Anthony Kavanagh is adamant his critically acclaimed book, Pop Scars, does not qualify as a “celebrity” memoir. “I’m not delusional enough to think that a Kavana autobiography is going to be top of the charts,” he says, especially after “being in a blackout for the best part of a decade”.
In the age of self-promotion, such unfettered honesty is refreshing. As his teen-idol persona, Kavana, he amassed four UK top 20 singles and an equal number of Smash Hits magazine cover shoots – the unassailable metric of 1990s’ notoriety. Slashing two letters from his surname created a moniker with exotic gravitas, but behind the perfectly parted hair and doe eyes, the real Kavanagh went into hiding, instigating a pattern of behaviour that would ultimately consume him.
Pop Scars provides a gripping antidote to the celebrity memoir format. There is no glossy highlights reel, nor a lofty setup to contrast the fall from grace. Through a brisk succession of filmic vignettes – each rendered in unflinching, sometimes grotesque detail – Anthony Kavanagh relays being swept from a council house in Manchester and dropped into the jaws of the corporate monster. The instant he approaches a music impresario in a gay nightclub, the reader detects a catch imperceptible to the teenage singer-songwriter: the pursuit of fame comes at a cost, and his innocence is both a commodity and a foible.
The dream maker is only ever referred to as The Manager. This eternal archetype has worn many guises throughout pop history, and the literary sleight of hand places Kavanagh at the centre of a narrative as old as time itself. In this iteration, The Manager employs his latest acquisition as a gofer in his office, arranges a £150,000 publishing deal, and helps sculpt him into a wholesome fantasy marketed to adolescent girls.
A debut single, “Crazy Chance”, arrived in 1996, penned by Howard Donald, a member of Britain’s biggest boy band, Take That. “Even though I had this whole album full of songs now – I’d written a lot of the songs myself at home, and they’d been produced by some great producers – The Manager’s angle was, ‘We’ll say that Howard wrote your first single,’” Kavanagh explains. “It was actually one of his spare demos for his album, so I just reworked it and sang it, and that was that.”
The next release, one of Kavanagh’s compositions called “Where Are You”, resembled the work of Donald’s colleague Gary Barlow in its slower, emotive sensibility, but failed to set the charts ablaze. Because Take That had reached number one with a version of Dan Hartman’s disco track “Relight My Fire”, it was decided that Kavanagh should cover a similar American hit. Shalamar’s “I Can Make You Feel Good” suited the teenager’s smooth, blue-eyed soul vocals and, fortunately, resonated with the public.
“I did the demo in my bedroom on my little four-track,” he says. “Then when [Virgin Records] heard it, they said, ‘You know what, why don’t we just keep this the same as the original? Instead of trying to make it something modern, just keep it the same.’ And it worked, thank God.” The implication is that his career could have ended prematurely were it not for the leveraging of this tried-and-tested formula. “It was make or break. I mean, nobody was saying it, but it was like, this has to be a hit. It has to be top ten.”
By the end of 1997, with two legitimate hits under the Kavana name, he won Best Male Singer at the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party. At this poptastic alternative to the BRIT Awards, he channeled the night’s superhero brief by performing “I Can Make You Feel Good” as Clark Kent, discarding his black-rimmed spectacles and overcoat to reveal a Superman T-shirt emblazoned with the nickname “Kav”. Bouncing around in a headset mic to the nimble choreography – “I was on that stage thinking I’m bloody Madonna in Blond Ambition,” he laughs – the nation’s latest It Boy seemed on top of the world.
The duality of Kent and Superman pointed to competing tensions within Kavanagh. In Pop Scars, he conveys the constant terror of being outed and the vigilance it produced: worrying that a Gaultier cologne smelled too feminine or wondering whether television makeup, once paired with his naturally long eyelashes, would give him away. After accepting his Best Male award at an arena packed with adoring fans, he returned to his hotel room alone, where he did cocaine off the statuette’s flat surface. He was just 20 years old.
