My Side of Life/by WESTLIFE.CN

by Shane Filan

  Really, it was brilliant management. Louis was pretty laid-back and never interfered unless we started behaving like maggots, but he knew exactly how to control us. Without him, we would have f**ked things up a thousand times.

  In any case, somebody was about to give Westlife a short, sharp reality check – a three-inch-tall clay workman in blue dungarees with an irritating catchphrase.

  Simon had chosen ‘What Makes a Man’ from Coast to Coast for our Christmas single for 2000 and I guess we all blithely assumed it would waft to number one exactly the same as its seven predecessors had done. It sounds bigheaded, but we had got used to winning the league every season.

  Louis normally called us halfway through the week when we had a single out to tell us our midweek chart position. It was always good news. Well, not this time.

  My mum and dad had let me do out a space at the top of our house as my own little apartment, and I was lying on my black leather couch in the afternoon watching TV (I even had more than two channels to choose from) when Louis came on the line.

  ‘Shane, it’s not good news,’ he began. ‘You’re number two.’

  ‘Number two?’

  ‘You’re miles behind Bob the Builder.’

  Yes: ‘What Makes a Man’ might be a gorgeous power ballad but it was no match for ‘Can We Fix It?’, the theme tune to the BBC kids’ cartoon series about a hard-hatted, pint-sized handyman. We had sold 270,000 singles, our most ever in a week; Bob had shifted half as many again. That little f**ker had fixed us.

  It sounds stupid now, but we took this setback seriously and felt shit for days about losing our 100-per-cent record. It seemed like everywhere we went, shop windows were full of little Bob toys, laughing at us. It nearly ruined our Christmas.

  Gillian and I fancied a break so I booked us a skiing holiday in Switzerland for over New Year. It was a total fiasco.

  When it came time to fly out, there was two feet of snow in Sligo, the roads were blocked and we had to get a train to Dublin airport. I had not been on public transport since Westlife got famous, and I sat in a corner with a hat pulled down low, desperate not to be recognized and cause a crowd scene.

  Gillian and I had imagined a romantic break in a log cabin, but when we got to Switzerland, we were booked into a Ritz-Carlton city-centre hotel a five-hour round trip from the nearest skiing – and there was no snow! What was the point? The next morning, we flew straight home.

  We got to Dublin airport to be greeted by a big new display: ‘Welcome to Ireland – the home of Westlife!’ Ireland was still snowed in and it took us six hours to drive home, but we had a great New Year’s Eve in Sligo.

  I never used that travel agent again.

  The New Year brought an exciting new challenge. Westlife were about to go out on our first full, proper tour.

  It was weird that we had got this far and sold millions of records without touring. Mainly it was because we hadn’t toured the first album, as Simon had been so keen on trying to break America. However, it did mean that an incredible desire had built up to see us perform live.

  In some ways, it was ridiculous. We were about to go on the road with our own show for the very first time and we were booking venues that bands normally take ten years to get to. When we first set eyes on our itinerary, we were all shitting ourselves.

  As fast as we announced dates, they sold out in minutes. Literally minutes. Then the promoter would add more. As we went into rehearsals at Dublin’s Factory Studios, we knew we had to play fifty-two nights in vast British and Irish arenas… including ten nights at Wembley Arena and thirteen at the Point Depot.

  Great. No pressure, then!

  The rehearsals were intensive to say the least. We knew we had to put on an amazing show visually as well as musically to reach the back of those huge arenas, so Simon and Louis drafted in a shit-hot choreographer called Priscilla Samuels.

  We liked Priscilla straight away. She was a really cool London woman; and my God she could dance! She reminded us of the Backstreet Boys’ choreographer, whom we’d met when we’d supported them back in the day, which obviously endeared her to us as well.

  I’m not sure her first impressions of us were quite so positive.

  Priscilla knew she would have her work cut out with us. We were a band known not for dancing but for sitting on stools. I had danced in plays and Brian had been to dance school, but Kian and Mark weren’t big dancers. Nicky had only stopped being a footballer a year ago and had never danced in his life.

