"The allure of the newly disbanded Westlife was not so much musical as magical."
So farewell then, Westlife. Good riddance, some might say. After 15 years of sitting on stools and crooning inane ballads, the Irish boy band are finally calling it a day. This weekend, they will perform their final concert, a move that will delight serious music fans, who see them as a cultural Chernobyl, or a cultural Bhopal, or at the very least a cultural wind farm.
With their covers of Abba and Barry Manilow and Phil Collins – and looking at Wikipedia, it would seem that they also had a stab at Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart – they were never going to tickle the fancy of your average leather-jacketed critic, whose idea of fun is a night spent in a pub full of spit and sawdust listening to “the next Bob Dylan”.
But then even Westlife themselves have acknowledged that it has never really been about the music. Interviewing them many moons ago, I asked if they had written any of the songs on their new album. “Look,” said a member with hair that resembled a pair of blonde curtains, “it’s not as if we’re Lennon and McCartney, is it?”
On that point, I couldn’t disagree. Anyway, reflecting on a decade and a half of saccharine songs, band member Mark Feehily this week said that “everyone knows the style. A piano intro… the drumbeat kicks in for the second verse. I sing the second verse and maybe the middle eight, then there’s a key change, a gospel choir and some ad libs, the end.” Their manager, the X Factor judge Louis Walsh, announced that he “could not care less” that the band were often derided musically. “Westlife are not hip or trendy or cool,” he said, “but they’re very successful.”
And they are. Fourteen number ones, 10 albums, two greatest hits collections – and yet, in common with most boy bands, Westlife’s achievements have precious little to do with music.
The role the boy band plays is not a cultural one – pre-pubescent girls rarely make good music critics – but a social one. From The Osmonds to The Monkees to The Bay City Rollers and beyond, the boy band has safely given girls a piggyback from childhood through to the end of adolescence, when they are old enough to hop off and meet a real boy without it mucking up their education.
Members of a boy band may sing, and they will dance, but their real job is to act as oestrogen receptacles for teenage girls so that said teenage girls are kept on the straight and narrow. When I was a teenager, my friend Emily mocked me for liking Take That “because anyone who is cool likes Nirvana”. That may have been so, but at the time I was too busy mooning over posters of Robbie Williams to bother much with the lads from the local boys’ school who introduced Emily to “exotic cheroots” (as they were described by the headmistress, when she explained her decision to expel my friend). And anyway, as Emily will tell you, the definition of cool is a very fluid thing – Take That are still around and Nirvana aren’t, largely because nobody in Take That ever became addicted to heroin or blew his brains out with a gun.
Having seen New Kids on the Block, Take That, East 17, the Backstreet Boys, Boyzone, and yes, even Westlife in concert, I like to think of the boy band as my specialist topic (oh, how I yearn to see One Direction, the British group manufactured on X Factor who have taken America by storm).
Perhaps one day I will put a boy band together myself. Like so many other business models, there is a strict formula to it. You need one hunk, one member who looks like a girl, one who can sing and possibly even write music, one who will later come out of the closet, and one who is a little bit naughty. With this combination you have all bases covered, as far as teenage girls are concerned. Then you take a syrupy song cooked up in a lab by professionals, and hook the adolescents at their most hormonal.
Everyone is a winner – the record company, the parents, the girls – except for the boy bands themselves, who will spend the next 10 years at the mercy of record executives as they attempt to pay back their advances in kind.
I remember my mother being terribly alarmed when the first poster of a boy went up on my wall. But I think she soon realised that this was infinitely preferable to finding a real one snuggled under my duvet. And this is why I worry about the demise of Westlife, coupled with the unstoppable march of the female superstar.
It’s not that when Rihanna wears clothes, they tend to be made of PVC; or that Katy Perry favours bras created from cans of whipped cream. I see that Jessie J and Beyoncé and Adele are really rather fabulous. It’s just that if you take boys away from the charts – and there’s currently only one boy band in the top 40, called The Wanted – then girls will simply go looking for them on the streets. Now that Westlife are on their way out, and Take That make the news for their tax affairs rather than their romantic ones, we should welcome boy bands such as One Direction with open arms – or, in the style of a teenage girl, a few shrill screams.
Credit Source : The Telegraph
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