Baby You're a Star (10 page)

Louis knew IOYou contained some good singers but the Backstreet Boys gig convinced him they could also rise to the challenge of performing to big crowds. He immediately decided to manage the band.

By this time, Louis had built up an impressive network of contacts in the UK music business. He sent a message to Simon Cowell, one of Britain’s most respected A&R figures. Cowell wanted to know more and Louis con-vinced him that IOYou was not an opportunity to be missed.

“He called me very excitedly to say he had a band, a six-piece boyband called IOYou,” recalls Cowell. “I subsequently went to Ireland to meet the boys and told him to forget it. I told him in no uncertain terms that he had to lose some of the members and get in new people. He told me to forget it and he said he’d get a deal for the boys.”

Louis stood his ground much to the relief of the band’s members.

“He told me to change three of them and one of the people he told me to change was Shane,” he says. Louis believed that Shane had all the necessary qualities to be in a boyband but was irate at what he perceived as a lack of professionalism on the young singer’s part.

“The first time we auditioned for Simon Cowell, I looked just like I didn’t care. I wasn’t dressed well. I didn’t sing well. I was very nervous and I just didn’t fit the bill in Simon Cowell’s eyes. Louis couldn’t believe it. He was really disgusted with me that day and it was the first fight I had with Louis. He really gave out to me. He took me to one side and said, ‘Listen, you’ve got to cop on. Don’t ever do that again. Have some respect.’ I just thought everything, all my dreams were over, that he was going to say good luck to me,” remembers Filan.

Despite his anger, Louis decided to keep Filan in the group. He knew, however, that he would have to heed Cowell’s advice to some extent if IOYou were ever to get a record deal. He asked Derek Lacey to leave the band because he didn’t fit in.

In reality, the move was part of a well thought out plan to turn IOYou into a financially viable product. Louis always had a formula for the ideal boyband.

The package worked best if teenage girls, the core of any boyband’s fanbase, regarded the band’s members as boy-next-door types. “The girls must believe in the backs of their minds that one day they’ll go out with him,” he says.

Louis next changed the band’s name to Westside. Through his contacts, he arranged for Westside to appear on the
Beat on the Street
, the Irish version of the
Smash Hits
Roadshow, that July. The band were next dispatched to London to record two tracks with well-known pop producer, Steve Mac, who had worked with Boyzone.

Westside were never going to perform in pubs and parish halls. Louis was now respected and humoured rather than tolerated or ignored. After the recording session, Louis concluded that Graham Keighron did not fit in and asked him to leave the band. Keighron accepted Louis’ judgment but he remained friends with the band, particularly with Kian, and later accompanied the band on tour.

A boyband with four members didn’t fit Louis’ notion of a perfect formula. Coincidentally, just as Louis needed another member for the band, he was made aware of auditions being held by another manager called Noel Carty. He was putting together a traditional music boyband that would eventually become Reel.

Louis found two singers at these auditions – Nicky Byrne and Bryan McFadden. Byrne performed reg-ularly with his father Nicholas, who had a band called Nikki and Studz. McFadden had attended the Billie Barry stage school and been in another pop band called Cartel, so both possessed stage experience. From Louis’ pers-pective, both had a look he was after.

Westside had gone from having six members to five to four, and now it had six again. Louis was still unhappy. He only wanted five. Michael Garrett was promptly dropped from the line up. Unlike Keighron, he took the rejection badly and returned home to Sligo dispirited. His shattered dream didn’t weigh on Louis’ mind. He had succeeded in shaping the band to fit his formula and now he had work to do.

Louis’ ruthless shaping of the band was hard to cope with for the three remaining original members.

“It was very difficult because they were like our three best friends in the band,” recalls Filan. “The six of us were very close at the time. He didn’t feel that three of them fitted the band or weren’t right for him in his eyes. It was very hard but we had the decision to go with the most talked about manager in Ireland to make our dreams come true. We knew straight away any one of us, no matter who it was, would have gone for it. I don’t think any of the lads in Sligo now could say they wouldn’t have gone for it if it was their choice. Because it was the chance of a lifetime.”

In the five years after Louis had touted photos of Boyzone to anyone and everyone he could think of, his circumstances had changed. Louis had proved he could cut it as a band manager and this time around, the record companies were falling over themselves to sign his latest ensemble. A&R representatives from BMG, Polydor, Parlophone, Virgin and MCA all met with Louis and the band. Three offered Westside a contract. In the end, Simon Cowell of RCA, owned by BMG, succeeded in signing the band in October 1998. The contract was for £4 million.

