by Shane Filan
‘Let’s write about what is important to you…’
As the sessions developed and I worked with a whole range of songwriters, there was one theme dominating my lyrics: how much I loved Gillian and my children, and how grateful I was to have a fantastic, happy life with them.
What was it that Gillian had said at the darkest point of the storm, when I could see no way out? ‘You still have me, Nicole, Patrick and Shane. What more do you need?’
She was right. Forget all the shite that had gone down in the last few years. I was still a very, very lucky man.
Universal had given me six months to make the album, which felt amazing to me. It could not have been more different from Westlife – in fact, we would probably have made four albums in that time!
Over the months, it all came together. I went to Steve Mac’s studio to do a track with him and Wayne Hector. Before we started work, I went to the toilet for a pee. On the wall at eye level was a platinum disc commemorating 36 million sales of Westlife records.
The funny thing was: that disc was out of date. We had actually sold 46 million.
Jesus. No pressure, then! But in a strange way, seeing it was an inspiration to me.
I went back into the studio laughing at what I had just seen. Steve came up with a great melody sitting at the piano and Wayne and I started improvising lyrics. The three of us wrote ‘About You’, a song for our wives that told them how perfect they were.
As a lyricist, Wayne is a genius. They don’t come much better than him and writing with him taught me so much. That week, he and I also wrote the lyrics to ‘In the End’, a song about love pulling you through the bad times; a topic that I felt I knew a little about.
With two songwriters called Paul Barry and Patrick Mascall, I penned ‘All You Need to Know’. It was another tribute to Gillian, a thank you to her, and it is still my favourite song on the album.
Universal sent me out to write some songs in Nashville, too. It was a magical city of music that seemed to have a recording studio in virtually every house. I even managed to sneak in a trip to Memphis to see Elvis’s mansion, Graceland, which was pretty freaky.
Out in Texas, with a guy named Brandon Hood, I wrote a song called ‘When I Met You’, all about the night that I had fallen in love with Gillian in Equinox club in Sligo, and lain awake until dawn wide-eyed and thinking about her. I loved the fact that I could write a good song with one person rather than with a team.
Universal were still liking the songs, and back in Cobham I was playing them to Gillian. She loved them, although she was a bit taken aback that so many were about her. She knew the exact story of where a lot of them came from. It made her emotional – as it did me.
Mostly, though, Gillian was proud of me that I had discovered a passion for songwriting. I had dabbled in it in Westlife, as we all had, but it had not been encouraged, or a big thing.
This was different. This was our future.
The album was so focused on me and Gillian that I knew it could only have one title: You and Me.
Getting the finished CD was a strange moment. I had received many, many finished CDs over the years, but this was the first one with my name alone on the front cover.
I felt very proud.
The cover also featured my new haircut: a perky quiff. Ross Williams, who had done my hair for years in Westlife, came up with it and sculpted it into place. He didn’t tell me it would take half a bottle of hairspray to keep it up there though!
I did a slew of interviews leading up to the release of the album in November 2013. The elephant in the room was my bankruptcy and fall from grace – would journalists want to ask me about it? Of course they all did. They could hardly believe what I told them.
Nor could I.
For I found that I didn’t mind talking about it; in some ways, it even helped me come to terms with it. Plus, if that was the price I had to pay to talk about my new career, then so be it. I had been through worse.
The Sligo Champion, of course, was still keen to remind its readers of my darkest hours. The trustee had put Castledale on the market, and the paper led with a picture of the house and a clever headline:
‘GOING FOR A SONG’. We had lost our family home and they were making a bad joke about it. They even put it in red ink. Classy!
But they couldn’t hurt me now. I couldn’t care less. We were moving forwards.
Old habits die hard, and I was concerned to see how high – or otherwise – the single and album would chart on their release. ‘Everything to Me’ went into the chart at number fourteen when it was released in late August 2013.
For Westlife, this would have been a disaster, but I was very aware that Westlife rules no longer applied. I just felt proud that I had written this little love song about my wife and people had liked it enough to go out and buy it.
It mattered more to me that the album went top ten, and I was relieved when You and Me went to number six in November. Universal seemed pleased, Louis was delighted, and I thought it was not bad for a fella who just six months earlier had been skulking around his house, not even knowing if he could write songs.
One effect of all the changes in my life was that my nerves seemed to have gone. At Christmas that year, Louis got me the biggest TV slot of my solo career to date – the final of The X Factor.
It was a show that Westlife had played so many times and I had always gone on feeling anxious, knowing what a huge stage it was. This time was different. It was very different.
I was to duet live on ‘Flying Without Wings’ with one of the contestants, Nicholas McDonald, and as we walked on, I felt utterly calm. The adrenaline was pumping through my veins but I felt ice-cold and in control.
This is it, I thought to myself. I was born to do this. This is the start of the rest of my career; of the rest of my life. We absolutely nailed it.
That was a real tipping point for me as a solo artist. Since that night, I have had a quiet but strong faith in my abilities at the very highest level. It made me realize: I have nothing to fear, and I fear nothing.
