and he reassured us that the cameramen would definitely shoot us at shoulder height. So we resumed rehearsals and the same thing happened again. I marched up to the producer. 'Right,' I said, 'forget it. We're off They couldn't afford to lose us because the Nolans were so popular in Japan and eventually our contribution to the show was filmed the way we wanted it.

Back home, we did a summer season in Bournemouth with Joe Longthorne who did wonderful impressions of everyone from Barbra Streisand to Frank Sinatra. If you've seen – and heard – him impersonate Shirley Bassey, it's not something you forget. He was lovely to work with, although he never socialised with us; he wasn't a family man so I think he preferred keeping his private life just that: private. All the same, he's always very good to his fans. They're devoted to him. In fact, at the beginning of that season, no one was very interested in our act – they were there to see Joe – but I think we won them round. The same people would come to the show, night after night, sitting in the best seats in the house. It must have cost them all their savings but they seemed to enjoy the familiarity of it all. We'd also attract our own individual fans. Bernie and Maureen were probably the most popular, but Coleen had her own fans who liked her best and so did I. Mine were two men in their twenties who always made a beeline for me after the show.

In 1993, Coleen left the group, having given birth to a second son, Jake. Shane's career was going well, so she didn't need to work for the money, and anyway she wanted to be at home with her two boys. That left three of us. Bernie and I would still occasionally clash, but Maureen always kept the peace between us. This was also the year when the remaining Nolans started to become popular on the gay circuit. The audience loved an all-girl group with their matching outfits and choreographed dance steps. Our very first such engagement was at a club called G.A.Y. in the Charing Cross Road in London. The audience went wild, singing along to all the words of all our hits. I'd never seen anything like it. Some of them were even dressed like us! It was a scream. We absolutely loved it.

A year later, Bernie announced she, too, wanted to go solo. She said she'd particularly disliked performing in the bingo halls which we'd started to do when there was no other work. This time, Maureen and I really thought that it might be the end of the act. We couldn't see how just two people could hope to make the same sound once produced by five, and Bernie had probably been the most popular of the three of us. She was certainly the most vivacious, the best dancer and a strong singer with a mass of blonde hair and bags of personality.

Before she left, we did a summer season with her at the Grand Theatre in Blackpool and an appearance at the Frontier Club in Barley at the end of November, but easily the most memorable event also involved every member of the family with the exception of Denise who was on tour and Coleen who was at home while Shane was away, looking after their two young sons.

The centenary of the Grand fell in the summer of 1994 and, to commemorate the occasion, a variety show was put on. The Queen and Prince Philip visited rehearsals in the afternoon and we were all introduced to them, although they didn't attend the actual performance, the Nolan family were given the honour of closing the first half. Each member of the family was introduced to the audience and came on to the stage, one by one: Dad was followed by our brothers, Tommy and Brian, and then came Maureen, Linda, Bernie and me. Next came Mum and Amy and Alex, now thirteen and seven respectively, as well as Danny, Maureen's six-year-old son, who joined in with the rest of us.

We sang our version of Barry Manilow's 'One Voice' which began with my dad and grew as each member of the family joined in, culminating in all of us singing in harmony. I wouldn't want to seem big-headed, but I have to say the sound we made was tremendous. At the end, the audience erupted as one. It's an evening I'll take with me to my grave – but it was the end of an era. It had been twenty years since my sisters and I had transformed ourselves from being a Blackpool family club act into one of England's most successful female groups of all time. We'd conquered Europe and the Far East, winning more awards and accolades than I could count. We'd released eighteen singles in the UK and eight albums. There had been so many TV appearances, it sometimes felt as though we were on more often than the news. Now it was to end.

The Nolans were reduced to just me and Maureen. While we contemplated whether we had a viable future, we received an invitation to go to Japan to put some new harmonies on the tracks we'd recorded and to re-record some of the lead vocals. It was nice work, well paid, and I enjoyed the fact that, because there were just the two of us, we each had more to do. But what lay ahead, professionally speaking, when we returned to the UK?

We didn't have to wait long to find out. Back in Blackpool, we were approached by Nick Thomas and John Conway, who ran an entertainments company called Qdos which had put on a lot of our summer shows in the past. They suggested we hire two dancers and they'd guarantee us six months' work in Butlins camps and a summer show. So Maureen and I found two girls, Julie Payne and Lee Davies, who we took on to give the act a bit more spectacle, a bit more substance. Unbeknown to the audience, they each had a dead microphone to give the impression they were also singing; we'd broken the rule of a lifetime and recorded our sisters' harmonies on backing tracks to bulk out the sound, but the reality was Julie and Lee were hired for their dancing skills.

The four of us duly did a three-month tour of Butlins, a pretty soul-destroying experience. It all seemed a long way from the glory days of chart-topping singles and sharing the bill with an icon like Frank Sinatra. However, we followed that with a highly enjoyable six-week summer season with Tom O'Connor at the Riviera Centre in my old stamping ground of Torquay. We rented a house on the outskirts of town complete with what turned out to be a flea-ridden cat which caused Amy (of course!) to develop an itchy rash.

