by Shane Filan
‘I want to give a big shout-out to our manager, Louis Walsh. I remember saying to Louis years ago, when we were supporting Boyzone at the Point Depot, “Do you ever think we’ll play this place?” He said, “Yeah, definitely!”’ (I did Louis’s words in his voice – and got a laugh. I do a very good Louis Walsh impersonation, even if I say so myself.)
‘Well, we got to play it seventy-three times! We got to play Croke Park four times in the last four years!’ The applause ratcheted up even further.
Now, it was time for the super-important stuff.
‘I want to say a massive thank you to my mum and dad. I’m so proud to be your son. Thank you so much for everything. I love you so much. You know that.’ By now I was tearing up – but I was never going to get through this one without crying.
‘The most important person in this stadium tonight is my beautiful wife, Gillian.’
There were 85,000 people around me in Croke Park, but for the next few seconds, I was talking to only one of them.
‘Gillian, I’ve loved you since the day I saw you for the very first time. We were only twelve years old. It took me a long time to get you initially, but I got you.’
People laughed and said, ‘Ah…’ but I could not have meant it more.
‘You’ve stuck by me so well. I can’t describe how much I love you. You’ve kept me focused on the job in hand; you’ve kept me going, every time. I love you so much, baby. You’ve given me three beautiful, lovely children, and that’s all we need, babe. That’s all we need. I love you.’
I blew her a kiss.
And then it was time for the big finale. The last ever Westlife moment, and one that took me right back to where it had all started for me.
‘I want you all to do me a favour now! If you’ve got a mobile phone, I want you to turn on your little flashlight app and hold it up high while I tell you a quick little story.’
Suddenly, every light in this strange, temporary city around me was burning bright. There it was. That city of twinkling lights I had seen on the Michael Jackson video, all those years ago.
‘I remember when I was eight years old, I was watching a video of Michael Jackson and all I saw on the telly was this…’ I gestured out at the flickering digital lights surrounding me.
‘I said to my mum, “That is going to be me some day!”
‘Well, Mum: the dream has come true.
‘Thank you all so much.’
Miraculously, the rain had suddenly stopped.
‘I want to dedicate this last song to my mum and dad – to all our mums and dads. Nicky [Nicky’s dad] and Kevin [Kian’s dad] who are looking down – thanks for stopping the rain for us! I want everyone to sing this really loud, OK?’
By now, Mark, Kian and Nicky had joined me at the end of the walkway.
‘This is our last memory of Westlife, so make it a good one. This is “You Raise Me Up”.’
What followed were the most emotional three minutes of my career – maybe of my life. There was an encore of ‘World of Our Own’, and of the song that made us: ‘Flying Without Wings’. And then it was over.
Westlife was no more.
The aftershow party was bizarre. I felt exhilarated, but also numb. It felt like too much had been happening to me in the last few weeks, both crazy highs and lows. You can only feel so much emotion before you explode, or shut down. I was getting dangerously near to that point.
The next morning, I woke up in the Four Seasons. I was a bankrupt, and there was no more band. So what did I do?
I went to the pub.
Westlife went together, all four of us, to Kehoe’s in the heart of Dublin, my favourite pub in the whole of Ireland. We had great craic for hours.
Well, could you think of a better way to go out?
***
Before too long, it was time to fly back to England – and to a new, very different existence. It was time to come to terms with my new life.
Time to learn what being bankrupt really meant.
The court had now appointed a trustee to sort out my estate, and to work both with me and with the banks to try to get the best outcome for everyone. It was to be a difficult and quite often depressing process, but he was at least pretty even-handed and fair to deal with.
The trustee was to take half of the money I earned for the next three years. My personal living expenses were all to come out of the half I kept. Castledale obviously had to go, as did every asset I owned except for the family home in Cobham, which I was left with as part of the agreement with the trustee.
The trustee worked closely with my business manager, Alan, who had done Westlife’s accounts right from the start. Alan had no obligation to step into the car crash of my life, but he went the extra mile and then some.
He was amazing – because I could not have had the conversations he was having on my behalf without dissolving into tears.
Everything changed. Gillian and I began living hand to mouth, day by day. Suddenly, I had no regular income, especially as my solo record deal had yet to materialize.
For the first time since Westlife got huge when I was twenty, I really had to think about money and what I could afford. The days of see it, want it, buy it had gone. There were to be no family holidays or fancy cars. We could take absolutely nothing for granted any more.
I have always been a strong person but the first few weeks of bankruptcy were unbearable. I was worried sick every second of the day. Questions buzzed around my head: would I have enough money to get through the week?
Some nights, I would put the kids to bed, come down to join Gillian in the sitting room, and burst into tears. The fear and the anxiety were overwhelming. Never in a million years had I ever thought I would feel – I would be – like this.
But this was my new reality. This was my life.
I felt so, so guilty that I had brought us to this. It was all down to me. If I had just stuck to singing and never gone near property, none of this would have happened. What the hell had I been thinking of?
