by Shane Filan
At this point, thinking back, I was living the life of Riley. I had money coming in by now, and as well as loving my cars, I got well used to going out with our stylist and splashing three or four grand on designer clothes.
Yet I was also determined to plan for the future. I knew my family couldn’t go on living above the Carlton forever, and I set about building a home that my parents, brothers and sisters, and Gillian’s family could call home for years to come.
My dad had bought a farm at a place called Carraroe on the outskirts of Sligo a few years earlier and gave me a piece of land as a present. Gillian and I hired a local architect, and we talked him through exactly what we wanted in our dream home for both of our families.
We had a very specific vision for it. I saw it as almost like a stately home; I knew I wanted it to be made with Irish-cut stone and to have a tower, plus a top floor with a bar and a cinema and a games room. Gillian designed the décor, which was all classy French château.
Gillian and I got totally into the house and it became our pet project. We knew the Carraroe house would take a long time to build. Mind you, we never imagined it would take anywhere near as long as it did…
I was still keeping up the silly pretence in interviews that I didn’t have a girlfriend, and people certainly bought it. That Valentine’s Day I received not hundreds but thousands of cards, as did the rest of the band. I suppose it was lucky that Gillian was not the jealous type.
Westlife ramped up again when we headed off to Mexico to film a vid for ‘Fool Again’, which was to be the fourth single from our debut album. Even by our standards, this was to prove an incredible trip.
We were getting pretty big in South America and we had to have armed security everywhere we went. We filmed the video on top of a skyscraper with a helicopter launch pad. Brian was so scared of heights that he freaked out if any of us went near the edge to wave to the crowds below.
The only bummer from the trip was getting robbed. Our hotel advised us to put our valuable stuff in just one safe, and when we got back it had all gone. I was really pissed off as my mum had bought me a Gucci watch that got nicked. Kian lost a ring that he really liked and our cameraman had lots of gear taken. It was shite.
Although our first album had been massive, we didn’t tour it in Britain because Simon and Sony BMG were keen on trying to break us around the world. In the May of 2000, we did a short East Meets Westlife series of gigs back in Asia. If possible, the reaction was even more hysterical than on our first visit.
I’d have loved Gillian to come with me but she was doing exams in Sligo at that time. One funny thing was that if I had done the course at her college I had signed up for before Westlife got massive, I would have been in one of her classes.
Gillian told me that my name was still on one or two lists of students, and one day a new tutor took a register at the start of a class and asked, ‘Is Shane Filan here?’ One lad in the class shot back, ‘Nah, that fella is flying without wings.’
In any case, there would have been no point in Gillian coming out to Asia with me. We spent all our time holed up in hotels, doing interviews or being screamed at by fans at gigs or signings. In Indonesia and the Philippines, fans rushed the stage and ripped the clothes from our backs.
A return trip to South America shortly afterwards was just as mental, including getting trapped in our tour bus by crowds on our way to a TV station in Buenos Aires. The TV crew had to improvise by interviewing us on top of the besieged bus as the fans chanted our name.
You never, ever forget experiences like that – and they seemed to be happening every day.
Yet there was one country in particular that Simon and Louis had their eyes on us breaking. It was the Holy Grail of show business: America.
The first time you see New York is amazing. As our yellow cabs weaved through the skyscrapers and the steam puffed up from the grilles on the street, it made me think of every US drama and cop show I had seen as a kid. It was as if we had leapt onto the other side of the screen.
We thought we had a good chance to break the States. Simon and Louis had told us all about our label boss there, Clive Davis, a music-industry legend who had signed Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen and Whitney Houston. If I am honest, I think at this point, we thought everything was possible.
We were ready to work to make it happen and that was just as well because America was a slog. It was nothing like home, where we put out a single, went on TV a few times and it all went mental. To break America, you had to work – hard.