Although Cowell didn’t realise it at the time, Louis had played a trick on him. He was anxious to keep Filan in the group but wanted Cowell to believe he had done as instructed and asked Filan to leave. Louis’ solution was typical of his ingenuity and nerve. He told Filan to grow his hair long and dye it blond, so Cowell would not recognise him when he came back to Dublin to see the group at a showcase in the Red Box.

“I said ‘Oh God, this is never going to work.’ When Simon came back, I had long blond hair. I got up and sang and Simon Cowell was like ‘Who’s the new guy? He’s great!’ and Louis said ‘That’s the guy I got for you. That’s the new guy!’ We got a record deal then. Simon laughs about it now,” says Filan.

Cowell acknowledges that the stunt was funny but is unapologetic about his initial views about Filan’s involvement in the band. His strategy at the time was to exert pressure on Louis to make the band leaner and more likely to succeed.

“In the end, we both kind of got our own way, because he got Shane to dye his hair blond and snuck him in! But when I saw the band it only took me thirty seconds to turn around to him and say, ‘We have a deal’,” says Cowell.

“They looked better. They were very tight. They weren’t so nervous and it was just one of those great showcases you go to once every 10 years and everything about this band told me they were going to be successful.”

Boyzone’s creative director and friend of Louis’, Colin Barlow of Polydor, had wanted to sign Westlife but was stopped by Lucian Grainge. He had grave reservations about Louis’ plans. “That is true and if I had my time over again I wouldn’t have done that,” says Grainge. “I had three things on my mind at the time. One was making sure that the next Boyzone album got the best possible shot, and then I believed that out of Boyzone, we would launch Ronan as a solo artist and also Stephen Gately, and that at some point we would have a Greatest Hits. So I took the view that there were four prospects there that I needed to protect in the long term. Certainly over the forthcoming two or three years: Ronan, Stephen, the Boyzone album and all the touring and all the international work and so forth as well as obviously the Greatest Hits.

“Colin was desperate to sign Westlife. I kept saying to him, ‘It is a junior version of Boyzone. You’re going to kill Boyzone internally overnight’ and it was not in anyone’s interest to extinguish Boyzone prematurely. I also felt that the only way in which you could break Westlife, was that if you attacked Boyzone, if you completely went for their audience, their market, their techniques, everything and I wasn’t prepared to do that,” says Grainge.

“And in reality, that’s exactly unfortunately what happened. When they signed to BMG, it was a complete carbon copy. And I also think that at the time Ronan co-managed them. Louis gave Ronan a piece of the management, I think I probably look back on it and think there may have been something, either conscious or sub-conscious, that maybe Ronan actually wanted to break from Boyzone, so he could get on with his own career,” adds Grainge.

Even before the contract with Cowell was signed, Westside had supported Boyzone on their European tour in September and October. Parachuting the new act in as support to his established band was the cheapest and most effective way to reach thousands of potential fans quickly. With the contract signed, Westside were then sent off on the
Smash Hits
Roadshow, and they duly won the
Best Newcomer
award, like Boyzone had four years earlier. Despite having performed in public on a number of occasions, the band had still not been officially launched. The band spent the next few months with a singing coach, a dietician, and stylists before they were ready to be presented to the press. A showcase gig was organised for the band in the Café de Paris in London. In less than a year, Westside had been transformed into a slick pop band.

There was one problem. It was brought to the attention of RCA that there were eight other groups on the National Band Register with Westside in their names. The legal advice RCA obtained led to the band being re-named Westlife – their fourth and final name.

From this point onwards, it was pretty much a given that Westlife would be a success, but nothing was left to chance. They were coached in every aspect of the pop star life. They had the backing of a major UK label, and the experience of Louis to guide them forward. They also had Ronan Keating, who had been co-opted as Westlife’s “co-manager”. A company called Rolo Management was formed to oversee the business. Keating continued as their co-manager for about a year.

The main reason for having Keating as co-manager, given that Louis was not a household name at this time, seems to have been to provide added publicity for the launch of the new band. It was also clearly intended to boost Keating’s credibility. Since then, many have doubted if Ronan had anything to do with the running of Westlife at all, but Louis maintains that he did. Asked if Keating really co-managed the band, Louis replies: “He was a mentor. He was good to give them advice. He was like a sixth member of the band for a while and he was very honest with them about different things and they looked up to him.”

Louis and Keating weren’t the only people involved with the group. To ensure that Westlife were given the best possible chance of conquering the charts, the heavy-weights of pop production and songwriting were brought on board.

