by Shane Filan
F**k. Not again! This was getting to be a habit, and not one that we liked. Kian was the closest to Graham, and pleaded with Louis to think again. We even put on a gig in Sligo and videoed it to send to Louis, to show him how good Graham was. It was no good: Louis was adamant.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to break the news this time. Louis volunteered to do it and phoned Graham, who was half-expecting it. Louis did a very cool thing. He told Graham he thought he wasn’t right for the group, but he liked him and he wanted him to be our tour manager (whatever that was).
Graham did an even cooler thing. He agreed. We were all relieved: at least Graham would still be part of the gang and he stayed with us for a bit, unlike poor Derek, who had been totally dumped.
So now Louis had cut two members from the band, were we good to go? Not at all. Our manager had been convinced that six was too many for a boy band; he was equally sure that four was too few. Louis declared that we needed one more member, and arranged auditions to find him.
It may seem odd just how ruthlessly Louis was imposing his vision on the band, and how we all went along with it. But we were wide-eyed kids, culchies from the west of Ireland, and he managed the biggest boy band in Europe. As far as we were concerned, Louis Walsh was God.
We weren’t really looking for another lead singer, because we knew by then that Mark’s voice and mine gelled well together and sounded special. We just needed someone who sang and danced well and looked great.
The auditions were at The Red Box, a small performance space inside the Pod (in Dublin, in those days, all roads led to the Pod). Louis and the four remaining members of IOYOU sat behind a desk to assess the nervous hopefuls singing for us. The funny thing was, we saw scores of people, but we ended up choosing the first two.
The first guy up was a tall, floppy-haired blond lad named Brian McFadden. He was in a flowery blue short-sleeve shirt, which he made a point of telling us was his dad’s. It certainly looked like a dad shirt. He was the image of Nick Carter, and I remember thinking, Brilliant! He looks like a Backstreet Boy!
Brian seemed a bit of a headcase, talking non-stop in a thick Dublin accent, but when he stopped yakking and got around to singing, he had a fantastic voice and picked out harmonies with forensic precision, which nobody else in the band could do.
Next was another Dubliner called Nicky Byrne, a sharp fella who had hair like Ronan Keating and carried himself well in his brown corduroy jacket and blue polo-neck sweater. Nicky looked the business and had a cool vibe about him. He sang us Boyzone’s ‘Father and Son’ and his voice was great too.
We saw a load of other people as the day went on, but no one else was as good and all our conversations kept going back to Brian and Nicky. At the end of the auditions, we asked the best four or five people to stay behind so we could interview them to see if we’d get on.
Brian came back in talking 500 words per minute and was a proper up-for-the-craic Dublin lad. He said that he had seen us supporting the Backstreet Boys, and explained that he wanted to leave the boy band he was in and join us to work with Louis Walsh. I thought he was great.
Nicky seemed more laid-back and mature and told us he had been a football goalkeeper who signed to Leeds United and then played for Shelbourne and Cobh Ramblers. He said he was dating Georgina Ahern, the daughter of the Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern.
For some reason Kian decided to give him the third degree.
‘If we said you had to give her up for the band, would you?’ he demanded.
‘No, I wouldn’t!’ said Nicky, looking like he thought it was as daft a question as I did.
We couldn’t decide between Nicky and Brian and we asked them both to come back for a second audition. They sang a few Backstreet Boys’ songs with us and were both brilliant again. Kian wasn’t sure about Brian. He thought he was mad, but he could see what a great voice he had and how much fun he could be.
We were still going around in circles, trying to choose, when Louis suddenly said: ‘Why don’t we have both of them?’
Eh? We pointed out that this would take us back to six members – which Louis had thought was too many.
‘Yes,’ said Louis. ‘We’ll include them both and then take a vote on the final five.’
This was very clever by Louis. We had an inkling that he wanted Michael out of the band. He didn’t always like his attitude, and Steve Mac had not been as keen on Miggles’s voice in the studio as he was on the rest of us. But Louis was smart. He let us decide for ourselves.
