by Shane Filan
Because China had been closed off to the West until late in Westlife’s career, we had never had the chance to play there regularly, as we had in the rest of Southeast Asia, but now it was clear that we were massive there. What a shame that we had only found out as we came to say goodbye!
It was a brilliant start to what we were dubbing the Farewell tour; and what was even better was that Westlife had retained that closeness we’d found towards the end of the Gravity tour. We were the best of friends again.
As we had discovered on our previous jaunt, deciding to split had dissipated all the tensions and the bad feelings between us. On the Farewell tour, we were proper mates again. Every night we went out after the show, and nearly always ended up in McDonald’s at 3 a.m.
We had taken a camera crew with us, and they shot some amazing footage of Westlife in China, having the time of our lives, partying and being a gang again. That film has never been seen. I hope it is one day – because we looked on top of the world.
Nicky, Mark and Kian knew I had a lot of property in Ireland and they obviously knew the economy was going down the toilet. In China, they asked me, ‘Are you covered? Are you OK?’ I told them I had a few problems but was working hard and should be able to sort them out. Yeah, I was sound.
I was lying, but it was a white lie. It was the last time I would be able to use Westlife to escape from my woes and forget what I was going through. The band was having a great time right then. I didn’t want to drag us down.
Those Chinese dates were the happiest Westlife had played in three years. As they came to an end, our Asian promoter Michael told us that he could get us twenty more dates straight away. Could we stay and play them? They would be worth millions to us.
We couldn’t… because Kian had just taken a TV job as a judge on The Voice of Ireland.
It was so funny. It reminded me of all the times that we got offered silly money for corporate gigs and ended up turning them down because somebody had some lame excuse. It had bugged the hell out of me then. Now, it was just comedic.
I remember us four in a Chinese taxi, laughing our heads off and saying, ‘For f**k’s sake, Kian! We could do twenty more gigs here if you weren’t doing your telly show!’ Kian was smiling, saying, ‘Sorry, lads – I had no idea.’ And he hadn’t.
We were past resenting and begrudging stuff like that. It was nobody’s fault. Life is too short. The important thing was that as we entered our last lap, Westlife was fun again.
When I got back to Cobham, Louis began arranging meetings for me with record labels. He and I went to see a stream of A & R chiefs and executives who were hugely encouraging about the possibility of a solo deal. I was still dead nervous about the idea of going solo – but it was looking positive.
At the same time, I went straight into a series of meetings with the lawyers who were looking to negotiate the IVA with the banks on my behalf. The Chinese trip had lifted my mood and I had rediscovered some of my usual fighting spirit and optimism.
There is no way I will go bankrupt, I told myself. We will find a way through this. I’ll explain to the banks that I want to work together with them to put this right, and we’ll come to an agreement that suits all of us.
We were all grown adults, after all. It shouldn’t be beyond us.
Bank of Ireland had just served court papers on me to try to get their money back and the newspapers were starting to run speculative stories about my financial position, but even so I remained optimistic that the bank would drop the court case when we got around the table to talk. We would sort it out between us.
My legal meetings were long and arduous. My team had to prepare documents itemizing all of my personal assets and debits. Castledale topped the list in both of the categories. I had by now remortgaged it three times to pay my bills, and its mortgage ran to €3.7m.
I went over and over everything with my legal team, right down to the value of my wedding ring. When they were finally happy with the accounts, they sealed them in an envelope to be lodged with the local court.
A few days later, I heard from the lawyers that there was to be a big meeting with all of my major bank creditors at the end of April 2012. It was to be held in Dublin, where I would by then be rehearsing with Westlife for the rest of the #tissuetour dates. Perfect!
First, I had a couple of weeks to chill out and relax with my family in Cobham. This included Easter weekend at the start of April. I had dropped Nicole off at a friend’s house for an Irish dancing class, then headed back an hour later to pick her up. I had just pulled up outside the house when my phone rang.
It was Joanne, my Irish PR. The news that she had could not have been any worse.
‘Shane, there is going to be a big story tomorrow in the Mail on Sunday,’ she began. ‘They have got hold of all of your financial information from your IVA court application.’
I sat in my car and my jaw dropped open like a bad actor. I could not believe what I was hearing.
‘What…? No! How can they? The papers were sealed to go to the court… What the…? They can’t… Oh, holy f**k!’
I broke out in a cold sweat as Joanne talked to me. A Mail on Sunday journalist had called her. They had the entire document my legal team had drawn up. They knew every single thing about my finances. And they were running a story the next day – a very big story.
Joanne has always been a very sharp and cool-headed PR and she outlined our immediate strategy. We would say nothing for now. No comment. We didn’t know how this would go and we had nothing to gain from talking.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and hung up.
I sat in the car. I felt like sobbing.
This was it.
This was the end of the world.
Until now, I had managed to keep the extent of Shafin’s problems secret. There had been a few press stories, but nothing too dreadful. Gillian had known how bad things were, as had my parents, but I had figured it was my private business. I would resolve it with the banks, privately.
