My Side of Life/by WESTLIFE.CN

by Shane Filan

  What the f**k was wrong with me? I didn’t know what to think. Of course, you fear the worst. Was I cracking up?

  Normally, Gillian could talk me down from my worst panics. She would tell me: ‘Look, of course you’re stressed. You’ve a lot on your plate with the band and being up to your neck in property debt and all the negativity. But it will pass. You, me, Nicole and Patrick will be fine. We’ll be OK.’

  Yet even she was horrified at the bad way I was in now. She had never seen me this way before – shit, I had never been this way before.

  I still have a great (well, actually, f**king awful) photo from that time that shows how terrible I got. I was out with my mum and dad at a function in Sligo when my phone rang. It was Ken Doherty, the snooker player, with whom I had become friendly. He was at an exhibition match in Sligo.

  ‘Shane, it’s Ken!’ he said. ‘I hear you’ve got a snooker table in your house – can I come out now and have a look at it? Oh, and I’ve got Steve Davis with me – can he come as well?’

  What?

  ‘Wow, yes, of course,’ I told him, and quickly headed back to the house, rounding up a few mates by phone on the way. I knew they wouldn’t want to miss the chance to play snooker with Steve Davis and Ken Doherty!

  Ken and Steve arrived. I had never met Steve before but he was a real gentleman. We all hung out until four in the morning, drinking pints and playing snooker and pool. It was a fantastic evening, one of the rare chances I got in that year off to forget the fear and anxiety of Shafin and just relax and enjoy myself.

  Even so, in the photos of that night, you can see just how ill I was. I was bloated, my face looked like a moon and there were smudges of make-up on my face where I was trying to cover up the boils. It is hard to imagine anybody who looked less like a pop star. I’m not sure Westlife fans would even have recognized me.

  Gillian was crazy worried about me. She said I should see a doctor and, out of desperation, she bought me a book about how to cope with stress called Anxiety for Dummies.

  I was at my wits’ end and willing to try anything and I started reading the book as soon as she gave it to me. I skimmed over the opening blurb and read a bit to Gillian: ‘The main causes of anxiety include stress and steroid use…’

  ‘Well, at least I don’t have to worry about one of them,’ I told her.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ she said. ‘Your anti-hay fever injection is a steroid.’

  Eh? Could it be that simple? I went to the doctor for a test and got the results straight away: allergic to the steroid.

  F**k! That explained the lack of sleep, the being bloated, the buzzing fingertips, the boils… everything! It wouldn’t take away my problems and my stress, but at least I now knew I wasn’t going mad.

  We needed a break away from the angst and the negativity of Sligo and we got one. Kian married Jodi in Barbados in May 2009 and Gillian, Nicole, Patrick and I flew out for the wedding.

  It was an amazing trip. Kian and Jodi got married in a truly stunning tropical garden and had the reception in a huge mansion on the edge of a cliff. The Caribbean sun was blazing down and the day was picture perfect.

  It was great to see the other lads again and there was no awkwardness about it – we just picked up where we left off. Mark was looking fantastic: he had been training hard and also travelling a lot, and he had lost a lot of weight.

  Nicky looked in grand shape, too. The rest of the band had clearly been having a far more relaxing year off than me. Kian had hired out the big house for the whole of the wedding week and invited us to stay over after the reception for a holiday.

  Nicky had to head back but Mark and Kevin, Gillian, me and the kids all stayed on for a week’s sun, sea and sand holiday. It was just what the doctor ordered (certainly more so than steroid injections!) and for a week at least I could forget about construction sites and An Bord Pleanálas.

  It became clear on the Barbados trip that while the other lads had all loved their year off, they were also raring to get together again and start work on a new Westlife album in a few weeks’ time. That was a massive relief – because I had missed singing, and I needed money more than ever before in my life.

  One reason for this, amongst the many others, was that Gillian was pregnant again. We were delighted by this news and had always wanted to have more than two kids – but it also increased my worries about having enough money to care for my family.

  Back in Sligo, Finbarr and I were still trying to find a project we could develop and sell to give some money back to the banks to lessen our crippling debts. Tesco had applied to build a superstore by our Carroroe site, but had been turned down by the council, who felt it would suck the life out of the town centre.

  Finbarr and I saw an opportunity for Shafin. We approached Tesco, proposing that we look for an alternative site for them around northwest Ireland and get the planning permission sorted for them. This played well with Ulster Bank, who figured any project with Tesco involved was a sure-fire winner.

  Finbarr and I found a site that Tesco liked but we knew it would be too big a job for us to undertake on our own. Ulster Bank agreed and said they would try to get one of their major Dublin developer clients to work with us.

  This character arrived in a helicopter that was so big that it could hardly land in my garden. He was a pretty flash fella but he liked the site and agreed to partner up with us if we could get the site subject to planning permission.

  Finbarr and I agreed a price with the guy selling the site on a Thursday afternoon. It’s a sign of how mad the banks were to work with us and how they were still throwing money at us, even this late on, that the following Monday, Finbarr had a seven-figure cheque from Ulster Bank. In the end, there was a problem with the site and the deal didn’t go through.

