by Shane Filan
We rounded off the Love tour with ten days at the Point in Dublin and headed home to await developments and contact from Mr Cowell. It came via a message from his right-hand man, Sonny.
Simon had decided on our next project, Sonny told us. It was to be an album of cover songs from the movies.
Sonny may not have been entirely expecting the strength of the reaction that he got back from us.
‘What?’
‘Is he joking?’
‘No way!’
‘No f**king way!’
We gave it to Sonny straight. We had had it up to here with covers. We were a band, a proper pop band, not a bunch of X Factor contestants. In our career, we had sold millions of copies of great, original songs. It was what we did best and it was what we wanted to do again.
We had done The Love Album that Simon had wanted from us, and fair play to him it had been a massive success, but no more. We were drawing a line in the sand. We wanted to go back to being Westlife, and to doing what Westlife did. It was a new album of original material, or it was nothing.
To summarize, then: we would not be singing an album of songs from the movies.
Sonny went away with a flea in his ear, knowing exactly how we felt. There were conversations between him and Simon, and between Simon and Louis. Louis called us to tell us that he could see our point, and he sympathized, but we should be careful not to piss off the record label too much. If they lost interest in us, it could be curtains.
We stood firm. We had gone along with what Simon wanted so many times, right from the start of our career, but this time it was non-negotiable.
A couple of days later, we got a message from Simon, via Louis: ‘Why don’t you come in, and we’ll have a chat?’
Uh-oh, we told each other. Here we go. Time for yet another session with the Great Persuader. We had lost count of how many times we had gone to meetings with Simon, ready to tell him that black was black, only to come out with him having somehow convinced us that it was actually white.
Well, not this time. This time would be different. As we all waited outside his office with Louis, we were still geeing each other up: ‘OK, no giving way! No agreeing to any more covers albums!’ We waited.
‘Come in, kiddos!’
Simon greeted us at the door as usual with his perfect white-toothed smile, all in black, perma-tanned, every hair in place. We all got the welcoming hug with a little intimate double pat on the back. The confidence that everything was going to be OK simply oozed from him.
That’s what Simon Cowell does. He gets you from the start.
We all took a seat as Simon went and sat back behind his desk, his usual little arsenal of cigarettes, tea and custard creams in front of him. We looked at him and all our anger and tension just dissipated. We couldn’t help but laugh.
If a picture dictionary wanted an image to epitomize success, it would choose a photo of Simon Cowell that day. As he sat grinning at his desk, his face also beamed from the framed front covers on the wall behind him: GQ, Esquire, Forbes magazine. Man, he looked more of a superstar than we did!
We had all our arguments readied – and then Simon disarmed us from the start.
‘Well, I get that you don’t want to do a covers album,’ he began. ‘I see your frustration and it’s no problem.’
Huh? Was it going to be this easy?
‘So we will make a classic Westlife album,’ he went on. ‘We will use the best songwriters for fantastic original songs, and we will have maybe just a couple of covers. And this will be our first single.’
Simon leaned back in his chair towards the sound system. It was ‘Mandy’ all over again. He pressed a button.
Soft guitar chords swelled around the meeting room, then a lovelorn vocal: ‘Another summer day has come and gone away, in Paris and Rome / But I want to come home…’
‘Home’ by Michael Bublé. Shit, I loved that song – but hadn’t it been out recently? And hadn’t Simon just said, ‘No covers’? Ah, but it is a great song, mind…
Those two ideas were fighting in my head. I looked up and Simon caught my eye and smiled. His look seemed to be saying, ‘Wouldn’t you just love to sing this song?’ I may even have nodded. He winked.
When it ended, we raised the objections: hadn’t it just been out? Simon had his answers all prepared: ‘It wasn’t a hit. It got a few plays on Magic FM and that’s all. Nobody will know it. It’s a great first single. We’ll take you to LA to do a video – and then you get your album of original songs.’
I could see from Mark’s face that he wasn’t keen on this but I could also see that Simon’s plan made a lot of sense. It was textbook Cowell. We talked it over a little more, had a couple of custard creams and said we’d get back to him.
‘I got a wink from Simon,’ said Nicky in the taxi afterwards.
‘I got two,’ said Mark, glumly.
The thing was that Westlife were always on a deadline. Our crazy schedule meant we always had just a month, or six weeks at most, to make an album. It would be lovely to spend the next few weeks searching for the perfect, original song for a first single – but, as ever, the clock was ticking. Tick tock. Album time.
In the end, it was Kian who talked Mark round. ‘Look, we’re getting to do the album of new songs we wanted,’ he said. ‘It’s not The Love Album part II. It’s not Songs From the Movies. Let’s just do it.’
We just did it. The Michael Bublé version of ‘Home’ was quite jazzy, but in the studio Steve Mac added big piano chords to the song and made it into a proper tear-jerking Westlife ballad. And Simon was right. I did love singing it.
We ricocheted between London, LA and Sweden during the summer of 2007, making the album which became Back Home; spending longer than usual in Stockholm. Nicky was eager for us to cover a song by Lonestar, ‘I’m Already There’, and the Swedish producers asked me to try out for the lead vocal.
