MEDIA

INTERVIEWS

Boys Will Be Boys TV HITS MAGAZINE (Australia) May 1998 Issue #117

TV HITS grabbed those hot guys from the Backstreet Boys for some guy talk about fans, dating and their amazing success!

Nick, there was a rumour that you collapsed at a rehearsal in Orlando, recently. Is that true?
Nick: First of all, I didn't collapse, which was a good thing! It was very hot in the rehearsal hall and I was getting really exhausted. So I went to the doctor, and he told me to take a few days off, just to rest. And that's what I did.

You all work really hard, is it true you once did 57 shows in 48 days?
Nick: Yeah, that was our first headlining tour, in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Howie D: We made it. No cancellations. It's rough. The road life is hard.
AJ: We're on our fourth tour now.

What are you looking forward to most about your upcoming world tour?
Kevin: We're definitely performing new material and on a new stage. We're gonna have pyro (fireworks) this time so that's going to be interesting. We're gonna have lots of special effects, new band members and we'll be playing under the stars for the first time, so that'll be cool.

How does it feel to finally have success back home in the US?
AJ: It feels really good. We've been overseas for the last year and a half now, and we've been waiting patiently every day to come back home and to bring our success back home. Hopefully with this first album things will most as smoothly as they did for us over in Europe. We're keeping our fingers crossed. With the support of our fans and families, hopefully we'll do it again here.

Now that you're popular all over the world, how do you decide where to promote your album?
Kevin: Well, getting to every place that wants to see a show, and making sure we spread ourselves around evenly, is definitely going to be a challenge now. Especially with the way things are going in the US now. Our time is few and far between right now. We have little time to do hardly anything. So we're just going to have to concentrate and make sure we spread ourselves around the right way.

What do you think of your fans worldwide?
Brian: We love the fans. The fans are what make the Backstreet Boys who we are. We have a lot of dedicated fans all around the world that have been there to support us for the last 18 months while we've been on tour. And like I say, without the fans there wouldn't be the Backstreet Boys.

Are fans around the world scared that you'll forget about them now that you're big in the US?
Kevin: We're not gonna forget about our fans who found us first. We appreciate our fans all over the world who discovered our music first.

Do you guys have time for a personal life at all?
Kevin: Not much. We date around. But nobody can really put up with our schedules right now.

Do you have to be careful going out in public, like when you want to go shopping?
Kevin: You just have to plan what you want to do a little carefully- make sure that security knows where you are at all times. If you don't want to be noticed, you can sort of hide.

You've been together every day for about five years, what bugs you about each other?
Kevin: We know each other's buttons to push by now, that's for sure.
Nick: Definitely
AJ: We're like brothers. We all know the right buttons to push to make each other mad or to have fun with each other. We're just like a family.

What would be the most important thing for Aussie fans to know about the Backstreet Boys?
Nick: That we're a vocal harmony group - we're not just a boy group.
AJ: We're real!
Nick: This is the Backstreet Boys. We're all about putting out good music. It's all legit. And we're here to hopefully stay for a while.

Brian, you wrote your first song on the album, "That's What She Said" right?
Brian: Yes, it's a song entitled "That's What She Said". It's not really about a specific person or a specific experience. It's a love song. It's about promises, about things that you say that never come true. It just came together. I was on tour, I got with our pianist and our guitarist from our band. I already had the melody in my head so we put it together. We finally got a chance to do some of our own material, because we'd been so busy all the time. So I got to be the lucky one to have a first song on the album. I'm very fortunate. I hope everybody likes it.

Nick, your younger brother Aaron is going to be touring with you in Europe. Will he be doing other shows with you too?
Nick: Who knows? He's just doing his own thing right now in Germany and Europe.

Do you get annoyed when people say the Backstreet Boys are the male version of the Spice Girls?
Kevin: (laughs) Actually, a lot of people who haven't heard of us before think we just popped out of nowhere. But we've been together now, working hard, for almost five years! We've done a few shows with the Spice Girls before and I think we're pretty different to them. We have a lot of soul and R&B influence in our music and I think that shows.. we're trying to do a little bit of everything.