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‘I hated being famous,” Samuel Preston says. “I hated, hated, hated it.” Twenty years ago, Preston, who presented himself by his surname to emulate Morrissey, was experiencing a very intense type of notoriety. He had been NME-famous with Worthing band the Ordinary Boys, whose socially conscious ska-influenced indie-punk had a strong cult following known as the Ordinary Army, thanks to hits such as Boys Will Be Boys. But his stint in the 2006 edition of Celebrity Big Brother, and the national interest in his will-they-won’t-they relationship with fellow contestant Chantelle Houghton – the fake “celebrity” sent in to dupe the B-listers – was what sent his profile through the roof.
After leaving the show, he says, “I was on loads of Prozac. I was in a weird space.” Now, after years living on-off in the US, becoming a successful songwriter for hire (to the likes of Kylie Minogue, Cher, Olly Murs, Liam Payne and Jessie Ware), and surviving a near-death experience and OxyContin addiction, Preston is making a comeback with the Ordinary Boys. The band’s new single Peer Pressure is their first music since 2015 (not counting a Christmas single with Olly Murs).
Excitable, dressed in a Martin Parr-branded T-shirt with his hair cropped and bleached, 44-year-old Preston is sitting upstairs at east London venue the Strongroom. Two days ago, the Ordinary Boys played their first gig in a decade here. While he has no nostalgia for the mid-00s UK indie scene (“literally the only time there’s been no redeeming music except for about three bands”) he says that after re-listening to the Ordinary Boys’ 2004 debut Over the Counter Culture and 2005 follow-up Brassbound, he noticed they had something to say. “Every song [on the debut] was: don’t get a job, capitalism is bad. We were a political band in our way.” He hadn’t really clocked it at the time. “Billy Bragg rang me up and said, ‘I think you’re doing something really important.’” He smiles. “But then two months later, I went on Big Brother.”
When the offer came through, he immediately said yes. “I’m very experiential,” he says. “I’ll do anything twice.” His bandmates weren’t happy, but he justified it to them – and himself – as “some kind of Warholian, ironic art piece”. That edition of CBB had a memorable cast: Pete Burns (“the coolest guy ever”), George Galloway (“evil energy”), Michael Barrymore (“a sweet guy, he made the best toad-in-the-hole I’ve ever had”). Jimmy Savile made a brief guest appearance. “Horrible. The evil radiated off him.”
But Preston and Houghton’s flirtations were what captured the nation – especially given that everyone knew Preston had a girlfriend, Camille Aznar, watching at home. It put him at the centre of a tabloid whirlwind. “It quickly became a nightmare,” he says.
One of the first things he did after Big Brother was a tell-all story and photoshoot for the Sunday Mirror. “They made me take my clothes off. And I didn’t want to. It was so uncomfortable.” He appeared on the front page topless, in between photos of Houghton and Aznar, presented as torn between two women. His mum has a copy of the front page framed on the wall of her downstairs toilet. “I don’t think she realises quite how triggering it is every time I take a piss.”
He married Houghton in August 2006, eight months after meeting her. “Of course we fell in love. We trauma-bonded through this intense experience.” They became the celebrity it-couple of the moment, and for all his protestations today, Preston seemed to enjoy the exposure: TV appearances, glossy magazine covers, film premieres. He and Houghton sold their wedding pictures to OK! Magazine for a reported £300,000 each. “I stand by that,” he says. “All these footballers would do it, why not me?”
Preston claimed – and still does – that 2006’s third album How to Get Everything You Ever Wanted in Ten Easy Steps, hastily written with help from “great friend” Will Self to capitalise on his new fame, was commenting on celebrity from inside the machine. “I said, ‘I’m gonna make an album about this insane world.’ But I scaled the walls to find it intense and cruel and weird. I think that’s why that album sounds so strange. That’s what Lonely at the Top is about. Suddenly there’s a million people around you and you don’t even know if they like you or not.”
But rather than being a self-satirising participant in some Warholian experiment, I tell him he actually appeared to be straightforwardly fame-hungry. “I think that’s very fair, but I don’t know if those things cancel themselves out,” he says. “Because there’s fame-hungry and there’s being curious. It wasn’t, ‘I can’t wait to be famous. I’m gonna have a really expensive car.’” He seemed to think acceptance into the club was a validating achievement in itself. “I was a nerd at school. A spiky-haired, total background guy. No one ever fancied me. So when I stepped out of Big Brother it was like, ‘I’m in, I’ve made it!’”