At that time, for one reason or another, I had been away from Nicole for about three weeks, which was our longest separation since she had been born. I went into the vocal booth, the producers cued up the track, and the lyrics just hit me:
He called her on the road, from a lonely cold hotel room
Just to say I love you one more time…
It was just how I felt right then. I was away, staying in hotel rooms, missing my family, missing my baby. The emotion welled up in me. It was the end of the first verse that got me:
A little voice came on the phone, said, ‘Daddy, when are you coming home?’
Suddenly, I was sobbing in the studio, really bawling. One of the producers flicked a switch on his console, concerned: ‘Hey, man, are you OK in there?’ I wasn’t, really, but I stayed in there doing that one song for an hour or more, getting into the heft and weave of the words, opening up my heart, trying to get it just perfect. I’m so proud of my vocal on that song.
I have been lucky enough never to have any major health issues – but I have always been prone to hay fever. While we were making the Back Home album, I came down with a particularly bad case of the sniffles.
My tablets weren’t doing the job but a doctor gave me an injection of a steroid that targets hay fever. It seemed to work and over the next few months I saw a few different doctors who gave me the same treatment.
While we were making the album, Finbarr and I were hitting more problems with Shafin Developments. The Dromahair estate was going great and we’d sold another ten homes in the first half of the year, but suddenly local rumours began to circulate that the houses were poorly designed and built – and even in danger of falling down.
To this day, I have no idea where these stories came from. We had spared no expense on the budgets and deliberately worked with top architects to ensure the homes were high quality, and McInerneys were one of the biggest builders in Ireland.
It made no sense, but it brought sales to a standstill. Finbarr and I were concerned, but it was no crisis. The sales on the estate were still ahead of our original projections,
and so we decided to hold fire, let the nonsense rumours pass, and relaunch the next year.
We were far more anxious about events surrounding the site by my home at Carraroe. We had adapted our plans for the development to include a tower at the express request of the town planner we were working with, even though it was our instinct to stay low-rise.
Now, suddenly, there was a change of personnel in the town council’s planning department, and the new guy in charge was totally opposed to our tower. We withdrew our plans to rethink them, as they were clearly not going to get approval as they stood. It was back to square one.
This wasn’t just an inconvenience in terms of delaying work starting on the site, on which I was still paying a prodigious mortgage and interest. It also hit me hard in the pocket in other ways. For a site that big, every time we commissioned fresh plans to be drawn up, it cost big money.
Everybody we hired wanted part of the fee upfront and the rest when the job was done – it was just normal business practice. That was fine, but it meant that Shafin was shelling out non-stop and getting nothing back.
More than half of the objections to our previous plans had come from one house right next to the Carraroe site. As our architect went back to the drawing board again, Finbarr and I figured it might make sense to buy the house to take the objector out of the picture.
We got in touch and began to negotiate. We made what we thought was a great offer – we’d buy the house. It was on no more than a third of an acre, but after months of negotiation, we offered more than €1m for it.
We were desperate to break the deadlock because the upside for the estate was looking so exciting. We had got in touch with one of Ireland’s biggest supermarket chains, SuperValu, who came to look at the Carraroe site. They agreed to open a 10,000ft superstore on the estate.
It was perfect for us and would have been great for that part of Sligo, because there was nothing of the sort around there. But first we had to build it.
Buying out the chief objector, even over the odds at more than €1m, seemed like sound business – but after a few weeks, they came back to us and said they would not accept the offer. They didn’t want to move at all. Square one, here we come again.
The ballroom development in Dromahair centre was also running into difficulties. Our meeting with the town planner for Leitrim had been our shortest ever. He loved our plans to convert it into a convenience store, crèche and gym and said he couldn’t foresee any objections from the locals.
But there were a few objections: sixty-three of them!
The opposition came from some existing local retailers. They began campaigning against us and issued people with a template for their objections. One confused soul merely signed the template and submitted it.
Finbarr and I found it bizarre that these traders objected so virulently to our plans. When Tesco had applied to build a store in the next town down the road, Manorhamilton, they had received only three objections.
What was so different about our proposals? We were also trying to address local needs. Dromahair badly lacked crèche facilities, with only ten or so childcare places available in a village about to have three estates built on its outskirts. We felt like we were being thwarted at every turn.
The planner told us to sit tight – he would be in touch. Of course, every time we sat tight on a site where nothing was happening, we were still paying out mortgages, interest on loans, architects’ and lawyers’ fees and countless other costs. We badly needed something to start happening.
As the autumn of 2007 turned into winter, Sony BMG put out ‘Home’ as Westlife’s lead single from the Back Home album. It went into the chart at number three, behind another of Simon’s X Factor winners, Leona Lewis, with ‘Bleeding Love’, and Take That with one of their original songs, ‘Rule the World’.
We were disappointed ‘Home’ wasn’t number one, because we thought our version of it was pretty good, but we also attracted some critical flak for putting it out as a single so soon after Michael Bublé’s version. Maybe it was another of those rare Simon Cowell missteps.