On their eponymously titled first album, released in November 1999, the band continued to work with Steve Mac and his songwriting partner, Wayne Hector at Steve Mac’s Rokstone Studios. Jôrgen Elofsson, David Kreuger, Per Magnusson, Max Martin and Rami of the Swedish studio Cheiron also weighed in with their contribution, while Pete Waterman produced the album, which eventually reached No. 2 in the albums chart.

Westlife’s first single,
Swear It Again
, was released in March 1999 and went straight to No. 1 in the UK, staying there for two weeks, beating both Fatboy Slim and The Offspring to the top spot. It was to be the first of four No. 1 singles for the band that year, with
If I Let You Go
in at the top in August, followed by
Flying Without Wings
in October and the double A-side of cover versions,
I Have A Dream/Seasons In The Sun
, in December. This last number one sold 213,000 copies and deprived Sir Cliff Richard of his customary Christmas No. 1.

Westlife were only the second act ever to have their first four singles reach the top of the charts. B*Witched had managed the same feat in the previous year. They were also Irish, counting two of Shane Lynch’s sisters among their number, but they were not managed by Louis Walsh, who had passed the band to Ray Hedges. When Westlife’s fifth single, and the last to be released from their first album
Fool Again
, went to No. 1 in April 2000, they became the first band ever to have their first five singles go straight in at the top. In the first year of record sales, Westlife had already outperformed Boyzone, who only got to No. 1 with their sixth single.

It had proven to be an astonishingly successful year. Apart from all the No. 1s, Westlife also won the Best UK & Ireland Act from MTV in November and ITV’s Record Of The Year for
Flying Without Wings
. The band, and its management, had scarcely put a foot wrong. They did attract a little controversy in November 1999 when they agreed to launch the annual British Legion Poppy Appeal. Sinn Féin protested vigorously, saying it was “insensitive in the extreme” and that Westlife should not support a “British military charity”. The Ulster Unionists countered, defending the boyband’s actions and accusing Sinn Féin of mounting “a silly outdated” protest.

RCA moved quickly to quash the controversy, saying the Poppy Appeal decision had been theirs and it would stand. Westlife went ahead and launched the appeal.

10

SEPARATE LIVES

Louis had announced on more than one occasion that Boyzone were on the verge of splitting, but it had never been more than a publicity ruse. As Lynch told the tabloids: “We’re sick and tired of reading that we’re going to split up, and the fact that it’s our manager who keeps putting out the stories really winds us up. He’s a complete berk, and only does it when he thinks we need help shifting concert tickets. I don’t think we’ve done a concert for the past five years that hasn’t sold out.”

In March 1999, Boyzone secured another No. 1 in the UK with a cover of the Billy Ocean song
When The Going Gets Tough
, which they recorded for Comic Relief. Westlife simultaneously entered the charts and got their first UK No. 1. Boyzone realised Louis’ full attention was no longer focused on them. The band had two further hits in 1999,
You Needed Me
(No. 1) and
Every Day I Love You
(No. 3). These were both taken from the group’s fourth album
By Request
, a greatest hits compilation released at the end of May. The greatest hits album was destined to be Boyzone’s last but the band members could be excused for not realising this; the album outsold every other record released in the UK that year.

In spite of the limited musical capability of some members of the group, Paul Keogh believes Boyzone came to believe they should have more influence over the direction of the group.

“As they got more powerful, they started to push their own views and they made a lot of mistakes because they forgot who their audience was,” says Keogh.

“It’s hard for boybands to realise that the vast majority of their audience are probably seven and eight years of age. So trying to look sexy and all that just goes straight over these kid’s heads. They just want to sing along to
Father and Son
and they want to see Ronan scream and smile. It’s all pantomime, more than music business.”

The biggest indicator that Boyzone was about to collapse came in July of the same year when Keating released his first solo record, a cover of the Keith Whitley song
When You Say Nothing At All.
The song was recorded for inclusion on the soundtrack of the film
Notting Hill
. It reached No. 1 and Keating distinctly enjoyed the rush of being a solo performer.

The single’s success and the way Keating relished his achievement should have sounded alarm bells for the rest of the group, but it didn’t. They were otherwise preoccupied in the summer of 1999.

Despite Louis’ instructions that girlfriends be kept out of sight, both Duffy and Graham fathered children with their long-term girlfriends, while Keating and Lynch married theirs. With four of the band publicly “taken”, only one was left to fend off questions about his personal life.

Gately was homosexual and in a relationship with Eloy de Jong, a member of Dutch boyband Caught In The Act, but this relationship had been kept from the media. Louis himself believed Gately was entitled to his private life. An unexpected problem, however, presented itself that summer when a former security guard attempted to sell Gately’s story to the English tabloids. Louis was deeply worried for Gately’s sake. Although there had been plenty of gay boyband members in the past, none of them had ever been openly gay.

