Westlife: Our Story. Westlife

account. Despite my disappointment at the way things had turned out, at least the money meant I didn’t have to rush my next move. I got a job at Alias Tom’s clothes shop in Dublin city centre which paid £150 a week and toyed with the idea of buying a Suzuki Vitara Jeep with most of the ten grand, but ended up spending £400 to insure me dad’s Seat Cordova. Dad loved it because I was able to drive him to his gigs at night and he could have a drink, and I loved it because once I’d dropped him off, usually about 7 p.m., I had a car for the evening.

      While I was passing my exams, I’d started singing in karaoke bars. I’d be working late in Alias Tom’s, get home, have my dinner, get changed, miss football training and go to karaoke instead. After a while, I was confident enough to enter some karaoke competitions and I did OK, getting to some semi-finals and the odd final. Funnily enough, I was almost always singing Take That and Boyzone songs. I’d played Boyzone a lot when I was at Leeds United. Songs like ‘Father and Son’ really made me miss home. The players used to take the piss out of me and call me Ronan, even. Georgina’s dad had met the band somewhere and he’d even got her a signed album, which we listened to non-stop. They were the songs I knew, they were the songs I was listening to. I didn’t really listen to the Backstreet Boys. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them, I just didn’t know much about them and I liked backing the Irish boys. A lot of fellas were into Boyzone; it wasn’t uncool to like them.

      One day I rang my dad and said, ‘Listen, if I buy a karaoke machine and some discs out of the money I’ve got left over from Leeds, will you come around with me when you’re not gigging your own shows? We’ll try and book a few venues that do karaoke.’

      He loved the idea, so we started playing shows where I’d present and sing two songs, then he’d do two songs, then we’d start asking the audience to come up and do a song. Suddenly I was working the clubs.

      I got all these ‘business’ cards printed. We were called – genius idea – Father and Son Karaoke.

      I was honestly starting to think about going down the road my dad had taken. I was looking to get a band together too and hopefully start working like that.

      My normal day would consist of dropping Dad off at work, going to school, finishing there mid-afternoon, then heading up to the suburbs of north Dublin, where I doorstepped pretty much every pub in the area. I’d meet the manager, give them my card, tell them we’d been doing this for years and years, chat about playing for Leeds and just generally use a bit of banter to get work. We got a couple of college socials through friends, then we got our first ever Friday night at the local pub, Gibneys, in Malahide, through a friend of mine and Georgina’s at school.

      One day Georgina phoned me and said, ‘My auntie’s just heard something about auditions for a new band.’

      It turned out someone was forming a traditional Irish boy band playing old instruments and singing classic Irish folk songs. I got all the info and it just asked for a picture and a demo tape and stated that playing an instrument would be preferable but not essential.

      Georgina’s sister, the novelist Cecelia Ahern, had been a big Take That fan, so that meant I’d been listening to more and more of this boy band stuff. I remember watching Take That on Top of the Pops and that’s the first time I started to admit to liking the idea of being in a boy band. I sat there and thought to myself, Five lads, touring the world, making loads of money, girls everywhere, they must be having a right craic. I even went to the barbers one day and asked for Jason Orange’s haircut.

      So now, a few years later, I decided to give it a go. I don’t know if it was the fame game or money or success or all of it rolled into one that I craved. I was definitely into the music thing by this point, even though I didn’t have a lot of experience.

      Funnily enough, I’d recently seen a photo in the Evening Herald of this new boy band—six lads called IOYOU. I didn’t recognize any of them and didn’t think anything more of it. It just said Louis Walsh had given them a slot supporting the Backstreet Boys. It sounded like they would do well. I thought, Lucky bastards.

      Back in the week before my audition for the traditional band, I didn’t have a demo tape, so my dad got our karaoke microphones out and set them up in the front room. Dad, Georgina and my little brother Adam were there. They kept laughing at me and I was getting really irate. I kept pressing ‘Stop’ halfway through a song and starting again.