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The chorus of “Swear It Again” is a blanket of it: a mantle of reassurance, piling steadily up every beat of the bar: I’M – NEVER – TREAT – BAD / I – NEVER – SEE – SAD. That kind of ultra-close harmony is a powerful emotional tool for the group, giving everything they sing a kind of polyvocal guarantee, four or five layers of underlined sincerity. The signature sound of Westlife arrives fully-formed on “Swear It Again” – five voices, moving as one. Who were they? What did they want to hear? And so we’re back to the question of Westlife’s audience – the other factor, apart from Cowell’s remarkable skill as a pop fixer, in their dominance. Which suggests that Cowell, Walsh and Keating had other ideas for Westlife. Boyzone’s Ronan Keating – stepping, like a midfielder nearing retirement, into a coaching role – apparently recommended the name change on the grounds that “IOYOU” sounded “too boyband”. If Westlife knew their moves 17 years ago, the whole country knows his now.īut the transition from IOYOU to Westlife hides another shift. It sounds like – well, it sounds like the kind of performance that gets you through Judges’ Houses on the X-Factor, and with hindsight that’s precisely what it was: you can see Simon’s appreciative half-grin as the boys’ voices combine, and his slight eyebrow-raise at a couple of the more puppyish ad libs. The tempo, the harmonies, the pledges of devotion: even in the Sligo classroom, the lads knew the moves well enough. IOYOU knew what they wanted to sound line – their demo, “Together Girl Forever”, a Shane and Mark co-write, is a well-churned slow jam from the limper end of R&B. He ended up a barman, if you’re keeping score.)ĭespite the personnel upheavals, there’s no great sign of creative tension in the early Westlife story. (A sixth schoolfriend, with the rather un-boybandly name of Derek, had already been given the push by Louis Walsh. The difference is Cowell, then at record label BMG, who pronounced IOYOU – as they were – the ugliest band he’d seen in his life, and got his scalpel out. The other three have sold forty million records. Two of these men are now a hairdresser and a garda. There’s Shane, Graham, Mark, Kian, Michael. They can sing a bit, they’ve seen Boyzone doing well, so they get a group together. Take five lads from Sligo, schoolfriends. Enter Simon Cowell.Ĭowell’s part in Westlife’s origins is a preview of his later household-name role: a murderer of youthful dreams. You need a loyal audience, which probably means one that isn’t being well served by the rest of pop music (so won’t switch to rival bands or sounds in a hurry). To game the charts this efficiently you need two things. But Westlife manage this again and again and again for years. Westlife aren’t the only fanbase band: in chart terms, Blur or the Manic Street Preachers perform similar disappearing acts.
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They were the Olestra of pop, slipping through its body undigested to leave an oily mess. They had very little impact on the rest of it. But there’s a corollary to this: if Westlife come and go so quickly, it’s a stretch to suggest that they themselves were a ruinous force in pop music. There’s barely a sign of crossover to a wider singles-buying audience. Westlife are the ultimate fanbase band: almost every one of their many, many hits is a one-week wonder and gets out of the Top 10 sharpish. Even so, the degree of success says very little good about how the charts were working by 1999, as a finely staged ballet of release date scheduling and fanbase priming. Westlife are a group like any other, with fans they speak to and mean a lot to, and deserve to be considered as more than just a statistical anomaly. This idea – Westlife as a sign of pop catastrophe – is a mix of the true and the false and the condescending. The scale of Westlife’s success, more than almost any other factor, was enough to convince even sympathisers that the charts were broken, that pop was broken, a damaged transmitter no longer capable of processing the cultural signals around it. One of these things is not like the others, apparently. Look at the list of the most successful Number One acts – Elvis, the Beatles, Westlife. Implicit in the jokes is a feeling that Westlife are different. There have been times when I’ve wondered myself what on earth I would say, given that from a standing start I could barely remember two of them. Westlife have always been this blog’s nemesis, the doom encoded in its premise: however entertaining the song or era I’m writing about is, at some point I will have to deal with fourteen Westlife number ones.