That house above the café gives me my very earliest memory. When I was three, I burnt my hand on the cooker in our kitchen. I remember as if it was yesterday reaching up to put my hand on the ring, then roaring and crying when it burnt me. I can still see the dog outside the room looking in at all the commotion. Mam calmed me down and put cold milk on the burn to soothe the pain. It’s a strong, vivid, first memory.
I loved having so many brothers and sisters around. My parents had had four kids back to back, with only a year between each. Then three more children followed with a two-year gap between each. My mum had her last baby, me, when she was 42. For some reason she’d always wanted seven kids and I think she just kept going till she got them. Back then it was very common to have at least four kids, to have just two kids wasn’t the norm. There were a lot more big families then than there are now, certainly in the west of Ireland anyway.
I never got picked on because I had those older brothers, so that made my life a lot easier than some. Maybe I got a little spoiled occasionally, as the youngest, but to be honest because there were seven of us Mam and Dad didn’t have time to spoil us, they were so busy just looking after us and feeding us and all that. It was a good life.
What we did have was a lot of chips! Perhaps I’m remembering wrong, but it seemed like we had chips five or six nights a week. No wonder really – now I’ve got my own family I’ve learned how much looking after kids costs, so perhaps it was cheap and easy. Chips and cans of Fanta and Coke – whenever I see those it reminds me of my childhood. I loved it; the café was busy and there was always something happening and interesting people coming in.
After that, my mind flits to the first day at Fatima Primary School, when I was four. It was run by nuns and I was gripped by sheer bloody fear. I stood in line at the entrance, waiting to enrol, holding on to my mum’s hand very tightly. One of the kids ran out of line and a nun went over to him, shouted something and then smacked him on the bum.
‘These nuns don’t look too happy, Mam,’ I said.
Mam just laughed and said not to worry.
A few days later, I’d started to settle in but was still a little anxious. One of my brothers was in the school across the road and one afternoon I noticed he’d put his nose against the window and was pulling faces and waving at me. I just burst out crying, bawled my eyes out, I did. That was all just early nerves, though. In fact it was a great school.
I’d already started singing when I went to primary. Funnily enough, ‘Uptown Girl’ by Billy Joel was my party piece. I’d be wheeled out at family dos; my mum used to make me get up in front of all the aunties and uncles to sing that song. Pure embarrassment, like. So I was rehearsing for the Westlife version way back then!
There was no musical background in my family, however. My dad’s a good singer and Yvonne, my sister, could sing all the hymns well at church, but there was no real background of singing or music there. Growing up, my big thing was Michael Jackson. I was a mental Michael Jackson fan, mental. The Bad album was on constantly in our house – ‘Man in the Mirror’, all those songs. That and Thriller. Jesus, I just wanted to be a star, a famous singer, up on stage. I’d sing all Jackson’s tunes in the mirror or in front of my sisters, but I was afraid of singing in front of a crowd. At that early point I was just taking Michael Jackson off really, copying him. I used to be quite good at mimicking people. Gradually, I developed my own style and my own voice and felt more confident about singing in front of people, but I never had the courage to go on stage until I was 12.
In class, I was an OK student, usually a C+, the occasional B, nothing spectacularly good or bad. My attention drifted very easily. There wasn’t really any subject I loved. I wasn’t academic and I didn’t have any dreams to become a doctor or a lawyer. I enjoyed the craic with the lads, I was in a decent class and there weren’t really any eejits in the group, so we all had a laugh. Apart from that, I never really enjoyed school that much, to be honest with you, it was just OK.
The most exciting thing about school was what happened afterwards. I was always talking and trying to sort out something to do after class: ‘Where are we going? What are we doing?’ I played rugby a bit and some Gaelic football, but all I really wanted to do was sing. There was no class for that, so for me it was like, OK, I’m going to do this school thing because I have to, but really I want to be in a band.
Then I started auditioning for musicals at school. Those auditions, rehearsals and performances are my fondest memories of my time at school. It was an all-boys school, so the girls would come up from their school and we’d all stay late for maybe three hours, working through rehearsals. It only happened for about six weeks of each school year, but it meant everything to me, my whole life revolved around it.
The first big break I got was at the Hawks Well Theatre in an adult production of Grease. It was put on by a woman called Mary McDonagh. She was the choreographer, director and producer, and was a pretty well-known name in Sligo. She brought a lot of people up through the ranks in the theatre, offering them their first roles and giving them confidence on stage. She was a great director. She gave me the role of Danny Zuko’s younger brother in this version of Grease. Also in the cast was a kid a year younger than me who I’d seen around town. His name was Kian Egan.
‘Mum, can we go to the feis now, please?’
‘Alright, Kian, come on, but we’ll have to be quick.’
I was sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, having just been seen about an ear infection. I was anxious to get out because my mum had entered me in a local poetry competition, called a feis. I was only four, but this was quite a big thing in Ireland, especially in Easter week. They’d hold a feis and you’d go on stage and recite a poem. Sometimes there’d be over 100 kids competing. However, I’d been quite ill with this ear infection so I actually missed my slot because Mum had been worried and had taken me to the doctor’s. When we finally got to the competition, though, she persuaded the poetry judges to give me a later slot.
I won.
My mum and dad, Kevin and Patricia Egan, were like that – always encouraging their kids. I come from a big family of four brothers and three sisters – Viveanne, Gavin, Fenella and Tom, who are older, and Marielle and Colm, who are younger. Dad met my mum at the dance, they became dance partners and eventually started going out with each other. The first baby arrived when they were only 20; I arrived on 29 April 1980.
My dad was an electrician for the Electricity Supply Board of Ireland, so he’d be out all hours sending the young fellas climbing up the poles, organizing all that. His family didn’t have anything, so he’d had to go to work at 16. Mum was a housewife. She had seven kids to look after, so she didn’t have a spare minute.
My dad had been brought up in Leitrim, a very rural area. His childhood was very typical of the west coast of Ireland at that point, then he set up the family home in nearby Sligo. It was a very busy home. At one point there would have been seven or eight of us in the house, all squeezing into bunk-beds and stuff like that. We weren’t rich, but it was fine. I have a lot of great memories of my childhood and we remain a very tight family to this day.
My mum wasn’t musical at all. I used to sit her at the piano to teach her ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’, but she couldn’t get it. My dad, on the other hand, would have had it in five minutes. He never played an instrument, though. When he was younger, the opportunity wasn’t necessarily there – if he’d said he wanted to be in a band, it would have been, ‘Away with you, get back to work.’ In his later years, however, I realized how much of a love for music he had and became more aware of his massive record collection.
All of us kids tried our hand at music. My eldest brother is, in my eyes, a piano genius – he’s the vice principal of a school in Sheffield now, with honours degrees in piano and guitar.