by Shane Filan
He took over my little life. For months I played Bad to death, over and over, until I knew it by heart. Every inch of the door and walls in my bedroom was covered in Michael pictures. I wrapped my fingers in bandages like him and took to parading around in one white glove.
Even this wasn’t enough for me. Seven doors down the road from us was a gentleman’s tailor, Horan’s, the only place in Sligo that sold hats. I would go in there, try them on and perfect my Michael dance routines, grabbing my crotch and moonwalking for the ladies who worked in the shop. They all laughed their heads off.
My favourite song from Bad was the huge ballad ‘Man in the Mirror’. I had a video of Michael singing it at a stadium show, in front of thousands of people who were holding up lighters like a city of twinkling lights. I must have watched it a thousand times. In fact, that might be an underestimate.
I studied that video like a set text and sang along with Michael’s every note. I had all of his quirky little vocal tics and hiccups down to a tee. I’d make my sisters be my audience and at first they would be falling around laughing, but then they would stop chuckling and tell me: ‘Jesus, Shane, you’re really good!’
I suppose that what I was doing was basically karaoke, but I had it spot-on and it was note-perfect. I dragged my mum in to watch the ‘Man in the Mirror’ video and told her, ‘That’s what I want to do when I grow up – I want to be like him.’ She smiled, humoured me and told me that I had to keep studying in case it didn’t work out.
In truth, Mum’s warning was timely because I wasn’t doing great in school. By now I had left Scoil Fatima for St John’s National School, then at twelve I went on to the big local all-boys secondary school, Summerhill College. It was fair to say that I was not setting the place alight.
The Filan family had always been academic. All my brothers and sisters had been straight-A and -B students and the older ones were by now leaving for university and doing some serious heavyweight studying. Peter was training to be a doctor; Finbarr was on his way to becoming an engineer. They had all worked hard and sailed through their exams.
I was showing every sign of not following in their footsteps. I wasn’t a bad pupil, or particularly disruptive, but I found it impossible to concentrate in class. I would be daydreaming and a million miles away, or else getting told off for talking. The teachers even called my parents in to have a little chat about my shortcomings.
The problem was that none of the subjects really interested me. I was no good at languages, even my own. I didn’t mind maths, accountancy and even home economics, but most of the time I would be away in my own little world, imagining being on a stage singing to thousands.
It wasn’t like I thought it could seriously happen. I knew that realistically I would never be like Michael Jackson. But in the back of my head there was a different, nervous but insistent voice, nagging away at me with some siren words: ‘Look, it happened to him. Why shouldn’t it happen for you?’
Outside of school, everything was going grand. As I headed towards my teens, like any boy I began to grow interested in girls, although going to all-boys schools made it difficult to meet them. Having broken Fran’s heart (or did she break mine? I can’t remember…), I would have been about eleven when I decided to try love again.
Her name was Orla and our mums knew each other through taking their kids to Irish dancing. My sister Mairead was big into it. Orla and her mum would come round to visit us, and Orla and I would sneak off to far corners of the house, to hold hands and kiss.
Orla was my ‘girlfriend’ for about a year. We probably only met four times, because her mum didn’t call in all that often, but I liked her and it felt cool to have a girlfriend. She was about eighteen months younger than me, so it was textbook puppy love.
About six months into our relationship, Orla and I decided to try French kissing, like we had seen on Dallas. We planned it carefully, but as soon as our open mouths clamped together, we were wide-eyed with horror: ‘Euurgh! What was that?’ We went straight back to kissing on the lips. It just seemed nicer, somehow.
Orla’s and my relationship dwindled to a close but I was keen to meet more girls, so I started going with Mum and Mairead to Mairead’s Irish dancing championships. The girls there were beautiful, done up to the nines, and I would run around trying to chat them up. I had the gift of the gab so some of them would talk with me, but a lot were put off by the fact that I barely came up to their shoulder.
At home, I was really keen to start working in the café. All of my brothers and sisters had passed through there – Finbarr was a great cook, and Denise was very organized and helped to run the place. I wasn’t really old enough to wait tables yet but I would get sent out on errands.
‘Shane! Can you get some peas and some curry sauce?’ my dad would yell, and I’d be off, grabbing a handful of coins from the till and running between the three local shops to see who had them. I always hoped that Cosgrove’s, the grocers over the road, could help me out, as the other two stores were a slog up a steep hill.
I liked doing the errands because it gave me a chance to rob the till. If I was going out to buy a 60p tub of curry sauce, I would take a fiver, and when I came back I’d put £2 back in the till and keep the rest for myself. I never took much and I wouldn’t have dared to take notes, but these little infusions of illicit cash came in handy for sweet money.
Because I kept my pilfering small and I was sneaky about it, I fondly imagined I was getting away with it. It wasn’t until years later that I learned my parents had known about it all along, and just weren’t that bothered.
So by the time I was twelve, life was grand and I could not have been much more content with my lot. The only cloud was my continued mediocre academic performance. I came to dread parents’ evenings, when my parents would go to Summerhill College to be told how I never paid attention in class and had a string of demerits to my name because I never shut up.
