by Shane Filan
What? I can’t bear the thought of another year off!
‘What if we were to cover “What About Now?”’ I asked him. ‘Would that be our first single?’
‘Wow, that’s a great idea!’ said Sonny, as if the very idea had never occurred to him or Simon. I couldn’t help feeling that I had just fallen into a clever trap.
And, in actual fact, I didn’t f**king care. I thought we had made a great, really strong comeback album and there was no way I wanted it to be in jeopardy because we were being precious about doing a cover. I told Sonny I would talk to the lads.
When I rang Nicky and Kian, they were pretty open to the idea. I called Mark last, because I knew he could be relied upon to feel the strongest on these questions, but to my relief, he was not actually too opposed to it.
‘Look, it’s a great song, there’s a time and a place for a cover, and it’s not well known at all,’ he said. ‘The rest of the album is great. Let’s do it.’
So Simon got his way. Who would have thought it? It was the last track we recorded for the album and it was such a cool song that we didn’t change too much about it. Simon was delighted and loved our vocals on the song.
Mark’s boyfriend Kevin was a photographer who had done a few Westlife shoots and he and Mark had an idea for the video. The label agreed to fly us to Iceland. We were out in the glaciers and the icebergs, miming and posing away as usual, and man, it was absolutely Baltic.
It was something crazy like minus 30 degrees and we all wore these huge coats, took them off for a few minutes as the cameras rolled, and then ran to put them on again. We filmed the end of the video at night, under the Northern Lights, and they were simply breathtaking.
Simon got us in to premiere ‘What About Now?’ on The X Factor, so we were all confident when the week of release came – and gutted when it only went in at number two.
Cheryl Cole’s ‘Fight for This Love’ kept it off the top and went on to become the biggest-selling single of the year. By then, Cheryl was also an X Factor judge and a national treasure. We felt disappointed to miss out on number one, but it was still a pretty successful comeback.
Cheryl also kept us off the top a month later when Where We Are debuted at number two in the album chart. It was the first sign for us that while Westlife were still clearly major pop players, we would no longer be the shoo-ins for number one that we had been for so many years.
It would be stupid to deny that this was a blow – but at the same time, given my circumstances and after the year I had had, I was just grateful to be in a band that was still in the game and making hit records… because, for me, the alternative did not bear thinking about.
My life by now had acquired a strange dual quality. Half of the time I was living in fear and dread, chasing around Sligo between banks and planning meetings with Finbarr, praying that Shafin’s debt mountain would not drag us under.
The other half, I was still a lead singer in one of the biggest boy bands in history, singing to hundreds of thousands of fans, jetting around the globe and glad-handing some of the most important people in the world… including the most important of all.
In November 2009, US President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, despite having only been in office for a year. The ceremony took place in the Norwegian capital of Oslo, and Westlife were invited to perform.
We had sung at the Nobel Peace Prize a couple of times before, and while we certainly weren’t blasé about it – it was always an honour – this one was different. We were to meet an American president, and a very cool one at that.
When we arrived in Oslo, half of the city was closed off. I had never seen anything like it. Obama apparently had 1,500 CIA and security men with him and Oslo was in lockdown. It is a very laid-back city but there was a mood of quiet hysteria.
The performers were to meet the President briefly before the ceremony and we waited for an hour for Obama to appear ‘momentarily’, as Americans like to say. Wyclef Jean from The Fugees was there, and then the host for the event came in – Will Smith. Will was really friendly, asking us, ‘Hey, what’s the story, you guys?’ He came over with his wife and kids, who were all co-hosting with him. We were chatting away but in my head, all that I could think was, Wow: I’m talking to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air!
The security guys snapped into action and asked us to stand in line to file in to meet Obama. We edged towards an inner-sanctum room and I felt as excited as I have ever been in my life. There was such a feeling of high drama.
