Menswear are regaling me with tales from when they were the hottest new band in Britain. It was autumn 1994. Blur and Oasis had gone supernova and the music industry wanted the next big Britpop thing. Dozens of record companies attended the sharp-suited quintet’s first gig at London’s Smashing club, the four-song performance starting a bidding war. One label even mounted what singer Johnny Dean describes as a “kidnap attempt” to prevent them signing to a rival. “They were trying to bundle me and our manager into a black cab to get us out of London,” explains guitarist Chris Gentry, who was 17. “At the last second we thought: ‘No, let’s not do this.’” By then, the youngsters had already been flown to New York, ferried about in limos, put up in five-star hotels and wined and dined at lavish restaurants. Drummer Matt Everitt – now a BBC Radio 6Music presenter – regrets turning down Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis, “because he made us pay for our own pizza”. Instead, they secured a £500,000 publishing deal, a £90,000 record contract and a reputedly better royalty rate than Madonna. “Our A&R man was literally begging us to sign, doing all these ridiculous things,” Dean chuckles. “Saying: ‘Do you want me to take my trousers off? I’ll take my trousers off!’ Eventually we had to say: ‘Stop! We’ll do it.’” The Menswear Collection, a new four-CD box set, traces their hurtling ascent – six effervescent hit singles and a Top 20 album – and descent, amid drugs, in-fighting, nervous breakdowns and a second album released only in Japan. Dean – undergoing treatment for a sarcoma – speaks via Zoom and regards their story as a “cautionary tale”. Gentry and Everitt have fonder memories. I meet them in – where else? – the Good Mixer pub in Camden, London, where Britpop royalty held court. “Camden really was the centre of the universe in 95,” smiles Everitt, who recalls “running from the tube to the pub for our first photoshoot. Gangly kids in mod suits. It felt like we were in a film.” Dean remembers walking on stage to “a wall of screaming”. What went wrong? “We couldn’t make a wrong decision,” suggests Gentry, “but then the pendulum swung, and we couldn’t make a right decision.” Everything happened at pace. Dean met bassist Stuart Black in London’s Blow Up club. “He got wrecked and decided he wanted to be in a band with me,” the singer remembers, “even though I couldn’t really do anything except stand there and look sort of cool.” Gentry, like Dean from Southend-on-Sea, was inspired by Blur and Suede and also reinvented himself in Camden – as a master networker. “We’d just point him at a group of people and off he’d go,” chuckles Dean. The pair appeared in Select magazine’s “new Mod” piece and Pulp’s Do You Remember the First Time video before they had completed the lineup. Gentry befriended Blur’s Graham Coxon and secured Pulp support slots and a Levi’s modelling contract. Select called Menswear “the indie Take That” and Caitlin Moran’s Melody Maker cover story hailed “the best-dressed new band in Britain”. Smashing impresario Adrian Webb became manager with zero experience, but Gentry says he was “great at creating events. When we played Astoria 2, the aftershow party included Noel Gallagher, Bobby Gillespie, Jarvis …” At T in the Park, they printed “Have a drink on Menswear” on banknotes and threw them to the crowd to use to buy booze. Everitt beams at this recollection: “What a brilliant thing to do.” Nineties music industry largesse meant every day gave cause for celebration. “We did a video shoot that turned into a party,” he reveals. “The results were unusable because the camera crew got shit-faced.” Everything seemed to come to Menswear so readily that they weren’t overly troubled by the actual requirements of making music. “We wrote our first song, Daydreamer, in a kitchen in Dartford in five minutes,” sniggers Dean. “It reached No 14.” Gentry’s well of anecdotes includes one about meeting Brummie guitarist Simon White in the Mixer. “He said he was a songwriter and played me three incredible songs. I said: ‘You’re in the band.’ Afterwards, Simon said: ‘We can’t use those songs. They’re Ocean Colour Scene songs.’ But he had written I’ll Manage Somehow, probably our best.” Menswear played that on Top of the Pops, a week before the single was released. As Gentry tells it, the BBC had built a new million-pound chrome stage, needed someone to test it out and the producer was a fan. “So we went down all suited up. Then our camp asked for an exclusive. It was genius PR.” Everitt gleefully recalls Menswear mania as their first national tour started in Brighton. “Kids going up and down the seafront shouting: ‘We are the mods!’ It was like being in Quadrophenia. Every night was insane.” Hysterical fans chased their bus in Tokyo. However, Dean gradually felt “like we’d gatecrashed someone else’s party, they’d discovered us and kicked us out”. All agree that their first wrong move was recording Nuisance – a youthful guitar pop debut – in Peter Gabriel’s ultra hi-tech Real World studios in the Wiltshire countryside, where they might have been better “banging it out” in Camden. “We spent thousands of pounds a day making a lo-fi record,” sighs Dean. The painstaking process wasn’t helped when Everitt knocked a can of Coke on to the mixing desk. “It cost £20,000 to repair. I’ve apologised to Peter Gabriel.” Dean sang Little Miss Pinpoint Eyes, “about a girl on heroin, as a swan floated by”. Later, when Pulp played Roxy Music’s Love is the Drug to Gentry to demonstrate their own musical ambitions, the young guitarist realised: “We haven’t got it in us to make records of that quality.” More trouble brewed after a Top of the Pops live exclusive from Osaka Castle in Japan was halted when fourth single Sleeping In stalled at No 24. The lovely follow-up, Being Brave, went Top 10. However, the music scene was changing and there were internal problems. Dean had a meltdown in Spain, attributed to cocaine psychosis. “I was seriously mentally ill,” he says now. Everitt (who drily observes that “being known as ‘the sensible one in Menswear’ doesn’t say very much”) skedaddled to London – “It all got too much” – and was sacked. “When things are going wrong you always blame the manager or the drummer,” offers a regretful Gentry. The drummer admits it was “one of the most awful things that ever happened to me”, and argues that the industry has a “duty of care” for such young bands with relentless schedules. “We didn’t have time to breathe,” says the singer, who regrets Britpop’s “nonchalance to hard drug use. Noel Gallagher famously said it was like having a cup of tea.” Gentry is a teetotal father now but was “close to” Elastica guitarist Donna Matthews during Britpop and paints a startling picture of the scene’s last days, as her King’s Cross apartment turned from “party central, where you’d find Jarvis or Ewan McGregor” to “somewhere dark. By 97, you wouldn’t wanna go there.” Gentry lost interest in Menswear, who Dean says had “gone nuts” as they soared over budget making 1998’s ill-fated ¡Hay Tiempo!, lush west coast rock with strings. “Quite a left turn,” the singer deadpans. “The record company got cold feet and the press wrote funny stuff about us turning up to the Mixer with beards and boot-cut jeans.” Then Menswear vanished without a press announcement. “We just stopped.” The singer took longest to “come to terms with it and who I was”, undergoing a spell in a psychiatric ward before a 2008 diagnosis of pervasive developmental disorder (an autism spectrum condition) helped him understand his otherness. Sarcoma aside, he’s in fine spirits. “I don’t want to go into it, but recently I’ve been very lucky.” Gentry and White are in music management, where they use their experience to advise charges such as Lemon Twigs. Black became a carpenter; Everitt says: “I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now without Menswear.” Perhaps because someone had to, manager Webb went to find himself in Goa. In 2010, Emily Eavis asked them to play Glastonbury, but after what Everitt calls a “terrible meeting”, they realised they “just weren’t ready to be in a room together”. Lately, though, the box set has healed wounds and rekindled friendships, although there won’t be a reunion. “People want to be 18 again, smashed on Hooch, copping off with someone and seeing us,” Everitt grins. “It wouldn’t be like that in our 40s.” Gentry makes comparisons with Ash, Britpop-era teenagers who have made eight albums. Could Menswear have done that? “Perhaps, if we’d have gone to bed earlier, rehearsed more, played more shows, written more songs, used big-name producers,” he chuckles. “But if we had done that, we wouldn’t have done all the stuff that made us exciting.” • The Menswear Collection is released by Edsel on 23 October. ¡Hay Tiempo! and Nuisance are available on vinyl on 23 October and 24 October (Record Store Day) respectively.