‘You can sing, can’t you?’
Yes, I can. Bring it on.
And my new-found self-belief helped to set me up for the real acid test: my first solo live tour.
Tickets had already gone on sale and were selling fast. Dublin sold out straight away and we added more dates, which was amazing news for me. It was good to know that, despite the best efforts of the local media, Ireland had not forsaken me.
Of course, journalists were still trying to have a pop. My live agents had told me there was a lot of demand for meet-and greet sessions before the shows, and asked if I wanted to do them.
I said that would be great, as long as the fans got good value for money and weren’t just paying for a handshake. We said they could hang out at the venue, see the sound check and spend a little time with me. It would hopefully be a great day for them.
My agents started to advertise the meet-and-greets – and a local Sligo radio station immediately announced that I was demanding that fans pay €300 just to have a photo taken with me!
The station even staged a whole debate on the topic. The implication was clear: greedy old Shane, up to his old tricks again! €300 for a photo!
My Irish PR, Joanne, contacted the network and pointed out that every artist going is doing the same thing nowadays. It is just the way that the music industry works, as artists look for ways to make up for plummeting CD sales. And nobody was being forced to do it.
Once, this story would have hurt me. Now, I couldn’t care less. There has been too much water under the bridge. Stuff like that is not on my radar now – and it never will be again.
I certainly wasn’t going to let it spoil the tour, which felt to me like my audition to the world. I was obviously going to sing both solo and Westlife material, and I knew exactly what I wanted: people to say I was a great live performer. Being just OK wouldn’t do.
Louis fixed me up with a great tour manager, Liam
McKenna. He was sharp, funny, smart, efficient and a real piss-taker. As soon as I met him, I knew he would make life on the road as a solo singer a lot easier – and more enjoyable.
The tour kicked off at the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool. It holds about 2,000 people, which would be a broom cupboard for Westlife but was a big deal for me. Gillian, Nicole and my mum and dad had come to support me, and I was so psyched up before the show. It felt like a moment of truth.
This is the one. It all starts here!
The show was quite overwhelming. I had so much nervous energy that I was gabbling away before every song like a madman. I must have thanked everybody I could thank twenty times. I even overran the evening curfew.
After the show, my production manager, Karen, gently took the piss, suggesting that maybe the next night I might try to keep my mouth shut a bit more and maybe we could all get home before dawn?
But I couldn’t help it. I was so grateful to be back on a stage, and to every one of the fans that had paid to see me. It felt like I was back.
Performing solo was exciting, but I wasn’t used to keeping a whole show together on my own, and I hadn’t toured for two years and was out of practice. After the show, the adrenaline oozed out of me like water being wrung from a cloth. I had one can of Guinness and slept for thirteen hours.
The buzz carried me through the next night, in Birmingham, but the night after that, in Reading, I hit a wall. I had to work it really hard and my voice felt knackered. The next day was a day off and I spent the day zapped, lying around my house, drifting in and out of sleep.
I felt bleary, disoriented and half-dead. I was sure that I was getting sick and would have to cancel the rest of the shows. What was happening to me?
Happily, I think it was just my body getting used to a new rhythm; a new reality. I woke up refreshed after my day off and never looked back. The rest of the tour was a real high.
What was great was the mix of fans who were coming to the shows. There were the older Westlife fans who had grown up with me in the band, but also a lot of fans in their mid-teens, probably because the music that I was playing now was a lot more poppy and upbeat.
At my Cardiff show, there were four women in the front row who were in their sixties if they were a day; maybe even seventy. One of them was going totally mental, yelling along to every song with her eyes closed and telling me that she loved me.
She was shaking her booty in front of me as I sang ‘Blurred Lines’ by Robin Thicke, and I high-fived her at the end. The funny thing was, right behind the four older ladies stood their husbands, arms folded and expressionless; behind them were fifteen-year-old girls. All human life was there.
In London, I played the Hammersmith Apollo for the first time. Westlife had never been there because we had started off at Wembley Arena, but it was a real thrill for me to play such a serious, iconic venue.
For all that I had done with Westlife, I couldn’t help but feel excited to stand outside the Apollo and see my name up in lights. A little voice whispered inside my head:
‘Ah, Shane Filan from Sligo – look at him now!’
I took a photo of it and made it my Twitter page background. The tour was going grand, and I warned the band to brace themselves for Belfast. It was a city that always went mad for Westlife, and I had a feeling that it might do the same for me. The band all gave me a look that seemed to say, ‘Yeah, whatever.’
They can’t say that I didn’t warn them.
We were playing two nights at the Waterfront, which is a cool hall that can hold maybe 2,500. It had sold out very early. As we walked onstage at the start, the screaming that erupted could have parted your hair.
I saw the band exchange shocked glances. Jesus! It was like the level of noise that Westlife used to get in arenas, packed into a venue a fifth of the size. I couldn’t hear myself sing. I couldn’t hear anything. The production crew were going spare because they couldn’t work the sound. The screaming was so loud it was coming out of my mic.
After the show, I had a raging migraine from the din.