When we got into the room, there was a sea of CIA men, all looking exactly like they do in the movies, scrutinizing every person who came in and muttering into walkie-talkies. And in the middle of this dramatic scene stood President Barack Obama.
Immediately I was even more starstruck. Talk about power and charisma! Obama looked so authoritative, fit, calm and basically cool… he looked a million dollars. We inched along in the queue of people waiting to meet him.
As we reached him, I heard a guy behind him brief him: ‘Mr President, sir, this is Westlife, an Irish pop band. They will be performing tonight.’ He gave us a welcoming smile and extended a hand for shaking.
‘Hey, you guys!’ the Leader of the Free World said to us. ‘I’m quarter-Irish, you know. How are you guys doing? You want to come over here and we’ll get a picture?’
Obama’s charm and people skills were extraordinary. I was utterly seduced. I don’t say these words lightly, but I think he may be an even greater politician than Simon Cowell.
As we all gathered around him for the official photographer, the President of the United States bantered away: ‘Wow, now I hear these Irish accents, I want a pint of Guinness! Let’s go get one!’ He never stopped smiling. I was speechless.
Then my life went from the sublime to the ridiculous. As soon as I flew back to Sligo, Finbarr and I were back in front of an An Bord Pleanála, officially lodging our proposal to convert the remainder of the residential estate at Dromahair to a 50-bed nursing home.
At the same time, Sligo council approved our application to do the same thing to the site at Orchard Lane. Finbarr and I could hardly believe it – yet were also grimly resigned to it – when the residents’ committee from the estate next door objected to it again.
How could they object to a nursing home and a retirement village? We couldn’t understand it. There was said to be fear that we might turn it into a B & B or even a homeless shelter – but this was not a likely way for us to spend €10m. So we went back to An Bord Pleanála. Yet again. It was like Groundhog Day remade as a tragedy – or a horror movie.
Unsurprisingly, Christmas 2009 was even tenser than the previous year had been. More than ever, I felt the financial rug was being pulled out from beneath me and it was getting impossible to keep my balance. I had had to remortgage the house after Ulster Bank pulled the plug on us.
Plus, of course, Gillian was eight months pregnant by Christmas – and on 22 January 2010 she gave birth to our second son, Shane Peter.
We called him Shane because my parents had given their second son, Peter, his dad’s name, and we thought it would be nice to do the same. Maybe it can become a Filan family tradition! In any case, I really wanted to call a son Shane. Shane Peter was the perfect name, and our new arrival was gorgeous.
He was also a very welcome distraction from the tsunami of financial woe that was by then engulfing Shafin. Having done a 180-degree turn on backing us, Ulster Bank were pressurizing us big time to repay the loans they’d given us. Meanwhile, Anglo-Irish Bank, who were funding our Dromahair centre development, had their own problems.
Our one bright spot was that Bank of Ireland in Sligo were still being really supportive and even facilitating us to buy more sites. They said they wanted us to have a ‘war chest’ so we could just buy any property we liked without having to go through tiresome application procedures every time.
They seemed to have total trust in us. My brother Liam had a horse business by the site at Carr
aroe. He needed to move, and a farm came up for sale. Bank of Ireland paid for it in full, instantly, including the stamp duty. Effectively, they gave us a 110 per cent loan.
It was all so easy. Was it too easy…? It was certainly a crazy contrast from Ulster Bank.
Finbarr and I still felt that one of our best escape routes from our mess was to find a site, get planning permission and sell it to Tesco, and Tesco had given us their blessing to do this. We bought a site at Ballina, again 100 per cent financed upfront by Bank of Ireland.
Tesco also seemed keen on a site that we found in Finisklin next to the Sligo docks. It had seven businesses on it. The biggest was the Bruss car-parts factory, which employed 400 people, and there were also six smaller companies based in warehouse units.
Another developer had assembled the site and managed to secure full planning permission for mixed residential, retail and office use – but now, like so many developers in Ireland, he was under financial pressure and had no money to put his plans into operation.