Now, as of tomorrow morning, the whole world would see that I was financially f**ked, destitute and heading towards skid row. My big dirty secret would be on headline boards outside every newsagent’s shop in Ireland.
The rest of the band would know. Louis would know. Simon would know. The fans would know. The whole world would know.
Jesus Christ! How had this happened?
It was twenty minutes before I could bring myself to knock on the door and pick up Nicole from her friend’s house. In the car she chattered about her day all the way home and I never heard a word. All I could think was that my world was about to fall apart… and if mine was, then so was hers.
I told Gillian as soon as I could take her to one side, away from the kids. We hardly slept that night. I kept going to the Mail on Sunday’s website. Eventually, in the early hours, there it was:
SHANE ‘FACING BANKRUPTCY OVER HIS DEBTS’
Westlife’s Shane Filan could be forced into bankruptcy if his creditors refuse to accept a proposed repayment scheme that he put before the courts in Britain last week.
***
The Sunday World also had the story and went for the more direct approach. ‘SKINT SHANE’S €23M BOMBSHELL’ their headline screamed, before listing the debts of my ‘property nightmare portfolio’ in full.
As soon as my solicitors’ office opened on Monday morning I rang to ask how the f**k the leak had happened. They were truly shocked and apologetic but assured me it was nobody on their side; somebody at the court must have seen my name on the envelope, copied the documents and flogged them to the tabloids.
I never did find out who did it, and it hardly mattered. The point was, my secret was out – and it opened the floodgates.
For the next few days, it seemed the most important topic for every newspaper, TV show and website in Ireland was Shane Filan’s finances. They chewed over the info, tut-tutted, second-guessed what had gone wrong and generally made themselves judge, jury and executioner.
/> It was a horrible, hideous, humiliating time. I stuck rigidly to Joanne’s say-nothing policy, although it was aggravating not to give my side of the story. But she was right. I was so angry that if I had spoken to the papers then, f**k knows what I would have said.
Nicky sent me a cool text the day the Mail story appeared. It just said, ‘Keep your head up.’ And Louis Walsh, as he always is in a crisis, was amazing.
He called me up, flabbergasted. ‘How the f**k did you keep all that secret?’ he asked me. ‘How the hell did you keep it from us? And why the f**k didn’t you tell me and ask me to help you?’ Then he went out to bat for me.
‘Shane is wiping the slate clean and starting over,’ Louis told the Irish papers. ‘He will be fine. He has a massive solo deal in the pipeline and is going to be a massive, massive star.
‘I am 100 per cent sticking by him through this. He is facing up to it and doing it in a very honourable and honest way. You have to respect him for that.’
Yet Louis’s wasn’t the angle that the media took. There was no shortage of columnists and opinion pieces happy to declare that I had been plain greedy, got above myself and deserved everything that was coming to me.
The fact they didn’t have the slightest idea what they were talking about didn’t seem to bother them. Schadenfreude was heavy in the air… and the worst offender was the Sligo Champion.
We had always supported our local paper. They had always got access to me and to Westlife for interviews. Gillian even judged a fashion show with them three years in a row. We supported their charity.
In the early days of Shafin, the Champion had run supportive pieces about our planned developments and how many jobs they would create for local people. Now it was very different. They had a good juicy story to get their teeth into now that it had all gone wrong.
For five or six consecutive weeks, Gillian and I made the Champion’s front cover. They honed in on the sensationalist aspects of the story: the fact that we could lose our home; the move to Cobham; the value of my wedding ring.
The newspaper’s headlines included ‘FIRE SALE’ and ‘THROUGH THE KEYHOLE’. One week we dominated the entire first four pages of the paper. There was no other news in Sligo that week.
It got to the stage, I am sure, that even people in Sligo were sick of reading about it. It was all too much. It was a media feeding frenzy – and we were trapped at the centre of it.
It cut me to the quick. I was expecting to get slagged off by the red-top tabloids: that is what they do. But I had hoped for better from the media in Sligo, the hometown I had travelled the world talking about. I never expected them to turn on me so viciously.
It was bad for Gillian and me, reading the headlines online in England, but it must have been worse for my family. We were mortified to think of our poor parents, still in Sligo, walking around town with everyone reading this stuff.
We sat and stewed in Cobham – and then I had to get on a plane to Dublin.
I was meeting Westlife to rehearse for the main body of the Greatest Hits/Farewell tour, but first there was the little matter of my IVA meeting with all the banks that I owed money to.
This meeting was a big deal. It would basically show me if the banks were willing to negotiate an arrangement with me – or if they were intent on the nuclear option of driving me under and making me bankrupt.
I was still desperate to avoid bankruptcy. I didn’t want it in my life or touching my family or the band. I didn’t want to be known as ‘Shane Filan, the bankrupt pop star’. I knew that I was heading for an incredibly tough meeting but I tried to be optimistic. Surely there was a better solution?
Gillian and the solicitor who was looking to negotiate the IVA came with me. Ever since my papers had been leaked to the Mail on Sunday it was open house on my private affairs, and the newspapers that morning were all talking about the meeting.
