by Shane Filan
I guess one reason was stupid male pride. I had gone into the property business looking to create a nice nest egg to look after my family after the band had finished. I just didn’t want to admit that I might have bitten off more than I could chew.
Also, I didn’t want my plight to impinge on the band. Mark was right – we did need a break and a year off, and I wasn’t about to ask Mark, Kian and Nicky to postpone it because I had a few financial worries.
I would feel humiliated and awful asking them, and I also felt it would not be fair to put them in that position. I had got myself into this situation. It was down to me to get out of it.
In any case, a year off would give Finbarr and me ample chance to focus fully on Shafin and get everything moving back in a positive direction. I have always been one of life’s optimists, and I strained hard to see this particular bottle as half-full.
The first leg of the Back Home tour ended at Wembley and I got a severe dose of my hay fever. This was the last thing I wanted, as I was about to head off to Spain on a short golfing holiday with my brother-in-law, Cathal.
I called in an on-call doctor and he gave me a double dose of the injection that had worked so well before. It was just as effective again, and by the time I got on the plane to Spain, my sniffles had totally cleared up.
However, I didn’t stay well in Spain. Once I got there, I felt restless, itchy and anxious. I had the weird sensation that the tips of my fingers were buzzing. I figured that it was all of the stress of Shafin finally catching up with me.
I have always slept like a log but one night I didn’t get a single wink and was in and out of the toilet all night. I was so bad that Cathal stayed up all night with me. This was not the relaxing golfing break I had hoped for.
Back home, as the second British and Irish leg of the Back Home tour got underway, one date leapt out of the itinerary: headlining Croke Park in Dublin on 1 June.
It was Louis’s idea and we were all pretty wary about it. OK, we had done thirteen nights in a row at the Point before, or ten at Wembley Arena, but this was a full-on, 85,000-capacity national sports stadium.
Croke Park was a special place for me, as it is for most Irish people. As a tiny kid, I had been a mascot there when my three brothers played in a hurling final. After they had won, I had been photographed with the cup on my head.
I had been to Croke Park with my dad to see Gaelic football matches. I had seen U2 there on their Vertigo tour three years earlier. But to play there myself, to try to sell the place out… I didn’t know.
If I am honest, the idea both exhilarated and terrified me. Was Louis overreaching himself? Was this finally going to be the point we embarrassingly fell flat on our arse?
We soon got the answer. The initial 56,000 tickets to go on sale all went on the first day. Within ten days, the gig was sold out. Wow. This was going to be quite something… We were playing arena dates throughout May 2008 but all of our thoughts were on the big one coming up. We wanted it to be truly spectacular, and at a series of planning meetings, we kept adding stuff to it. We would start with female dancers; we would add additional pyrotechnics; we would have an extra stage in the middle of the stadium and a walkway leading to it…
On the day before the gig I felt like I was coming down with hay fever again. No! I couldn’t sing to 85,000 people in Croke Park with a blocked nose! I managed to see an on-call doctor in Dublin who gave me a double-dose injection of the magic treatment.
That night, I checked into the Four Seasons hotel in Dublin with Gillian and Nicole. It was where Westlife had staged our awful press conference when Brian had quit the band, and I had a fleeting thought of how much he would have loved to play Croke Park with us.
Ah, well. He had made his decision…
In the days leading up to the gig, I had tried to play it down in my mind, figuring there was no way that it would be able to meet my fevered expectations.
It didn’t. It surpassed them.
From the moment that Mark, Kian, Nicky and I rose up on a platform in the stage floor, the show was a mad, intoxicating dream. The fans seemed to stretch to the horizon; I couldn’t even see where the crowd ended. The screams went beyond deafening. It was just white noise.
We did the first two songs – ‘Hit You with the Real Thing’, from Face to Face, and ‘World of Our Own’ – from memory at the heart of the madness, then managed to regain control and enjoy the show. Now and then we’d shoot each other boggling glances: can you believe this? We had had some amazing shows, but this was the best night of our career.