Could this be the answer to our prayers? The Bank of Ireland certainly thought so, and urged us to press ahead.
Finbarr had a personal contact at Bruss who told him they would be delighted to make way for Tesco, if we could buy the site and help them build a factory elsewhere. We also secured agreements with four of the other six landowners.
Two of them were tough negotiators. One of them clearly saw a major financial opportunity when a pop star asked to buy his land, and asked for around €2m for his quarter-acre of land. What? The bank said it was small change next to the overall value of the site. We agreed, subject to us getting the planning permission.
The other guy, whom I shall call Mr Hawkins, drove an even harder bargain.
Unlike the other tenants, Mr Hawkins insisted that we lease his unit from him while we assembled the site, as well as buying it once we’d got planning permission for Tesco. He wanted a pretty hefty rent, too. He was the sole remaining obstacle to beginning work, so we agreed.
Looking back, I shake my head that we got into all this even as the Irish economy was collapsing around our ears. But by now we were so desperate to retrieve the situation that we were trying to spend our way out of debt. We were willing to try just about anything.
Bank of Ireland in Sligo were still showering us with praise and were incredibly excited about this Sligo docks project. They asked Finbarr and I to put together a proposal covering all of Shafin’s plans for them to send to their national bosses to get rubber-stamped. We started working on that.
That April of 2010 we were granted planning permission to begin work on the residential nursing home on our first site at Dromahair. If only we could. It would cost us £4m to build and would employ fifty nurses and carers – but by now, of course, our financiers on that project, Ulster Bank, had pulled out. We began looking for alternative sources of funding.
It became clear that the Bruss site in the docks was not going to work for Tesco, and we began examining a site right next to it instead. Mr Hawkins insisted that we continue to pay him his rent, which we did, even though we were not personally legally obliged to. It seemed the right thing to do for the project.
While this was all going on, my escape from it all was that Westlife were rehearsing in Dublin for the Where We Are tour. After our year’s break, it would be our first major tour in two years, and we were all up for it and raring to go.
Mark, Kian and Nicky were on grand form, it was good to see Priscilla again and we had a real buzz in the rehearsals. Our agents, John Giddings and Sarah Sherlock at Solo, had lined up a huge tour for us, and it had pretty much sold out straight away.
Phew! After our year off, we were all relieved that people still cared.
The spirit in the band was great as we performed multiple nights at all of our usual arena haunts in Britain. Our medley was good fun on that tour: we were covering the Black Eyed Peas’ ‘I Got a Feeling’ and Kings of Leon’s ‘Sex on Fire’.
We had a couple of big outdoor Irish dates booked too. We did Croke Park again and it was almost more fun than the first gig there. This time, we weren’t all so hyped up and fixated on remembering every second of it, and were far more able to relax and enjoy the day.
The second outdoor Irish gig probably meant even more to us. We headlined a festival at Lissadell House, a lovely old country mansion where W. B. Yeats used to holiday, which overlooks the picturesque Drumcliff Bay to the north of Sligo. Leonard Cohen played the other two nights.
Westlife had not played Sligo for many years and that balmy evening we were acclaimed like returning local heroes. I felt my relationship with Sligo was a little damaged by the Shafin shenanigans, but that night it hardly mattered as we belted out our hits with the mountain of Benulben in our sights. It was a special night.
Halfway through the Where We Are tour, Shafin got the final, appeal-proof permission to build the nursing home at the Orchard Lane site. The development was by now a care home and retirement village that would provide eighty beds and around a hundred jobs.
Yet, as with Dromahair, we now had planning permission – but no money to build. The Bank of Ireland in Sligo still loved all our plans, but they could not give us funding until the bank’s national directors approved the proposal we had been asked to write, setting out all of Shafin’s ongoing projects.