Brian and Nicky agreed to move to Sligo for a few weeks. Brian came to stay with me. Nicky was staying with Michael, but he could see how things were going and felt awkward, so we made up some excuse why he should crash over the café, too.
The final nail in Miggles’s coffin was an IOYOU audition for Virgin Records in Dublin. Michael missed the train and was late, which infuriated Louis, and when he finally arrived he went on and on about the Spice Girls, who were Virgin’s big act at the time.
Michael knew the way the wind was blowing and was desperate to hang in there, but as he gabbled on and on, it came over as trying too hard. Louis was rolling his eyes, and although we sang five a cappella songs really well, Virgin passed on us.
It all had to come to a head, and we had the decisive band meeting a few days later at the Pod. Louis said the vote was between Nicky, Brian and Michael and then handed over to Graham – who, let’s face it, knew all about being cut from the band.
‘Everybody wants Brian to be in the band,’ said Graham. ‘It’s down to Nicky or Michael. We’ll have a secret ballot in the toilet.’
It seemed a strange place to vote to me, but Graham went off to the loo and we all filed in one by one to write a name on a piece of paper. Democracy in action! Graham re-emerged and stood by the pub table.
‘The members of IOYOU are Shane Filan, Kian Egan, Mark Feehily, Brian McFadden and Nicky Byrne,’ he said.
Miggles could not have been more gutted. His head dropped and he slumped forward in his seat as if the life had been sucked out of him. His phone rang and he picked it up and hurled it across the bar.
‘Oh, OK,’ he said. ‘Well, that’s fine.’ It clearly wasn’t. Nobody knew what to do, or to say. It felt like things couldn’t possibly get any more tense or difficult. We were wrong.
Louis had booked us all tickets to see Grease (yep, Grease again…) at the Point that night and Michael decided that he was still coming. Before that, he and I had to go to the airport: he was now dating Gillian’s best friend (and my old girlfriend) Helena; she and Gillian had been on holiday to America for two weeks, and we were picking them up.
To make matters worse, Nicky – who had just taken Miggles’s place in the band – drove our silent car to the airport. In the arrivals terminal, I hugged Gillian as Michael told Helena, ‘I’m not in the band,’ and cried. Then we all got back in the car to go to Grease. It could not have been more awkward.
Michael was a great guy and he had been with us right from the early days as Six As One. We all felt bad, and we all felt for him. I hoped we’d stay friends, but he vanished off the radar. Had it been me, I would probably have done the same.
Now that we had our final line-up, the pace really picked up. Louis fixed us an audition with a fella named Colin Barlow, who had signed Boyzone at Polydor Records. After weeks of rehearsal we were getting pretty slick; we knew it had gone well and they made us an offer, which was exciting.
Before Louis could accept it, though, there was one very important date in our diary: the return match with Simon Cowell.
Simon had been true to his word and agreed to come back to Dublin to see IOYOU re-audition with the new members. Louis had told him he had got rid of the deadwood from the band – which, as far as Simon was concerned, included me.
In the three months following my hangover fiasco I had been busy turning into a master of disguise. I had gone on a few sunbeds to get a tan; my hair was well over my shoulders and peroxide blond. Oddly enough, I
quite liked that look.
Waiting outside the audition room at the Pod, I was shitting myself. The other lads tried to encourage me, saying I looked so different now there was no way Simon would recognize me, but I was sure I would be rumbled. I took a deep breath, walked in and sang my heart out.
What a difference being sober makes! It was totally unlike our first audition. Simon was smiling and nodding, and Louis told me afterwards that a few bars into ‘Everybody Knows’, our first song, Simon leaned over and asked him, ‘Who’s the new guy? I love his voice! He’s so much better than that other chap.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Louis. ‘I got rid of him.’
‘I’ll sign them,’ said Simon.
We sang about six songs, a mix of Boyzone, Boyz II Men and Backstreet Boys – B bands clearly worked for us! After we were done, Simon came and sat down with us.
‘I really like you guys,’ he told us. ‘You’ve got good looks and harmonies and there is something unique about you. You’re a genuine male vocal pop group.’
