by Shane Filan
We found out our fate on a Sunday – of course. Sunday is always chart day. It was Sunday 25 April 1999. We were recording a track in Pete Waterman’s studio in London, killing time until the chart show later that afternoon, when Kian’s phone rang.
It was Louis.
‘Lads, I have some news for you.’
We all held our breath.
‘You’re going to be number one.’
5
‘SHANE, I LOVE YOU!’
It had been just over a year since I had dropped to my knees and sobbed with joy at MJ Carr’s when Louis had phoned to tell me that IOYOU were supporting the Backstreet Boys. Now we were top of the charts.
We had never in a million years remotely imagined anything like this happening, and happening so quickly. It would be easy to say that it felt like a dream, but as I scrabbled for my phone to tell Gillian and my parents the news, I thought that I would never even have dared to dream this.
Being number one brings with it its own special ritual, of course. Two days later, we were at Elstree Studios in London to perform on Top of the Pops, a show I had watched religiously every week for as long as I could remember (at friends’ houses; it wasn’t on either of the two channels that Mum let us have at home).
Beforehand, I was very nervous about our performance. A lot of artists mimed on Top of the Pops, but Simon decreed that we should sing ‘Swear It Again’ live, which meant that I had to lead off and sing the first verse on my own in front of 5 million people. Nice one, Simon!
Simon saw that I was worried, and had a brainwave. ‘Why don’t you sit down to sing?’ he suggested. ‘It will help you to concentrate.’ He had the idea of us all sitting in a line along the front of the stage on bar stools.
Westlife didn’t particularly have any up-tempo songs then and we weren’t really a dancing band anyway, so it made sense. Of course, we weren’t to know that over the years those stools would become our gimmick and the thing that millions of people associated us with!
(As well as, incidentally, gaining us a reputation as the laziest band in pop. What can you do?)
Top of the Pops was filmed right next door to the EastEnders set so we had a quick goose at that. I was overawed at being on TOTP, especially when I bumped into Shania Twain, a beautiful, tiny woman in thigh-length boots, backstage. ‘Howdy,’ she trilled at me as I gawped, starstruck.
There were only about 100 people in the studio audience but there were a few Westlife fans there yelling for us, which helped. My mouth felt dry as Jamie Theakston introduced us, lined up on our stools behind him. I took a deep breath and hit the opening note, and it went fine.
‘Swear It Again’ was still number one the next week so we took our stools back to Top of the Pops… and then began one of the most insane and intense periods in the band’s history. If we thought we had been busy before, now we had a number one, it really went crazy.
‘Swear It Again’ was also a decent-sized hit in a few European countries, so we did short follow-up trips to play PAs (personal appearances) or do interviews. Each trip away was the first time that we had been to whichever country it was, and it was an incredibly exciting and exotic time.
Or rather, it would have been if we had actually got to see any of the countries we were in. We soon learned our tight schedules didn’t allow for any of that. What we saw of most countries consisted of this: airport-car-record label-car-radio station-car-hotel-car-radio station-car-airport.
On a flying visit back to Stockholm, we got to meet a new, upcoming US rapper called Eminem. He was following us onstage to do a song at a radio station roadshow, and as we crossed paths, he sneered at us: ‘Wow! You’re the new f**king Backstreet Boys, huh?’
We were taken aback, and a bit gutted, and I held forth to the rest of the band afterwards: ‘He’s a bit of a bollocks, isn’t he? What a dickhead! What the f**k does he know? In any case, a white guy trying to be a rapper – shit, he’s never going to get anywhere…’
At a radio station in Madrid we met Britney Spears, who had just had a massive hit with ‘… Baby One More Time’. She was nice but just sitting quietly in the corner, with short hair, and I was a bit disappointed.
I guess I was hoping that she would be in pigtails and a school uniform.
We saw a bit more of Spain when we went to Tenerife for three days. Our second single was to be ‘If I Let You Go’ and we flew out to the Mediterranean to make a video for it.