Just when we thought the screams could get no louder, we’d unveil a crowd favourite and the noise would go up another notch: ‘What Makes a Man’, ‘Uptown Girl’, ‘If I Let You Go’, ‘Mandy’. Our medley section included Robbie Williams’s ‘Let Me Entertain You’ and 85,000 people freaked out like they were at a full-on rock show.
How had this happened? How did we sell all these tickets? How the f**k did we ever get this big?
If only these people knew it was all about to come to an end – for a year, at least.
They say always leave them wanting more, and we closed the main set with ‘Flying Without Wings’ and the encore with ‘You Raise Me Up’. As the last strains fell away and the platform sank bank into the stage, I stood on my tiptoes to drink in the crowd and their reaction to the very last second.
It had been unbelievable. Would we ever do it again?
It was such an adrenaline rush and after it was over I felt totally drained. I went to the aftershow party, but was too tired and emotionally wrecked to drink and talk. I think I was in bed by midnight.
After a couple more arena dates, Westlife had an enjoyable extracurricular jaunt – we played at Wayne Rooney’s wedding.
Our agent had told us that we had been offered a huge celebrity wedding in Tuscany in mid-June. We figured that it might be a footballer, and looking at the papers, you didn’t have to be Magnum PI to work out that it might be Wayne Rooney and Coleen McLoughlin.
We knew Wayne was a Westlife fan because he had come to one of our Manchester gigs a few years earlier, when he was still at Everton, and had a brief chat with us after the show. For our part, Nicky and I were big Manchester United fans, and could not believe our luck.
It was a classy affair from the start. They sent a private jet to fly us out to Italy, and no matter how many times you travel that way it is always cool. We were booked to play their wedding party in a gorgeous castle in Portofino.
Coleen had booked us as a surprise for Wayne but the press got hold of the story and, as usual, spoiled it. Wayne, Coleen and their families were welcoming and down-to-earth and had only one request for our set list – that we start with ‘I Do’ from the latest album.
It was their first dance, and it was the first, and only, time we ever sang that song live.
We did a 45-minute set and it was great craic. Wayne got up to sing with us on ‘Swear It Again’ – well, I say sing: he was kind of half-rapping it, like an Eminem vibe. Lovely guy, but as a singer, he makes a great footballer.
When we finished, Wayne and Coleen were chuffed, and invited us to stick around, have a drink and enjoy the rest of the party. After the stresses and euphoria of Croke Park, it was a brilliant, relaxing, chilled-out break.
The Back Home tour still had another week of dates to go, including stadium shows in Galway and Killarney, before it finished up in Liverpool. Yet as soon as we came back from Italy, I was consumed with thoughts of our year off. The morning after the Liverpool gig, Louis announced on Irish TV that Westlife were taking a break for exactly a year, until 1 July 2009.
So, this was it. I knew that I had things to look forward to – becoming a dad again in September, playing a lot of golf, chilling out – but a huge part of me was just deeply anxious.
What if Mark, Nicky and Kian enjoyed their time off so much that Westlife never came back? And what were Finbarr and I going to do about the almighty mess Shafin Developments was gettin
g into… how were we going to sort that out?
I was about to get some very worrying answers.
11
I DON’T LIKE THIS HOLIDAY
The first morning of our year off from Westlife, I woke up absolutely petrified.
I guess this was partly down to the fact I was taking a leap into the unknown. Since my teens, I had lived in the Westlife bubble, loving my charmed life of being in a gang with my best mates, enjoying phenomenal success, and happy to be in the cosy, familiar cycles of making albums and touring. Suddenly this had all been snatched away.
Yet my biggest anxiety by far was Shafin. When Finbarr and I had launched the company it had seemed rich with potential to safeguard our families’ financial futures and help the northwest of Ireland to realize its potential. Now it had become a source of stress, hassle and negativity.
