by Shane Filan
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction: Snookered in the Red
1Living Over the Café
2The Boys in the Band
3Louis, Louis
4‘Everybody’s Looking for That Something…’
5‘SHANE, I LOVE YOU!’
6No Sleep Till Dublin
7‘Mum, This Is the Pope…’
8The Strife of Brian
9It’s a Rat Pack – and We’ve Been Caught!
10We’re Going Out and We May Be Some Time
11I Don’t Like This Holiday
12Things Fall Apart
13Losing the Meaning of ’Life
14‘I’m Sorry, Shane, They Said No’
15A City of Twinkling Lights
16My Life After ’Life
Picture Section
Index
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
As a lead singer of Westlife, one of the most successful pop acts of all time, Shane Filan was on top of the world. Together with the band, he achieved an incredible 14 No.1 singles (a record beaten only by the Beatles) sold 44 million records and was adored by fans the world over.
Everything he touched turned to gold, or so it seemed. Like many others, he had piled his fortunes into the Irish property boom and when the bubble burst, Shane struggled with mounting debt. Just ten days after Westlife’s final farewell concert, in front of a sold-out crowd of 80,000 fans, Shane was declared bankrupt with debts of £18 million – losing everything.
But this wasn’t the end for Shane Filan – a devoted singer and family man, Shane circled back to his roots and a year later he launched his solo career.
In My Side of Life Shane shares his story for the first time – his early years growing up as part of a large Irish family in Co. Sligo, the phenomenal success of Westlife and the ups and downs of their time together, the breakup of the band, his financial devastation, and finally, going it alone as a solo artist.
This is Shane’s side of the story.
About the Author
SHANE FILAN was born and grew up in Co. Sligo, Ireland, the youngest of seven children. His big break came in 1998 when he formed the band Westlife with Mark Feehily, Kian Egan, Nicky Byrne and Brian McFadden. Managed by Louis Walsh and signed by Simon Cowell, Westlife sold over 44 million records worldwide, and accumulated 14 No.1 singles. In 2012, the band went their separate ways and in 2013 Shane launched his solo career to critical acclaim.
He lives in Surrey with his wife Gillian and their three children, Nicole, Patrick and Shane.
To Gillian,
Together Girl Forever
INTRODUCTION
SNOOKERED IN THE RED
There was a bit of history to that basket.
It had been around for a long time. My wife, Gillian, had first had it in her family home when she was a girl. She used to throw her spare change and her tips from her teenage waitressing job into it. When she and I got together and married, her basket had come with her. Now, it lived inside a wardrobe in our bedroom in Castledale, our big family home just outside Sligo.
That house was our pride and joy. We had designed it ourselves, just as Westlife were getting huge, and then spent four years watching it go up before we moved in. We had lived there as happy as could be with our daughter, Nicole, and son Patrick. We had another kid on the way.
Gillian and I used the basket for the same purpose that she always had. We threw our spare coins in there. Every time I was in the bedroom getting dressed and had change in my pocket, or I came home from a Westlife tour laden down with euros, I chucked them in there.
We had done it for years. God knows how much was in there; we had never counted. We always laughed that the money would come in handy for a rainy day.
Not that rain ever seemed likely. I was the multi-millionaire singer of one of the biggest boy bands the world had ever seen. Everything I touched turned to gold. I led a charmed life.
That was what the outside world thought, anyway. The reality was very different – and a lot darker.
For the last five years, I had been leading a double life. It was a dual existence that was about to result in despair… and disaster.
Westlife had always had our ups and downs, and I had often worried how I would provide for my family when the band eventually came to an end. I had hit on the idea of a sideline in the property business.
At the time, everybody was doing it. Ireland was booming and bricks and mortar were the way forward. My brother, Finbarr, and I had started up a company. We called it Shafin Developments.
We had started small, and were happy to stay that way. But when I felt forced into buying a huge plot of land to protect my home (it’s a long story, but I will tell it here), we had somehow turned into major property developers.
It had never been our intention. And, to say the least, it had not gone well.
We had fallen into debt. Trying to spend our way out of it, we had got in way over our heads just as the global economy was crashing. We owed millions of euros – and, today, our bank had demanded all of the money back.
A multi-millionaire pop star? I was worse than destitute. I had always said that my change basket was for a rainy day. Well, right now it was a very, very rainy night in Sligo.
In fact, it was one of the worst nights of my life. Gillian was heavily pregnant and was lying on the couch, feeling sick. I was tending to her – but my thoughts were also on that basket.
My brother and I pulled it out of the wardrobe and lugged it downstairs to my snooker room. I had spent many happy hours knocking balls around that snooker table. Once, I had even played with two world champions: Ken Doherty and Steve Davis. Now I needed it for a rather more unpleasant purpose.
Finbarr and I tipped the contents of the basket onto the table and hunched over it, counting.
Counting, and panicking. How much was there?
It took us fifteen minutes: ‘€100… €200… €600… €800… €1,000…’
It came to €1,400. Finbarr and I pocketed half of it each. It would see us through the next few days. But after that… What would I do then? Where was all this going to end?