“I didn’t know when he joined the band that he was gay,” says Louis. “I had no idea at all. It would have been a big thing to me at the time, because I thought it would have been very damaging. But it wasn’t. Everybody in the media knew he was gay and nobody cared.

“I think it was best for him to get it out of himself because he was the one with the problem. Nobody else had the problem except Stephen. When he came out in
The Sun
, we didn’t get one bad letter. He didn’t lose any fans as a result. I think he was a better person. He was a happier person.”

Gately officially became gay on 16 June that year when
The Sun
published “Boyzone Stephen: I’m Gay And I’m In Love” on page one. Gately received thousands of supportive emails and letters from fans, along with a letter from Graham Norton, flowers from Elton John, and a phone call from George Michael. The readers of
Smash Hits
voted him “Hero of the Year”.

Having seen out the storm, Louis and the rest of the band were soon to experience more upheaval. By December 1999, the tabloids and celebrity gossip mag-azines had more fodder for their pages. Buoyed by the success of
When You Say Nothing At All
, Keating announced that he wanted to take a break and work on an album of his own.

Duffy and Lynch, in particular, were unhappy to go along with this plan, but without their lead singer, the group could scarcely continue. Boyzone formally announced they were taking a break for a year. Everyone in the band, including Keating, appears to have believed the band was on sabbatical. The music industry, the media and the fans accepted that Boyzone was finished.

Under Louis’ stewardship, Boyzone was one of the most successful boybands ever. They had 16 top three singles, six of which were No. 1s. They had four No. 1 albums, selling over 12 million copies worldwide. They appeared on
Top of the Pops
over twenty times, and performed on countless sell-out tours. Their images adorned all sorts of merchandise including, but not limited to, posters, calendars, videos, books, t-shirts, sweatshirts, bandannas, watches, keyrings, purses, mobile phone covers, dogtags, and dolls. The band also made hundreds of thousands endorsing products including Pepsi, Sugar Puffs and Creme Eggs.

The five members of Boyzone had each become millionaires many times over as did Louis and Reynolds. Six years after Louis had made a wild bid to break out of the tortuous cycle of life as a booking agent, he had become a very rich man.

The decision to split, however, sparked off bitter internal feuding with all involved making allegations and counter allegations against each other. Keating was openly criticised by former band members in the tabloids. He was accused of being Louis’ favourite. “You know what, it’s sad the way it all went and I think if people hadn’t been all uppity about it and got up saying what they were saying, there would have been a future for Boyzone down the road to do something,” says Keating. “It’s gone far beyond that now and sadly we can’t.”

He says other band members may have interpreted his friendship with Louis the wrong way and this may have caused friction.

“There was times, because we talked all the time on the phone, that there might have been situations. But at the end of the day, I was kind of the channel. I spoke to the band and I spoke to Louis. Not all of the lads would call Louis every day, so I was passing every-thing on to Louis and likewise if the lads had a problem, they’d come to me, and I’d call Louis and say ‘Louis, this is the story’.”

Louis was more vehement in his response to criticism levied at him from the band members.

“It’s human nature. They always forget. They always forget the good things. I don’t really care because I’m in the music business forever. I’m always going to be in it and want to be in it.

“They’re lucky they got the break in the first place. But you know what, I would pick them all again. That’s the only thing I could tell you. I would definitely pick the five guys again for Boyzone, because they were great fun and they were great personalities.”

A large number of people involved in the management team say getting rich was never Louis’ main goal with Boyzone.

According to Paul Keogh, Louis “wasn’t that interested in money. He didn’t do Boyzone for the vision of being rich and famous. He did it, I think, because it was something he always wanted to do, and it allowed him to live the lifestyle he wanted without having to . . . ” Keogh stops for a moment, before continuing. “In early days, Louis would always be the one in the queue on the guest list, half way back, and then people would say ‘Oh there’s Louis Walsh again’ and now he’s probably managing all the guest lists and that’s the difference.”

Louis had always been known for knowing everyone on the music scene in Dublin. Now, he knew most of the influential people in the music scene in the UK. As Boyzone had become more successful, Louis had ensured that they only dealt with the best in any given area of the business. They only worked with the best pop producers and songwriters. Their A&R person was Colin Barlow, their agent was Louis Parker, head of the huge Concorde artist booking agency, and their PR was handled by the respected Outside Organisation.

