My Side of Life/by WESTLIFE.CN

by Shane Filan

  Simon got involved in choosing the set list and in styling us. This time, we were nothing like the Backstreet Boys in their baggy jeans and hoodies; Simon got us dressed up in smart jackets and woolly polo necks. Come to think of it, we looked like mini-Simon Cowells.

  Boyzone were so massive that it meant we were playing our very first tour in venues like aircraft hangers. The opening show was at the Bournemouth Centre, and I was so nervous as I stood twitchily by the side of the stage that I felt as if my life was flashing before my eyes. This was it! Could we do it?

  The adrenaline buzz as we ran out onstage was amazing. The set Simon had chosen for us was all ballads, no upbeat songs, but the harsh lights and our heavy Savile Row clothes had us sweating like pigs. What carried us through was the sheer excitement… and the screaming.

  The noise was incredible. These girls had hardly heard of us before, but they thought we were Ronan’s protégés and they seemed to like us, and they yelled their hearts out. Being screamed at by 4,000 fans… really? It was beyond our wildest dreams. Backstage afterwards, we were all too dizzy and disoriented to think clearly.

  Not that there was any danger of getting carried away. Louis wanted to milk this tour to the max. When Boyzone had first started out, he had made them hang around outside Take That’s Dublin gigs introducing themselves to the fans going in, and he did the same to us.

  So before every Boyzone show, Louis sent us out to greet the fans. It could have been embarrassing but luckily the girls were cool with us. We sang a cappella versions of ‘Swear It Again’, signed autographs, and handed out photos with a cheesy message on the back (I would like to stress we did not write this):

  Westside are five gorgeous Irish boys and they’re going to take the world by storm! If you like angelic voices, smooth moves and beautiful songs, then clear some space on your bedroom walls and in your record collection ’cos Westside are coming…

  Kian, Brian, Nicky, Mark and Shane have the looks and the talent, and they’re gonna be absolutely huge. Who says so? None other than Ronan Keating, who loves them so much he’s decided to co-manage them! He’ll be there with tons of top pop advice and the boys hope that you’ll be there with your support too.

  To be part of the Westside story, fill this form in, pop it in the post (you don’t need a stamp), and we’ll get a whole bunch of Westside info out to you…

  We loved doing the Boyzone shows but offstage the tour wasn’t glamorous. Not for us, anyway. We travelled on a poky little bus, with Graham getting used to being our tour manager, and stayed in B & Bs and dirt-cheap hotels two to a room (except for Mark, who liked to have his own room).

  Boyzone were cool. They could have resented us as we were coming right onto their turf: we had the same manager and Louis was pushing us hard as ‘the new Boyzone’. But if they did, they hid it well. Stephen must have been pissed off about ‘Flying Without Wings’, but he was nice to us too.

  It was an insanely full-on tour for a new band that had never put out a single, let alone played live. We even did two nights at Wembley! The arenas were still filling up when we played but it was still incredibly exciting.

  Fans already had their favourite members. Louis told us to introduce ourselves onstage every night – ‘Hi, I’m Shane’ or ‘Hi, I’m Kian’, no second names – and while we all got a good scream, Brian’s was always the loudest. Well, to be fair, he did look like Nick Carter!

  We would come offstage so giddy and high each night that there was no way we could just toddle off to bed. We wanted to party but could hardly afford a beer. Occasionally, Boyzone took pity on us and invited us back to their hotel bar.

  Ronan hung out with us a bit and travelled on our tour bus a few times. He would give us friendly advice – and some of it was about girls.

  The Boyzone tour was the first time that we met girls who wanted to get with us for what we represented, not for who we were. It was quite low-level because we were still unknown, but even so girls would be flirting with us outside the venues or tracking us down to our hotels.

  Ronan didn’t give a lecture, just a few wise words: ‘Be careful. If you get famous, you’ll get a lot of attention from girls and it will often be for the wrong reasons. You’ll be tempted and it’s up to you what you do. But be careful.’