Finbarr worked on this crucial document 24/7 and I helped in my downtime from the band. We were in and out of Bank of Ireland in Sligo as we finessed it. We noticed a definite trend emerge. If I was in the meeting, everything was grand and wonderful. If it was just Finbarr, the bank were always finding problems and asking for rewrites.
It was almost like they were treating me differently simply because I was in Westlife. It would have been comical had it not been so serious, but we persevered with them: we had no choice. They were our only hope.
By now my financial situation was beyond desperate. I still had money coming in from Westlife, thankfully, but it would hardly touch the sides of my account before being snatched out to meet bank loan repayments or interest charges.
I had even missed a couple of mortgage payments and ended up having to remortgage Castledale again just to get some money to live. Westlife was keeping us afloat, just, but we desperately needed that money from Bank of Ireland.
The second leg of the Where We Are tour ran later than most of our tours, right up until the end of August 2010, and so we were having our usual discussions about the end-of-year Westlife album while we were still on the road. To my horror, there were mixed opinions about our next move.
When Westlife had reconvened after the year off, we had all been excited and full of fighting talk about being bigger and better than ever and going on for another decade, like Take That. A year into our comeback, that positivity and spirit was starting to wobble.
The tour had been great craic, they always were, but were we really getting bigger and better? Where We Are had sold less than our other albums. We weren’t unique in that, of course – downloads and piracy meant that album sales were down for everybody.
Our live ticket sales had held up incredibly well and our gigs were still a major draw. However, the most worrying sign was that our relationships were fracturing. We appeared to be drifting apart.
Westlife had been going for nearly twelve years now. OK, we had had a short break, but now here we were, back on the same old treadmill yet again. We were about to go straight from a huge tour into a studio to make our second album inside a year. So what had changed, exactly?
The fans and the shows were still brilliant, but as the Where We Are tour came to an end, the band was already starting to feel a little tired and stale again.
We had a lot of conversations on the road. Do we keep going, or do we call it a day?
Is this it?
The interesting thing was that it wasn’t one member pushing for it and others against. Mark, Kian and Nicky were all on the same page, looking for clues as to what to do next. We reminisced about
how we had always said Westlife should go out at the top, before we started to decline: was now the time?
Mark didn’t know. Kian didn’t know. Nicky didn’t know. Nobody was actually saying we should split right now – so we decided to go to Los Angeles to make the next album.
The conversations about the band ending were torture for me. Mark, Kian and Nicky were all financially secure and had the luxury of deciding whether to go on with Westlife or not. I knew that without it, I was dead in the water.
The other lads didn’t have the first idea about this, of course, and I felt like I had a dirty secret that I could never tell them. I was closest to Nicky at that stage, and once or twice I came near to confessing to him just how financially f**ked I was… but I didn’t. I just couldn’t.
So, in the absence of any decision to the contrary, we flew to Los Angeles to make the Gravity album.
Simon and Sonny had fixed us up to make the whole album with John Shanks, who was a US producer who had made both of Take That’s enormous comeback albums, Beautiful World and The Circus. It was painfully obvious that Simon was hoping that John could ‘do a Take That’ with Westlife.
John was a really cool guy and we spent a lot of time hanging out in his house as well as in the studio. The band were even writing songs again, for the first time since our third album: I contributed to two tracks, ‘Closer’ and ‘Too Hard to Say Goodbye’.
The band vibe was basically good during the sessions. It is always great to be in California, and we were all happy with the way that Gravity was going. As we finished off the album in St John’s Wood in London, I think we all felt confident that we had made a better record than Where We Are.
After being away from home for so long, on the road and then making the album, it felt wonderful to have some time to spend with Gillian and the kids in Castledale. Yet going back to Sligo also meant returning to the angst of Shafin. All of our main sites now had planning permission but were standing idle, awaiting funds.
We desperately needed to get our overall plan approved by Bank of Ireland HQ, and we took it into the Sligo office that October of 2010. We knew it was really strong. But the bank asked if we could add a few modifications and clarifications and take it back in December.
