Before he became the most famous torso of the 1990s, the pop singer and reality TV star grew up a devout Jehovah’s Witness. Now a children’s author, he tells Decca Aitkenhead how he still lives with the guilt of breaking free from his faith.
Peter Andre’s home is so pristine that when you walk in you feel like human clutter. Deep in the Surrey stockbroker belt, behind electronic gates on a private road, it looks like a show home for executive suburban luxury chic. The palette is taupe and mushroom and beige, the scatter cushions regimented into rows of flawless symmetry; glossy cream floor tiles shimmer, marble kitchen surfaces gleam. It’s as if the entire house has just come back from the dry cleaners.
The family atmosphere is as orderly as the aesthetic. Andre opens the front door with a big smile and the kind of solicitous welcome — would I like a coffee? A Coke Zero? Something to eat? — most celebrities delegate to an assistant. His wife, Emily, a doctor, is in the study seeing NHS patients on Zoom. “Mi casa su casa,” he tells me, before nipping upstairs to wash his hair for the photoshoot. “Do you know,” he pauses at the door to check, “what that means?”
Their children, Millie, nine, and Theo, six, are at school, but if they walked in I wouldn’t recognise them. Their parents do not post pictures of them on social media and their faces are pixelated in the press. When they get home from school they won’t be allowed on their iPads, as screen time is limited to early Saturday and Sunday mornings. “Emily’s a very strict mum,” Andre explains. Their dining table is a no-phones zone and a one-screen policy is enforced when the family sit down to watch TV together.
Andre’s children from his first marriage to the glamour model Katie Price — Junior, 17, and Princess, 15 — are not wild about these policies. “You should have seen the eye-rolling,” Andre says, chuckling. His elder two grew up glued to their devices and all over our screens; from birth they shared their lives with camera crews filming their parents’ reality TV shows. When not with Andre and Emily, their other home is their mother’s infamous “mucky mansion” 50km away in West Sussex, a chaotic farmhouse full of dogs and builders and boyfriends and perpetual drama, all documented on reality TV and social media.
I’ve come to talk to Andre about his new children’s book, the moral of its story being that addiction to screens is bad for humanity. It’s an illustrated tale about a brother and sister called Theo and Millie who fly on a space rocket to visit a planet where every single thing is mysteriously grey. Where had all the colour gone? Millie solves the puzzle by clocking that all everyone on the planet does is stare at their phones. When she persuades them to look up and reconnect with one another the colour comes flooding back, restoring joy and love to the planet.
From a celebrity whose entire career has been built on getting us to stare at screens, this allegorical tale is a surprise. I’m curious to know what Junior and Princess, who have more than a million Instagram followers between them, make of it, but Andre just grins and says, “Both of them were a bit, like, he-llo? Why have you mentioned Millie and Theo and not us?”
If Andre is at all troubled by this envy, it doesn’t show. He delivers the line like everything else he says all day, in an upbeat tone of unassailable contentment. Nothing can penetrate his forcefield of sunny optimism. To be fair, his agent is beside me on the sofa policing the conversation to veto any topic that might risk steering Andre off-brand from Mr Nice — specifically his ex-wife, and the recent Wagatha Christie trial during which Rebekah Vardy’s infamous kiss-and-tell claim that he is “hung like a small chipolata” was republicised. But Andre really does seem sublimely relaxed about everything — even the challenge of parenting a blended family with Katie Price.
Can anyone be this frictionless, particularly after leading such a complicated life? Having interviewed his ex-wife not long ago my mind boggles at how they manage to co-parent, and I wish I was allowed to ask. As blended families’ values go, his and Price’s could hardly be less compatible. Then again, now 50, Andre’s whole life has been a succession of contradictory identities.
He was born in Harrow, northwest London, the second youngest of five boys and one girl to Greek-Cypriot parents — a barber and a housewife. The family emigrated to Australia when he was six. Among the Gold Coast’s blue-eyed blond kids they were the “only ethnic family”, and Andre was badly bullied and beaten up throughout his childhood. His parents were devout Jehovah’s Witnesses and until the age of 16 Andre went to church five days a week, door-knocking all weekend to spread the word that the end of the world was nigh. The only book allowed in his house was the Bible; the only other ones he read were approved texts about the Jehovah faith.