It was the first time I’d been to a sunny holiday destination and I had no idea how to dress. On the first day, I appeared by the hotel pool in flip-flops, white socks, shorts, a vest with a shirt over it and a bum bag.
The rest of the lads fell off their sun loungers laughing and sent me back up to change. Truth be told, as a vain boy, I was mortified.
For the video we had to stride down a beach in vests looking mean and moody as a pair of horsemen galloped through the surf behind us. It was hard to keep a straight face but it was our second vid, we were getting used to the cameras and we were on the way to becoming professional poseurs.
Being in Tenerife and soaking up the sun was great, but it was the first time we realized how knackering making videos can be. We would start at eight in the morning and end at two at night: an eighteen-hour day to make – what? Three minutes of film?
It was all about ‘Hurry up and wait’: hours and hours sitting around a Winnebago eating sweets, drinking Coke and talking shite. Normally, Brian would regale us with stories of his adventures in Dublin, tell jokes or just ramble on. He was definitely the band entertainment.
Everything was new, and fresh, and it was such a huge buzz for Westlife to be getting successful in Britain, Ireland and even Europe. It was even more amazing to realize that our new-found success had spread to countries that some of us had hardly heard of.
Sony BMG said that ‘Swear It Again’ had gone down great in Southeast Asia and so Simon packed us off over there in the early summer of 1999 for a short promo tour. We didn’t have the first idea what to expect; as I remember it, we were all just excited about going on our first long-haul flight.
We landed in Indonesia and as we got off the plane the heat and the humidity hit us. It was like we were on a different planet. We were expecting to be met by a driver and maybe a local record-label person, but as we rode an escalator into baggage reclaim, we heard a mad noise.
Thunk!
Thunk!
Thunk!
There was a big window alongside the reclaim area, and all we could see were a thousand or more girls packed against it, faces squashed against the glass, banging on the window as if they wanted to smash it. We thought they might just do it.
As we cleared customs into Arrivals, the whole hall was crammed with excited fans, aged between about twelve and eighteen, screaming, crying, waving and holding up signs:
‘SHANE, I LOVE YOU!’
‘KIAN, YOU ARE MINE!’
There were ten security guards waiting and they had to take us out one by one with the fans fighting them to get to us.
It was the same in Malaysia and the Philippines. We sped around in vans with security and girls would jump into taxis and tell them to follow us. They’d pull alongside at speed, the girls yelling, ‘Hello! We love you!’ and the taxi driver grinning, giving us a thumbs-up and totally ignoring the chaotic road in front of him.
How do you start to make sense of that? How do you process it? It was bizarre, exhilarating, surreal and a bit scary. We giggled nervously as we were pursued through Manila or Kuala Lumpur: we felt a long, long way from home and at the centre of a whole lot of madness.
Louis had seen it all before with Boyzone, of course, and he tried to keep our feet on the ground. However, what really brought home to us how insane things were becoming was going back to Sligo.
That summer of 1999, when we were not on the road, we had largely been staying in London. The record label put us up at the K West hotel in Shepherd’s Bush. I was living off room-service meals of ste
ak and mash every night. Gillian would often fly over at weekends.
It seemed like we had done a signing session in pretty much every city going except for Sligo, and we were desperate to put that right. Maybe we figured our hometown would give us a welcome dose of normality. The reality was exactly the opposite.
We did a signing for ‘If I Let You Go’ at The Record Room. The police had closed off part of the city, the thousands of fans were delirious and our hometown was the scene of the same pandemonium we experienced everywhere else we went. Even here, the rules had changed.
The next week, ‘If I Let You Go’ became our second single to go straight to number one. It knocked Ronan Keating’s solo record ‘When You Say Nothing At All’ off the top, which was weird: just a year ago, he’d been like a god to us.
Simon and Louis were working us into the ground. They put us back on the Smash Hits roadshow. In contrast to the first year, when we were wide-eyed newcomers, now we were headlining over Steps, B*Witched, Billie Piper… and a new girl band from Liverpool called Atomic Kitten.
