Boys' own adventure

Sam Preston is probably one of the most famous people in Britain, and, by depressing extension, Ireland, right now. He does not look it. He certainly doesn’t act it.

“It’s weird, being a celeb,” muses Preston, who has dark, impassive eyes and the ashen demeanor of a man for whom a solid night’s sleep is a distant memory. “‘Cos, when you’re inside the bubble, things don’t feel any different. Say, I’m at a restaurant and people are snapping me with a camera-phone behind my back, I don’t necessarily notice it. ”
Samuel Preston (the first name has been dropped as insufficiently iconic) has for the past four years fronted The Ordinary Boys, a mid-level Brit rock outfit whose forte is ska-influenced blue-collar indie. This fact, of course, is largely incidental to his story.
Diehard fans aside, the first most people heard of Preston was when he smouldered up the screen on Celebrity Big Brother, in which he shared a house with such media deities as renegade MP George Galloway, one of Sven Goran Eriksson’s conquests and a bloke out of Goldie Lookin’ Chain.
Nobody imagined Preston would make an impact, himself least of all. Yet the singer’s slow-burning flirtation with Chantelle Houghton, a hyper-ditzy blend of Paris Hilton and Colleen McLoughlin, emerged as the most powerful narrative of the show (that and Galloway coming across as something of a wanker).
A tabloid frenzy kicked off as it emerged Preston already had a long-term girlfriend. By the time he left the Big Brother house (he finished fourth) he was more famous than the prime minister
“I expected the whole thing to calm down eventually,” he says of his Big Brother-bestowed profile. “At the beginning, when I first came out, it was absolutely crazy. I was being offered all sorts of things. I was asked to do a shampoo advert. Stuff like that. I didn’t get an agent and my manager was completely overwhelmed. He still is. You should see the size of my post bag!”
A more welcome byproduct of Preston’s Big Brother fame has been the revival of The Ordinary Boys, stragglers until now, gagging on the fumes of contemporaries like Kaiser Chiefs and Hard-Fi (with whom they share a ‘chav-chic’ sound and fashion sense).
Twelve months ago, the Brighton band struggled to draw a crowd to Dublin’s Temple Bar Music Centre. Several hours after this interview, they will fill the much larger Ambassador Theatre. Currently, a gaggle of adolescent girls are outside the venue, baying for Preston. The last concert they attended was, you suspect, a Westlife show.
Sell-out gigs, a teeny-bop following – it’s enough to make a struggling indie rocker’s head spin. Their group’s older fans, a bedraggled bunch who would like very much that you call them ‘The Ordinary Army’, are surely aghast.
“Nah, our fans have been great, very supportive,” insists their Commander-In-Chief. “They’ve been behind us all of the way. Anyway, we’re not sniffy about who comes to our shows. Teenage girls are welcome – everyone is welcome.”
This, I suggest, marks an enormous reversal for indie rock. The Ordinary Boys have used reality television to court a mainstream audience. A decade ago, they would have been pilloried for daring such a thing. One cannot, for instance, imagine The Wedding Present or The Smiths surviving a similar stunt. But people, it appears, admire The Ordinary Boys’ cheek. Their determination to sell out is regarded as an attribute.
“Indie rock is such a misnomer,” says Preston, curling his lips. “ The whole idea of being underground is utter nonsense. One of the reasons I agreed to do Big Brother was to show that today, the underground and the mainstream are one and the same and if you pretend they aren’t you just aren’t being honest. Besides, we’re not an art-rock band, we’re not Bloc Party.”
Post-Big Brother, The Ordinary Boys clearly need Preston far more than he needs them. One gets the impression that the rest of the group are painfully aware of the fact. In his presence, they seem both deferential and quietly resentful.
It doesn’t take long for the divide to become apparent. When the HP photographer asks the The Ordinary Boys to chat among themselves as he lines up some shots, the other three members start to natter while Preston stands out front, hands shoved in pockets. Who is blanking who isn’t quite clear.
Preston’s bandmates admit to being horrified and astonished upon learning he was to participate in Celebrity Big Brother. Their distress deepened as he became one of the stars of the programme.
“I didn’t think it was a good idea at all,” admits guitarist William Brown. “We were kind of embarrassed about it really.”
Does Preston’s celebrity alter the balance of power within the group? As Brown mulls over the question, the singer, who tends to purse his lips when not the centre of attention, interjects.
“I’m not going to go solo because the rest of the lads write the songs and I couldn’t survive without them. Anyway, I didn’t do this because I wanted to be famous. It seems to me that Celebrity Big Brother is making a very clever comment on what fame is or can be. I think the whole thing is hilarious. It’s a postmodern prank.”
He has, he says, been reluctant to trade on his celebrity since, but did agree to several ‘tell all exclusives’ with gossip magazines.
“I appeared on the cover of NME and Hello magazine in the same week, which tells you something about the nature of celebrity in the modern world. Like I said, there’s no such thing as the underground and the mainstream anymore.”
Not all of the byproducts of Big Brother have been so naff. Recently, Will Self approached Preston with a view to working on lyrics together. There was some irony here. Several months earlier – pre-Big Brother – he had written to the novelist, receiving no reply (Self swears he never saw the correspondence).
Rumours that Preston was a last minute replacement for someone more famous are, the singer adds, untrue (he admits none of the other housemates had heard of him). Nor did he lobby for a place on the show – Channel 4 rang his manager, wondering if he would be interested in taking part.
“They wanted me to do it and I didn’t hesitate. It was such an interesting thing. Also, it mostly consisted of sitting around. As someone in a band, I’ve lots of experience of killing time between the sound-check and the gig so that came easily to me. I could sit on the couch for hours. I’m a natural at it.”