He liked church — “I was picked on a lot, so going there was a blessing, ‘cos it felt like a sanctuary” — but also loved Michael Jackson, and would practise his dance moves alone in his bedroom. At 16 he took part in Australia’s New Faces talent contest, landed his first record deal, and “from then into my twenties I rebelled against everything. I hadn’t been allowed to do anything, so it was just mad.”
A star in Australia after his second single got to No 3, he went on tour supporting Madonna, and in 1996 his single Mysterious Girl reached No 2 in the UK charts and turned him into a global heart-throb. Famous for his six-pack as much as his singing, his life became a blur of nightclubs, photoshoots and gorgeous groupies. He didn’t touch drugs — “that would have broken my parents’ hearts” — but there was a lot of casual sex, shirtless posing and arrogance, all of which he feels terrible about now.
“It was an insecurity thing, trying to prove a point because of the years that you weren’t accepted. I don’t like who I became when I was just going with girls and not caring. I just went off on a tangent.” At the height of his fame, at 25, he had a nervous breakdown. It began with brain fog, then panic attacks, depression, anxiety, agoraphobia, even vertigo. He puts it down to the legacy of childhood bullying: all the fear he’d felt as a boy was finally catching up with him. Unable to function, he went home to his family in Australia, then into hiding in the US.
After six years of medication and therapy, psychiatric units and solitude, Andre was coaxed out of retirement and into the jungle, where we watched agog as he fell head over heels for his fellow I’m a Celebrity contestant Katie Price. Every drama in their volatile five-year romance was commodified for the cameras in a series of fly-on-the-wall reality TV shows and OK! magazine spreads, and after Andre left her in 2009 we continued to follow his life over ten series of Peter Andre: My Life. TV audiences could not get enough.
All that ended in 2013 after he fell in love with his second wife. The pair had met when he offered concert tickets to the surgeon who removed his kidney stone, who couldn’t go so gave them to his daughter, Emily. Seventeen years Andre’s junior and a stranger to showbusiness, “she’s smart and sensible and organised, and she makes me see things very differently. She has made me be like I was when I was really young. I sort of went into this crazy life from my late teens to 40 and then all of a sudden she has brought out the simple part of me again.”
Yet fans still can’t get enough of him. His 2015 appearance on Strictly Come Dancing invited breathless references to national treasure status, and this year he celebrates 30 years in showbusiness with a sell-out tour, a West End run in Grease, two film projects and Super Space Kids! Save Planet Drizzlebottom, the first in what will be a series of children’s books about Millie and Theo’s intergalactic adventures.
Andre didn’t read books as a child — “the only book we had was the Bible” — and was 21 before he encountered his first novel, a thriller by John Grisham, who remains to this day the only author he names whenever someone like me asks for his favourite writers. So when Planet Drizzlebottom turned out to be unexpectedly good, I assumed Andre must have got someone else to write it. Fortunately he takes this as a compliment. “No!” he says, laughing. “I was adamant — no ghostwriters.”
Ever since his children were babies he always read to them, he explains, but would deviate from the book to ad lib with outlandish plotlines of his own, swapping the fictional protagonists for his own children. The more they begged for more, the wilder his imagination ran riot. All his books will be based on the bedtime stories he spun to entertain his kids.
This is obviously charming and casts Andre in a more creative light than I had hitherto appreciated. He cheerfully agrees that neither of us would have predicted, when he first became famous for dancing about on a beach with his shirt off in the Mysterious Girl video, that nearly three decades later we would be reflecting on the longevity of his success in The Sunday Times. I’m keen to work out the secret of his enduring star appeal and he is sweetly earnest about everything we discuss, but is so emollient that it’s hard to get an opinion out of him on practically anything.
Although proud to be writing the children’s books himself he quickly adds: “Not that there’s anything wrong with ghostwriters.” He doesn’t hold particularly strong views on children’s screen-time either. “I can’t say, ‘Well, the right thing to do is this.’ There is no right way.” After telling me he has made Junior promise never to ride a motorbike, he adds: “But there’s nothing wrong with riding motorbikes. Some people are very good at it.” We inch close to an actual opinion when he says he can’t bring himself to believe Michael Jackson was guilty of abusing boys, before his agent jumps in to shut him up because “this isn’t appropriate”.