  On her first morning, Priscilla put some music on in a big rehearsal room and said, ‘Just dance what you feel when you hear this – express yourselves!’ Some serious free-form madness went down. Nicky was doing some sort of weird rave dancing and running on the spot.

  Priscilla took a deep breath and set about whipping us into line. Within a couple of weeks she had us jumping about in sync like the Backstreet Boys. My feet were OK but I couldn’t help waving my arms about and she was always shouting at me. I got let off a few arm routines by claiming I needed my hands to hold my mic.

  We wanted our vocals to be perfect on tour – that was what Westlife were all about – so a gospel singer named Laurence sat at a grand piano and taught us harmonies. We also had to wear in-ear monitors, which had us yelling our heads off until we got used to them.

  Yes, we needed total focus as we prepared for a tour that would see us play to more than half a million people – so that was when Brian decided to tell us that he was going to be a dad.

  Actually, it wasn’t Brian who told us. It was Nicky. He had gone out with Brian, and Brian had said to him, ‘Oh, I need to buy a house.’ Nicky had asked him, ‘What do you need to buy a house for?’ And Brian had said, ‘Because I’m going to be a dad.’

  It’s weird now to think how we reacted to this news when Nicky told us. We acted like a bomb had gone off. We all felt as if it could be the end of everything. I raced into the toilet in the studio, looked in the mirror, puffed out my cheeks and went, ‘Whew!’ Why was this? I suppose we thought: would it change the way people saw the band? Would it make our fans see us differently? Would Simon give up on us?

  How could we still be young, available, supposedly sexy pop stars if one of us was a… dad?

  I remembered that Keith Duffy had had a baby halfway through Boyzone and it hadn’t done them any harm, but it still felt scary. When Brian came in and we all congratulated him, it was clear he was scared as well. Sure, he loved Kerry, but he was only twenty years old.

  Looking back, it’s odd how badly we took the news – it wasn’t like Brian had gone and got a fan pregnant, or something – but as ever, Louis talked us down. ‘It’s not going to change anything,’ he told us. ‘Anyway, what can we do?

  ‘It is what it is.’

  After the initial shock, we didn’t dwell on it for too long. That was how it was in Westlife back then – you couldn’t chew on anything for long because some other mad adventure would be along to distract you. And the next one was a good one.

  The BBC asked us to record a single for Comic Relief. We were going to do a cover of Billy Joel’s ‘Uptown Girl’, which was a buzz for me because I had loved it ever since I used to sing it to my mum and dad when I was five years old, and I still knew it off by heart.

  But that wasn’t the mad bit. The mad bit was that we were going to make a video for the song… with Claudia Schiffer. Claudia Schiffer! The world’s most famous supermodel, and I was going to be serenading her in a diner!

  Naturally we were shitting ourselves, but come the day it was Mariah Carey all over again. Claudia was as drop-dead gorgeous as we’d expected but she was also super-friendly, nice and, well, normal.

  That was the weird thing with us. We’d meet celebrities and feel overwhelmed, while never realizing that that was what we were ourselves now too. Sure, we knew that we had sold a lot of records and we were in a famous band, but we never felt like we were special, or we were stars.

  I guess this was partly down to o
ur backgrounds, and partly down to Louis doing a damn good job of keeping us humble and nervous. But when we met real A-list celebrities, we felt like… competition winners. For better or worse, that feeling never really went away.

  Then again, if you do want to feel famous or special, a pretty good way is to have half a million people screaming their adoration at you. And our first tour had sold half a million tickets.

  The Where Dreams Come True tour kicked off in Newcastle on 9 February 2001. Like every date on the tour, it was in a stupidly big enormodome. The Telewest Arena was a sea of 13,000 screaming up-for-it party animals, a lot of whom had decided to come in deely-boppers (remember them? Those crazy headbands with two pronged, bouncing embellishments.).

  We hadn’t just sold the place out once: we were doing six nights there.