For a few weeks in that summer of 2000, the five of us lived on planes and highways. We would do early-morning calls from our hotel to breakfast radio shows, fly off to do a lunchtime gig or PA in a shopping mall, and then play early-evening gigs, performing support slots to half-empty arenas, before moving on to a new town. The next day, it would start all over again.
We didn’t just see New York and Los Angeles, we pinballed around the whole country, visiting Sligo-sized towns in the Midwest or the South. America blurred into one crazy, giddy haze. Most days, if you had asked us to name the city we were in, we couldn’t have told you.
It was fun, sometimes, and it was exciting – shit, we are in America! – but mostly it felt like we were banging our heads against a brick wall. It seemed that the era of the boy band had passed in the States, and it was all about hip-hop and R&B. Still, what the hell? It was a fantastic adventure.
We returned home with America firmly unbroken but Asia still loved us and we headed back out there for yet another short promo tour. Talk about contrast! We left a land that was indifferent to us and arrived in a place where our every move led to hysteria.
Once again, Indonesia and the Philippines were unhinged. We would show up for what we thought was a low-key PA singing a few songs to find 10,000 people waiting for us. You may think: How can you ever get used to madness like that? It’s a good question. But, in a strange way, we did.
We played one huge show in Indonesia and when it finished the crowd just all milled around outside the arena waiting for us. The police went to try to clear them away and the venue’s security men promptly attacked the cops. There was this huge ruck – police against security.
Everything seemed bizarre, exaggerated, larger than life, and the surprises just kept coming. While we were in Indonesia, Louis called Kian with some extraordinary news: we were to do a duet with Mariah Carey.
Mariah is still a huge star but back then she was one of the biggest superstars in the world; it would be like being told now that you were going to sing with Rihanna or Katy Perry. We were all excited, and Mark was completely blown away: Mariah is his all-time idol.
We were to sing a cover of Phil Collins’s ‘Against All Odds’ and we had to record the song and make the video in just two days in Capri, Italy. We flew straight there from Asia – or, rather, four of us did; poor Kian had managed to lose his passport.
Capri was beautiful and we met Mariah for dinner the night we flew in. We were all dead nervous and she was a regal presence as she wafted into the restaurant, all flowing chiffon gown and air kisses. What do you say to someone like that? But as we ate, she turned out to be surprisingly normal.
We were used to doing recording sessions during the day and knocking off at six, like a normal job, but Mariah is more nocturnal. Her people – and there were lots of them – told us to meet her in a clifftop studio the following evening at about 10 o’clock.
We were in the studio until four in the morning. Mariah cradled a glass of wine and while she was pretty un-diva-like again as she chatted to us, we were still in awe. When she put the headphones on, her voice was phenomenal; it was hard not to laugh with delight as we listened.
The funny thing that happened with Mariah was that the following day, after we had shot the video, a photographer took some snaps of us all to promote the single. Mariah sat at a desk and the photographer told us to gather around her, as if we were reading lyrics off the desk.
Mariah
is a very sexy woman, she has got some outstanding natural assets, and she was wearing a very low-cut top that day. It was hard not to stare down her cleavage as we leaned over her, but we all tried to control our lustful urges – except for Brian.
A couple of days later, Sony BMG phoned Louis and told him that the photos were great except that Brian was ogling Mariah’s tits in every shot! There wasn’t one that they could use; in the end, they had to repaint his eyes digitally onto the final image. Brian thought this was hilarious. To be fair, he was right.
We knew ‘Against All Odds’ would be the first single from our second album, but now the time had come to record the rest of the record. We decided that we would like it to have one big difference from our debut.
Westlife had been a massive album for us and it had helped to make our name. We were totally proud of it and we had thrown ourselves into performing its songs – but at the same time, we hadn’t written any of them.
We had exploded into the pop world like a volcano, but not everybody liked us. Not writing any of our own material just gave ammunition to those critics – and there were already plenty of them – who proclaimed Westlife to be mere pop puppets: all-singing, all-dancing pretty-boys without a shred of originality.
