My Side of Life/by WESTLIFE.CN

by Shane Filan

  ‘You’re from Colga, Calry, County Sligo.’

  ‘You’re from Lynn Dale, County Sligo.’

  ‘You’re from the Carlton Café in Castle Street, Sligo.’

  ‘Look at the state of us. What the hell are we doing here?’

  Yet this primitive reality check stood no chance of working when everyday life was so mind-boggling. Just when you thought things couldn’t get any madder, they did. Like when Louis asked us: would you like £500,000 to play a private show for the Sultan of Brunei?

  I’ve never been big into politics, haven’t got a political bone in my body, but the wealth we saw in Brunei was obscene. The Sultan sent a private jet to fly us out there, and a Rolls-Royce to pick us up from the airport. His palace made the Taj Mahal look like a Portakabin.

  As a car freak, the trip did my head in. The Sultan had about 3,000 cars, including just about every Ferrari and Porsche and Lamborghini ever made, in every colour you can think of. We were even allowed to test-drive a couple.

  We played a free (to them) 5,000-people show in the Sultan’s grounds on a stage he had built for his previous guest, a few months before – Michael Jackson. We never saw the Sultan, I don’t know if he even came to the show, but we met his two wives and their ten children. Even his five-year-old was dripping in more diamonds than I had ever seen in my life before.

  I am from the Carlton Café, in Castle Street… We returned to Sligo exhausted but elated. The Where Dreams Come True tour had lasted four months, been to twenty-two different countries, entertained 600,000 people and made £12m.

  OK, we had drunk our body weight in vodka and Red Bull and trashed our livers along the way, but it could hardly have gone better. Westlife were on top of the world.

  So naturally, as it came time to begin recording our third album, we did the most sensible thing that we could do.

  We started falling out with each other.

  7

  ‘MUM, THIS IS THE POPE…’

  What Louis Walsh had done right at the start of Westlife had been brilliant. Once we had settled on our final line-up, it had been a fantastic idea to pack us all off to live together to get to know each other inside out, and it had worked like a dream.

  That intensive bonding period had turned the five of us into brothers, especially when the madness exploded around us and we had to cope with the head-spinning insanity of fame. On tour we were together 24/7, a gang whether we were working, playing, chatting, eating, scheming or just falling-down drunk.

  As Louis had wanted, it was us against the world. We loved each other.

  Having said that, it is impossible to spend all of your time in each other’s pockets without rows and arguments breaking out. Tensions and bickering would creep in, and occasionally we would have niggling fallings-out on the road that would drag on for days.

  It would always be about something dumb, like one of us joking that somebody was putting on weight or not looking too good, but then we would get offended and give each other the silent treatment. It was stupid, really, but life in a band can make you stupid.

  Brian and I might fall out and not talk for days. We would meet each other in a hotel corridor or at the side of the stage and look away as if the other person wasn’t there. Or I would not be talking to Kian, except via Nicky or Brian.

  Eventually, Mark or somebody would say, ‘Look, will you two f**king eejits talk to each other! You’re arguing over nothing!’

  It was always petty, it was never a big deal and once it was over, it was over; we didn’t bear grudges. For the most part, we got on grand, but these tensions did come up now and then, especially as our fame and success made us all more confident in our opinions.

  It was time to record our third album, and figuring that if it’s not broke, you don’t fix it, Simon wanted to pack us off to London and Sweden as usual. We agreed to a few trips, but at the same time, we had been away from home a long time and we were all for spending some time in Ireland.

  The record label saw our point and put us into Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin, where U2 had made so many of their records. I stayed with Brian and Kerry in Dublin during the week and went back to Sligo at weekends. For a couple of months, it was almost like a normal life.

  It was great to hang out with Gillian and see my family again so regularly; and there was plenty for me to keep an eye on. The building work was well underway on the big house at Carraroe, and while there was still a long way to go, it was exciting to see it going up.

  It was just when everything was sunny in the garden and everything was going great that some pressures opened up in the band – over songwriting.