It was getting to be a pressure on me, because with all of my older siblings being such high achievers, it was starting to look like I was going to be the black sheep of the family – or, more honestly, the runt of the litter.
I felt this even more because I was still so tiny. I longed to be like my brothers, big and strong and playing rugby, but I was a little ferret. I felt people didn’t take me seriously because of it. My mum always said a growth spurt would come, but I knew secretly she was worried that I was such a midget.
Thinking back, I guess what I needed was a clue to my direction in life, a confidence boost, a chance to discover something that I was really good at. I got it.
My drama teacher at school was called Mr McEvoy: Dave McEvoy. I didn’t get on with a lot of the teachers, who correctly thought I was an annoying little shit who wouldn’t keep his mouth shut, but Dave was kind and laid-back and easy to talk to. He also loved music and it didn’t take me long to bond with him.
Dave was the person who organized and staged the musical theatre productions at Summerhill College, together with a very posh lady named Mrs Fitzpatrick, and he asked me to get involved and go to rehearsals. To my delight, he said he thought I was somebody who could be really good on the stage.
Unlike English, science or metalwork, singing was something that I knew I was good at (after all, I was definitely Sligo’s leading exponent of Michael Jackson karaoke). I got a buzz from hanging out at the after-school theatre classes and for the first time I began to feel I might have found my niche.
I was saying this to Finbarr at home one afternoon and my brother happily agreed: ‘Sure, you’re a great singer!’ But he went further. He had heard that a local theatre group, the Hawks Well Theatre, was auditioning for actors and singers to appear in their musicals. Why didn’t I give it a go?
Well, why didn’t I? I had nothing to lose.
Hawks Well Theatre was run by a very friendly, driven and formidable woman in her thirties called Mary McDonagh. She was the producer, director, choreographer, and pretty much everything else. I wen
t down to meet her, did a little sketch and a song for her, and she told me that I was in.
I wasn’t the only local boy who had gone down to audition for her. There was also a lad named Kian Egan.
Kian was at Summerhill College too, but I didn’t know him very well. Although he was a lot taller than me – as were most people – he was in the year below me, so although I had seen him around town and in the school corridors, we hadn’t really talked. That all changed as we hung out together at Hawks Well.
Kian wasn’t really into school but, unlike me, he was great at English and always won the school poetry competitions. His big thing was rock music. He loved bands like Green Day and Metallica and was in his own metal band named Skrod (anyone who speaks Gaelic will know how rude that is).
This meant he was horrified by my own musical tastes. I had always been about pop, and specifically boy bands: New Kids on the Block and Kris Kross (I even wore my jeans backwards in honour of the latter pair). Take That were just emerging and I loved them from the start.
Kian thought this really wasn’t cool at all.
But he and I got on well and bonded over our love of drama and singing. In the run up to Christmas, 1991, Hawks Well was putting on a performance of Grease, the John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John musical. It was a full adult production but it had a chorus of teenagers, so Kian and I assumed we would be in that.
It turned out that Mary had other plans for us. She had thought that Kian and I had something about us when we auditioned, so she wrote in a little scene just for us, telling us we were to play Danny and Kenickie’s younger brothers. We were quite surprised but it was exciting.
Kian and I had a little scene in the first half where we walked onstage like little mini-Danny Zukos in blue jeans and white T-shirts with slicked-back hair, bumped into two girls and went off with them. It was all very cute.
Right after the interval, I reappeared onstage with one of the girls, Olwyn, who played a character called Cherry. Our dialogue went something like this:
Me:
Hey, Cherry, can I carry your books?
Olwyn:
But I don’t have any books!
Me:
Do you want to go for a walk?
Olwyn:
OK!
Me:
Let’s go together!
Then the two of us would sing ‘We Go Together’, the closing song from the movie. Mary explained that on the night we would do it with a live band, with microphones clipped to us, which sounded terrifying but cool. For six weeks, I went down to the Hawks Well after school and rehearsed the arse off that scene.
At rehearsals Kian and I hung out with the kids in the chorus, one of whom was Kian’s cousin, a girl named Gillian Walsh. She was two months older than me, had long, curly, strawberry blonde hair and was very pretty and easy to talk to. She stood out to me, and any chance I got, I’d be running over and chatting with her.
On the first night of our week-long run, I felt sick with nerves. The Hawks Well was a proper theatre: it had a double balcony and it held 400 people, and as I stood by the side of the stage waiting to go on, I knew every seat in the house was full. I thought I was going to faint.
When we walked out, the heat of the lights and the noise of the audience hit me and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Somehow I managed to get my lines out, but when the band struck up for the song I hit my stride and we belted out ‘We Go Together’ pretty well.
We must have looked comical – I was three feet tall and serenading a girl a foot bigger than me – but at the end, there was a roar of applause. The clapping went on for an age. Some people were even standing up! As I stood there, shocked, soaking it all in, one thought was going through my head.
Yes! This is what I want! It was the first time I had ever stood on a stage, the first time I had sung in front of a crowd, and I loved it. Afterwards my mum and dad and brothers and sisters took it in turns to tell me how good I was. I lapped up every word.