It was going to end in tragedy, heartache, public humiliation, misery… and the loss of the home that Gillian and I adored.
It was going to end in bankruptcy.
So how did I go from fronting one of the world’s biggest pop bands, travelling the globe and entertaining millions, to this? And, after Westlife imploded, how would I begin my long, slow journey to recovery and redemption?
Believe me, it’s an extraordinary story – and it begins thirty-five years ago in the heart of Sligo, Ireland, with a spectacularly happy childhood in a place called the Carlton Café.
1
LIVING OVER THE CAFÉ
The cliché of an Irish childhood is being born into a huge, loving family, with firm but easy-going parents, and running around with loads of brothers and sisters, playing mad games, getting into sports, messing about with horses and generally having brilliant craic.
Well, I guess I must have had a very clichéd childhood. It was wonderful.
I was lucky to get the chance to enjoy it, though. Before I was born, I almost died. I have never been one to do things in the straightforward way, and my path to life wasn’t easy. My mum had complications in her pregnancy and nearly miscarried me twice, at ten weeks and twelve weeks. She had to get a stitch put in her womb to hold me in.
Despite this, or maybe because of it, I was clearly desperate to get out and arrived four weeks ear
ly, at 8.45 a.m. on 5 July 1979, at Sligo General Hospital. Like a lot of premature kids, I was tiny and weighed in at just under five pounds. It took me a long time to catch up: I was loads smaller than other kids my age right until my mid-teens.
Having made my arrival, I found I was joining quite the crowd scene. My mum and dad had always wanted a big family, and I was the youngest of seven kids with only eleven years between the lot of us: Finbarr, Peter, Yvonne, Liam, Denise, Mairead and me. You have probably worked out by now that my parents were Catholic.
My dad, Peter Filan, was from Castleplunkett in County Roscommon while my mum, Mae MacNicholas, was from Kiltimagh in Mayo. They had met in the 1950s at a dance in Carrick-on-Shannon. My mum was a very beautiful girl with jet-black hair and she was a great dancer, and my dad was transfixed the second he set eyes on her.
He kept going back to the same dance week after week and eventually worked up the courage to talk to her. Mum was working as a clerk in the town hall at Carrick-on-Shannon and sharing an apartment with a couple of other girls, and she invited him round for tea and biscuits one afternoon. They are still together close on fifty years later. They must have been great biscuits.
My dad’s parents had tried to encourage him to go into the priesthood, but he had managed to swerve that one. Instead, he had got together with a brother and a sister – my Uncle Luke and Aunty Lily – and they bought a café in Castlerea, close by Castleplunkett.
They ran the place for a bit but when my dad married my mum, the two of them and Uncle Luke bought another café called the Mayfair in Sligo. I think they chose Sligo just because it was halfway between her home and his. Then a year or so later my parents went off and upgraded to a bigger café, the Carlton, which was just around the corner in Castle Street, in the middle of Sligo.
That was where I grew up; my home for more than twenty years. The Carlton was a proper old-fashioned diner-style Irish café with long wooden tables and a big counter at the side of the room where everything got cooked. Mum did the books, she and Dad were the chefs and we all lived on the two upstairs floors.
We had four bedrooms between seven kids and so we took it in turns to share. A lot of kids might have kicked off about this, but it was just how it was and we never really minded. We were always chopping and changing: I think I must have shared with every one of my siblings over the years.
These were the days before McDonalds and Burger King hit Sligo and there were only two restaurants in the town centre, so our café always seemed to be packed. People would come in for breakfast, lunch, dinner – and to fill up after the pubs had shut. Often, we would be open until three in the morning.
Looking back, my parents had an amazing relationship. They weren’t soppy or lovey-dovey but I genuinely don’t think I ever heard them have a cross word. My dad was mad for music and he would always be playing Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline around the house. He was a pretty good singer himself.
My mum wasn’t. She couldn’t hit a note.
As clear as anything, I can still hear my dad every morning, in the bathroom as he shaved, singing ‘True Love’ by Bing Crosby. The other song I remember was Slim Whitman’s ‘Darling, Happy Anniversary’, which he’d always sing to my mum on their wedding anniversary. He’d be hugging her, and she’d be telling him not to be an eejit and trying to fight him off.
What was I like as a kid? My mum used to tell me I was a scourge. I don’t doubt she was right. I wasn’t a bad kid, but I was this tiny ball of energy, running everywhere, making a racket, always daydreaming and with zero attention span.
Today, I’m sure that experts would say that I had attention deficit disorder. Back then, I was just a pain in the arse.
Being the youngest of seven was pretty cool. With three big brothers and three big sisters to spoil me, I thought I could get away with just about anything. Maybe because I had to fight for attention, I was talkative and I almost never shut up. To be honest, nothing has really changed in that respect.
I loved growing up in Sligo. As a kid it seemed like a fantastic place, and as I grew older, I still felt the same. Because it has a cathedral, it is technically a small city, but really it is a big town – and in its friendliness and its sense of community, it seemed to have the spirit of a close-knit village.
It felt like everything we needed was right at hand. The local shop was a minute away, as were the video store, the church and my school. We were next door to the sweet shop. I guess kids always think that their home is the centre of the world, but I knew it for a fact.