Of course, every TV reality show going wanted me. I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here, Celebrity Big Brother, Strictly Come Dancing, Dancing on Ice… the lot. A couple of them, particularly Celebrity Big Brother, were six-figure sums.
I wasn’t tempted by any of them. I knew they all just wanted me to go on and talk about my bankruptcy and my personal life, and I was not about to do that. Louis hated the idea and I knew it wasn’t right for my career.
So for weeks, I did virtually nothing. Louis arranged a few more record-label meetings. I played a bit of golf, but I was so unhappy and stressed out that I couldn’t enjoy it. It felt like everything I touched turned to shit.
And then I had to go back to Sligo to see my family.
I had never been away from my hometown for so long before. Even at the height of Westlife’s superstardom, the longest I had ever been away from Sligo was five weeks. Now I was about to return for the first time in seven months.
As Gillian and I drove there from Dublin, I felt like my every memory of Sligo was flashing before me. I felt nervous and apprehensive. So much had changed in my relationship with the town. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel welcome.
Going to Castledale was heartbreaking. Gillian and I didn’t let on to the kids that we were about to lose it and they just loved being there again.
It was great to see my parents again, but even this had a dark side. Nothing that had happened had been my mum and dad’s fault, yet they had suffered through me and been exposed to all the scandal and gossip surrounding my fall from grace.
It made me feel guilty, and angry – emotions that I was getting very used to.
The first day or two Gillian and I were in Sligo, we hardly went into town, but then we thought, Why shouldn’t we? It was our home; why should we have to skulk around? We decided to go out for lunch.
We left Nicole, Patrick and Shane with their grandparents and went to a great little restaurant on the outskirts of town. We had
always loved going there when we lived in Sligo. We sat down, got a drink, placed our orders – and then a man approached our table.
It was Mr Hawkins, the guy whose last contact with us had been to threaten to plaster our pictures all over his van and drive around Sligo with a loudspeaker.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Can I talk to you for a second?’ ‘Of course you can,’ I told him. We went outside. I have to give it to Mr Hawkins; he didn’t waste time on small talk or social niceties.
‘Where is my money?’ he asked me.
I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘What?’ I asked him.
Off he went on a rant – but he didn’t get far this time. ‘How dare you?’ I asked him. ‘After the letters you sent my family, are you having a laugh?’ I was so sick of this. And then it dawned on me. A little voice in my head said: I don’t have to listen to this any more. And that was the end of that. As I walked away, I said, ‘If you have got a problem, take it up with my solicitor.’ I never heard from Mr Hawkins or his stupid van again.
I even managed to enjoy the rest of our stay in Sligo, before returning to the reality of life in Cobham. Every day seemed to bring a new reminder of our reduced circumstances; of my downfall.
One particularly bleak moment came a few months after the end of the Farewell tour. The Westlife accountants sent through the usual email itemizing the tour payments to the members of the band.
Mark, Nicky and Kian’s names were all there as usual, but next to them was a new one: Kevin, my trustee, who was obviously taking my share. It was a seven-figure sum.
How I could have done with that.
It was one of the many things that brought home to me just how grim my plight had become. I wondered what the other lads had thought when they got that email.
It was a dark, dark time, and even somebody as naturally upbeat as me could have gone under – if not for Gillian. She was amazing throughout, and especially during those first bleak weeks when I was wallowing in despair. She saved my sanity and she saved me. She saved us.
Even when I was wracked by anxiety, Gillian was so positive about our future and our family. She didn’t seem to have a doubt in her head that we would come through this – and we would come through together.
She would give me almost daily pep talks: ‘Shane, we will be fine. We are going to survive. You can still sing, and you will get a new deal. You will have a career, and it doesn’t matter if it is big or small. It will be enough.’
When we came out the other side, Gillian confessed that she was often putting on a front and bullshitting, saying the first thing that came into her head – anything that would lift my spirits. Well, it worked and it was incredible. When she could see me falling, she picked me up.
I was lucky to have two miracle-workers in my life – and the other one was Louis Walsh.
Louis did what he said he was going to. He got me a deal. We had thought of talking to Simon at Syco, but I looked at their current roster. They had One Direction, who were now the biggest boy band in the world; they had all the X Factor acts; would I really be a priority for them?
No, I had loved working with Simon for years, but now it was time to look elsewhere.
And Louis came through. After all of our meetings, we had a few offers on the table, which was nice and a relief, and we chose to go with Universal Records. It just seemed the best fit, and there was a nice symmetry to it – because Westlife had turned them down when we signed to Simon.
By Christmas 2012, I knew that I would be going with Universal, but I couldn’t announce it or sign the deal for legal reasons. In any case, Gillian and I had one last, pressing ordeal on our minds: we had to move out of Castledale.
This was the dark cloud that had been hanging over us ever since my bankruptcy. The banks had originally wanted us out of the house straight away, but as my solicitor had explained to them, it wasn’t an easy job to pack up a place of that scale.