Atomic Kitten hadn’t yet had a big hit with ‘Whole Again’. They were starting out and were pretty unknown, just like we had been the year before. They were a lot of fun and we had a good laugh hanging out with them at the shows.
They were all proper funny, quick-witted Liverpool girls and the most over-the-top was Kerry Katona. Kerry was lovely, a very pretty blonde girl and a bubbly, sunny person, a real motormouth who was always laughing, swearing and talking flat out. She seemed like the Kittens’ version of Brian.
Brian certainly noticed her. They were like two sides of the same coin and they clicked straight away. After we met the Kittens for the first time, he couldn’t shut up about her in the dressing room afterwards: ‘Ah, that Kerry, she’s amazing, isn’t she? She’s class, that one!’
We could see Brian fancied Kerry and they were doing some pretty serious flirting all throughout the tour, but we didn’t think too much of it: we figured it was just Brian being Brian. There was so much else going on that it wasn’t a big deal for us.
It seemed like in a flash we were becoming the biggest boy band in Britain. Suddenly, we were hardly off magazine front covers and the radio. Our nearest rivals were 5ive, who were a couple of albums ahead of us and seemed to be on CD:UK every week, the same as we were.
We were probably a bit in awe of 5ive, because they had had a lot of hits, but there was definitely a rivalry between us, and a couple of them would never acknowledge us when we met. But they had a very different image to us.
5ive were the new East 17-type bad boys of pop, whereas Westlife were squeaky clean. Or, at least, that was how we were seen. Simon and Louis were adamant that we had to set an example and be role models, because we were going to have a lot of very young fans, some of them not yet even teenagers, looking up to us.
Simon was also in charge of 5ive, of course, but for whatever reason he wanted to cast us as the clean-cut, well-dressed, polite young lads that girls could take home to meet their mums. He liked us being in the pop papers but he didn’t want us getting snapped falling out of nightclubs drunk.
We were just normal young lads, but we went along with all of this. We liked a drink but none of us were alcoholics, and we certainly never went near drugs. We had seen Robbie Williams going off the rails and leaving Take That: it was the last thing that we wanted to happen to us.
In any case, we didn’t need to get high. We were flying every day – quite literally in October ’99, when ‘Flying Without Wings’ was finally released as a single. We had known from the second we were given it that it was our secret weapon, and without being cocky, we weren’t at all surprised when it went to number one. It was a song that deserved to.
In fact, with our first three singles having all gone straight in at number one, I think we were beginning to feel invincible. When the Westlife album was released the following month, we sat back and waited for it to do the same.
It didn’t. Westlife went into the chart at number two – pipped to the top by just a thousand sales by Steps’ Steptacular album.
I could pretend that we weren’t gutted by this – but I would be lying. It was a bit of a shocker. We knew Steps from the Smash Hits tours and bumping into them at TV studios and we liked them, so it was nothing personal. But we had also liked our image as the band that always got to number one.
So we brooded for a few days, but it didn’t last. We might have lost our unbeaten record but Westlife was still flying out of the shops and in no time went platinum: 300,000 sales. This was seriously major.
In fact, what could be bigger than that? Well, maybe the chance to play for the Queen of England.
Four weeks after the album came out, we appeared at the Royal Variety Performance. It was at the Hippodrome in Birmingham and, to say the least, featured quite a range of talent: Steps, Charlotte Church, LeAnn Rimes, Joe Pasquale, Barry Manilow and Ken Dodd. Lucky Her Majesty!
Sony BMG told us that we should promote our upcoming Christmas single, a cover of Abba’s ‘I Have a Dream’. The label had suggested we cover it, and Louis had agreed, and said we should do it as a double A-side with an old 1970s ballad called ‘Seasons in the Sun’, which, if I am honest, I had never heard of.
It was pretty nerve-wracking singing Abba in front of the Queen, and even more so when we queued up to meet her afterwards. Her courtiers briefed us in advance on the protocol. We were to call her ‘Your Majesty’ or ‘Ma’am’; we didn’t speak to her unless she spoke to us; we didn’t put out a hand to shake unless she extended hers to us.
