My Side of Life/by WESTLIFE.CN

by Shane Filan

  Frankly, who cared? Maybe it would have bugged us once, but now we were just delighted that Westlife were back, reborn and on form again – because we knew it could so easily have gone the other way.

  The end of that year brought another major change for Gillian and me. Now Westlife were back on the rise we knew I would have to be spending a lot more time in London, and I didn’t want to miss out on seeing Nicole grow up. We decided to buy a place in the UK so she and Gillian could always be near me.

  Steve Mac recommended looking around Surrey, where he lived, and Gillian and I saw a lovely Georgian-style house in Cobham, near the Chelsea FC training ground. It was on the market for a bit more than we ideally wanted to spend but we loved it, so we took the plunge and bought it.

  In the meantime, Finbarr and I were pressing on with Shafin business back at home. We were ready to begin construction on the Dormahair site, and it was brilliant to see McInerney’s diggers and builders go in as our architect’s plans for the estate leapt off the drawing board and began to become a reality.

  More pressingly, now that we had bought the site next to my house in Carraroe, we had to work out what to do with it. We were quite keen to keep the development low-rise – after all, the reason I had bought it in the first place was to try to stop some monstrosity towering over my home like a spaceship!

  Carraroe only had one shop, one church and one school, so we got together with our architect and worked out plans for a development to benefit the village. It would have a few houses but also a supermarket, crèche, gym, doctors’ and dentists’ surgeries, restaurant, takeaway, laundry and coffee shop – all things the village currently lacked.

  The town planner we were initially working with wanted a higher-rise development and asked us to feature a tower near the entrance to the site. He seemed to have some sort of bizarre vision that this structure and the 15-storey hotel could become Sligo’s own Twin Towers.

  This was the last thing that Finbarr and I had envisaged, but we took the planner’s comments on board and started sending plans back and forth to his office.

  I had only bought the land to protect my family’s privacy and this was all starting to get a bit complex and wearisome, but I felt confident. Developments were shooting up everywhere and an estate down the road had sold forty houses in a single day.

  We knew that we had a great site. What was there to worry about?

  We also got approached about another site at Orchard Lane off the Strandhill Road, one of the main streets that ran through Sligo. We kind of felt we had enough on our plate but when Finbarr and I mentioned it to Ulster Bank, they again advised us it was potentially a lucrative project and introduced us to a developer from Galway.

  Finbarr and I liked this guy straight away, we went to see a few of his developments and they looked fantastic, and it was clear he knew exactly what he was doing. OK, we were in: we took out another Ulster Bank loan and bought the site.

  These loans were all to Shafin Developments, but I stood as the personal guarantor to all of them. Why would I not? I was the millionaire pop star, not Finbarr – and in any case, we would make our money back on these investments, and more. Wouldn’t we?

  Had I sought out advice from Louis or the band’s financial advisers when I got into Shafin, they would probably have told me not to guarantee the loans personally. But I never asked them. I just went ahead and did it. With hindsight, this was not my wisest move.

  I did mention what I was doing to the other lads in the band and they just went, ‘Oh yeah, cool.’ No one questioned it. At the time, it seemed like everybody in Ireland was doing it.

  In my downtime from the band and the property developments, I was just loving being a dad. Gillian did the lion’s share of looking after Nicole, as many mums do, but some days I would get up at the crack of dawn to watch TV with her: The Wiggles, Noddy and Balamory.

  I was the textbook doting dad who thought everything that Nicole did was adorable. When I was rooting in the fridge one day and she said her first word, ‘ham’, it seemed the most amazing thing ever. Oh, and she said ‘Dadda’ before she said ‘Momma’! Gillian doesn’t agree, but she is wrong…

  We were having such a perfect family time together that when it came time for the band to head off on the Face to Face tour in spring 2006, I couldn’t bear to leave Gillian and Nicole behind. Instead, we hired two buses instead of the usual one and they came with me.

  The Face to Face tour was a big success. We were confident enough to open our set with ‘Flying Without Wings’, happy in the knowledge that we had another killer track to finish off with in ‘You Raise Me Up’. It was also just a really settled, happy time for the whole band.

  Nicky brought Georgina, whom he’d married in 2003, on the road with him a lot and Kian was with Jodi Albert; they’d been dating for a couple of years. Mark had a lovely boyfriend, Kevin McDaid, who was a photographer and also came along and took lots of great shots of Nicole.

  If we were travelling overnight, Nicole would sleep in a bunk bed on the bus, but mostly we would be in hotels and Gillian would put Nicole to bed while I was onstage. It was such a buzz to do a gig knowing my wife and daughter were waiting for me, and then heading back to them afterwards.

  Westlife rarely felt like a treadmill but I suppose it was true that each year followed the same routine. Every autumn without fail we would release a new album, then start promoting it nonstop: Britain and Ireland, Europe, Asia. November would bring the first single, then the album.

  After a break for Christmas, we would start rehearsing for the tour, which would take us through from early spring into high summer. In June or July, we would go in to see Simon to talk about the next album, and the cycle would begin again.