It was during that season that a man jumped up on stage and mooned at us, an event Maureen missed because she had her eyes closed at the time, having reached a soulful point in the song she was singing. As a matter of fact, I reassured her afterwards that she'd missed nothing, which makes it a bit of a mystery as to why the man felt so compelled to parade his bits and pieces in the first place.

It was also while we were appearing in Torquay that one day Maureen and I went to get some money out of a cash dispenser before going into a shop to buy magazines and birthday cards. She was at the other end of the shop, looking through the selection of cards and, as I turned round from the magazine rack, I saw a man approach her, slip his hand into her bag and take out her purse containing the money she'd just withdrawn. He'd been watching her and had followed her into the shop. He quickly turned around and walked towards the entrance, but I stood in his way. 'I'll take that,' I said and grabbed the purse off him. In hindsight, it was an impulsive and probably foolish thing to have done. He could have punched me or even pulled a knife on me, but I was so outraged he should have taken my sister's purse that I didn't stop and think. He was more shocked than me that I'd caught him in the act, so he just ran out of the shop. I then went over to Maureen who'd been completely unaware of any of this.

It was in the papers the next day – how I'd foiled a theft. I'd told a local journalist called Paul Levie what had happened and he'd written a story about what a heroine I'd been! Brian and I had originally got to know Paul when we lived in Torquay. He had his own small news agency and we'd become very friendly with him; in fact, Brian is godfather to his son. I remember he came to see me in hospital when Amy was born and my sisters were there. He started taking pictures and earned himself a tongue lashing from Maureen who, being protective, felt he was overstepping the mark, but when they got to know him better, they could see he was a nice man.

At the end of the year, Maureen and I did our first pantomime together at the Grand in Blackpool. She was Snow White and I was the Wicked Queen; it's much more fun being a baddie, and working with my sister dispelled any potential nerves. Because it was local, it also meant, of course, that we were based at home all over Christmas, a real treat. Alex, then eight, and her cousin Laura, Tommy's thirteen-year-old, auditioned for small dancing roles in the production and both were accepted, which made it a proper family affair.

Alex had already had a walk-on part in the stage musical version of
Summer Holiday
starring Darren Day at the Opera House in Blackpool. Both she and Amy had taken lessons at a local dancing school, but I can't say that either of the girls had expressed an interest in following me into show business generally or singing in particular.

The following summer, we did a tour – just Maureen and me, but we were used to it being the two of us by now – with The Bachelors, Jimmy Cricket and The Grumbleweeds; we sang all our hits, a West End musical medley and we each had a solo. We followed this with a summer season in Weymouth but only had to work Wednesday, Thursday, Friday each week. We'd taken a house on the beach which meant we could laze around each day lying in the sunshine. It was lovely. Amy and Alex were there because it was the school holidays and Maureen's son, Danny, too. Brian came down for a fortnight; it was just a shame he couldn't be with us the whole time.

While I was away, he'd spend his free time helping to coach a local football team, Blackpool Rovers – he also played for them – and I'd go and watch the team play whenever I could. Later on, he coached other local teams: Fleetwood, Mechanics and Squires Gate. He just couldn't get football out of his system and it kept him fit. I regret now the number of football functions, company dances and so on that I had to miss because I was away working. I would dearly have loved to have accompanied him but, without my work, we couldn't have afforded the lifestyle to which we'd grown accustomed.

Having said that, money was never in abundance. If there were any gaps in our diary, I'd look for some work on my own. I remember once landing a gig in a local hotel just to boost our income, although I also wanted the experience of seeing what it was like performing solo. I borrowed my brother Tommy's sound system and used some backing tracks belonging to the Nolans. Accompanied by my friend. Dee Fitzgerald, who manned the tape machine, off I went. It was scary and a whole new challenge without two or three sisters to 'hide' behind, but I got a taste for it and, at one stage, I was doing two or three solo gigs a week.

In March 1997, Amy turned sixteen. We spent the day in Manchester on a shopping trip and then, in the evening, the rest of the family along with Amy's friends all gathered for a party at my parents' house in Waterloo Road. Dad hadn't been feeling too well during the day, apparently, but he'd decided to clean the oven using a strong abrasive cleaner, ignoring the printed instruction that he should use protective gloves and a mask and, rather more importantly, that the job shouldn't be undertaken by anyone suffering any kind of breathing problems. During the evening, he complained of feeling worse and took himself off to bed. He had been a lifelong heavy smoker, and it was the beginning of what turned out to be a year and a half of ill health. His breathing gradually deteriorated, the trips to visit the consultant at Victoria Hospital becoming more frequent. Within months, he was unable to go anywhere without an oxygen canister and a mask over his nose and mouth. My overwhelming feeling was one of pity. He cut an increasingly sad figure. He was only in his early seventies, but he no longer had the breath to walk the short distance to the end of the garden.