Junior already has a recording deal with Columbia Records and Princess a modelling contract with the fast fashion brand PrettyLittleThing, so I wonder how their father feels about “nepo baby”, the recently coined term for precociously famous children of celebrities that implies they owe their success to nepotism.
“OK, I understand people’s thoughts on the whole nepo baby thing,” he agrees equably. “But I don’t agree with it. Now, people are going to say, ‘Well, of course you don’t agree with it because you’re in the industry and your son’s getting into the industry.’ But any parent would give a helping hand for any job they do, whether they’re a doctor, a nurse or a fireman. So their kids are entering something almost a step ahead by the experience they’ve had. But if a kid’s not good, you’re only going to last for a very short time. You have to be good at it. And you have to work damn hard for it.”
Along with hard work and “my amazing team”, Andre puts his own longevity down to niceness. “If you’re nice in this industry and you get on with people, it doesn’t mean you’re not going to fall. But when you’re trying to get up, a person’s going to reach out and help because of how you’ve been nice.” He discovered this for himself when he returned to showbusiness following his breakdown, he says — but then looks worried. “It’s such a cliché to say it’s about being humble and being nice. It’s just really nice that people have been so nice to me.”
If he came across as arrogant in his youth, he says it was just a self-defence mechanism, though he thinks it might help explain why he’s so popular now. “In the Nineties guys were thinking, ‘Are you looking at my girl?’ and all that. But now I’m not threatening in any sort of way, shape or form.”
In more than a decade together he says he and Emily have not had a single argument. If he ever disagrees with anyone he says sorry immediately, and he can’t remember the last time he raised his voice: “I genuinely don’t get angry.” Public approval and the love of his fans mean everything to Andre. “Ah, it’s the best thing in the world,” he says, his face lighting up. “I get overwhelmed every time, because I think about where we went from — from being these outcast kids — to being accepted.”
The childhood bullying comes up time and again throughout the conversation. He still suffers from panic attacks to this day, and I wonder if his compulsion to people-please is another of its legacies, but the approval he seems to crave more than any is that of his octogenarian parents — which is a tricky challenge, given their strict Jehovah faith. He began to question it in his early teens, “but one of the things that kept me going as a Witness was that I knew the people I loved in the music industry were Witnesses. George Benson, he was an elder. Michael Jackson’s family were all Witnesses. Even Prince became a very devout Witness towards the end. And I still feel quite protective about it.”
When he got famous he began breaking all his faith’s rules: sex outside marriage, swearing, getting drunk, celebrating Christmas and birthdays. He was racked with guilt and felt desperately disloyal. “I still do, to this day. I have to keep a lot of things from my parents.” He did take Junior and Princess to a Kingdom Hall when they were young and does still believe in God: “I have faith that there’s something much greater than us.” But he now believes in bringing up children to decide their religion for themselves and does not observe Jehovah practices, which isn’t easy for his parents.
“Mum is very, very, very devout, so there will always be guilt. It’s my mum and I love her so much, and it’s, like, well, if you love her, why wouldn’t you give her what she wants? So it’s hard.”
Yet it is the guilt, he thinks, that keeps him grounded. “It was an amazing childhood because it actually instilled in us a lot of purity and a lot of good messages, and I am so grateful for what they taught me.” On his old reality TV shows he used to swear, but his home today is a profanity-free zone and he has never heard one of his children curse. “I’m happy being like me now — which is the me I always was.”
Because he suffered such low self-esteem as a child, I’m curious to know if anything can still make him feel insecure. “OK,” he says, grinning bashfully. “Here’s one thing for you. I’m confident that I feel in good shape for my age. But you will never see me walking around on the beach with my shirt off or anything like that.”
It takes me a moment to grasp he means that he would be comparing what he looks like now, at 50, to how his legendary torso looked in his Mysterious Girl video. “For some reason I’ve never been able to go, ‘But I look good, I don’t care.’ For some reason there’s a little barrier there, because I’m not exactly what I was.”
I don’t think he has any idea what another utterly charming answer this is, because he quickly adds, anxious not to sound vain, “I don’t go on about it because people would go, ‘Get over yourself, get over it.’ But you’re asking me, so I’m being honest. That is my insecurity.”
Written by: Decca Aitkenhead
© The Times of London