  That year, we had a month off from the Face to Face tour before going back on the road to play a load of huge outdoor British dates and then Asia. It was a gorgeous sunny day in Sligo in summer 2006 and I was in the garden with Nicole when Louis called me.

  ‘Simon’s back from America and he knows what he wants to do,’ he told me. ‘It’s a covers album of love songs.’

  Oh, really? I must admit, my first reaction to this news was extremely lukewarm. I felt as if Westlife had just fought our way out of a slump with a strong album of mostly original songs – it felt like taking a step back to be doing covers again.

  Could we not keep looking for great new material? After all, Take That had just reformed – without Robbie – after ten years, and we knew that they were recording an album of all-new original material. Why couldn’t we do the same thing?

  We argued our corner and didn’t agree to Simon’s plan straight away. Over the next few days, there were a lot of serious conversations within the band, and with Louis. As usual, Mark was the most opposed to doing covers and the keenest to do our own thing.

  Kian, Nicky and I were a bit more into the idea. It wouldn’t have been our first choice, any of us. On the other hand, we wanted to keep our new success going, and Simon did have a fantastic track record of getting things like this right (well, apart from the Rat Pack album).

  Really, it was just Simon taking a cold, hard look at what had worked and wanting more of the same. We had just had an enormous hit with ‘You Raise Me Up’ so now he was looking for an album of the same sort of thing.

  By now, as well as attracting screaming girls, Westlife had a lot of fans in their thirties, forties and even fifties, and this album was to be aimed fairly and squarely at these women. Simon knew they would go for covers of big romantic hits they had loved when they were younger.

  It was very Cowell and typically clever. He even asked us for a list of our favourite love songs for possible inclusion on the record, to make us feel involved rather than as if we had had the idea foisted upon us (which we had). I don’t think too many of our choices made it on the final album.

  We wavered back and forth but Simon still had this gift of making his ideas always seem like the right ones and in the end he got his way. When t
he Face to Face tour finally finished with the usual scenes of hysteria in Taiwan and Indonesia, we went into Steve Mac’s studio to record The Love Album.

  Steve gave the album his best efforts, as always, but I think he was secretly disappointed that we were plodding down the covers route again. It was a quick-fix album and it was done and dusted in three weeks, with songs by artists as mixed as the Righteous Brothers, The Judds and Leo Sayer.

  The lead-off single was ‘The Rose’ by Bette Midler, which was probably my least favourite Westlife single of them all – in fact, I don’t think any of us really liked it. It was a blatant, cynical attempt to come up with ‘You Raise Me Up II’ – and it worked, in that it leapt straight to number one.

  It was the credibility versus commercialism battle again: and once again commercialism had won. The Love Album was a great idea in terms of selling records, but it did nothing for our image, once more playing into the hands of the many critics who saw Westlife as purveyors of lame, dreary karaoke.

  We were used to being slagged off by now, of course, and normally we didn’t give a shit about it. There are always people who love to criticize. We knew we would never be a cool critics’ band, but we did have fourteen number-one singles, multi-platinum albums and sell-out arena tours. F**k the haters – they could write what they liked!

  The Love Album was up against some serious competition when it was released in November 2006. It wasn’t just out in the same week as an Oasis Greatest Hits record called Stop the Clocks, but also a Beatles compilation, Love, and a U2 ‘best of’ record named U218. No pressure, then!

  Oasis were a proper rock ’n’ roll band that journalists loved, of course, and in the week leading up to the release, the Sun newspaper in Britain had a campaign to get Oasis to number one ahead of us. They told their readers to buy multiple copies of the Oasis album to keep Westlife off the top.

  Noel Gallagher was giving out absolute stink about us in the Sun, saying that our album was a load of shite and caning us day after day. The Sun didn’t just run the front-page headline ‘STOP THE COCKS’ (the ‘cocks’ being us, Westlife): they even printed and sold T-shirts with the slogan.

  It was nasty stuff but Simon and Louis loved it and just told us it was the kind of advertising that money couldn’t buy. By now the two of them were judges on The X Factor, of course – bona fide high-profile stars – so they both put their two penn’orth in as well and kept the publicity fires burning.

  The Sun’s campaign was in vain. When the eagerly awaited album chart appeared, Westlife were number one, ahead of Oasis. The Beatles were at number three and U2 were fourth. I loved the top of that chart so much that I cut it out of the paper and carried it around in my wallet for ages.

  The Love Album was a massive record for us. It ended up selling well over a million copies and even outsold Face to Face, establishing beyond doubt that we were one of the biggest bands in pop.

  The downside was that it once again had people thinking of Westlife as a band that did covers.

  We had some fun promoting it. Singing a cover of ‘Easy’ live on TV with Lionel Richie a couple of times was a real blast. Yet at other times our dissatisfaction and uneasiness with the project showed through.

  The second single from the album was supposed to be Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. It was a song that none of us really liked. It was just too naff, a step too far, beyond even Barry Manilow. It wasn’t cool in any way and we didn’t know why we were doing it.