In any case, the important thing was the album, and Back Home went straight in at number one. We should have been used to this by now, but it was still a big deal for us – and this time around it was also a relief. We felt vindicated for having stood firm and refused to make another covers album.
Who knows? Maybe Westlife Sing Classic Movie Songs would have done even better. But we wouldn’t have felt as proud of it – and at least this way we were getting a break from being accused of being karaoke artistes.
The band pushed Sony BMG to release ‘I’m Already There’ as a single, the song that I had recorded in tears in Sweden, but they didn’t want to do it. Even so, we sang it on The X Factor at Christmas and fans loved it. A lot of people still assume it was a single.
It was mixed feelings in the house in Sligo that Christmastime. On the one hand, Gillian, Nicole and I were blissfully happy, and Westlife were coming off the back of yet another number-one album. On the other hand, I was worried that so many Shafin projects were bogged down in objections and delays.
These problems worsened at the start of 2008 when the Leitrim town planner came back to us with a request for twenty-five more points of information on the Dromahair ballroom site. This was the guy who had absolutely loved our plans when we first lodged them. There was a certain irony there.
Shafin thought we had better news when the council granted planning permission for our 63-apartment development at Orchard Lane, but inevitably there was an objection and we had to go to yet another An Bord Pleanála – the board that hears appeals against council planning decisions. We were getting very used to those things.
As Finbarr and I struggled to get our Shafin projects moving, and Westlife went into rehearsals for the Back Home tour, I had a rare but very welcome shaft of good news: Gillian was pregnant again.
Gillian and I both came from big families and we wanted lots of children ourselves, so we were delighted that Nicole was going to get a little brother or sister – as was she. Even so, I couldn’t help worrying that the property side of things was starting to look troublesome.
Thank God I still had Westlife.
Or did I? The Back Home tour was a massive jaunt, starting off with more than twenty sold-out British and Irish arena dates. After a month off, we were heading to New Zealand for the first time, before a second wave of gigs at home through the spring and early summer of 2008.
It was another four months on the road – and as the tour got underway, it became clear a few of us were flagging.
Westlife on the road had changed so much. Where our first-ever tour had been non-stop hedonism, alcohol, puking and deely-boppers, now we were far more mature, measured and professional. Put simply, we weren’t kids any more.
We might have been on the verge of releasing a single from Back Home called ‘Us Against the World’ but we were no longer a gang of teenage tearaways. Two of us were family men – Nicky and Georgina had their twins, Rocco and Jay, by now – and we took our families with us. We travelled on two tour buses and we all had separate dressing rooms.
Plus, of course, we could not keep up this crazy pace forever. Westlife had released eight albums – eight! – in nine years, toured every summer and never had a break. We had spent close on a decade riding this pop rollercoaster… and we were exhausted.
As the Back Home tour rolled through all our familiar old haunts, from Belfast Odyssey Arena to the SECC in Glasgow, we began having a conversation about an idea that had never even occurred to us previously.
Maybe we needed a year off.
Mark was the most vociferous on this theme. He had still not totally got over how much Westlife had become perceived as a covers band, and increasingly felt we had become stale and would benefit from a year away from the treadmill.
‘Lads, we need to take a break here,’ he would tell us as we talked in backstage dressing rooms or hotel suites. ‘We can come back a
lot fresher. If we don’t do it, it will kill the band.’
Mark might have been the first member actually to come out and say it, but he certainly wasn’t alone in his wish. Kian and Nicky had their moments of being sick of it all, and had it not been for my unravelling financial state, I might have jumped at the idea. However, the very thing that we felt we needed also scared us.
I guess the danger for any pop band, particularly a boy band like us who had been going for nearly ten years, was this: if we go away, will anyone care when we come back? Pop is a young person’s game. We might think that we were saying ‘Au revoir…’ but would we really be saying goodbye for good?
We talked it over and went back and forth as the Back Home tour wended its way up and down Britain – but we kept on coming back to the same conclusion. We were grateful for all we had, and all we had done, but we were knackered and we needed a break. We decided to talk to Louis and Simon.
They obviously wanted to keep things rolling along. Westlife had been a phenomenon and a cash cow for a very long time: why on earth would they want it to come to a halt? But they also understood our point of view, and didn’t try to persuade us out of it.
I suppose the band’s thinking was partly that by now we were all wealthy, we were all millionaires, and it was an opportunity to take some time off and enjoy what we had earned.
I had not given Mark, Kian or Nicky the slightest clue that, for me, this was now very much not the case.
All the time we were talking about taking a year off, a voice in my head was screaming, ‘F**k, no!’ Over the last two or three years, I had shovelled most of my Westlife income into Shafin Developments.
What the f**k would I do if that income was no longer there?
I was the personal guarantor to all of Shafin’s commitments, which covered millions of euros worth of bank loans, huge mortgages on four different property developments and vast fees to architects, builders and lawyers. The idea of keeping this afloat during a year off was terrifying.
So why didn’t I say a word about it to anybody in Westlife?