“I had quite a high threshold for uncomfortableness,” says Kavanagh. “But there was a lot of lonely times. I’d be traveling the world, I’d be in Australia, I’d be in Italy, I’d be in Germany … That was just hell on earth because … there’s not lots to do when you’re doing a German radio tour, and they’re all in grey cement buildings. Then you’re back at the hotel, and, you know, you put on the German pay-per-view porn, and then you’re going for, like, herring or something to eat for dinner with the record label.”
A friendship with Stephen Gately from the Irish group Boyzone brought some reprieve from the closeted pop star’s torment. He recounts their connection in Pop Scars with real tenderness, sidestepping the graphic viscerality of other anecdotes; it is as if something sacrosanct passed between the two young men, recognizing in one another a private impulse the world was yet to uncover.
“I had to talk about it because it was the first male relationship I’d had with someone my age, and a lot of it was more in my head than a big, passionate affair,” Kavanagh explains. “We didn’t spend enough time together for it to be a deep, deep love, like a proper falling in love. But it was the first time I’d experienced that – the butterflies when I’d see the Irish number come up on my mobile, or the smell of his aftershave … Suddenly the world became Technicolor. It was like The Wizard of Oz.”
Emboldened by this glimpse of personal happiness and the taste of public acclaim, Kavanagh changed management. “I knew that things were falling apart at Virgin,” he said. “My A&R had left, and [fellow Virgin act] the Spice Girls were huge, and all the team had moved to America.” He signed with Peter Evans, whose peripheral connection to the Spice Girls’ team persuaded the label to give Kavana another chance. “He’s like, ‘Look, the [Absolute] boys are going to produce the record,’ and they’d just done both Spice albums. They were the hot property, and they were great guys as well, dead down to earth … And [Virgin] couldn’t resist the package.”
Instinct, a reference to the gut feeling that prompted the switch, was recorded over three “magical” months in Italy. The Mediterranean atmosphere injected “Funky Love”, the album’s second single, with a breezy, sun-soaked groove, but the video edged Kavanagh dangerously close to the very thing he was desperate to conceal. In an empty swimming pool decked out as a Y2K club, a coterie of ambiguous models grind on each other while he watches voyeuristically, one eyebrow arched in perpetual flirtation. As the song reaches its climax, the water pipes burst – a symbolic release of everything that has been suppressed.
“It was [directed by] Phil Griffin, who was Mr Pop Video at the time,” Kavanagh recalls. “Virgin were spending more money on my styling and cooler photography, and all that stuff. I remember … the water scene at the end, and it just being freezing cold, and I really fancied a couple of the male models in the shoot as well. I was like, oh God, I wonder if they were gay? Obviously, I couldn’t do anything about it … I think because of the time and the era, those that knew, knew, but they wouldn’t say it.” (When asked about the current proliferation of queer artists, he is “quite envious … It really is great to see, but I can’t help but feel a little sad for the younger me.”)
During the Instinct sessions, George Michael’s sexuality – brought to light by an arrest in a public bathroom – dominated headlines. Kavanagh’s anxiety spiked: he had modeled himself on the now openly gay singer, a sound that is evident on deep cuts such as “Him or Me”, buried on the B-side of his final single. “I was about to go to Asia for two months on this massive tour, so [Paul Wilson and Andy Watkins from Absolute] said, ‘We need to knock out a load of B-sides.’ … I do listen to some of my singing back then, and it was quite heavily influenced by George Michael.” His ever-moving right eyebrow – practically a paid actor in Kavana music videos – also constituted an homage to the former Wham! frontman: “I was trying to copy George in “Fastlove”. I think that’s what I was trying to emulate.”
As diminishing chart returns cut his pop shelf-life short, Virgin’s axe fell. Pop Scars unspools the heartbreaking meeting with boyish disbelief, Kavanagh writing how he had purposefully worn a blazer to signal his commitment. Funded by a generous severance package, he moved to Los Angeles on a “special talent visa”, where his ambition was soon eviscerated by a tornado of cocaine, ecstasy, and crystal meth, and blacked-out visits to the Playboy Mansion, Chateau Marmont, and the Viper Room. “I’d never felt anything like it before,” he says. “The dopamine, which I have lacked all my life.”