  Our bad luck seemed to have turned when An Bord Pleanála, deciding on our application to turn the ballroom in Dromahair centre into a convenience store and crèche, found in our favour. It was such a relief… until we had a call from the Bord a few days later. They had messed up, failed to take into consideration one of the objections, and would have to appoint another inspector to hear the case again.

  Logically, I could see this was fair if they had not heard all of the evidence they should have. Even so, it made Finbarr and I feel even more that the world was against us. Just how many black cats had we killed in a previous life?

  By now the property crash had kicked in in a big way and sales on our housing estate at Dromahair, which had been our one success story to date, had ground to a halt. With no signs of them picking up again, Finbarr and I knew that we needed a plan B.

  We decided to take a lead from our Orchard Lane project. Instead of more homes that nobody would buy, we would change the Dromahair planning application, and look to build a nursing home and sheltered-accommodation units. We set one of our architects to work yet again.

  We worked closely with Alzheimer’s Ireland to try to ensure that the residents in these nursing homes would have the best quality of life possible. We left no stone unturned. An experienced care-home manager was reviewing every detail of our plans; we even built a full-size bedroom in a warehouse to see how a wheelchair would function around a bed.

  In the midst of all of the chaos and confusion of Shafin, I could not have been more relieved when the time came to hook up with Mark, Kian and Nicky to get Westlife moving again.

  First of all, we met up with Louis at a hotel in London for a chat about how we all felt after our time off and if we were ready for a comeback. It was a really positive meeting. The other three were all looking relaxed, trim and in good shape. It was clear that the year off had done them a world of good.

  We were all very bullish in the meeting. We wanted to keep Westlife going and we felt that we had to up our game and explode back with a really brilliant album. There was no point in going through the motions. We had to show that we were still a force to be reckoned with.

  If we were secretly worrying that we were getting too ol
d to be a boy band, Take That’s return had settled those fears. If we were a dad-band by now, they were a granddad-band – yet while we had been away, they had got bigger than ever, and now they were on a stadium tour.

  We didn’t see Take That as competition, exactly; it wasn’t as simple as that. But their triumphant return inspired us to think that if we had the right songs, we could do something similar. If they could do it, why shouldn’t we?

  One or two of the other lads were saying that Westlife could last another ten years, just like Take That, but that we wouldn’t be able to keep up our usual insane pace of putting out an album and touring every year. We would have to space the albums out more and maybe do one every other year.

  I saw what they were saying, but at the same time I thought, F**k! Let’s carry on doing an album a year! Because I knew that I was financially screwed, and chances were that things might get a lot worse before they got better.

  Even so, I didn’t say a word. Partly it was still my stupid pride, but mainly I still knew that Westlife’s future had to be decided by what everybody naturally wanted to do, not by my financial woes. I wasn’t going to beg the band to go into a studio to pay my bills.

  The new album would show people where we were at after our time away, so we decided to call it that – Where We Are. It was the first album where we didn’t work with Steve Mac and Wayne Hector. They had always been great, but we felt we needed a change. We did a couple of tracks with the Swedes in Stockholm, but mostly we were to record it in Los Angeles.

  We decamped to LA at the height of the summer in 2009 to work with a load of new producers, including Ryan Tedder from OneRepublic and Sam Watters who used to be in Color Me Badd. It was fantastic to be back in the studio and I could feel the relief flooding out of me.

  In the depths of my despair over Shafin in our year off, I had forgotten how much I loved singing and being in Westlife. It was brilliant to put on headphones again and lose myself in a song. At least here, I knew exactly what I was doing.

  It is a blessing to find your vocation in life and I should never have lost sight of mine. Singing was my thing. This was me. I felt like I had been in hell for the last twelve months but here was my escape – back into the world that I knew, and loved.

  Simon Cowell had relocated to America for a lot of the year while he continued his rise to effortless world domination on American Idol. He had a place in Beverly Hills – well, of course he did – and Louis was taking him our recordings as we finished them in the studio.

  We liked the way the album was going, and so did Simon, but he felt that we were still missing the big single we needed to relaunch Westlife and kick-start Where We Are. Early in August 2009, he invited us over to his house to discuss progress.

  Louis had hired a convertible, and as we cruised through the palm-tree-lined Beverly Hills streets in the bright California sunshine, we boggled at the opulent wealth on show. Well, that was before we saw Simon’s house.

  We knew that Simon was a superstar on both sides of the Atlantic now, and as we pulled into the drive of his lavish white mansion it was clear that he was living like one. He had bought Jennifer Lopez’s house, knocked it down and built something even more impressive on the site.

  Simon clearly fitted into Beverly Hills like a hand in a glove. When he opened the door to us, wreathed in smiles, he looked like Mr Hollywood incarnate. We couldn’t help but laugh in admiration.

  ‘Jeez, Simon, you’re doing OK for yourself!’ I told him.

  ‘I’m just telling the truth, same as always, kiddos,’ he grinned from behind his shades. ‘And America seems to like it.’

  He gave us a quick tour of his house, which was totally white with all black furniture. Staircases swept up to the heavens and art photographs of Sinatra dotted the walls. We all went out to sit around his pool for a chat.