This worldly, super-sophisticated London music executive was talking about putting us to work with Steve Mac again, and with Max Martin, the Swede who wrote and produced for the Backstreet Boys. We loved what he was saying and how he was focusing on our voices.
One thing that Simon didn’t like was our name (and, to be fair, it was bollocks). ‘I think IOYOU is absolutely horrible,’ he said, and suggested something that reflected our west of Ireland roots. We settled on Westside.
‘We’re signing with him,’ a beaming Louis told us, as soon as Simon had gone. ‘He was the one I wanted all along.’
A couple of years later, I asked Simon if he had realized I was the same guy from our failed audition at our second meeting. ‘Of course I knew, kiddo,’ he smirked (Cowell always called us ‘kiddo’). I didn’t believe a word he was saying.
We had a major-label record deal! It was such a mad buzz to tell Gillian and my family about it, and for the first time I felt like the crazy dream I had had for years, as a little culchie kid worshipping Michael Jackson and the Backstreet Boys, might even come true. Jesus – I had a chance of being a pop star!
We hadn’t yet signed a contract, but now Louis went into overdrive. The first thing he did was to move us to Dublin for a few weeks. Mark and I stayed with Nicky, Kian stayed with Brian, and Louis told us to hang out 24/7, get to know each other inside out and basically become a gang; a proper band.
He fixed it up for us to appear on The Beat on the Street, a music roadshow-cum-mobile festival run by the 2FM radio station. That summer we travelled around Ireland playing ten-minute lunchtime slots on the back of a trailer to a few hundred people in places like Cork, Limerick and Ballina in County Mayo.
We were all in denim and wore head mics, even though we were miming. Our dance routines weren’t great. Nicky had never danced – he had only just stopped being a footballer – and he was always going right when the rest of us were going left. We’d come offstage, or, rather, off the trailer, going, ‘Jesus, that was awful!’
I suppose we were paying our dues. Our Beat on the Street shows were a bit of a shambles, but they went down OK with the crowds. But I am very glad there were no camera phones and YouTube in those days.
In any case, we had some rather more serious dates to plan for. Louis had given us the support slot on the forthcoming Boyzone tour.
So that hectic summer of ’98 we split our time between hanging out and rehearsing in Dublin, weekends in Sligo, and trips out to do roadshows. Louis’s plan to help us bond worked. The five of us spent so much time together – working, playing cards, getting drunk – that we became like brothers.
We didn’t find too much we didn’t like about each other, apart from the brief spell when the rest of the band decided that I was sometimes a bit slow to get the joke, or the point of things, and started calling me Trigger out of Only Fools and Horses! I soon knocked that one on the head.
Louis pulled a couple of real masterstrokes for us. The first was to get us on the Boyzone tour, which was such exciting news we could hardly take it in. The other was to get Ronan Keating involved with the band.
Louis announced that Ronan was going to be co-managing us. This was fine by us – after all, he was a superstar! Ronan was great, and he didn’t have to do too much except occasionally hang out with us and give us bits of friendly advice. But the buzz around us started to get even bigger once his name was attached to the band.
After Ronan got involved, he invited us up to his house to chill and get to know him. Gillian and I drove up there with Mark and Kian. We were so awkward that we didn’t know what to take as a present, so we got him a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of Baileys – like he wouldn’t have those already!
Ronan gave us a tour of his house and showed us his pool. There were a few of his mates there as well, and after dinner we all got to drinking.
We were up half of the night and it got messy. Ronan and his mates were enjoying winding up their wet-behind-the-ears young guests, and at one point gave us shots to drink. They had vinegar in them. It was revolting.
In the early hours, Gillian and I staggered up to bed – and broke the bed. It just fell to pieces beneath us. We were so embarrassed and mortified… oh my good God! We have broken Ronan Keating’s bed!
The next morning we were the last ones down to breakfast because we were dreading telling Ronan what we had done. He just laughed and wound us up something rotten, and we got a lot of funny looks and smirks (obviously, like any fella, I was secretly quite proud).