Did I care? Did I f**k! It was wonderful!
Yet my first solo tour finished where it was always going to end – in Dublin.
I did three nights back-to-back at the Olympia, a grand old Dublin theatre, over St Patrick’s weekend in March 2014. My family were all there. It was the perfect end to a tour that had been everything I could have wished, and more.
I could not have been more proud.
There was more good news to come. John and Sarah, my live agents, told me there was enough demand for tickets for me to do a second leg of the British tour later that year, which was wonderful to learn.
And I also learned that other parts of the world still cared about me too.
My Asian promoters, Midas, were fixing up a tour of China and Southeast Asia later in the year, and packed me off to Asia a few weeks in advance to do interviews and promotion. It was a route that I had trodden with Westlife so many times, and it felt weird and a bit intimidating returning on my own. Would anyone even care, now Westlife were no more?
They did. When I landed in the Philippines, security men were wrestling with 300 or 400 screaming girls waiting for me. I went to sign autographs and sing a couple of songs in a shopping mall, and found 2,000 people going demented. I sang on the final of the Philippines version of The Voice and 75 million people tuned in (not all for me, obviously!).
Ah, it is good to know that I am still a thriller in Manila…
Just after I came back from Asia, and while I was writing this book, I celebrated my thirty-fifth birthday. It’s the landmark that always used to indicate that you were halfway through your life, your threescore years and ten; but I can’t help but feel I have already packed at least two lives into mine.
It has been an incredible life, really. I have crammed in so many unbelievable experiences that I could never even have imagined when I was growing up over the Carlton Café in Castle Street, Sligo.
In particular, I guess I have done two things that seem out of the reach, out of the ken, of most people. I have been a pop star in one of the biggest boy bands in the world, and I have been declared bankrupt owing €23m.
How do I begin to make sense of it all?
Looking back, everything happens for a reason. Ever since I saw Michael Jackson doing ‘Man in the Mirror’ amidst a city of twinkling lights, I wanted to be a pop star, and I devoted myself single-mindedly to this goal.
I made it – through a lot of hard work; but through a lot of luck as well. I was lucky to meet Kian, Mark, Nicky, and Brian, and lucky that so many things fell into place when they did.
I am especially lucky that my mum grew up in the same little County Mayo village as Louis Walsh. In so many ways I owe everything to her, and to him. And to one fateful phone call.
My pop career can be seen as a white-knuckle rollercoaster journey up the charts and around the world that ended at Croke Park, in Dublin, when I stood in the midst of my own city of twinkling lights.
The property business and the bankruptcy are rather harder to make sense of.
I made some bad mistakes and I was very unlucky. That was the long and short of it. I took bad advice and did things that I never should have, but in truth I still think I was harshly treated where other people were given an escape route.
As Ireland collapsed in the global crash, people owing €1bn or €500m were quietly given IVAs with no publicity while the pop star who was seen as getting ideas above his station went to the wall as the media salivated. Looking back, it is hard to escape the conclusion that I was made an example of.
Well, these things happen. What can you do? It has made me a stronger person, very realistic but also determined to fight back and bounce back. The anger has long gone, because I was the only person that was hurting. Now it is time to look forward.
We are still not out of the woods yet. I am still working with the trustee, still handing over a large portion of my income, and I will be for a
while yet. But I have my wife; my kids; a home. As Gillian said, ‘You have me, Nicole, Patrick and Shane – what more do you need?’
I’m so proud that all the time Finbarr and I were going through hell on earth with Shafin Developments, we never once blamed each other or turned on one another. All the way through we had each other’s backs, as families do.
Life is full of ironies, and some of them are good ones. One of my best friends in Cobham is a renowned heart surgeon, Professor Brendan Madden. When Gillian’s parents visited us last year, Brendan noticed that her dad, Michael, wasn’t looking well and gave him a check-up.
He kept an eye on him and a few months later he was doing a sextuple-bypass heart operation on him: one of the few times it’s been done in the world. He saved his life – which would never have happened had I not gone bankrupt and moved to England.
There is always a bright side, if you look hard enough.
So what is next for me, and for my solo career?
I am proud of my first album but I want to keep going, and growing, and getting better and better. I know I will never be as big as Westlife, because we were a phenomenon, a once-in-a-generation success story.
We achieved so much that at the time we maybe got blasé, but now I think back it is amazing just what we did. Nobody since has seen their first seven singles all go to number one. Maybe nobody ever will.
So no, I can only dream of being as huge as Westlife, but I’d like to keep making records and touring and go to places I haven’t gone to as a solo artist yet. I’d like to do well in Europe, and Australia, and South America, and… who knows?
Maybe with my new Nashville tendencies, I could even have a pop at America; the one place that Westlife could never break. Well, a boy can dream. And, as I’ve learned to my delight, sometimes dreams come true.
But really it’s all about the music, and about the songs. I’m still looking for that special number, that great song that might launch my solo career into the stratosphere. It wasn’t on You and Me. I’m still searching for my very own ‘Flying Without Wings’ or my ‘You Raise Me Up’.