  The show began with us all swinging down onto the stage on harnesses, and as we waited, hidden high up in the gods, and heard 13,000 impatient Geordies chanting the band’s name – ‘WEST-LIFE! WEST-LIFE!’ – I suddenly felt like I couldn’t remember even one minute of the show. Clearly, the last month’s intense rehearsals had been a complete f**king waste of time.

  ‘WEST-LIFE! WEST-LIFE!’

  It was our first live show, it was a massive production, and as I balanced on my harness, the set list, harmonies, dance moves and costume changes that we had obsessively honed melted to mulch in my head. I didn’t even know what my name was. I looked over at Kian and saw the same terror all over his face.

  ‘WEST-LIFE! WEST-LIFE!’

  The lights went down and the shrill chants became a mass roar of anticipation. Shit! This was it! Five trembling souls zip-wired down into the cauldron; the arena; the bear pit. It was the closest I had ever been in my life to a panic attack.

  We started with ‘Dreams Come True’ – well, obviously – and to this day I can’t remember a thing about it. I was on autopilot, lost in the heat, the deafening screams, the fear, the out-of-body feeling. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

  We had a pretty high-energy – for us – start to the show, and had put on way too much hairspray. In seconds, it was rolling into our eyes so we couldn’t see. A few songs in, we sprinted offstage for our first costume change and looked at each other. We were all sweating like we could be wrung out.

  ‘That’s the hard bit done,’ one of us said (it might even have been me). ‘Now let’s go and finish the show!’

  From that point on, we loved it. We felt as if we were surfing neat adrenaline. The wild crowd were singing every word with us, not just of massive hits like ‘Swear It Again’ and ‘Flying Without Wings’ but of every single song; in between tracks, all we could hear were thousands of voices yelling, ‘We love you!’

  What kind of eejit would not enjoy that? That gig in Newcastle was the night I discovered that I loved playing live best of everything in Westlife; best of everything I had ever done. It was, and it still is, the best feeling in the world.

  There is no way, after experiencing euphoria like that, that a band could meekly file backstage, have a glass of milk and a chat, and toddle quietly off to bed. So we didn’t.

  The tour should have been sponsored by Red Bull because we were drinking lakes of the stuff. Our favourite tipple at the time was vodka and Red Bull, and every night, after we came offstage, we got completely and totally trashed on it.

  Something had to give. We had been in a pressure cooker for two years, working non-stop doing interviews and promo with hardly a day off, criss-crossing the globe, playing up to this image we had of squeaky-clean, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-their-mouths robots. We had gone from anonymity to international fame beyond our wildest imaginings.

  Jesus, we were still only twenty years old!

  Onstage, we were slick, professional and family-friendly; off, it was total party time. As I said, we were never a drug band, and girls were out of bounds for me, but we drank… and drank… and drank. Sailors on shore leave would have given Westlife a wide berth on that tour.

  Work hard and play hard? You could say that again!

  We were limited in where we could go. Pubs were out of the question: we’d have got torn limb from limb. Once or twice we hired out VIP rooms in local clubs. Mostly, we did the easiest thing: holed up in our hotel bar, where our two very harassed, overworked security guys could keep an eye on us.

  Vodka and Red Bull is an incredible drink. The vodka sends you bananas while the Red Bull convinces you that you are fine and keeps your energy levels sky-high. Some nights I’d get through half a bottle of vodka on my own, easy.

  Nicky was more of a beer man but Brian and Mark would cane the vodka as well, and Kian and I were like a tag team. It became an unspoken contest between the two of us: anything you can drink, I can drink more. See, we are typical Irish lads in more ways than one.

  We were probably still drunk when we had a surprise high-level encounter on that tour in Glasgow. We were doing five nights at the SECC, and next door the British Labour Party were having their annual conference.

  We got a message that the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was keen to meet us. Wow! Really? We were taken to his private room, where he got his guitar out, talked about bands he loved and got our autographs for his kids and their friends. Mr Blair seemed a very nice guy who was really into music.

  What a crazy experience! It was just one more thing to laugh about after the show that night as we got steaming drunk in the hotel bar yet again.

  We had no shortage of things to drink to. Two weeks into the tour, the ‘Uptown Girl’ Comic Relief single came out and went straight to number one.