The Queen was surprisingly small and proceeded down the line of artistes fairly slowly, not speaking to many of them. She was wearing a brightly coloured dress that looked like a Quality Street wrapper.
When she came to me, she stopped and looked me up and down.
Jesus! I’m about to talk to the Queen!
‘That was a lovely song you sang,’ she told me, in that world-famous cut-glass accent. (I suppose you’d call it the Queen’s English.) ‘Did you write it yourselves?’
‘No, Ma’am,’ I told her. ‘It is by Abba.’
She smiled and moved on down the line of band members – including Brian, who had clearly forgotten every word of the advance protocol briefing we had been given.
‘Ah, Ma’am, that’s a lovely dress you have there!’ he greeted her, extending his hand with a beaming smile. An invisible thought bubble formed over the heads of the other four band members: ‘Brian, shut the f**k up!’
Meeting the Queen was one more highlight in an amazing year that ended on yet another high. In a TV ceremony voted by viewers, we won the Record of the Year award for ‘Flying Without Wings’, beating Ricky Martin’s ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’, Britney Spears’s ‘… Baby One More Time’, and even Ronan’s ‘When You Say Nothing At All’. When they read out our name as the winners I jumped up from the table, punched the air, and my shirt burst open to the waist – but I didn’t care. Yet again, I had to wonder, Is this really happening?
But our incredible year hadn’t quite finished with us yet. I don’t know whether the Queen bought a copy, but ‘I Have a Dream’ followed our first three singles straight to the top of the chart.
As Westlife headed back to Ireland for a much-needed holiday, we were Britain’s Christmas number one.
Our lives had changed beyond recognition. At Christmas in Sligo that winter of 1999, it showed. For one thing, fans from all over the world had started undertaking pilgrimages to my home at the Carlton Café.
I had given my mum and dad a few gold discs for our singles and they had dotted them around the café’s walls. Some girls would fly in from Italy or Japan and nurse a glass of Coke in the Carlton for five hours.
Mum loved chatting to them. If I were ever home, wandered in and said, ‘Good morning’ to those girls, they just froze.
Mostly people in Sligo were cool with us. That was a relief. As I walked around town, everybody wanted a word or a chat, an
d I was determined to give it to them. I didn’t want anyone saying that yer man had gone off, got famous and turned into a bigheaded bollock.
Naturally, not everybody in Ireland loved Westlife from the off. There are always begrudgers and a few people would throw us nasty comments if they had a few drinks in them. It never really bothered us. I’d just think, Mate, check the charts!
We occasionally got abuse in Dublin. I’ll never forget around that time being in a minibus and passing a kid of about twelve on a mountain bike. He clocked us and set off in pursuit, his legs whirling like a windmill. He caught up with us at traffic lights, stared in the open van window and let us have it: ‘WESTLIFE! ARSE BANDITS!’
Luckily, we were laughing too much to be offended.
In Sligo, though, we were hometown heroes and most people seemed proud of us. The biggest danger was that I would go out for a drink with Gillian and never get a chance to speak to her because of everyone coming up wanting to talk. After all, there was a lot to talk about.
It had been such a mad year. In 1999, Westlife had had four number-one singles, a number-two album, got massive in Asia and even started to get big in South America. It was all the more weird as we hadn’t even properly been on tour yet.
That Christmas in Sligo, Kian, Mark and I calculated that we had worked 103 days non-stop. It was great to fall back into the routine of local pubs, vodka and Red Bull, table seven at the Embassy, and Equinox.
On Millennium Eve, me and the Sligo lads hired out a local club called the Penthouse for a big party for our friends and family. It was such an exciting night. A new era was dawning – and we all sensed we had some incredible times ahead.
As Westlife reconvened early in 2000, we learned some wild news. Brian had started dating Kerry Katona and had spent Christmas in Dublin with her. That wasn’t all he had done. He had asked her to marry him.
It was crazy sudden, but that was Brian for you, and after the initial shock we were all pleased for them – they clearly loved each other. Kerry moved to Ireland pretty quickly and started getting really friendly with Gillian.