However, “then I found that world completely unchangeable. And the only way to survive seemed to be to contort myself to a shape that fitted within the boundaries of whatever they wanted. I relinquished control.”
He was constantly followed by paparazzi, and had people going through his bins. “It was that Nuts and Zoo Weekly magazine era. The way that people were talked about – ‘Preston looks fat today’ – it was just awful.” Moreover, his phone was hacked. In 2018, Preston was one of 16 celebrities who settled phone-hacking claims with News Group Newspapers, winning substantial damages. “Phone hacking was a huge part of that whole ordeal,” he says. Going somewhere to find paparazzi were already waiting for them “really made me doubt everyone. ‘Who the fuck told you that we were going to be here?’”
In January 2007, he made his infamous appearance on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, walking off mid-show after host Simon Amstell mockingly read passages from Houghton’s memoir, Living the Dream. Houghton was in the audience. “That’s a proud moment,” Preston says. “It was actually cruel and classist. I really don’t know what other choice I had.” But by the end of the year, his marriage had fallen apart and in early 2008 the Ordinary Boys broke up, the initial post-Big Brother career surge – Brassbound going gold, three Top 10 singles – declining just as sharply. “We hated each other by that point,” he says of his bandmates.
He bought a one-way ticket to Philadelphia, his mum’s home city, and tried to launch a solo career with a Siouxsie and the Banshees-sampling single, Dressed to Kill. After it failed to chart, he retreated into songwriting-for-hire: Cher later covered Dressed to Kill, and a song from his scrapped solo album, Heart Skips a Beat, became a No 1 hit for Murs.
In 2015 the Ordinary Boys returned with an almost entirely ignored self-titled pop-punk album – “a great record, but we didn’t engage with it” – and two years later, Preston nearly died the night before a songwriting camp in Denmark. Drunk on free champagne, he took a sleeping pill and fell off a second floor balcony. Airlifted to hospital, he was told he would never walk again.
“I remember just thinking, ‘Come on, don’t be daft,’” he says. He was using a wheelchair for six months and has several metal plates in his body: he stands up and pulls down one side of his trousers to reveal a huge scar running all the way down his leg. He says he’s now in better shape than ever, but in recovery he became addicted to OxyContin. “I got four different doctors to prescribe me the amount I was allowed,” he smiles ruefully. “I’m an idiot for doing that.” After a year of “dread and horror”, he went cold turkey. “I had a weekend where I vomited and shook in bed, fitting. It was awful.”
He wrote a song about his accident called Live Forever. He gave it to his good friend and collaborator Payne: the One Direction singer released his version in 2019. “And then he falls off a balcony and dies,” says Preston, shaking his head in disbelief. “There are certain things that happen in your life where you just cannot believe this is a real set of circumstances.”
He says Payne “was a very funny, sweet, kind guy. Misunderstood. A great talent.” But he recognises the songs Payne co-wrote with him were often “undisguised cries for help”. The pair would discuss the pressures of fame together. “I saw a lot of him in me, because we both suffered. I massively wish I’d been able to do more. But as for some kind of intervention, I don’t think I [had that role] in his life.” He says Live Forever “was me trying to say, ‘Look, man, this thing happened to me.’ But it’s hard to give people advice if they’re not ready to receive it.”
For the last three years, Preston has lived in LA (“the land of inequality”) writing hits for Sum 41 and K-pop band Tomorrow X Together. But he recently asked himself: what would really make me happy? “With the songwriting, I felt as if I was following someone else’s dream. I’ve had 20 years of fucking around in studios trying to write music I didn’t necessarily like.”
As for regrets, he says: “I see my peers that have carried on” – mid-00s NME bands such as the Kooks and the Wombats – “are selling out huge arenas.” It sounds as if he’s still courting the fame he professes to despise, but he makes a distinction. “I like people being into my music. Being a famous musician is totally different. If I’d put in more hard work maybe I could have done that instead, and I would be in a very different position.”
After Peer Pressure – “me trying to write the quintessential Ordinary Boys song” – he’s currently working on the band’s comeback album. “The main thing in my life now is making some really good shit.” He says it’ll be political, about “the things I feel passionate about”: billionaires, AI, the manosphere, “the general hellscape that the world has become”.
He admits to being unsure how the comeback will go. “I’ve had a very confusing career. I’ve alienated my fanbase over and over again.” But he’s finally committed to the Ordinary Boys once more. “This has focus,” he says. “I want to do it again. I want to do it bigger. I’m really ready.”
