Skip to content
Bros: After The Screaming Stops brings the twin brothers back together to perform at the O2 in Wembley, 28 years after they first performed at Wembley.
But that’s nothing! I was at one of their first ever gigs, and certainly their first warm-up gig for their first tour, at the Manchester Apollo in 1988. The tickets cost £5 each, and I bought four, thinking I could sell them for a bundle… I managed to sell three of them for face value and just used the fourth one to go myself.
It was the loudest 90 minutes I’d every experienced and I loved every minute of it, and came out deaf.
They became the biggest thing ever at the time – epitomising what The Jam said, “The public want what the public get(!)”, but what zooms up, comes crashing down big-time. Their first album was great, but their second felt like just a rehash. There was a third, but like everyone else, I didn’t care any more and the world had moved on.
In their hey-day, they were so big so soon that they could even turn down touring with the man who slept in the same bed as young children, Michael Jackson.
When they came back together for the gig, it’s not like they were desperate for the money, since Luke Goss acts in films that rarely make it to the big screen, while brother Matt has a residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
For Luke, we see him putting together his directorial debut movie, Your Move, which currently has a rating of 3.9/10 out of 267 reviews, so we’re talking ‘straight to DVD’ fare.
Meanwhile, Matt is chilling at home with 1000 crystals around his home, and sitting at his piano, singing.
When I reviewed Whitney: Can I Be Me, in 2017, I wondered what happens, literally, after the screaming stops… you’ve been belting out I Will Always Love You at the top of your voice, you come off stage, and then you’re still getting up the next morning and doing the washing up, so fame isn’t quite what it seems.
The pair of them have got a stupid number of silly tattoos between them, they both argue with lots of effing and jeffing, the film takes in the sad passing of their sister, Carolyn, as well as their mother, and we learn they were so poor as children that they didn’t have a dartboard… just a single dart, throwing it up in the air and how they should be able to live with such danger… even though one time, the dart ended up in one of Luke’s ribs.
Also, they put the setlist together, and they rehearse, but even when we got to the actual gig, which only showed us the first song (When Will I Be Famous?), it all felt as flat as the hair on their heads.
With the occasional line, such as when Luke says: “They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, and fuck me, that’s true… but we don’t have the time that Rome had.” (Huh?), a lot of people online seemed to find this as a spoof documentary – or ‘mockumentary’ – like This Is Spinal Tap, but overall, I still just felt it was very flat throughout. They may be playing up a bit for the cameras, but not enough to make any major difference.
I watched this on BBC iPlayer, and if you hadn’t noticed (and presumably in tribute to that great film), it also goes up to 11.
Bros: After The Screaming Stops is available to buy on Blu-ray, Amazon Video and DVD.
Detailed specs:
Cert: 
Running time: 98 minutes
Studio: Spirit Entertainment
Year: 2018
Format: 1.78:1 (16:9)
Rating: 4/10
Directors: Joe Pearlman, David Soutar
Producer: Leo Pearlman
Music: Ian Arber, Dave Rowntree
Himself: Luke Goss
Himself: Matt Goss
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.