Louis’s idea of getting Ronan involved was brilliant, because it got thousands and thousands of Boyzone fans as well as the media interested in us. The story was that Ronan had helped to form us, and so many people heard our name for the first time (even if that name was Westside).
The Boyzone tour was the big one we were looking forward to, but while we were waiting for it to begin, Simon and Louis sent us back to Steve Mac and Wayne Hector’s studio. They played us some tracks they had written, like ‘Swear It Again’ and ‘If I Let You Go’, but one song stood out a mile.
It was called ‘Flying Without Wings’.
4
‘EVERYBODY’S LOOKING FOR THAT SOMETHING…’
There is so much music in the world and you hear so many songs every day that it is incredibly rare for a song to stop you in your tracks and make you think, Holy God. The first time we heard ‘Flying Without Wings’ was like that.
We were all standing around Steve Mac’s plush studio as he told us that he and Wayne Hector had written this new song and Wayne had sung the vocal on the demo. He pressed play on his console.
‘Everybody’s looking for that something, one thing that makes it all complete…’
As soon as the song came flooding out of the speakers, I was completely overwhelmed. Jesus, what a tune this was! I can’t think of a time I have ever been so amazed at a song on first listen – not before, not since. It may be a cliché, but it’s true: the hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end.
‘You’ll find it in the strangest places, places you never knew it could be…’
Why did the song blow me away so totally? It was talking to me. It was a love song, sure, but it was also about chasing a dream, and it felt to me like it could be about us, right now, looking to make it as a band and conquer the world and become the next Backstreet Boys.
Listening to it, it felt like I was thinking aloud.
It wasn’t just me who felt that way. I glanced around and saw my shock reflected in everybody else’s faces. When it finished there was a stunned silence, then we all said a variant on the same thing: ‘Jesus! Can you just imagine if we had a song like that?’
But it wasn’t that simple. Steve Mac said that he was in the process of probably giving it to Stephen Gately from Boyzone to sing. Stephen loved it, he had already recorded a version, and it was possibly going on the soundtrack of a movie.
Ah, shite! It was so disappointing, but at th
e same time we understood. Stephen was in Boyzone, he was a big name and a proper star, and who were we? Five gawky kids in some new band that nobody had heard of… Of course Steve and Wayne would give it to Stephen first.
Yet we couldn’t stop talking about ‘Flying Without Wings’. The next time we spoke to Louis we were gabbling on about this unbelievable song and how it would have been ideal for us but we were too late. Louis must have said something to Simon, because he went down to Steve’s studio to hear it.
And suddenly… we had the song. Simon clearly agreed that it was perfect for us. I don’t know what Simon said to Steve or what kind of deal he did, but out of the blue Louis told Mark and me to head back to London and record ‘Flying Without Wings’.
We were only doing what they call a guide vocal, without the rest of the band, so that Simon and Louis could hear it, but the session was still amazing. I put a little croak in my voice as I sang that brilliant first line, and Mark completely nailed all the difficult high notes.
Our two voices were totally different but they came together so magically on that song. It made us do a double take. What were the odds on voices as complementary as ours both coming out of a tiny little town like Sligo?
‘Flying Without Wings’ was a major step up for us. Without being too cocky, we felt it showed we were a proper male vocal group, not ‘just’ a boy band for girls to scream at. Simon and Louis both felt the same when they heard it, and said the same thing: ‘Wow! We have got some serious singers here…’
The weird thing was that on the day that Mark and I recorded it, Ronan knew we were in town and invited us to dinner at a posh Japanese restaurant called Benihana. With him were his wife Yvonne, Irish singer Brian Kennedy… and Stephen Gately.
Mark and I felt cool about having dinner with Ronan and Stephen, but we were also a little uneasy. Stephen had no idea we had just recorded the song that had been meant for him, and as Mark and I got quietly pissed, we thought, F**k! He is going to hit the roof about this – and we’re about to go on tour with Boyzone! The days and weeks leading up to the tour passed in a blur of hyperactivity. There was a lot of singing; a lot of dancing; a lot of rehearsals. We were doing a twenty-minute slot to open up their Where We Belong tour and it felt like the biggest thing we had done to date – by far.