My infant school was called Scoil Fatima and I started there when I was four. My first day was nerve-wracking. The school was run by nuns, and as I held my mum’s hand and queued up to enroll, one of the boys ran out of the line and a nun yelled at him and belted him up the arse. It terrified me: was my mum really sure she wanted me to go here?
My first few days were traumatic as I tried to fit in. My brother Finbarr was in the school down the road, and one day I saw him with his nose against a classroom window, pulling faces at me. I burst into tears, and it took my teacher an age to calm me down.
Yet I never had any major problems at school. I was only a little dot, but with my three elder brothers around, nobody was ever going to pick on me, and I made friends easily. I’d drive the teachers spare with talking in class and never concentrating, but they knew I would never be any serious trouble.
Like most Irish women of her generation, my mum was very devout and would be praying to St Anthony, the patron saint of lost stuff, if she mislaid anything. She packed all of us kids off to Mass every Sunday. The services lasted an hour. I’m not sure it’s the sort of thing any young kid would enjoy, and we got pretty bored, but our going kept Mum happy.
Living over a café was perfect for a boy who loved his food. I would go home at lunchtime or after school and help myself to fishfingers, mash and beans, or grab a few chips and a can of Coke or Fanta and run upstairs. We even had an ice-cream machine.
It was great to have all that stuff on tap, but every night my mum did us a full cooked dinner. My favourite was a real west of Ireland delicacy: bacon and cabbage with parsley sauce. It is hard to think of any way that life over the café could have been any better…
Well, it could have been a bit warmer. My mum never liked central heating – she thought it might give us asthma – so we had little heaters in our rooms and went off to bed in winter in jumpers, clutching hot-water bottles.
Finbarr had the worst of it. His room down the end of the corridor was so cold we all called it The Fridge.
The situation with the heating wasn’t Mum’s only old-fashioned way. She also had no time for television, thinking it was a waste of time that would get in the way of our studying, so we only had two channels on our telly: RTE1 and RTE2. It meant that I never got to see most of the shows the other kids at school talked about (although for a while I developed an unhealthy fixation with the Australian teatime soap Home and Away).
I never minded the lack of TV too much because we had so much else going on. My family had a few horses in a stable right around the corner from our house, and three nights per week or so I’d go straight from school to the yard and saddle up.
We had a grey pony called Jasper and I absolutely loved him. Feeding Jasper after school with Dad or my brother Liam are some of my very happiest childhood memories. And I’ve got a lot.
Liam and my sister Denise were great riders and Liam took it upon himself to teach me. He was very patient and would take me off on ten-mile trots on Jasper, but he would often complain that I was daydreaming and didn’t listen to what he was telling me.
He was dead right. I didn’t.
Liam was so mad into the horses that if it was raining and we couldn’t get out to ride, he would fix up an equestrian course in the hallways of our house. He would make jumps out of chairs and hurley sticks and he, Denise and I would attempt the course. I was so tiny that I would normally go flying.
Denise and Liam were pretty
serious about riding. They entered national tournaments and local jumping shows such as the Sligo Gymkhana and I would go with them. I would get decked out in my jodhpurs and riding hat and trot around on Jasper in the tiny-tots category. I even won a prize once or twice.
More importantly, Sligo Gymkhana was where I met my first girlfriend. Fran and I were both seven, she was very pretty with blonde hair, and she was as tiny as me. We announced that we were boyfriend and girlfriend and took to strolling around hand-in-hand and pecking each other on the cheek. It was a big deal for us. Everybody else thought it was hilarious.
Fox-hunting was big in our part of Ireland and every St Stephen’s Day and New Year’s Day, my whole family would saddle up and join in with the hunt. Now I am older, I can see what a cruel sport it is, but as a kid it was incredibly exciting and I looked forward to it.
Because we never watched TV, I had loads of hobbies. I had a spell of being mad for Bruce Lee and took up kung fu. I joined a club, the Green Dragon, run by a man called John Sweeney, the dad of one of my school friends, Jonathan.
I worked through to being a green belt before I got bored of kung fu. I entered a couple of competitions, though; when I was proclaimed King of the Spinning Kick and given a trophy, for doing a big roundhouse kick, I could not have been more proud.
I must have had a little thing for exotic violent men, because my favourite toy was a doll of Mr T from The A Team. I loved to pull the string in his back and hear his deep, scornful voice: ‘I pity the fool!’
Yet while show jumping, first kisses, kung fu and Mr T passed the time, they all faded to nothing next to my love for Michael Jackson.
I had always loved singing as a little kid. As a nipper, I would belt out a song for my uncles and aunties at family parties, and I had a couple of party pieces: ‘Uptown Girl’ by Billy Joel and ‘I Won’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’ by Nik Kershaw (I wonder whatever happened to him?). But when I first heard Jacko, it changed everything.
I was eight years old when the Bad album came out and it absolutely transfixed me. Michael Jackson! He just seemed so incredible, so brilliant at everything he did. He had this amazing aura, like he had beamed down to Earth from a different planet, and I totally worshipped him.