Kavanagh’s descent into addiction, laid shockingly bare for the reader, is never self-pitying. He leavens mounting tragedy with black comedy at every turn, such as the tale of dinner with the Prince of Brunei – a fervent admirer – or an eye-watering recount where he contracts a sexually transmitted disease from a soap actor with a humiliation kink. In Polaroids from the “lost decade”, he is a waif-like visage, crucifix slung around his neck and a cigarette dangling from his lips. The New Hollywood look belied a series of lies and half-truths: Kavanagh telephoned his parents at the house he bought them with updates, omitting that he had arisen in a stranger’s apartment to find cash stuffed in the pockets of his skinny jeans – payment for services rendered.
In hindsight, surviving six turbulent years in Los Angeles yielded a special kind of grace. “That was my coming of age,” he says. “I’d never met anybody that wanted to be my friend, and actually really loved me just for me … I didn’t have any baggage with me. So, I made some amazing, lifelong friends, and a lot of stragglers and crazy people, like myself, towards the end. It was dangerous at times, and it was wild, but … it was needed.”
His inevitable homecoming was clouded by immeasurable grief. His father, diagnosed with cancer just as Kavanagh moved to America, passed away, and he lost his only sister. His mother, a tea-leaf fortune teller, moved into a care facility. “I think that was the start of when I used to drink a little bit to self-medicate. I didn’t realise I was doing that. You know, just to forget … and at that point, my mum was starting to get dementia, and the house was starting to get run down, and I was about to sell it, and lose it.”
Following a run of reality television appearances and a lifetime ban from the chat show Loose Women for drunken conduct, Kavanagh resorted to the kindness of strangers. In a scene ripped straight from Stephen King’s Misery, he stayed with an enthusiastic fan who neglected to hide the pillowcases bearing his face; when her idol’s attention wavered, she fired off a death threat via email. (“Boundaries,” he admits, “are not my forte.”) Two residential rehabilitation programs later, Kavanagh embraced – and maintained – sobriety. The clarity helped him take stock of his unique story, and a writing course offered by a literary agency gave him the tools to tell it.
Led by best-selling author and professor Christie Watson, the Smash Hits cover boy seemed the odd one out in a room of women, many of whom had academic qualifications or were proven writers. “I thought, I know I’ve got these stories, and this insight into what it was like to be in that world of peak nineties pop … but I’m not famous enough,” he says. Watson rightly identified this as his chief strength. “She said, ‘Lean into the kitchen sink, lean into the perceived failure because … not everybody wants to read a memoir written by somebody from a place of privilege,’” he remembers. “That completely changed the whole scope of how I did it.”
Reading Jennette McCurdy’s highly lauded 2022 memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died inspired Kavanagh’s quickfire writing style as he mapped out a balance of trauma and humour. He refused to engage a ghostwriter, realizing that the book’s power lay in his authentic voice, which leaps from the pages like a sardonic bloodletting. A natural storyteller, his eye for sensory description gives Pop Scars a textural depth, and his fascinating yet egoless encounters with Bono, Prince and Amy Winehouse make him less of a cultural “outsider” than he sees himself as. Only last year, legendary Scottish powerhouse Lulu – a spiritual ally who contributed to his first album – asked him to dog-sit while she was abroad.
Named after Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, Kavanagh threads his Catholic guilt through Pop Scars, giving form to the shame that cast a shadow over his life. After pulling the curtain back to expose the inner workings of the commercial pop machine and a treacherous pilgrimage over the Hollywood rainbow, he has finally come home to himself.
“What I’ve been looking for all my life, I think, is recognition. Recognition for who I really am, which to me is an artist, and someone that’s talented, and that can’t do many things, but that might be quite good at certain things. But I was looking for it in the wrong places,” he explains. “At the end of the book something happens with my mum, where obviously she’s got Alzheimer’s, but she has a moment of lucidity … I went all the long way around to find it, and actually, the person it meant the most to was her in that moment, you know?”