  After writing a couple of our own songs on Coast to Coast, we were keen to do more. Our lawyers had just negotiated us a massive contract extension with Sony BMG, worth about £10m, and people around us were in our ears telling us that we could earn even more if we wrote songs, and that we were missing out on a lot of potential royalties.

  Brian and I were getting pretty close at this point. I was staying at his place during that spring and summer of 2001, we had both got into golf, and Gillian and Kerry hung out and saw a lot of each other. It made sense for Brian and me to start writing a few songs with professional songwriters.

  We mentioned this to Mark, Kian and Nicky, and in no time at all, the three of them had formed into a separate team doing the same thing. I suppose they felt threatened and wanted to make the point that they could write as well as we could, but it divided the band into two camps.

  It wasn’t as if we were short of great material for the new record, which was going to be called World of Our Own. Steve Mac and Wayne Hector had given us the title track and ‘Queen of My Heart’, and the Swedes had written songs such as ‘Evergreen’.

  We knew we needed those guys, they had helped to make us to an extraordinary degree, and we were incredibly grateful for their help. It wasn’t like Brian and I thought we were Lennon and McCartney – but at the same time, we wanted our songs on there.

  The final decision, as ever, came down to Simon. I’m sure he knew all about our little split. We had all been giving Louis earache, and I’m sure he was talking to Simon: ‘Jesus, they’re going on about songwriting again!’

  Louis probably advised Simon to humour us and that’s what they did. When Simon chose the final album track listing, there were three McFadden/Filan songs, three from the Byrne, Egan and Feehily camp – and ‘I Wanna Grow Old with You’, written by myself, Brian and Kian.

  At the time, it kept everybody happy. Looking back, I am not sure at least four of our songs should have made the album. But I guess it is the kind of thing that labels have to do when they are dealing with pushy little boy bands who are developing pop-star egos.

  Brian had to record some of his vocals for World of Our Own separately because he had more important things to worry about than how many songwriting credits he got on a pop album. At the end of August 2001, Kerry gave birth to little Molly.

  Like most young blokes, Brian had been scared when he learned his girlfriend was pregnant, but he was proud and glowing to be a dad. We could see it in him. He did admit, however, that he was worried about going on tour a few months down the line and having to leave Kerry and Molly behind.

  I was also about to experience a change in my own personal life – and I was delighted with it.

  Three years into Westlife, I was still telling interviewers that I didn’t have a girlfriend. The joke was wearing thin. As the band got bigger it was getting harder and harder to keep Gillian a secret, and in any case I didn’t want to. I had had enough of sneaking around.

  The pantomime came to an end when Gillian and I spent a weekend at a nice hotel in Dublin. Somebody at the hotel must have tipped off the papers, because a photographer got a long-range shot of us leaving and getting into a taxi.

  We didn’t know a thing about it until the following weekend, when the picture appeared in the News of the World. It was a world exclusive, apparently:

  QUEE
N OF HIS HEART!

  The story reported that ‘Heart-throb Shane has dated Gillian Walsh for more than a year’ (well, try nearly four years…) and quoted ‘a source’ as saying, ‘The couple are in constant touch with each other wherever Shane is in the world. His phone bill is massive but he doesn’t care – he really loves Gillian.’

  I had to wonder who this ‘source’ was. My guess was some hack in the office making the quote up, as they always did.

  Still, now the truth was out, it was a huge relief. It made day-to-day life more honest. Gillian was also OK with it by now but hated that the photo of us they used was a bit shite, so the next time we went to a function all dressed-up, we let the press get some shots of us together.

  It felt good to stop sneaking around and as 2001 neared its end, life as a whole felt pretty grand. ‘Queen of My Heart’ was released as the lead single from World of Our Own in November and went straight to number one, and the album followed it there a week later.

  Ha! So where are you now, Bob the Builder?

  Then, just when I thought life couldn’t get any better, we got invited to meet the Pope, John Paul II.