  It was good advice. Some of the band listened to it closely, and some totally ignored it – because, of course, we were all in very different situations.

  For my part, I wouldn’t do anything that would endanger my relationship with Gillian. I was finally with the girl I loved and it had taken me a long time, a lot of courage and a few false starts to get there. There was no way that I was going to risk all that for a quick shag on the road.

  Nicky was the same, as he had been dating Georgina since he was twelve, so he and I shared a room. Mark always had his own room but he didn’t really go off with girls. We just figured he was quiet and a bit shy.

  Kian and Brian were a different story. They were both single and happily so, and when Ronan had warned us some girls would target us because we were getting famous, Brian had let loose a big grin that clearly said, ‘I don’t give a shit what their reasons are! Bring them on!’

  We never talked about it, that wasn’t how we were, but Kian and Brian shared a room and I am pretty sure they reacted to girls throwing themselves at us in the early days in the way most red-blooded single fellas would do. Why not? It didn’t bother me. It was none of my business; and, in any case, if not for Gillian…

  The Boyzone tour had been a mental experience, and seeing Ronan and the others every night opened our eyes to what being in a mega boy band was all about. We didn’t dare to dream that we’d ever be as big as them, but what an adventure!

  After the tour, we went down to London to sign our record contract with Sony BMG at long last. We also learned we would be getting a new name. It turned out there were a few other bands knocking around called Westside or West Side. We would have to change it.

  The two options seemed to be West High or Westlife, and Simon settled it: ‘Let’s go with Westlife.’ So, there we were. Westlife it was.

  Simon was in the BMG boardroom for the signing, as was his right-hand man, Sonny Takhar, a straight-talking London guy who was to do a lot of the day-to-day work with us. We were signing a five-album deal that would pay us about £4m if Westside, sorry, Westlife took off.

  Lately, my life was often starting to feel like a dream. It happened again right there and then. I scribbled my name, and as we sipped champagne and had our photos taken, I thought, Well, this is it! We’re going to be pop stars! I’m going to be a millionaire! I can buy a f**k-off car!

  I was nineteen years old.

  After the Boyzone dates we went on a Smash Hits roadshow tour. It featured some big stars, like 5ive, Steps and Billie Piper, but we mostly kept ourselves to ourselves. It was just shyness. At heart we still felt like five Irish lads who could get found out any minute. But Smash Hits gave us an award for Best New Tour Act, which we loved.

  Gillian had visited me in London or Dublin a few times but I had hardly been to Sligo or seen my family in months. When I got a few days at home after the Smash Hits tour, it happily coincided with a long-awaited payday.

  For although we might have been signing multi-million-pound contracts, the truth was we were all broke. We hadn’t seen a penny so far and had been living off hand-outs from Louis. That all changed when we each received a £25,000 advance on a publishing deal (not that I knew what publishing was).

  I had never seen so much money in my life and, naturally, I did the only sensible thing I could. I went out and spent £20,000 on a car.

  I had always been mad for cars but I had never been able to afford one. This was a beauty, a 1993 silver BMW. I can remember exactly what it cost: £16,750. The insurance was £4,000; not unreasonably as I was a wide-eyed teenage wannabe pop star.

  That car became my pride and joy. I used to love picking up Gillian from her house in it, and when she wasn’
t around, I would carefully do laps of the town with four or five mates squeezed in with me. I’d hand-wash it in the car park over the road, and at night I’d park it outside the café and pray that nobody scratched or vandalized it.

  Some people probably thought it was a bit cocky for me to buy myself a swanky car as soon as I got money. I figured, I’d made my first few quid, I didn’t have any other expenses – why shouldn’t I get a cool car? In any case, it was a six-year-old BMW. It wasn’t that flash.

  I only got a few days to chill out in Sligo with Gillian. Now the real work was set to begin. We had to make an album.

  Simon Cowell being Simon Cowell, Westlife were starting at the very top. As winter fell, Louis told us that we were to fly straight out to Sweden to work with the shit-hot producers at Max Martin’s Cheiron Studios, who had helped to turn the Backstreet Boys into global superstars.