This bugged me because I knew having the media all over my case and making it high profile would put pressure on the banks not to be soft on me. I thought it could affect how things worked out. And, to be honest, I think it did.
The IVA meeting was horrible, one of the worst days of my life. Gillian and I were put to wait in an anteroom while my solicitor went in to talk to the bankers. We had expected to be there about fifteen minutes; instead, it was a very, very long hour and a half.
When we finally got into the room, there were seven or eight executives around the table, representing the five banks that I by now owed money to. What was noticeable straight away was that there was not a familiar face among them.
These were senior figures from the banks, most of whom had flown in from London. There were more English than Irish accents in the room. Not one of them was a person who had actually sat down with Finbarr and me, talked through our plans and then loaned us money.
I’m sure the local managers had briefed them, in a report or an email, but they didn’t know me personally and they had no idea what had really gone on. They may have never been to Sligo. As far as they were concerned, I was just one more Irish failure who had overreached himself.
And not only that – I was an uppity pop star to boot! Maybe the sort of person who needed to be taught a lesson…
I spoke first in the meeting. I thanked them for coming and said that I wanted to work with them to repair the situation as best I could. I wanted to negotiate an IVA that was fair and made sense for all of us.
I stressed that I wanted to fix things together. It wasn’t that I didn’t care that I had a mountain of debt: I did, and that was why I was trying to do an IVA rather than taking the easy option of declaring myself bankrupt and writing off the debt.
I told them I would work with them and earn as much as I could. I would work hard to support my wife and kids and then a lot of the money left over would be going to them towards my debts. I guess I was saying that I wanted to be honourable.
When I finished talking, one of the bankers fixed me with a steely glare. ‘Are you going to hand over the keys to your house?’ he asked me.
So that was the way it was going to go.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If that is part of the agreement, of course I will. I’m not expecting to keep it.’
We had quietly hoped for a miracle, but in our hearts Gillian and I had known for a while that we would lose Castledale, the dream home we had built from nothing. Yet I was taken aback at the tone of this very first comment. There was a lot of anger and resentment in the men ranged against me in that room.
The mood was that I had done wrong and must be punished. None of the bankers seemed to feel they had done anything even slightly questionable – except one.
The man from Ulster Bank gave a little speech during which he acknowledged that we had all made this mess and we all had to clean it up. I looked around the room.
Well, yeah! I thought. You’re the men whose banks were happy throwing millions of euros at a twenty-five-year-old pop star with no experience of property, and encouraging him to buy and build more and more! Too f**king right you helped to make this mess!
Perhaps wisely, I left this unsaid.
The task of the meeting was to work out a formula for the IVA. We could either agree that I would give them a lump sum over however long it would take me to earn it, or that I would give them a fixed percentage of my income over the next few years.
They went into my plans in depth. I explained that I was looking for a solo deal after Westlife, that I had already had a lot of meetings with record labels and my manager was very confident it would be a good deal. I wouldn’t have a record out that year, but I should have one the following year.
Over two hours, various proposals went back and forth between the bankers and my solicitor. Our first proposition was that the banks should take 50 per cent of my earnings, after my living expenses, for the next three and a half years.
I sensed that they wanted a lot more; possibly, that they wanted blood. The mood was not good. The meeting was inconclusive, and broke up with
the promise to keep working towards a deal. Legally, we had a month from the date of the meeting to make it happen.
If we didn’t, I would be bankrupt.
I went straight from the meeting to meet Westlife at tour rehearsals.
It was the first time I had seen Nicky, Mark and Kian since my money troubles had exploded all over the media. They were concerned and sympathetic, and asked me, ‘Jeez, are you OK, Shane?’
I told them I was fine – ever the in-denial optimist! – and explained about the meeting I had just been in, and that I was trying to negotiate a settlement. They nodded and didn’t intrude any further. We got back to our dancing.
A week before the Greatest Hits/Farewell tour began, Shafin Developments finally went bust. Ulster Bank appointed a receiver: we owed them €5.5m. We had known that it was coming but it was still a sad day, and excited another wave of media coverage. Some of it appeared to verge on gloating.
In the midst of all my financial grief and turmoil, it was good to get back on the road and do what I did best, for the very last time – singing with Westlife.
Inevitably, we had mixed emotions on the Farewell tour. It was a huge jaunt, with multiple arena shows in all of the major cities, thirty gigs in all, before we ended our career at the scene of one of our greatest triumphs: Croke Park. We were doing two dates there – amazing!
It was also a fantastic production. We’d gone the extra mile with the staging and in rehearsals with Priscilla, and we knew the #tissuetour was one our moist-eyed fans would never forget. After fourteen years, we wanted to make sure that Westlife went out with a bang.
Yet there was also a very hardcore, profound sadness underlining it all. Because: it was the last time. We had spent our whole adult lives jumping onstage, singing and dancing with Westlife, and after this tour we would never do it again.
It was impossible not to feel melancholy. Every night was a goodbye. We would sit in someone’s dressing room before the show and say, ‘Ah, just think, 10,000 people here, and it is the last time any of them will see us!’ We fixated on this point so much it became morbid.