Louis had taken on the music industry at its own game. He had won, and now he was part of it. Many pop band managers only ever handle one major act, but Louis was too ambitious, and too energetic, and enjoyed the experience far too much, to sit back and savour his achievements with Boyzone. There were more acts to manage, and more No. 1s to celebrate. That said, nothing else after Boyzone would ever be quite as exciting an experience. He would never have as steep a learning curve again, never again experience the heady unbelievable thrill of guiding a group to a No. 1 hit for the first time. He would never again gaze in awe and delight at one of his acts on a magazine cover in the way he did when Mark Frith showed him the photocopied cover of Boyzone, and he knew he had made it.

Boyzone might have been finished but a new act had risen from the ashes: Ronan Keating. Louis had always maintained a closer bond with Keating than with any other members of Boyzone, and he had nurtured Keating carefully. He believed Keating and Gately were the only ones with a real chance of solo success. But he didn’t believe he could manage both.

“I couldn’t manage both of them,” says Louis. “I probably would have, but I know Ronan definitely wouldn’t have wanted that. I think I would have kicked Stephen up the arse a lot more. He needed that from someone. I don’t think he was surrounded by people that were honest with him.

“He had come from a really big band, and I think he thought he was just going to automatically have fame. Ronan knew he had to work and start all over again. Stephen, he’ll always be involved in the music business. He could always be working, always be on TV.”

Choosing to manage Keating wasn’t a difficult decision for Louis. Those in the Boyzone management team had considered Keating a great deal shrewder than his fellow entertainers.

“People have asked, ‘Was that obvious at the start?’,” says Keogh. “It wasn’t, but it became very obvious. Shane didn’t take enough time to understand the industry, Keith was the party man, Mikey never forgave Louis for not being the lead singer when he started.

“Stephen probably would have thought he would have a better chance as a solo artist, but I don’t think he really spent the time to understand the business like Ronan.

“Ronan knew who was important. Ronan knew it was like ‘I’ll do an Elton John gig and that’ll get me this’. He was well calculated in everything he did and he stuck with Louis as well.”

Music journalist George Byrne agrees with this analysis. “It was obvious from very early on that Ronan was the golden boy.

Keogh acknowledges the three Boyzone members who didn’t sing on the albums did not pull their musical weight to the same extent as Keating and Gately.

The three clearly would not have found it as easy to further their international careers in pop music. However, they were determined to prove Louis and others wrong. Graham had always been the odd one out in Boyzone. There were the two that could sing, the two that couldn’t sing, and there was Graham.

He harboured ambitions of being a singer-songwriter but when Boyzone split none of the major labels were interested in signing him.

Undeterred, he launched his own label, Public Records, and released a single called
You’re My Angel
. The single reached No. 13 in the UK.

Graham’s career was more successful in Germany and Central Europe where his music was better received. No further singles were released in the UK until April 2001. The single
You Could Be My Everything
reached only No. 63 in the UK. A planned tour of the UK and Ireland was cancelled as Graham pleaded “nervous exhaustion”. For the time being at least, Graham’s solo career was put to bed.

Few onlookers expected Lynch to have another go at the music business. All he had ever wanted from Boyzone was to get “rich, laid and famous”. When Boyzone disbanded, he spent his time racing cars on a semi-professional basis for Ford. In 2001, in an interview, he declared that his true musical love had always been hip-hop and he was forming a new act with Ben Ofoedu, formerly of Phats & Small.

The new band, a four-piece called Redhill, planned to release its first single in the summer of 2001, and then in January 2002, but no single appeared.

Lynch did have a little post-Boyzone success, in the form of a cover of Milli Vanilli’s
Girl You Know It’s True,
which he recorded with Duffy. The song reached No. 36 in the UK charts. It later emerged that it was recorded it as a joke. Milli Vanilli were a band best remembered for not singing on their own records.

Duffy secured work as a presenter on RTE’s Pepsi Chart Show. He also hosted the childrens programme
FBI
before appearing in
Celebrity Big Brother
. The resultant hype helped his career along considerably, most recently with his appointment as
Coronation Street’s
latest bad boy. He still found himself drawn to the music business, however, and has recently formed a new Irish boyband called Broken Hill, which he co-manages.

Gately never achieved international success as a solo artist. He was signed by Colin Barlow at Polydor, which released his first single
New Beginning
in July 2000. The single went to No. 3 in the UK. The follow-up singles
I Believe
(from the Billy Elliot soundtrack) and
Stay
made it to No. 11 and No. 13 respectively, and his album, also entitled
New Beginning
reached No. 9.

Despite his reasonably successful showing, Polydor dropped him. Barlow blames the media for the singer’s failure to become a solo artist. He says the album was “fantastic” but it was “horrible” when the Boyzone fans did not remain loyal to Gately.