  The invitation was to sing at a special festive performance that the Vatican held every Christmas. I was so excited – but nothing compared to how my mum was when I asked her and Dad to come with me. It was like she was going to meet Jesus.

  We flew over to Rome in a private jet, only to find that we had somehow managed to leave the band’s suits behind. We could have bought new ones there, but instead we panicked and sent the jet back to pick them up. No expense spared, huh?

  The performance was nearly a disaster. The Vatican had asked – well, told – us to sing ‘Little Drummer Boy’, but at the rehearsal the 100-piece orchestra were playing it three keys above our range. Mark might just be able to get there; I had no chance.

  Luckily, Kian saw Dolores O’Riordan from The Cranberries, who were also performing, hanging around at the rehearsal. When he asked her, she happily agreed to guest on ‘Little Drummer Boy’ with us, meaning we could sing the backing vocals. She was our angel of the Vatican, no question!

  After the show, we got to meet the Pope, who was very old and frail. I was nervous and awkward, but it was wonderful to see how happy it made my mum as she bent forward and kissed the ring on his hand. She looked like she had… well, gone to Heaven.

  Back in Ireland, Brian and Kerry had bought a lovely house in Wicklow, and Gillian and I went out to visit them and see baby Molly. They all seemed so happy, and I remember Gillian and I looking at each other and saying, ‘Wow – what if we had a life like this?’

  I was a groomsman two weeks later in January 2002 when Brian and Kerry got married with a huge reception at Slane Castle. They sold their wedding pictures to Hello! and it was a full-on celebrity bash with paparazzi outside. They just seemed a really happy couple.

  Mind you, I was a very happy young man shortly afterwards, when I bought myself a Ferrari. As ever, part of me thought, Should I do this? Are people in Sligo going to think I’m a f**king prick? But then I thought, Look, I can afford it and I want it. Why shouldn’t I? The people who slag me would probably do the same if they could!

  Brian, Nicky and I went to a Ferrari dealership in Surrey. Brian bought a canary yellow Ferrari that looked a bit like a spaceship and Nicky bought a red one. I loved the red one as well but was a bit afraid of looking like a cliché, so I test-drove a black Ferrari 550 Maranello. It was amazing.

  It cost £94,500. I phoned my accountant. ‘Can you transfer the funds into my account?’ I asked him. ‘Can I buy it?’

  ‘You’re f**king mad,’ he told me. ‘But you can do whatever you want.’ I did.

  Brian, Nicky and I walked out of that showroom as three young lads who had just spent a quarter of a million pounds on cars. My insurance came to £13,000 a year. I honestly think cars then were like a drug to me.

  Then again, it was better than actually spending my money on drugs, I suppose. People ask if I often got offered drugs in Westlife but it only ever happened three times – once in Sligo, when I got offered a line of coke in a toilet nightclub. I remember thinking, Jesus, of all the places… I wasn’t even tempted by it. In fact, I was terrified. My mum and Louis had both drilled into me the dangers of drugs and where they can lead you and leave you. In that respect, at least, our squeaky-clean reputation was justified.

  In any case, I wasn’t just wasting all of my hard-earned cash on premium vehicles. I decided it was time for Gillian and me to get onto a more secure footing.

  For months, she had been renting a flat in the middle of Sligo and when I was in town I would spend half of my time there and half at my parents’ house. We had freedom and it felt a bit like the best of both worlds, but seeing Brian and Kerry’s domestic bliss had also made us hanker for more.

  My mum was never interfering or judgmental, but one day even she asked why Gillian and I were dossing down in a poky one-bedroom pad when I could afford to buy a much nicer place. It was a very good question and when I gave it some thought, I wasn’t sure what the answer was.

  So Gillian and I bought a house in Carraroe, near to where my family mansion was still being built. It felt a big move, and it was… but at the same time, I was lucky enough to be able to buy it outright, for cash.

  Early in 2002, ‘World of Our Own’ came out as a single and went to number one. I was very proud of that because when I had sung it, I was absolutely bollocksed.