  We launched it live on TV on the National Lottery show and it would be an understatement to say that our hearts were not in it. We were promoting our new single on one of the biggest shows going and we just did not want to be there. The Saturday night TV audience certainly got cheated if they were hoping for a rip-roaring version of ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. We all felt depressed and we looked it, and in truth we were barely going through the motions. How the hell had we come to this?

  The day after the programme, Louis phoned us to say that Simon had seen it, had thought we looked bored off our tits and was pulling the single release because he thought there was no point. We didn’t object to this. In fact, if I am honest, we felt relieved.

  Westlife were back on top of the pop world – but we had paid a heavy price to get up there, and maybe that price had been our artistic integrity. Enough was enough.

  Next time around, we swore, we would not be doing covers.

  10

  WE’RE GOING OUT AND WE MAY BE SOME TIME

  Shafin Developments and my property dealings had always effectively been a sideline to my main love and career of being in Westlife; a nice little extracurricular activity to try to build up a nest egg for when the band was finally over.

  To my concern, this appeared to be changing as it became notably more time-consuming. As winter fell and we headed towards Christmas 2006, Shafin was getting dangerously close to feeling like a full-time job.

  It seemed to be taking over my life. Every day off from the band seemed to be filled with Shafin meetings and I was not getting enough time to spend with Gillian and Nicole. It was all too much. I had never wanted to be a full-time property developer.

  Finbarr and I were certainly trying to juggle plenty of balls. Having finalized our plans for the Carraroe site near my house, which as requested included a tower and more medium-rise buildings, we lodged our planning proposals with the council. By now we had been working on them for nearly a year.

  We were pleased with the plans, which we really believed we had sensitively thought through to provide plenty of local amenities that that part of Sligo was currently lacking. But when the council published the plans, they received eight formal objections from people living nearby.

  Five of the objections came from one guy who lived right next to the site. They were to do with how tall the buildings were, how close together, what colour they were, the effect on locals – everything, really. They ran to pages and pages.

  The council asked us to go away, supply them with further information and recalibrate our plans in the light of these objections. This was a major setback for us, especially as the hefty mortgage on the site was costing me well over €100,000 per year.

  I was also surprised at the nature of the objections. There had been around 100 objections to the proposed 15-storey monstrosity of a hotel down the road, which had been granted permission – surely our plans made more sense than that? I was baffled, and slightly angry at the whole thing.

  Around the same time we applied for planning permission to build sixty-three apartments on the Orchard Lane site we had bought at the start of the year. This also hit objections, with the main one being from the residents’ committee of a nearby estate. So now Finbarr and I had two projects going, quite literally, back to the drawing board.

  The good news was that building was well underway on our first, the Dromahair site. We had already sold twenty-five houses there, and the first tenant had just moved in. Fired by this success, we had been looking at another project in the area.

  We had noticed that Dromahair was very poorly served by shops, especially as there were four new estates being built around the town, including ours. Staking out the centre of the town for prospective retail sites, we discovered an old ballroom that was now closed up and disused.

  Another bank, Anglo-Irish, had approached us wanting to work with us and we looked at the ballroom site together. They agreed it had huge potential, and agreed to give us a loan to convert it into a convenience store, crèche, small gym and community room. We bought the site.

  Were Finbarr and I getting carried away? It may seem that way now, but at the time banks were beating a path to our door and falling over themselves to give us money, and the upsides to all of these projects seemed limitless. We could just see potential everywhere we looked.

  I also had another, major motivation. I had always loved Sligo and had stayed there and made my home there even after Westlife became so big. Shafin was a business venture,
sure, but I thought I was really giving something back to the place that had raised me.

  That was why I was putting my money into Sligo rather than into Dublin or Dubai. It may sound simplistic, and maybe it is, but I thought I was making things better.

  It was a relief to get back to Westlife business in the New Year. On the back of the enormous success of The Love Album, the Love tour had sold out very quickly and things were looking extremely good for our latest mega-jaunt around the globe.

  Westlife had never done especially well in Australia, but that had all changed with the arrival of the all-conquering ‘You Raise Me Up’ and we kicked off the tour with a week down under in spring 2007, playing arenas in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

  It was a fantastic start. My mum and dad flew out with us for their first-ever trip to Australia. My brother Peter was by now living in Melbourne with his family, working as a doctor, so it was great for us all to catch up.

  After a week in South Africa, we came back to hit the British and Irish arenas. We were all getting on grand and having good craic but at the same time we all still had this bubbling undercurrent of resentment that had been simmering ever since Simon had blindsided us into doing The Love Album.

  It was very simple. We were just tired of being regarded as a covers band. Some of our best, most powerful and most successful songs had been original material, but even so we were finding it hard to shake off this perception of Westlife merely being slick karaoke. It was misleading, and wrong. We were a lot more than that.

  Mark still felt the strongest about this, but really we were all on the same page this time around. We admired the amazing way Take That had come back after ten years with a brilliant album of original material. Well, if they could do it, so could we. There was no way that Simon was going to shoehorn us into a covers project this time.