New Kid goes solo

Joey Mcintyre looks to recapture pop idol status with new album

"I'm not going to have bed sheets. I'm not going to have pillows,"laughs former New Kids on the Block member Joey McIntyre when asked how he's going to do things differently for his solo pop debut.

McIntyre was in Toronto recently on a promotional trip for his album, Stay The Same, and even after all these years he still has teenage girls tracking him down.

"They're kind of there wherever I go," he says.

Noting the current resurgence in pop music and the fact that the Boston-based vocalist is still only 26 (younger in fact than the oldest Backstreet Boy) the blue-eyed, chisel-jawed McIntyre could well recapture his pop idol status, but he isn't keen on the constant frenzy the New Kids invited.

"I'm trying to be conscious of the fact that I want a normal life," he says. "I still want to make them crazy when I'm onstage, but I try to be honest with my fans and say, 'Hey, take a picture or whatever but now I gotta do my thing.' I think they can respect that. If you respect them, they respect you."

When New Kids disbanded in 1994, McIntyre, the youngest member of the group who joined when he was only 12, had enough money to do absolutely nothing. He bought a house and a Mercedes back when he was 17. The group sold more than 60 million albums and 500,000 pieces of related merchandise.

Unlike other teen stars, McIntyre happily reports that no lawsuits ensued from disgruntled employees or management, no bad investments were made, no tens of millions went missing.

"No horror stories," he says. "We had good people. Everybody was watching everybody else - our families. We had a good agent, we had a good manager, we had a good producer. Everybody was making money."

"I kind of went through a period where I didn't really know what I wanted in life and didn't know what I wanted to do. For a while, it was just about going out at night and partying."

He wanted to get back into music and turned to big band material. He did covers of Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole and wrote some originals too. But his plans changed when he was in Los Angeles and hooked up with his old New Kids mate, Donnie Wahlberg.

"Me and Donnie fought the most back then," remembers McIntyre. "We were so much alike back then that we clashed, but now we're really good friends."

Together, they wrote and recorded We Can Get Down, which appears on Stay The Same. McIntyre wrote or co-wrote 12 of the album's 13 cuts.

McIntyre agrees it's all great timing, releasing a pop album at a time when the genre is enormous.

"That's why they signed me," he says of Columbia Records, the label that signed New Kids, "because they felt the market was right, and not because they totally believed in me, and that's fine. Everybody has their own agenda, and it's up to me to do my work and make my own path."

He has seen the Backstreet Boys perform but doesn't chuckle at the similarities.

"I'm not saying we were the originators because there was New Edition and The Jackson 5, but we were just being who we were and then they made a blueprint. But these guys are doing new things too and they're very talented. They're great singers and great performers.