BBC Radio Manchester<\/a>: “I didn’t want the book to be a pity party – I wanted it to be a book of hope and of silver linings ultimately.”<\/p>\nGrowing up in a council house in the inner-city Harpurhey area, he “didn’t really show off” his musical talents, but would practise songs on a piano that had been handed down by an aunt.<\/p>\n
But discovering the Smash Hits magazine cemented his ambitions to be a pop star.<\/p>\n
“I would buy it every two weeks and I’d just get lost in this magazine, and I just became fascinated and obsessed with wanting to be a pop singer.”<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1753979529_433_grey-placeholder.png\")
![\"Getty](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/5cdea250-6e0d-11f0-aa33-1bf5e0b3ec8e.jpg.webp.webp\")
Getty Images<\/p>\n
Anthony Kavanagh shot to fame in the mid-90s and performed gigs with the Spice Girls<\/p>\n
The dream became reality when at the age of 18, he signed a deal with Virgin Records at the same time as the then unknown Spice Girls.<\/p>\n
Both acts performed at the firm’s summer ball and he went on to chart success with singles I Can Make You Feel Good and Special Kind Of Something.<\/p>\n
He was even flown out to perform for the Brunei royal family and once missed a phone call from Madonna.<\/p>\n
“It was peak 90s. It was me and Spice Girls and all the boy bands and the Smash Hits tours. I mean what a time, it was right in the middle of that pop movement.”<\/p>\n
But he struggled with hiding his sexuality in an image-fixated industry that saw him adorn posters in girls’ bedrooms all over the country. <\/p>\n
“I was a chubby kid,” he says. “So it was strange to be adored like this. I didn’t really believe it, but yeah, I was in the closet.<\/p>\n
He added he was “very inexperienced so I kind of took on this role and hid that”. <\/p>\n
“After a while that’s going to affect you,” he added. <\/p>\n
![\"Anthony](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/b18e95e0-6e0c-11f0-8781-f373780efcb5.jpg.webp.webp\")
Anthony Kavanagh<\/p>\n
Anthony Kavanagh released this image to celebrate one year of sobriety<\/p>\n
As a solo artist, he says he missed out on the camaraderie and mutual support of being in a boy band and became caught up in drink and drugs.<\/p>\n
“I think what I now understand, looking back years later, is that there was a lot of loneliness.”<\/p>\n
In the often cut-throat music industry, he was dropped by his record firm at the age of 21.<\/p>\n
He describe the grip of the addictions as “slow and insidious”.<\/p>\n
“I was chasing a feeling and that was to be wanted and liked and, I suppose, loved really.<\/p>\n
“When you get that very fast, very quick and then it goes, I don’t think your mind knows how to cope with it. <\/p>\n
“So I turned to something else that gave me that feeling but obviously took me down as well eventually.”<\/p>\n
‘Write your truth’<\/p>\n
He returned to the public eye as a contestant on The Voice UK in 2013, but didn’t get through to further stages, despite judge Sir Tom Jones telling him he had a “lovely, lovely tone”.<\/p>\n
But at the time his addictions had a grip on him. After a stint on Celebrity Big Brother, he appeared drunk on an appearance on Loose Women.<\/p>\n
The loss of his father and sister, and his mother’s diagnosis with Alzheimer’s, also took a heavy toll. <\/p>\n
“I just kept having these rock bottoms after rock bottoms and I think I had to be stripped of every single thing – that means people, family, relationships – to then finally surrender.<\/p>\n
“I’m just going: ‘You know what? I’m done’. That’s when my life started to change properly, and suddenly then I started to get this creativity back.”<\/p>\n
He enrolled on a three-month writing course, where the instructor swept aside his anxieties.<\/p>\n
“She gave me the self-esteem to keep going. She kept saying ‘stop this’ because I kept saying I’m not famous enough to write a book. She was like, it doesn’t matter, write your truth, write what moves you and so I did.”<\/p>\n
He describes his book as “the first thing I’ve done in sobriety”.<\/p>\n
“So probably I’ve not done anything since I was 16 that’s not been in some way affected by my addiction. <\/p>\n
“So yeah, I’m slightly proud of it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michelle Adamson and Rumeana Jahangir BBC News Anthony Kavanagh Anthony Kavanagh and the Spice Girls performed together as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40636,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,136],"class_list":["post-40635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Anthony](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/8e5121b0-6e0c-11f0-8781-f373780efcb5.jpg.webp.webp\")
Anthony Kavanagh<\/p>\n