If I’m honest, I never really cared what people like that said. They were never going to like a boy band, and my instinctive response was: ‘Just have a look who’s top of the charts, mate!’ Some of the lads were more bothered, and Brian said he’d like us to have a go at writing a song or two.
This was intimidating, given that whatever we did would be judged against people like Steve Mac and Wayne Hector and Max Martin’s team, who were the very best in the business.
How could we hope to equal that? Talk about being the underdogs. Still, Brian, Kian and I put our heads together and wrote a number called ‘Fragile Heart’. It didn’t come easy, and if I ever listen to it now – which I don’t often do – it is OK, but not great. Probably we should have asked for outside help with it, rather than just doing it between us.
Even so, Simon said it was ‘quite a nice song’ and let us put it on the album – we knew he wouldn’t do that if it were a load of shite. It was beginning to seem like everything we touched turned to gold and we started getting a bit cocky.
It’s impossible to have the kind of sudden success that we had had without it going to your head a little bit, and making the second album, we definitely began to believe a bit of our own publicity.
The first sessions for the album, in Steve Mac’s studio, had gone well. Steve and Wayne had been playing us great new songs like ‘What Makes a Man’ and it was clear the record was going to be as strong as our first one, if not better. We were not the same people making it, though.
Whereas Steve and Wayne had dealt with timid little culchies before, now we were getting messy. We thought nothing of going out and getting bananas at night and turning up at the studio hungover. Or we would slouch in one by one, hours late.
I guess we were figuring, Why the f**k shouldn’t we? We’re Westlife!
It wasn’t exactly Ozzy Osbourne biting the heads off bats or throwing TVs out of hotel windows, but we would get chips from the chippy and leave the papers and rubbish strewn all around Steve’s studio. After a few days he had had enough and put a phone call in to Louis and Simon.
‘The little shits are coming in here thinking they’re Mariah Carey!’ he told them. ‘They’re leaving my studio like a right f**king tip!’ Louis phoned and had a word with us, and we apologized to Steve, saying we hadn’t meant any harm.
The penny didn’t drop, though, because a couple of weeks later we were back in Sweden, recording songs like ‘I Lay My Love on You’ and ‘When You’re Looking Like That’, and we were behaving exactly the same. We’d go in late for sessions saying that we were tired (i.e. still drunk); a couple of times, we didn’t turn up at all.
The Swedish producers got just as pissed off and they also put a complaining phone call in to London. The first thing we knew about it was when Louis showed up in Stockholm. He wasn’t mincing his words.
‘I’m f**king done with you lot,’ he told us. ‘You’re a f**king nightmare. Simon is getting calls at the label and he thinks you are turning into arrogant little shits. He’s really annoyed and isn’t sure you’re worth the hassle. To be honest, neither am I. I’m washing my hands of ye.’
Louis stormed out of the studio. We looked at each other, ashen-faced. Did he mean it? A couple of us followed him outside, where he was waiting for his car.
He was still livid. ‘I f**king mean it!’ he said. ‘You’re doing everything I told you not to. I don’t even know why I bothered coming out here – you’re not worth it. I’m flying back to Dublin.’
His car pulled up. He got in and left without a backwards glance.
Shit. This was major.
It scared the hell out of us, and later Kian phoned him at his hotel and begged him to give us a second chance. We promised that we would clean up our act and toe the line. Louis relented.
He knew exactly what he was doing, of course, and his shock tactics worked. Westlife had just become one of the biggest pop bands in Europe, but at the same time we were still gullible young lads who could not believe our luck and thought it could all vanish as quickly as it had appeared.
We knuckled down and finished the album, which we called Coast to Coast after the first line from ‘My Love’. We had had our ups and downs making the record, but when it was done we thought it was fantastic. That September, the Mariah Carey duet came out as a single. It became our sixth consecutive number one.
