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Wednesday, April 12, 2000
mytown charms Toronto
By STEPHANIE McGRATH--AllPop
TORONTO -- The boys of mytown have been going strong all day and they show no signs of slowing down yet.
Tuesday started off with an early-morning root canal for group member Paul, then a performance for the winners of the YTV Achievement Awards, and an appearance on "The Mike Bullard Show".
They look and sound like a typical "boy band": smooth harmonies, good looks and that certain je ne sais quoi that makes 13-year-old girls melt. But it was at the YTV Achievement Awards that mytown got two steps ahead of the boy-band counterparts.
When Adam Gregory, the winner of the YTV vocal category, stood up to give his performance, he winced as he strummed his guitar and realized it was out of tune. Shaken, he glanced around for help and quickly found it in mytown member Danny, who grabbed the guitar and tuned it for him. Taking a deep breath and preparing to play again, the winner accidentally dropped his guitar, which landed with a loud thud on the stage floor. He stared at it for a minute and then looked up in absolute despair. Again, the mytown boys were there. They rushed to the back of the room, grabbed their own guitar, tuned it, strapped him into it and then got the crowd revved up for his performance.
The simple act of kindness was second nature to the band, who seemed surprised that anyone would expect them to behave any differently.
"Our heart just went out to him ... you know. He's really talented."
If you combine the cuteness factor with their pleasant sound and add their genuinely chivalrous natures, you just might come across a recipe for the next record-breaking pop act.
After trailing the band from the YTV awards, to the rehearsal for the 'Mike Bullard Show', to an autograph session, AllPop finally caught up with Paul, Marc, Danny and Terry in-person as they grabbed a few quick minutes to relax in their dressing room.
Upstairs in the studio, a group of squealing girls anxiously waits for the group to make an appearance. Their dressing-room door keeps opening, and their manager is handed everything from a white teddy bear to a box of Lucky Charms cereal.
But the boys say they love their fans -- as long as they don't get too obsessive, as Terry explains.
"I had just met this girl in England and she wanted to know whether she could write to me, so I gave her my address thinking 'she's in Germany, I'm in Ireland, cool'. She ended up on my door with her bags at Christmas time."
Terry was shocked but didn't lose his cool for a minute. "Well ... I invited the girl in, first thing. That was the craziest thing that's happened to me."
The boys may be overwhelmed by fans sometimes, but they're always ready for a laugh.
"We were heading back to Dublin in a bus," Marc says, "and there all these girls were going by in cars and things. And this big coach went by with mytown signs. They all started mooning us out the window, so we pulled past them, pulled all our clothes off, and stood there in front of the bus and waited for them to go by."
But it's not mooning fans and stalkers from Germany that shock the mytown members. It's simply the fact that there are so many fans out there.
"We were going over to Planet Hollywood in Orlando for a dinner with a girl [a contest winner]," Paul says. "We looked out the window and saw the queue was just hundreds of people. And we thought, 'Oh no here we go, we've got to queue up for two hours before we can get a seat.' We pulled the bus over and the girl with us said 'What are you talking about? That's for you'. I opened the door and everyone was like 'AHHH!' It was the most ridiculous thing."
Now that mytown's self-titled album is quickly climbing the charts, the boys will have to learn to deal with masses of screaming fans. They're currently working on putting together a tour, and promise that fans will be happy with their performance because they've got "tricks up their sleeves".
According to Danny, their concerts will be an amazing event because they each bring a different aspect to mytown.
Each of the members are too modest to talk about their best qualities but their friends are more than happy to fill in the blanks.
According to Marc, he's incredibly uninteresting but Terry disagrees.
"He's just totally driven in just everything he does," Paul says about Marc, who's got a background in choreography.
"Paul's best trait is his talking ability," Terry says. "He's a very good speaker. He's not a bad actor either."
"Here's something people might not know about me," pipes up Danny. "I used to work in a coffee shop before the band."
"Dan's best trait is his coffee," says Marc.
"Terry's best trait is that when he finally gets up he actually shows up for work," Marc adds, and then the rest jump in to explain how Terry manages to be late for everything. "And, he's a very nice bloke and he's witty. He's always having a bit of fun."
Just then, an especially loud squeal can be heard from a fan down the hallway.
"It shocks me every time we come to Canada, 'cause we just do so much work here and the response for us is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and the demand for us is getting bigger, " Marc says. "Canada in general has been great to us, and that excites us every time we come here, [thinking] what's next."
Mytown's album is in stores now.
See photos from AllPop's backstage visit with mytown HERE.
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