Shafin had promising projects waiting to roll, but nothing was happening. We had done the hard part in finding and buying the sites for development and lining up clients – supermarkets, pharmacies, agencies – who wanted to move in. In theory, our property venture should be booming.
Instead, the Dromahair retail project, Orchard Lane and the big, all-important development next to my home in Carraroe were all bogged down in objections, planning delays and red tape. We had never for one second imagined that everything would take so long and prove so difficult.
While these interminable delays were dragging on, I was still shelling out vast monthly sums in mortgages and interest on loans as well as architects’, solicitors’ and builders’ fees – not that we were building anything yet. Even the sales on the residential estate at Dromahair had ground to a halt as Ireland began to feel the effects of the global financial crash.
The banks had been falling over themselves to give Shafin Developments money back in the day and we had raced ahead, fuelled by the optimism of the boom years. By now our loans ran to well over €10m and these same banks were starting to worry that all of our projects appeared to have stalled.
Something needed to happen – and fast.
A few days after Westlife went on hiatus, An Bord Pleanála, who had been considering our plans for Orchard Lane, withdrew permission for the 63-apartment development. They asked us to redesign the project and resubmit our new plans.
As we were seeing to our horror in Dromahair, the bottom was falling out of the Irish housing market. Casting around for alternatives, Finbarr and I decided to try a different tack entirely and apply for permission to build a nursing home at Orchard Lane.
This made a lot of sense. The estate next door’s residents’ committee, who had blocked our housing proposal, would be far less likely to object to a care home. More importantly, it would meet a major need in Sligo, which suffered from a chronic shortage of nursing-home beds.
The planners were very keen on this so we commissioned another expensive redesign and contacted the Alzheimer’s Ireland charity for advice. Our new idea was to build a state-of-the-art nursing-home/respite-care centre and a retirement village. These plans would be a year in the making.
In truth, if Finbarr and I could have got out of property now, we would have done it in a flash. Shafin was fast becoming a living nightmare and I would have even taken a hefty loss to be able to wash my hands of the whole thing and go back to my easygoing, trouble-free life.
Yet we knew we couldn’t do that. We were in too deep. We needed to get at least one of the projects moving and generate some sales to give some money back to the banks and reduce the crippling mortgage on the Carraroe land. In any case, the banks were still supportive and we believed they were all good, strong projects.
We just needed to catch a break.
In the midst of this barrage of bad news, it was good to have something to celebrate. On 15 September 2008, Gillian gave birth to our second baby, Patrick Michael.
After the drama of Nicole’s birth and the Caesarean section, Patrick’s was a far more straightforward arrival. He came two weeks early, and while we hadn’t known the sex in advance, I guess we had both been secretly hoping for a boy.
Nicole, who was three by now, was delighted to have a little brother, and Gillian and I were far more used to the sleep deprivation that had killed us first time around. In terms of me being at home for a year, the timing was perfect and I got some quality time to bond with Patrick.
My son arrived into a loving home, but also a very stressed one. Kian, Mark and Nicky might have been chilling but my year off was proving to be anything but relaxing as Finbarr and I cast around for ideas to try to release the pressure on Shafin.
Our biggest albatross was the enormous mortgage on the site at Carraroe, and we were desperate to build something that we could sell, so we could give the money back to the bank to reduce that burden. Another supermarket chain, Centra, was keen on moving into that part of Sligo, and told us they would be interested in buying a site from us if we had sorted the planning permission.
Finbarr and I talked over our plight every day, and we told our parents we were having difficulties, but my sole other confidante at this troubled time was Gillian. She could not have been more understanding as I spilled my heart out in frustration and despair night after night.
In October 2008 we put in a revamped planning application for the site at Carraroe. The tower had gone and the stylish, tasteful design for the supermarket and businesses, plus forty apartments, was all low-rise. We had to wait four months for a decision, but people seemed to like it and it appeared less likely to be objected to.