  Simon was up to speed with what we had done on the album so far, which was all original songs. He knew we wouldn’t be up for coming back with a cover, so he delivered his latest proposal even more shrewdly than usual.

  ‘The album is strong,’ he said, ‘but I still think that you are missing something. You’re missing a song that is something like this.’

  He had a laptop on his little table by the pool and clicked on a button. An unmistakably American soft-rock anthem wafted out: ‘Shadows fill an empty heart / As love is fading…’

  It was a power ballad called ‘What About Now?’ by a US rock band called Daughtry, who had got huge in the States after their singer, Chris Daughtry, reached the final of American Idol. Nicky knew it because he and Georgina had been on holiday in LA when it hit big. I had never heard it, but as I listened I could tell it was a fantastic tune.

  ‘Jeez, yeah, it would be great to have a song like that!’ we all agreed.

  ‘I’m going to tell a few of the writers to write something like that for you,’ promised Simon. ‘We’ll make it happen.’

  We were all more than happy with that. Before we left, Simon took us to his home cinema, which was kitted out entirely in black leather, and showed us – what else? – some episodes of the next series of The X Factor that he had just finished recording in London.

  The boy had done good, all right! Simon hugged us and bade us farewell next to his three immaculate black cars – a Rolls-Royce, a Bugatti and a Bentley. The next day we flew home to continue recording the album in London.

  I was on a high from being back with Westlife and the trip to California – and suddenly it looked as if things were going to start going Shafin’s way, too. Just after I got back, I woke up to a text from Finbarr: ‘We got the planning on Carraroe.’

  Thank f**k! After four years, many hundreds of thousands of pounds in fees and numerous objections, the final An Bord Pleanála on our main project at Carraroe had given us the green light. There could be no more appeals.

  At last we could start building and the supermarket chain, pharmacists, coffee-shop owners and hairdressers that we had lined up could start buying from us, moving in and doing business. Thank you, Jesus! Finally I could pay the bank back most of what we owed them and get my peace of mind – no, get my life back.

  I eagerly flew back to Sligo and we gave Ulster Bank the great news and met up to move things forward. Now we had planning permission, we had to arrange the next tranche of loans from them to give our builders their down payments so they could start building.

  It was a meeting I will never forget – and one that was to haunt me for many years to come.

  ‘Congratulations!’ said the guy from Ulster Bank. ‘But I am afraid that in the light of the downturn in the market at the moment, we are withdrawing from development business in Ireland. We can no longer finance this project.’

  I looked at the fella. Time seemed to stand still. I could see his lips moving but I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying to me. Or, I didn’t want to.

  ‘Wait, wait a minute,’ I said to him. ‘You loaned us the money to buy this site, you gave us money to pay the architects’ fees and the solicitors’ fees, you promised us the money to build the development – and now you’re saying that you don’t have it?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ the manager said, apologetically.

  ‘So where the f**k does that leave me? How am I going to pay it all back?’

  He grinned at me, awkwardly.

  ‘I’m afraid that is really a matter for you.’

  It was terrifying. It felt like Armageddon. That night, Finbarr and I were sharing out my spare Euros, panic-striken and raging with anger, on my snooker table.

  What would we do now?

  12

  THINGS FALL APART

  Finbarr and I had been through some serious grief and pain with Shafin Developments – but nothing like this. In that one conversation, our problems worsened a hundredfold.

  To say that Ulster Bank withdrawing all of our funding felt like a deathblow would be an understatement. The bank had been our support from the start, encouraging us to take on
more investments and extend ourselves, assuring us that they had our backs – and now, suddenly, they weren’t there.

  Our problem was very straightforward. By now Shafin owed banks millions of euros in loans. The only way for us to repay those loans was to develop the sites we had bought with them. If we had no funding, we couldn’t develop a thing.

  We were trapped in a classic Catch-22 that could lead only to disaster. As Finbarr and I left that fateful meeting, we knew that we were in deep, deep shit.

  It was truly desperate – but one possible solution presented itself. When I was first starting out in Westlife, I had initially been with the Bank of Ireland before moving to Ulster Bank for some reason or other.

  Bank of Ireland had taken this desertion hard, and over the following years, as Westlife soared through the stratosphere, they had frequently written to me to try to tempt me back into the fold. They had continued to do so when we formed Shafin.

  They seemed like an option, so I contacted them and Finbarr and I went into the local branch to see them. They could not have been more welcoming and seemed to think that all of our sites were fantastic. Their enthusiasm reminded me of what Ulster Bank had been like when we first started out.

  We knew we were far from out of the woods, but at least Finbarr and I could see a glimmer of light and Bank of Ireland weren’t just offering us a lifeline – they were all over us like a rash. Finbarr set about opening up Shafin accounts with them; I had Westlife business to deal with.

  Where We Are was almost finished but despite Simon’s fine words in Hollywood, we didn’t yet have the big single in the mould of ‘What About Now?’ Simon had phoned us a couple of times, basically saying, ‘No, we don’t have the hit yet.’

  The clock was ticking and Sonny from Simon’s office called me for a big heart-to-heart. He seemed to be subtly dropping hints that without a single, the label might not even release the album.