  Normal service had been resumed. We felt we were back where we belonged.

  On the road, we would lie in our beds in an alcoholic haze every day until early afternoon, then get taken to the venue to sound-check and the whole shebang would kick off again. Gillian flew out to join the tour at weekends but I didn’t even slow down the partying then; she just joined in with us.

  Kian and I went out and got bananas twenty-four nights in a row. The shows were still grand because our adrenaline and youthful energy was carrying us through them, but it couldn’t go on forever – and our new drunken lifestyle caught up with me in Sheffield.

  We were doing three nights at the Sheffield Arena, and after the second one we stayed up literally all night necking vodka. Normally we called it a day around 3 a.m., but on this night we had gone clean through. Back at the venue the next afternoon, I wasn’t just half-drunk: I was still pissed.

  We were doing interviews about the release of ‘Uptown Girl’ for Comic Relief and Sky News were there, but as our tour manager rounded us up, I made an informed, and accurate, decision: ‘No, I can’t do it!’ Instead, I spent my time running up and down the corridors in my boxer shorts, giggling, before being found curled up asleep in the dressing room in a pair of deely-boppers.

  It was hilarious… and then the hangover hit. The crippling, evil, all-crushing hangover; the worst I had ever had by a million miles, as twenty-four days of drinking caught up with me. I was sick as a dog and puking non-stop: sunk into a desperate, depressed gloom, I was talking of pulling the show.

  We were never really going to do that, but as I was virtually carried to the stage to be strapped into my harness, I puked into one of the buckets that Karen from our production team had strategically placed by the side of the stage. Nice!

  If I can get through this, I told myself, I will never drink again. The lights went up, the harnesses sailed down…

  ‘Hello, Sheffield!’

  I got through it. The old cliché is true: the show must go on. The crowd’s energy lifted me and I told myself that out there were 10,000 fans who adored Westlife and who had never seen us live before; I couldn’t let them down. As my alcohol poisoning lifted, I even started to enjoy the show.

  Even so, enough was enough. That night, as Kian called at my room to start the partying, I told him I had different plans.

  ‘Nah, you’re all right. I’m gonna have a qui
et night in, get some sleep, and try to hit the gym in the morning.’

  Kian stared at me in incomprehension and slight disgust and then headed off down to the bar.

  Of course, I was back on the sauce the next night – and stayed there, as we romped through the nuclear-hysteria levels of shows in London, Belfast and Dublin. Our first night at Wembley felt pretty special… but then so did the other nine.

  Everybody likes to be appreciated in their own country and our thirteen nights at the Point Depot, with all of our friends and families caught up in the screaming throng, were the highlights of the whole amazing tour. Most nights after the Dublin shows we headed down to Lillie’s Bordello, which had taken over from the Pod as the city’s hip nightspot where local celebs like Bono hung out.

  Now that Brian was with Kerry, Kian was the last member standing who was flying the flag for Westlife with the girls. Kian was very selective, but he sure had a good selection to pick from and he enjoyed himself.

  There again, Ronan’s warning proved astute when a girl did a kiss-and-tell on Kian all over a Sunday tabloid front page. She was quite complimentary and said what a stud he was. Kian wasn’t cheating on anyone so he hadn’t done anything wrong, but he was still mortified: he hated the thought of his mum reading it.

  I felt sorry for Kian – and more relieved than ever that my policy was to look, but not touch. Gillian was my life and you don’t throw your life away.

  After six weeks of UK dates, we got a one-day break before the tour swung through Europe, including five shows in Germany, then a few dates in the Middle East and South Africa, where we were doing really well. The last fortnight, in Southeast Asia, was reliably berserk.

  We developed a routine to try to help us hold on to at least a little bit of our sanity. As we sat in a tour bus in Kuala Lumpur as screaming girls launched themselves at the vehicle like weapons, or we were pursued through the crazy traffic of Phnom Penh, Mark, Kian and I would adopt comedically thick, exaggerated west-of-Ireland accents to remind each other who we were.