Just in case we thought things were going our way, we had another setback. The council in Leitrim refused us planning permission for the former ballroom site, even though we had reduced the floor area of the shop and taken out the gym completely.
It seemed to us that the weight of the orchestrated local protests had shaped the council’s decision. For now, though, there was little we could do except give a deep sigh and appeal to yet another An Bord Pleanála.
By now my panic at our failing business was beginning to mix with paranoia. Why, exactly, were Shafin’s proposals – which were all carefully thought out to try to benefit local communities – meeting so many objections, where other firms’ proposals seemed to sail through?
It was hard not to think that some of the obstructions and protests were happening purely because of who I was. I might have been a local boy made good, but not everybody appreciates success, and perhaps a lot of people thought I was a cocky pop star getting above myself and thinking I could do whatever I wanted.
If they just knew the reality, and could see how frightened and in over my head I was, they would see nothing could be further from the truth. I was going mad with worry – but nevertheless Sligo and Leitrim suddenly appeared to me to be full of people queuing up to bring Shane from Westlife down a peg or two.
That November of 2008 was really weird for me. It was the first time in eight years that Westlife had not got a November album out and this gave me a spooked, empty feeling. Tellingly, after spending the last decade in each other’s pockets, Mark, Kian, Nicky and I had not spoken once since the last tour. Maybe we had needed a break after all.
I did see the lads just before Christmas when we interrupted our year off to appear on The X Factor final show, singing ‘Flying Without Wings’ with the latest hot new boy band, JLS. I guess it was Simon’s clever way of reminding the world that we still existed.
That Christmas, in the middle of a year’s holiday and with two kids to pamper rather than one, should have been a joy for Gillian and me, but it was just incredibly tense. I found it impossible to relax. My last thought before I went to sleep every night, and my first when I woke up each morning, was: What the f**k am I going to do about Shafin? In the New Year, I had yet another anti-hay fever injection. It had been coming back at regular intervals and I had been caning this super-cure. You were only supposed to have one or two injections per year but I had had five or six, some of them double doses. The doctor swore by them.
/> Would my luck change in 2009? It looked like it in February when Finbarr and I finally got planning permission on our biggest and most important project – the €10m development by my house at Carraroe. At last! Our new subtle, carefully recalibrated low-rise plans had paid off!
No such luck. The same neighbour who had refused our €1m offer to buy his house objected again a couple of weeks later. It was back to An Bord Pleanála for us. We wouldn’t have a decision until the end of the summer.
There was one massive irony towering – or, rather, not towering – over all of this. I had only bought the Carraroe site to protect my family’s privacy and our quality of life after the council had given permission for the 15-storey hotel a few hundred yards away. The idea of buying the land would never even have occurred to me otherwise.
Well, three years on, building work had not started on the hotel, and there were no signs of it starting. The developers had faced more than 100 protests, and were even more mired in objections and An Bord Pleanálas (rightly so, in their case) than we were.
The hotel would probably never happen and the site would remain what it had always been – a peaceful country field with cows grazing on it. There had been no need for me to get into this f**king mess in the first place. The whole thing was a joke, but Finbarr and I certainly weren’t laughing.
The banks were becoming more and more concerned and kept calling, sending emails and wanting meetings to talk about why nothing was getting built. They started making noises about needing to have loans repaid. As the weeks ground by with no breakthroughs and no let-up in the pressure, I started to get seriously ill.
I have always been a fairly happy-go-lucky character but now I was becoming horribly stressed. I could hardly sleep for worry, and even when I did drop off, I would wake up to pee five or six times in the night.
I had the thing I’d had on my golfing trip to Spain again, where my fingertips were buzzing all the time and I couldn’t think straight. Then things got worse. I was getting really bloated, and huge boils were breaking out all over my face. When I went out, I tried to cover them up with make-up.