The applause wasn’t the only thing I had liked about the production, though. Gillian had left a mark on my impressionable young mind, and when Kian and I went to see her in another Hawks Well Theatre show, The Pajama Game, shortly after my Grease triumph, I asked him a favour: ‘Can you fix me up with your cousin?’
All credit to Kian, he didn’t waste any time. He vanished backstage in the interval to ask Gillian if she would go on a date with me, and re-emerged with the good news that she would. The second half of The Pajama Game passed in a blur of excitement for me. It wasn’t down to the script.
That weekend, Gillian and I went to a teenage disco called Dino’s and had a few soft drinks, a bit of a bop and, at the end, a slow dance and even a bit of a snog. That was it: I was thirteen and I had a new girlfriend. Life was good!
Dave McEvoy from the school drama group had seen me in Grease and asked me if I’d be in his next musical. It was to be Annie Get Your Gun and because we were an all-boys school, I sang in the chorus and played a girl called Jessie, in a floral dress with a bonnet over my hair, which was tied up in a bun.
That was just a bit of a hoot, but things got more serious when Dave and Mrs Fitzpatrick asked me to audition to be in Oliver! and I got the part of the Artful Dodger. It was a proper production, with teachers playing the older roles like Fagin, and I was so excited to get the script. My main thing was still singing, but I loved getting into the acting aspect of it as well.
We did Oliver! in front of the whole school and it went great. Naturally, not everybody loved it. Some of the lads in school thought acting in shows was poofy, and enjoyed slagging me off: ‘Look at yer fella, dressing up and singing, and being into boy bands!’ Oddly enough, it didn’t bother me at all.
I was more concerned with what the girls thought. Being the Artful Dodger was the second time I had stood on a stage getting cheered, and I couldn’t help noticing just how many girls were into it. Suddenly they were paying me a lot more attention. It was a major confidence boost.
My fling with Gillian had fizzled out after a few weeks and so I started to try to play the field. My role model in this was my eldest brother, Peter, who was still training to be a doctor and was big into his clothes and image. He was always bringing attractive girlfriends home (I used to look forward to them) and I longed to be like him.
I had a simple rule of thumb: I would go after the most attractive girl in the room. I was still a little short-arse so a lot of them didn’t want to know, despite my new status as mini-star of the local shows. Rejection never bothered me too much; I would just bounce back, and on to the next one.
Yet I was oddly moral about it all, probably because of how special my mum and dad’s relationship was. If I was dating a girl, I would never see somebody else at the same time: it just felt wrong. I would tell my girlfriend, ‘It’s not working out…’ and be snogging the face off her best friend five minutes later.
At home I had started serving tables in the café, which I really enjoyed. I used to like giving liver and onions to the old fellas who came in every day and always sat at the same table. I also got really into cleaning the place when it was closed, for some reason. You could see your face in the floor when I had finished it.
It was like an obsessive compulsive disorder (not that we had heard of the phrase OCD in those days). I would start off cleaning the tables, then have to do the floors, then the pots and finally the walls. By the time I had finished, the whole Carlton would reek of Jif.
Freakish, I know – yet it is something I have carried through to my adult life.
After the success of the Hawks Well Theatre production of Grease, my school decided to do the same show. This time I was promoted to Kenickie, and together with Kian and a few other lads we made up the T-Birds.
We wore leather jackets, slicked our hair back and sang all those great songs from Grease like some sort of 1950s boy band. It got a lot of attention locally, a few girls screamed at us onstage, and it was a real blast.
It was around tha
t time that a lad called Mark Feehily introduced himself to me.
I knew who Mark was. He was in the year below me at Summerhill College, like Kian, and he had been knocking around the musicals – he had been in Annie Get Your Gun and in the chorus of Grease. But we hadn’t really spoken until he came up and said hi.
Mark was a lot shyer and more self-conscious than Kian and me, but I thought he had balls of steel. I had seen him in school talent shows, which I would never have dared to do, belting out Mariah Carey songs. He had this amazing R&B/soul voice, and he never seemed to miss a note.
Mark and I quickly became great mates and started hanging out at each other’s houses. Our new friendship was totally based on singing – we would watch music videos and sing along and harmonize to them. Most people might have thought it was weird but we loved doing it.
He also shared my own musical tastes, which had been disgusting Kian more than ever of late. I was big into Take That by now, and Boyzone; it wasn’t that I thought Boyzone were particularly cool, like Take That were, but I loved the fact that they were Irish and they had made it big. It gave me an incentive and made me think, If they can do it, why can’t we? Why can’t I?
Yet my big group at the time was the Backstreet Boys. As soon as they came along, I loved them in a way that I hadn’t loved anyone since Michael Jackson.
It’s always hard to say exactly why you worship some music, but I thought the Backstreet Boys had everything. Their songs were incredible, they had great melodies and harmonies, and I loved their dress sense. I adored Brian Littrell’s voice – plus, of course, they were American, which made them glamorous and untouchable.
Being into boy bands still wasn’t hip, but in truth I loved them so much that I didn’t really care what anyone else thought. In any case, it wasn’t like I lived for them; I was still also doing the things that any normal teenage boy would do. Like chasing girls and drinking.