After announcing their comeback tour that shall be hitting Brisbane's Hifi come June, Tony Mortimer, former lead singer of legendary boy band act of the 90’s ‘East 17’ has given up part of his lazy Friday morning in the rainy UK to catch up with QNews and reveal all on band reformation, future music collaborations and tour.

Q: What kept you busy after East 17 died its natural, boy band death?

Tony: [laughs] yeh that’s it! The band died and my family was born and that’s trying to keep tabs on two daughters and the Mrs. – it keeps you busy. I’ve been doing music, obviously just been writing songs and stuff in the background and doing bits and bobs really. Relaxing, getting over the trauma, the post dramatic stress disorder period you go through after your band [laughs]. But being a dad really.

Hanson, Backstreet Boys, Aqua, N-Trance – are all reforming and touring these days. Did you just join the trend bandwagon or coincidence?

It’s different for us because we’ve been trying to come back since 2004. We tried in 2006, that didn’t work. Um, we tried it again in 2008, 2009, [laughs] we keep trying to reincarnate ourselves. It's different for us because we are not like a band that was put together as such, we’s were a band that grew up together in school as such so it’s more like we’re just having a laugh but we’re not kids but old men now. So we just got out act together in 2012 – that’s the coincidence, we just got our act together six years after we first tried our comeback.

Why did you want to want to get back together in 2004?

Originally we got back together because we wanted to end it with a bit of a nicer ending on it – because it kind of ended in a bit of a wet fart back in 1997 and it was a shame for what we had achieved for over the years. So we tried to put a nicer edge on it but in the end we just made it worse [laughs.]

You read press releases back in the day about your mid 90’s split. It was dramatic. What’s it like being back together with this history? Fun or are some things just overlooked and not spoken of?

A bit of both in terms of we sort of keep things.... erm – we don’t rock the boat, if you know what I mean. It’s easier now because there is only three of us (Tony, John and Terry) and we’re all going in the same direction.  So to be honest that’s a lot easier.

You are still writing music! New Single ‘Can’t Get You Off My Mind (Crazy)’ – how was that process?

It was all recorded on analogue. We wanted to do a more live sound and we wanted to record it analogue digital. We really wanted to do it properly this time. Digital has made music more cheap and more accessible and we wanted to go a bit more old school. It’s a different sound, it’s a bit more rock n roll for us and we’ve done this album and we’re already thinking about the next album – and we know we have to take it up a gear next album and get back so many early East 17 energy in there as well.

How long has it been since you have been in Aus?

It’s been...GOD!...it’s been 15 years. We love it out there. John was going to immigrate about  two years ago. Me and Terry were like, ‘No! We’re gonna get the band together again – we haven’t done it this year so c’mon we’ll do it again.’ We stopped him. We scuffled his plans.

I’m sure if he did immigrate, one of our talent shows would have eaten him up and utilised him as a judge – that’s what Aus seems to do these days.

[Laughs] Fantastic!

What can Australia expect to see when we see you at the Hifi come June? All the classics will be done – will we be dancing ect?

There’ll be no dancing. Erm.. Yeh they’ll be no dancing – they’ll just be some moving or shuffling about. [laughs] we be SHUFFLING! We’re gonna sing the old songs – we’ll do one or two from the new album but we know it’s going to go really quiet at that point – but we’re mainly doing the old stuff like ‘House Of Love’, ‘Deep,’ ‘It’s Alright,’

 And we’ll get to hear you rap again too?

Yes! We’re also looking forward to our days off too in Australia to have some fun. It’s going to be hard to get us home afterwards.

So much fun getting to know you Tony and all the best with your tour, album and band reformation. The iconic East 17 everyone!!