It’s the Christmas gift that keeps on giving: 30 years after its release, “Stay Another Day” is as popular as ever.
It’s a seasonal staple, blasting out of high street shops, auto-playing on holiday playlists, on permanent December rotation on Peter Kay’s beloved Forever FM. In 2023 East 17’s lachrymose piano ballad was streamed 20 million times, almost double the figure for the previous year. On Spotify, where you can find covers of the song by Jorja Smith, Kylie Minogue and Girls Aloud, it’s currently sitting at 64.1 million plays, and will possibly be at 65 million by the time you finish reading this story.
All of which is the long-tail legacy of a song that, in 1994, raced to No 1 and stayed there for five weeks, holding off another song that would become a festive perennial: Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You”. The following year, “Stay Another Day” won its creator an Ivor Novello award for songwriting.
For that man, though, “Stay Another Day” is also the gift that keeps on taking.
“It usually starts around October,” begins East 17 founder and songwriter Tony Mortimer with a tight smile. “I accept it, but it’s always been difficult, a two-edged sword, for my family. People come up to me and say: ‘That song means a lot to me...’ I’m like: ‘Hang about, I’m not ready for that yet, I’m just in McDonald’s!’ But I’ve got used to it, because it’s been so long. It never stops, though, and it’s every year. So, yeah, I said to the missus this morning: ‘Going into town today to do some interviews. They’re gonna remind me that my brother killed himself.’”
“Stay Another Day” was written by a 23-year-old Mortimer in August 1994. Its lyrics – “Baby if you’ve got to go away/ Don’t think I could take the pain/ Won’t you stay another day?” – aren’t about lost romantic love at that most wonderful time of the year. They’re about the suicide, four summers previously, of Mortimer’s older brother Ollie. He was 22.
“It’s such a heavy word, suicide, and people do struggle at this time of year. That is the dark side of [the song] – but the light side of it is that it’s become a Christmas snowman!” says Mortimer, 54, with a boyish giggle at the thought of the fluffy, puffy white coats that he and his bandmates wore in the iconic, very mid-Nineties pop video. “It’s surreal. Anyway, it’s the 30th anniversary and the record company was going to do something. We were batting around ideas, talking about a reunion and something big. And I said: ‘I don’t just want to release the single and be on the take. That’s not right.’ So I’ve stopped them just releasing it [for money] – and I feel good about that.”
Rather, Mortimer has partnered with the music therapy charity Nordoff and Robbins to re-release “Stay Another Day” as part of an awareness and fundraising initiative. Over the past few weeks the Essex-based musician, a father of two and grandfather of three, has been performing with some of their young clients ahead of a special Nordoff and Robbins Carol Service. At the event next week (which also features Jamie Cullum and Lemar) at St Luke’s Church in Chelsea, Mortimer will perform “Stay Another Day” accompanied by a children’s choir.
“[We want to] help parents find out that there is music therapy, something they probably haven’t heard of, if their child’s suffering with autism or some other mental thing,” says Mortimer as we talk in a room in a private members’ club in central London. “And I think we can get that message out there via this song.”
Ruby, 17, from Bedfordshire, has autism and ADHD. She’s one of the teenagers who’ve been helped by Nordoff and Robbins, and by working with Mortimer. As her case study notes, “Everyday events caused Ruby extreme emotional distress. At age 14 she was sectioned for her safety and placed in a specialist psychiatric children’s ward. After returning home, Ruby started weekly sessions of music therapy.”
Music therapy has really helped with my confidence
“It’s really helped with my confidence,” Ruby, a keen bass player, tells me over a Zoom interview alongside her mum, Bev. “I wouldn’t be in the place I am now musically if I hadn’t done music therapy. Mentally, [it’s the] same. Socially, they’ve really helped me as well. Now I’m a lot better at leaving the house, going out to places and socialising with people. [It’s a] safe place – after being in hospital for such a long time, you get used to being with the same six people for ages.”
As for how working one-to-one with Mortimer in the music room has helped her, she says, approvingly, “He’s so down-to-earth. You wouldn’t think he was famous at all – not in a horrible way!” Ruby adds with a laugh. “He’s got this comforting aura.”
“It’s a warm feeling he gives you,” agrees Bev. “I can see with Ruby that she interacted with him really well.”
And what did she know about East 17 before now?
“I didn’t know who they were!” Ruby admits. “Mum had to show me loads of music videos on YouTube. It was really funny seeing Tony being a boyband person and doing his… stuff.”
That stuff has recently been excavated in the excellent, unvarnished BBC documentary series Boybands Forever. Lairy bad boys East 17 are featured heavily, alongside parent-friendly rivals Take That, in the first episode. The four-piece from Walthamstow, east London (postcode: E17) signed their record deal in 1992 – on April Fool’s Day, notes Mortimer.
By the end of 1993, they’d had three top five singles from their debut album. The pressure was on for Mortimer, as chief songwriter, to keep up the hit-rate with their second album. Working at a furious pace the following summer – he had six weeks to come up with an entire album (“I was told to cancel my family holiday”) – he wrote “Stay Another Day”. Does he think it took him four years to process the loss of his brother and turn it into something artistic and, well, positive?