  The Backstreet Boys’ producers! This was another of our ‘Holy God’ moments. They were starting to come thick and fast.

  I had never been outside of the UK and Ireland before and Stockholm sounded as glamorous as going to New York. I had no idea what to expect. Scandinavia! It just seemed so exotic… I distinctly remember packing earmuffs.

  I didn’t use them much, but even so we landed in Sweden in the thickest snow I had ever seen. There were fans waiting for us at the airport; they had heard of us from the Boyzone tour. We’re not talking The Beatles here, there were literally ten girls, but it still felt very cool.

  These same girls would wait for us every morning outside our hotel and walk to Cherion with us. And the studio was something else. Everywhere we looked there were platinum discs for the Backstreet Boys, for 1 million, 5 million, 10 million sales. All that we could think was, What are we doing here?

  Per Magnusson, David Kreuger, Rami Yacoub, Jörgen Elofsson, Jake Schulze, Andreas Carlsson and the other Swedish guys were very professional and efficient, and they were also fun to work with. They played us loads of songs like ‘If I Let You Go’, ‘Fool Again’ and ‘Miss You’. This was all new to us: we were overwhelmed and very impressed.

  We would go into the studio at midday and record track after track. The producers gave me, Mark and Brian nearly all the lead vocals and had me starting off virtually every song. It was all full-on: we got pizza and lasagna delivered in the evenings and worked till midnight.

  A couple of times the producers took us to snazzy local bars and clubs where a beer cost about twenty times what it did in Sligo, but mostly we were too knackered from singing all day to go out in the evenings. After a couple of weeks, we flew home for Christmas.

  That Christmas in Sligo gave me a chance to reflect on what had been a crazy, life-changing year. I had started 1998 as a failed accountancy student; I closed it as a dreamer, with dreams that were coming true in HD.

  What a year… We had lost three members, found two more, supported the Backstreet Boys, gained a famous manager, changed our name (twice), toured with Boyzone, signed a record deal and made an album. I enjoyed a great, happy Christmas that had the feel of a calm before a storm.

  How true that was.

  In the New Year we were back in Sweden to wrap up the album, which was to be called, simply, Westlife. It sounded great to us, just the mix of powerful ballads and pop tunes that we wanted. Now, I think that it is too long and could have lost a few songs; then, we loved it.

  Simon and Louis had a master plan. We would put the album out at the end of the year, in November, release three singles leading up to it, and in the meantime do non-stop interviews and promotion to get our name about.

  There was talk of playing our trump card, ‘Flying Without Wings’, at the start, but Simon wanted to hold that back until right before the album came out. Instead, he decided to put out ‘Swear It Again’ as our debut single and sent us off to make a video for it.

  This was yet another new experience for us. We were at Pinewood, the famous London studio. They were filming a James Bond movie there at the same time. We didn’t dare speak to Pierce Brosnan, but we waved as he drove past us in a tuxedo on a golf buggy.

  The video concept was the band standing all in black on a big glossy stage, miming our singing in front of a sixty-piece string orchestra. It reminded me of acting in plays at the Hawks Well, but the cameras were a new factor, and it was nerve-wracking working out when to look at them and when to look away.

  We spent a few days filming this vid and apparently it cost something crazy like £100,000. We thought it looked grand but then Simon hated it, and made us reshoot it in a theatre with plush red seats. As normal, we went along with it.

  Everything then became focused on the release of the single in April and the Sony BMG publicity machine took over. We all pretty much moved into a hotel in London full-time as we did weeks and weeks of TV, radio and magazine interviews.

  Doing TV shows was a new thing for us, but after our initial nerves we took to it quite quickly. We soon became regulars on CD:UK, the Saturday morning kids/music show, and got friendly with hosts Ant and Dec and Cat Deeley, who weren’t much older than us. We always had good craic with them.

  As a kid, I had always dreamed of what it would be like to do interviews, and now we were talking to newspapers and magazines every day. We were amazed they were so interested in us, but they had heard of us from the Boyzone tour and winning the award from Smash Hits.

