"The Simon Cowell-backed Irish boyband will play a sold-out final show in Dublin on Saturday."
First there were six members. Then there were five, then four. Soon there will be none. After a 15-year career that has spawned a record-breaking run of 14 No 1s and platinum success with 10 studio albums and two Greatest Hits collections, Irish boyband Westlife will be rising triumphantly from their stools one last time this Saturday, at the second of two sold-out farewell shows.
Westlife are one of the last remaining bands from pop's late-90s boom period and have enjoyed an unusually lengthy run of success. Saturday's concert, at the 80,000-capacity Croke Park stadium in Dublin, will also be broadcast in 200 cinemas across 17 countries. But Westlife's continued popularity and has done little to silence their critics, who have spent over a decade railing against the boyband's safe and formulaic brand of mum-friendly ballads. Westlife's manager, Louis Walsh, is not looking for any last-minute reconciliation in the band's dying days. Walsh said he didn't mind whether people liked them: "I could not care less. People did the same with the Bee Gees. Westlife are not hip or trendy or cool but they're very fucking successful – they've probably sold more records than Take That."
The band started life in Sligo, Ireland in 1997 as a six-piece called Six As One. After they renamed themselves IOU their break came when one member's mother brought them to the attention of Walsh, who was managing Boyzone, the Irish five-piece who signed to Polydor Records and conquered the charts after an A&R man at RCA passed up the chance to sign them. That A&R man, oneSimon Cowell, was not about to make the same mistake twice. "Nobody else could have broken Westlife like Simon did," Walsh recalls. "There are a few reasons they were successful: yes they were nice guys, and yes they had good songs. But it was Simon who broke them. He wasn't on TV then, he was an A&R man trying to break a band. He was so into it. Every single little detail, from the clothes, to the videos."
Instrumental in the band's launch was the positioning of the Boyzone singerRonan Keating as the band's co-manager, which reassured Boyzone fans that it was all right to also enjoy this new boyband. Indeed, the band's first Smash Hitsfeature depicted Westlife as schoolboys, being tutored by Keating. Twelve years later, a cheery Walsh clarifies the situation. "Ronan was not involved in the band," he states. "We were using his name, he was using us, that was all. Because at that time, he meant something."
Westlife – Shane Filan, Mark Feehily, Kian Egan, Nicky Byrne and Bryan McFadden – quickly established their signature style. According to Feehily, the laws of the Westlife ballad were a source of fond amusement to the band as much as to their detractors. "Everyone knows the style," he laughs. "A piano intro, Shane starts the song, the drum beat 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."
It was a hit formula. The band's first two singles leapt to No 1, but their success rocketed with third single Flying Without Wings. The song had been planned as the first solo single for Boyzone's Stephen Gately. "Stephen did the demo and he thought it was going to be his song," Walsh recalls. "I'll be quite honest, I missed it, but as soon as Simon heard it he just went bananas. It was really difficult because Westlife were on tour with Boyzone, as the support act."
Over in Kildare, Nicola Reily – Nicola Filan to her followers on Twitter – remembers that tour well. "I first saw them on TV when I was seven," she remembers, "and I actually fell in love with them. I went to the Boyzone tour to see them. Westlife were better than Boyzone." Westlife announced their split on 19 October 2011, four days after Nicola's 22nd birthday, which she now looks back on as her "worst birthday ever. I'm still in shock that they're splitting up," she says. "They're amazing singers, they pick the right songs, and they stick together through thick and thin, no matter what." Unless they'reMcFadden, who left the band in 2004: "To be honest, they were better off without him." She may be right. McFadden most recently made headlines last year, when his universally derided and poorly judged single Just the Way You Are (Drunk at the Bar) was criticised for glamorising date rape, leading to a video being scrapped and a less-than-impressive No 49 chart peak, in Australia. Last year didn't go precisely according to plan back in the Westlife camp, either. "It's not really my kind of thing to go naming names," Feehily tactfully says, "but very recently we recorded a song purely because of who wrote it, and I just didn't like it and I was against recording it, but because of who wrote it, I think people put all their belief into it. It turned out exactly how I expected it would: nobody liked it. It's a real shame."
He's talking about Lighthouse, the Gary Barlow-penned single that crawled to No 33, and gave Westlife their worst-ever chart position, at the end of 2011. Walsh is less coy about what happened after Cowell cut his ties with Westlife to concentrate on other projects. "That was the A&R man's fault. When Cowell left, nobody gave a shit. And that song – well, Gary wrote that song for Elton John a few years ago. And he gave it to the producer, and the producer gave it to the guys because they didn't have anything else."
Looking to the future, Walsh – these days, like Cowell, a star in his own right thanks to his role on The X Factor – will continue to manage Filan. No doubt keen to get his finances back on track after the collapse of his property development company forced him to declare bankruptcy last week, Filan will be launched as what Walsh describes as "the male Adele".
"Leaving behind the memories and the lifestyle and the good parts will be difficult," Feehily admits. "But the last shows will be easier because deep down inside we each know it's the right thing to do." He's also looking at a solo career. "We had a year off once and it didn't take me long to realise that I need to be active to be happy," he admits.
He may even look beyond ballads. "I love singing every Westlife song," he says, "but I can't deny I'm excited by the idea of the unknown."
Credit Source : M.Guardian.co.uk
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