It was a huge house and it was packed with stuff. It was where we had lived, loved, laughed, brought our children into the world and raised them. It had been our heaven; our haven; our home. It had been very, very special.
The banks grudgingly agreed to give us until early January. So that Christmas we flew back to Sligo to spend our last three weeks in the home that Gillian and I had first started planning and dreaming about more than a decade earlier.
It was such a shit, horrible Christmas. It felt precious to have a few last days in the house, but it was so poignant that it was unbearable. We had built Castledale from scratch, and now we had to take it apart before having it ripped away from us.
It was the house we had assumed we would live in for our whole lives, bring up our children in, and then leave it to them. Every room was full of associations; every corner had its memories. It was our spiritual home and now we were leaving it.
Our families helped and we hired a removals firm, but basically Gillian and I emptied Castledale ourselves. We packed everything into boxes. We even watched the snooker table, on which Finbarr and I had scrabbled for loose change, being dismantled.
The kids were too young to know what was going on so we didn’t tell them. We simply said there was a problem with the roof and we were moving everything out to get it fixed. Luckily, at that age you believe everything your parents tell you.
On the final day, Gillian and I left the children with their grandparents and walked slowly together from room to room for one last time. It was the moment I had been dreading. Our home was as empty as it had been eight years earlier when we had first moved in.
It was the saddest day of our lives. I know how dramatic this is going to sound, but losing Castledale felt like a member of our family had died. And now we were about to close the coffin lid.
When we got to the top floor, where I had watched so many football matches, sunk so many Guinnesses and played so many games of pool with my friends, I lost it. It was too sad. I slumped on the bar and I cried as hard as I had cried when I’d learned I was being made bankrupt.
It took me a few minutes to collect myself. Gillian and I walked out onto the balcony one final time. The view we had loved across the fields – the fields that had helped to bankrupt me – was as beautiful as ever.
There was no 15-storey hotel towering over it. There was never f**king going to be. For a second, it was too much to bear.
But you move on. You always move on. Gillian and I had a cuddle, hugged each other, took a deep breath, walked down the spiral staircase and closed the door behind us.
We tried not to look back.
We didn’t quite manage it.
The next day, we had to hand in the keys – but we couldn’t hang around. We had a flight to catch.
I had to get back to London so I could start writing songs for my first solo album.
16
MY LIFE AFTER ’LIFE
When I’d first realized that I was going to launch a solo career, I had become fixated on one topic. Where would I get my songs? Who was going to write them? It was a question that went around and around my head until it began to drive me crazy.
The answer was not what I expected: it was me.
When I signed to Universal, they knew everything that I had been through over the last few years and clearly figured that I might get some decent songs out of it. ‘You have a lot to talk about!’ they told me. ‘Why don’t you try writing?’
I agreed, but with reservations. Although I had co-written a few tunes for Westlife over the years, I had never seen it as my major talent. ‘I’ll try, but I hope you haven’t signed me expecting me to write hit songs,’ I cautioned. ‘I never have and I don’t know if I can.’
Universal booked me into a studio to work with a selection of professional songwriters once I came back from clearing out Castledale. The night before my first session, I was dead nervous. I was sitting doing a jigsaw with Nicole in Cobham, but my mind was hardly on it.
The next morning, my head cleared a little as I drove around the M25 to the stu
dio. ‘Look, let’s just do it!’ I told myself. ‘Let’s give it a go! If it is shite, it is shite, and then nobody will hear it so it won’t matter.’
The first writers Universal had picked for me to write with were Nick Atkinson, who had co-written Boyzone’s ‘Love You Anyway’, and Tom Wilding. We talked about what I had gone through recently and they were gobsmacked. They could hardly believe it.
‘Well, let’s write about what is important to you,’ they suggested.
Tom was playing guitar and Nick and I started singing and coming up with lyrics. I remembered doing the jigsaw with Nicole the previous night. I picked up a pen.
If life is like a jigsaw, where would you start?
You think you got the picture, like it’s written on your heart…
Within three or four hours we had written ‘Everything to Me’, the song that was to become my debut solo single. It was a song totally and wholly about Gillian and the kids; how they were all that mattered to me after all I had gone through; how they were everything to me.
’Cause I don’t need the sunlight shining on my face
And I don’t need perfection to have the perfect day
I just want to see you happy, a smile on your face
Nothing else matters ’cause you’re everything to me, to me, to me…
***
The words poured out of me, and I loved writing it and the fact that it was upbeat, but I didn’t know if it was any good or not. I was too close to it – plus I was still in emotional turmoil from moving out of Castledale two days earlier. It was difficult to see anything very clearly.
Nick produced and tweaked it and sent it over to the record label a couple of days later. They came back straight away and said they loved it, it was exactly what I should be doing, and could I do more of the same, please?
It was a major confidence boost. Driving into the next songwriting session, I didn’t even feel nervous.
One thing I knew was that I wanted it to be a cheerful album. I had been through so much grief in my life recently that I could easily have made an angry, bitter record. I didn’t want that. I wanted it to be positive. I wanted to look forward.