  The interviews were OK as we are all Irish lads with the gift of the gab. Mark was always the quietest, but I could rattle on and Brian normally came out with some entertaining free-form bollocks. In my head, I would be waiting for the inevitable question that came in every – and I mean every – single interview:

  ‘Shane, do you have a girlfriend?’

  And every single time I would lie. ‘No,’ I would tell them. ‘I don’t.’

  Why did I do this? Firstly, Louis and the record label had quietly advised us to play down the girlfriend angle. Fans love to think that the guys in boy bands are available, and it didn’t make sense to shoot ourselves in the foot this early by saying we weren’t.

  Nicky didn’t have this option. Georgina was the Taoiseach’s daughter, so his relationship was high-profile and widely known. It was different for me, with Gillian. I could get away with it.

  Yet it was also for Gillian’s sake – and she agreed with the subterfuge. She was starting college in Sligo, studying business, and she wanted her life there to be as normal as possible. We had no idea if Westlife was going to take off or not, but if it did, she hated the idea of being known as just ‘that pop star’s girlfriend’.

  Even so, I felt guilty every time I said it and saw the resulting feature claim that ‘Westlife’s Shane is young, free and single and on the lookout!’ It was a white lie, and a harmless one – but, ideally, I would have preferred to be honest.

  The interviews kept coming and got bigger and bigger. We were getting front covers; Smash Hits put us on their cover before we even had a single out, the first time they had ever done that. Radio 1 was playing our single to death. We could sense that things were snowballing even though we could hardly believe it.

  ‘Swear It Again’ was coming out in Ireland two days before the British release, so we also did a load of promo there – and it was in our homeland that we first got a clue as to just how crazy things were about to get.

  We were to sign copies of the single at the Blanchardstown Centre, a big shopping mall in Dublin. We knew people were getting to know of us in Ireland, due to the Boyzone link and to Ronan plugging us, but we had no idea how many people would turn up.

  As our people carrier drove through Dublin’s busy streets, we speculated nervously. Five hundred? Could there be a thousand? Although we didn’t admit it, at the back of our minds was the Spinal Tap scenario where we arrived to find nobody there.

  We got to the Blanchardstown to be met by what looked like a football crowd, if football crowds were made up only of crying, screaming teenage girls. Security men met us and hustled us through
corridors to a waiting desk. On the way, they said there were at least 5,000 people there.

  Five thousand! Jesus – that could fill the Point Depot! The next four hours were a blur. We calmed down the fans who were too excited to speak; posed for photos; signed singles, photos and scrapbooks; dispensed kisses. We hadn’t met even a fifth of the people waiting for us.

  We had to leave for another signing in Cork and hated to let the other fans down, so we went onto the roof of the shopping centre to wave at the thousands below who had not even got into the mall. As we peeked over the edge, the shrill screech of the screams was like a jet taking off.

  Suddenly we knew what it felt like to be in the Backstreet Boys, in Take That, in Boyzone, even in The Beatles. How in the love of God was this happening? We got a police escort away from Blanchardstown and, heart pounding, I stared across the car at Louis. He was grinning like a cat in a lake of cream.

  It wasn’t just a ‘Holy God’ moment. This one was ‘Holy f**k!’ Despite all we had done to that point – the album, the video, the TV, the interviews – our fame had been theoretical. This was the first time we had seen it – felt it – at first hand. We were in shock.

  What it did show us was that our single was going to do well in Ireland. When ‘Swear It Again’ came out the next week, it went straight in at number one. It was such a proud moment. Ireland is a tiny country, sure, and we maybe only sold 10,000 copies (half of them at the Blanchardstown Centre…) but it meant a lot. It was our home; our land.

  The big test lay across the water. We knew how very much it mattered how well our first single did in Britain. It could make or break a band. In a way, all of our efforts up to that point had been leading up to this.

  What did we hope for? We didn’t dare say. We knew things had been going well, but who knew how well? We just hoped to get into the top ten. That would be a brilliant start.