  We had recorded it during the Dublin album sessions. Steve Mac’s initial plan was for Brian or Mark to sing lead but he hadn’t been totally happy with the result. I had arrived in the studio still steaming from the night before and he had asked me to have a go.

  ‘Ah, shite, man,’ I had told him. ‘I can’t do it. I’m hungover and my voice is f**ked.’

  ‘No, give it a go, and make it nice and raspy,’ Steve had said. I did, and to my surprise, it came out great. In fact, of all the producers we worked with, it was Steve Mac who helped me to find parts of my voice I didn’t even know were there.

  The World of Our Own tour kicked off in Europe in April and would take us through the next few months. It was pretty cool – it had a loose space theme, and we all got to enter out of planet-like globes at the start of the set. A world of our own, see?

  The tour was in the round, and we ticked off another of the big London venues when we played five nights at Earls Court. We were still partying, but nothing like the insanity of the Where Dreams Come True tour. In Dublin, we did another thirteen gigs at the Point, and we rounded off with our first headline stadium show, in Killarney.

  The tour was on at the same time as the World Cup in Japan and it seemed like the whole country was watching the football. Ireland did well, drawing with Germany in the group stages before being knocked out on penalties by Spain, and it made our Irish gigs fantastic craic.

  As the tour came to an end, we put out ‘Bop Bop Baby’ as a single. It was a song that Brian and I had co-written, so really I should have been chuffed, but in all honesty I was in two minds about doing it.

  I was surprised when Simon had phoned me to say that he was releasing it as a single because I didn’t think it was all that good. Maybe I was right, because it only got to number five, our worst chart performance by far.

  Simon is very canny and I suspect he may have done it to teach us a lesson: so we would learn which side our bread was buttered on and go on singing the songs that Steve Mac and the Swedes gave us, and stop bothering our pretty little heads about songwriting.

  We had a laugh making the ‘Bop Bop Baby’ video, though. We were all got up in medieval garb in a dungeon on the film set where they made Harry Potter. Vinnie Jones was in the video playing the baddie and was great to hang out with. Naomi Campbell was supposed to be in it, but she cancelled the day before and Leah Wood stepped in.

  Simon still had his eye on the biggest prize of all – America. We had got nowhere at all on our first attempt, a couple of years ear
lier, but he still thought we might be able to crack it and sent us back over there for a month that summer.

  He thought we might be able to break big with ‘World of Our Own’, which he felt could work over there. We even made a new video for it, just for America. We stayed in Los Angeles, got some Californian sunshine, gazed at the Hollywood sign and worked like mad.

  Yet on that second American trip, some tensions that had been bubbling beneath the surface of the band came to a head – and led to our worst argument yet.

  In recent months, there had been a definite trend in our photo shoots. We were doing shoots for the record label, for newspapers, for magazines, and each time photographers had the same request: ‘Can Shane stand in the middle?’

  It didn’t seem like a big deal, but it was starting to rankle with the other lads. We had always wanted Westlife to be a band of equals and not like Boyzone, where Ronan Keating was the standout star, but they thought things were heading that way.

  Before we flew to the States, the other lads complained to each other and then raised it with me. This made me feel like they had been talking behind my back, so I argued with them: ‘What does it matter? So I’m in the middle – what’s the big deal?’

  Out in LA, we did a two-hour photo shoot for the US label and the photographer must have taken 1,000 photos. I was in the middle in every single one. Even I had to admit it was a bit weird.

  After the shoot, the band went to a diner, and we ended up having a huge fight. It started off the same as usual, with the lads saying it wasn’t fair and I was being raised above them; like Justin Timberlake had been in ’N Sync. I was pissed off, and I let them all have it with both barrels.

  ‘Look, what the f**k is your problem? I’m a lead singer. We are a band. We’re all pop stars; we’re being paid the same; we’re having a good laugh. Am I supposed to ask to be on the edge of the pictures? I just stand where I’m asked to stand. Get over yourselves!’