The album was to follow six weeks later, and we had some serious doubts about Sony BMG’s release strategy. They had scheduled it up against the Spice Girls.
Geri had just left the Spices but they were still massive and their comeback album, Forever, was going to be enormous. After losing out to Steps first time around, we could all see it happening again, even when people at our label were telling us, ‘No – we think you can beat them!’
I have to give the label this: they put their money where their mouth was. As a publicity stunt, they hired us a jet, and for two days prior to the album’s release, they flew us from city to city to do record signings.
That forty-eight hours was totally insane. Having not toured Britain yet, it was the first time we had come properly face to face with the people who were buying our records, and it was all totally overwhelming. Everywhere we went it was in cars with blacked-out windows, with police escorts and total mayhem.
We started out in Glasgow where 2,000 people had been queuing up since dawn. Birmingham was the same, as was Manchester. Whenever we got out of a car, there would be fans in our faces, screaming, crying, roaring, even more overcome than we were.
What did we feel at the heart of it? The usual: amazement, exhilaration, fear, but most of all this… ‘Jesus, this is great craic!’ Yet at the same time we were looking at each other, grinning, blinking hard, and asking: ‘What’s so special about us? What do they see in us? Why is this happening?’
We signed everything we could, but there was no way that we could meet all the people who had come. We couldn’t have done it if we’d had ten doppelgängers each. In between signings, we’d try to catch a couple of hours’ kip – then it was back on the jet and off to the next official riot.
The jamboree ended up with a launch party at London’s preposterously posh St Martin’s Lane hotel. It had been two days of sheer madness… but it had been worth it. In that week’s album chart, the Spice Girls were a speck in our rear-view mirror. Coast to Coast had sold nearly a quarter of a million copies. We had our first number-one album.
It felt like we literally couldn’t be any bigger.
How little we knew. We were about to enter our world-domination period.
6
NO SLEEP TILL DUBLIN
Coast to Coast was flying out of the shops at an insane rate and suddenly we were realizing that Westlife were
n’t just pop stars: we were becoming a phenomenon. It seemed like every day brought yet another reason to pinch ourselves. Is this for real? Are you sure? When you’re living in a hall of mirrors, the bizarre becomes normality. ‘My Love’ went to number one, and we got loads of attention because we were the first artists in chart history to get to number one with our first seven singles. Not even The Beatles had done that. We couldn’t believe it.
Another major thing had changed. With two multi-platinum albums behind us, suddenly we were earning serious money. The only problem was finding time to spend it; rather than wallowing in the success of Coast to Coast, we went straight out on another Smash Hits roadshow mini-tour with Atomic Kitten and A1.
When we got a few days off in Sligo, I indulged my one fetish again: cars. Nicky had turned up to the video shoot for ‘My Love’ in a brand-new navy BMW with cream leather and I loved it. I wanted to get one exactly the same, but in black.
Kian wanted to do exactly the same too, but I thought we would look a pair of nobs driving the exact same car around Sligo, so maybe I would get the 5 series. I went to see the town’s main BMW dealer, a local character named Martin Riley.
Martin had a smile as wide as one of his windscreens when he saw me walking across the forecourt. I think he knew he had a good day coming up. I asked him if he had a 5-series BMW in black.
‘No, I don’t, but I’ve got a lovely car here,’ he said, directing me towards a gorgeous blue-velvet BMW with a champagne leather interior. ‘Let’s take it for a test drive!’
It wasn’t black, but the second I sat in the car, I knew I was going to buy it. I paid for it feeling like a kid buying a sweet shop. It was £56,000. I didn’t even bother to haggle.
Looking back, we could have become unbearable right about now, but Louis was very good at keeping us grounded. He would tell us, ‘You’re very lucky boys, but it could all be over in the morning’; if any of us had a hissy fit, he’d be saying, ‘Look, you can easily be replaced.’