“I’d love to say yeah,” replies Mortimer, a generally cheerful, easy-going man, and an open book. “But no. It was the desperation that I needed songs for an album, and I was drawing on anything. I would always have this little mental box [of subjects]. I could write about a club. About a breakup with a girl. About seeing a girl in a club.” But he allows that he was, by then, a more accomplished writer. “So I was a better artist [and more] capable to draw on it. But it wasn’t the intention. The intention was just to write a ballad.”
Still, that didn’t mean a Christmas ballad. Or, in fact, a single at all. “It’s a ballad, and East 17 didn’t release them – they’re a bit sad. It was to go on a B-side.” Then their manager Tom Watkins heard it. “That’s a Christmas No 1!” says Mortimer, approximating the late Svengali’s gruff bark. “And I went: ‘No, not that one. You really ain’t releasing that one.’ I explained what it was about. But he was looking from a marketing perspective. Then the record company said it was a classic. So because they liked it as well, it just got worse!” Mortimer says with another giddy laugh. “I had absolutely no control with what they were putting out.”
When I talked to Mortimer in 2011, he told me he was crushed by the need to keep the “gravy train” on track. When I remind him of that today, he nods. “I always thought: if I don’t deliver an album, this stops. So I put myself under that pressure. The weight was coming off me – I’m six-foot and I was nine-stone-three, which is really unhealthy. And later I was 19 stone at my heaviest. So I’ve gone from super-featherweight to super-heavyweight. My heart can’t handle it!”
Back then, he also fretted about the impact of “Stay Another Day” on his family. “If I get to open my soul to the public, it’s an honour,” he explained. “But my family had no say. Even now, when they hear the song, it’s hard. It takes them right back. They’re like: ‘Cheers you t***. Made that one a bit public.’”
My family had no say... even now, when they hear the song, it’s hard
“My mum and dad have passed, so there’s a bit of relief with that,” he says now. “But back then, yeah, it was difficult. It’s their son... My dad rang me because I’d told a tabloid the story. They’d gone with the headline ‘A Rave from the Grave’. How sensitive! My dad was very upset.
“So there was this stuff going on in the background. It was definitely opening your soul to the public – but it also feels like you’re walking around with your trousers down.”
And worse. Boybands Forever opens with mobile phone footage from 2015 of East 17 singer Brian Harvey having a meltdown in the street. “Over the past 15 years I’ve been treated like a complete c***,” he yells. “I’ve got no f***ing heating. I’m getting abused by the police, I’m getting abused by the court system and I’m getting abused by the CPS, and I’ve had enough of all of you.” Then he smashes his record sales awards discs. “One million sales. This is what it means. That’s what I think of your f***ing music industry.”
I ask Mortimer the inescapable question: how damaged was Harvey by his experience in the band?
“That’s his personality,” he says carefully of a former bandmate with whom he now seems to have few dealings. “People think he’s [been pushed] to that point. But that’s his personality, that’s what he was like in the band… But of course, there is a public pressure.”
“And how about you, Tony?”
“Oh, damaged? I was worn out. I’ve often wondered if I have PTSD from it. It was hilarious but, yeah, I was so tired by the end of it. I always found travelling really tiring. I hate going to airports, even now. But damaged? I’ve always been messed up. I’m just more messed up!”
We recently saw the extreme, terrible outcome of that pressure on young men from boybands with the death of Liam Payne. Mortimer expresses deep sympathy for him and his family. But he seems not to have engaged properly with the news, whether because he’s otherwise distracted with his work and family life, or for his own mental wellbeing. “I just heard he fell off a balcony. I saw it got a lot of attention online, and then people are jumping all over it. That’s what people do.”
He does, though, have thoughts on what was revealed in Payne’s toxicology report. “Drugs don’t help. You might think they mask [your troubles]. But you’re never gonna make your best decisions on them. Drugs are the problem we need to look at. But, yeah, there is pressure,” he repeats, exhaling heavily. “For us, it was for quite a short period – four-and-a-bit years.”
But from that popstar mayfly existence has come a song whose sleigh bells chime resonantly to this day. Thirty years on Tony Mortimer can, finally, take a more elevated, even slightly dispassionate view of the song that defines him as a musician. This year’s partnership with Nordoff and Robbins, and the music therapy he’s able to give to Ruby, are a life-affirming alchemising of a song born of deep darkness and sadness.
“It still stings, but it does help,” he acknowledges. “I can’t play that song and not know what I’m playing, not think of my brother, every time. But it’s not about me any more, and it’s not about him. It’s about the song and how the public see it. Most of them don’t even know the thing behind it. And I accept that – that it [just signifies] Christmas. That gives me a smile.”
‘Stay Another Day’ is released on limited-edition seven-inch vinyl on 13 December. For all items sold via www.stayanotherday.co.uk, London Records is donating £1 to Nordoff and Robbins Music Therapy. Tickets for the Nordoff and Robbins Carol Service on 10 December are available here
If you are experiencing feelings of distress, or are struggling to cope, you can speak to the Samaritans, in confidence, on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email jo@samaritans.org, or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch. If you are based in the USA, and you or someone you know needs mental health assistance right now, call or text 988, or visit 988lifeline.org to access online chat from the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. This is a free, confidential crisis hotline that is available to everyone 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you are in another country, you can go to www.befrienders.org to find a helpline near you
