My dad had the weirdest, most interesting record collection. I don’t know how he accumulated such an odd mix. He had Queen, Top of the Pops compilations, Eddy Grant albums, Nana Mouskouri, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack, all sorts. For some reason he used to put his record player out in the garage and I’d go in there and hear all this eclectic stuff.
It was a slower way of life than in the town. When you’re a child living in the countryside, you can spend hours doing things and you don’t even realize how the time has passed by.
My primary school, St Patrick’s, was beautiful and I loved it. On the very first day I was very apprehensive because I didn’t like strangers or kids I didn’t know. But once I got into it, I loved it. It was out in the countryside, bathed in fresh air. I was very lucky. I was a very peaceful kind of child and that school was a very peaceful place to go every day.
Then one day my dad came home with this enormous satellite dish. He had been working on a house and they had wanted to throw this thing away, so he had brought it home. Suddenly, instead of, like, four channels, we had 400. I could get tons of American music channels – early hip-hop, music television, loads of stuff. That had a huge impact on me. Funnily enough, we got a microwave around the same time – we were one of the first families I knew to get one – so that, along with my satellite dish and a new pair of trainers I’d just got, made me feel like I was the richest kid on Earth. We weren’t rich at all, though. My dad had just got lucky with this random old satellite.
There was a lot of music at school, which is typical of Irish education. All my schools taught tin whistle in class, for example. And we’d sing; nearly every day we used to sing. So I was brought up around this very random collection of all sorts of music from different cultures, different countries – a real mixture.
The common denominator in all of this was the singing – I loved to sing. If it was an Irish country classic, I’d sing it; if it was an R&B or hip-hop tune, I’d sing the chorus melody in between the rap verses; if it was an American pop tune I’d heard on satellite, I’d sing that.
Then I discovered Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. I must have shattered my parents’ eardrums singing along to ‘I Will Always Love You’. Mariah was my favourite, though, and when I first heard ‘Hero’ it had a huge impact on me. My dad saw her on the telly and called up to my bedroom for me to go down. I did and just stood there in silence and watched the whole song. I’d never seen or heard of her before and I was very drawn to her gospel voice and beautiful image. I just remember looking at her and thinking how absolutely gorgeous she was, and then she sang and her voice was out of this world. Hearing her sing was a rare moment for me, because that was the awakening of my love for pop music. I literally think at that precise second listening to that song something awakened in me, without a shadow of a doubt. If I hadn’t seen her that day, maybe the door to music and eventually Westlife wouldn’t have opened. Who knows? But after that I started rooting out soul and gospel tunes and completely immersed myself in music. I also started singing a lot at school. At first I was crap, singing way too loud, and it drove the teachers insane. I would belt out ‘Silent Night’ or the latest pop song at full blast. But I started to improve and I couldn’t stop myself, I just loved singing.
Inevitably, I starting singing in school plays and productions. The first thing I did was a play called Scrooged and I just absolutely got a major buzz from it, on this tiny little stage. I was only about eight but I loved it. I was extremely self-conscious as a kid – something I still carry with me to this day to a certain extent – but I noticed that when I sang, all the anxiety fell away, I didn’t care who was singing with me or listening to me, as long as I was singing I was happy.
It was the same at Mass. We weren’t an overly religious family, but we did go to Mass and I really enjoyed the singing there. The first time I sang in front of people was at church – ‘Away in a Manger’, on Christmas Eve at midnight Mass. The acoustics were so amazing. It wasn’t a huge church, but it had a lovely echo, and the smell of incense is still with me today. I just really enjoyed it and I didn’t care for one second that people were watching me. Each week, there might be a couple of teachers and some older boys in the choir – had that been a room full of people chatting, I wouldn’t have said a word. But as it was singing, I had no self-doubt and no awkwardness at all. During that time I realized that gospel affected me more deeply than any other music. It still has a power over me. It is something special, unique.
I think I was quite well behaved as a kid, but I’m not going to say I was very, very obedient. Occasionally I used to kick up a stink with my parents, but all kids do at some point. Mum and Dad said I had to be responsible for my own homework and I did it. I was allowed to do it when I wanted to, as long as I got it done. That was reflective of their attitude generally: they respected the kids and gave them the space to grow up and be themselves. And I just wanted to give back a bit of the love my parents and grandparents showed me.
One of the first big moments on stage for me was a talent competition at school in front of the whole hall. It was maybe a few hundred kids, but it felt like a few thousand. It was the same night Kian serenaded the teacher with ‘Wonderful Tonight’. There were two other lads in the talent competition that were my age; one did line dancing and one sang a Garth Brookes song. Both got booed. I won my category and age group and I didn’t get booed, I didn’t get laughed at, I got clapped. People weren’t bouncing off the ceiling, but I got clapped. That was a key moment for me.
Outside of when I was singing, I was a pretty introspective child at school. I was quiet, reserved, nervous. That was how I was all the time – except when I was singing. It’s strange. I don’t know why it was, but I didn’t question it, I just enjoyed it. Even today, singing is the one thing I can do and not feel embarrassed. I just get into the zone and start singing and lose myself.
When I went to the secondary school at Summerhill College in Sligo, I had to get used to a less idyllic routine than at the primary. The boys from town were tougher and, being very honest with you, I did get some stick. For a long time, it mattered to me what people thought of me. If someone put pen on my cheek or if I had dog shit on my shoe, like kids do, I would be so embarrassed. Stuff like that made me want to crawl up into a ball. If anyone ever pointed at me and laughed, I was gutted. If I played tennis and someone said I was rubbish, it would break my heart. I was only a kid, 12 years old or so, but I just wasn’t that hard and stuff like that made a deep impression on me. I sort of wish I wasn’t like that, because life would have been a lot easier if I didn’t give a shit, like some people.
We thought pushing Mark into the shower was just a bit of fun, explains Kian, but it wasn’t to him. The name-calling was hurtful. I’m very glad to say that despite this we very quickly became good friends, hanging around with each other, great mates.
Mark had a difficult time with certain people. A little bit because of his weight, but also because he was a singer, he was quiet, he was from the country – you know, he did different things from everyone else. I was a good sports player, I was good at Gaelic football; when I was 17, I played in the All Ireland quarter finals, and that sportiness always helps a kid at school. Even then, the rougher edges of my childhood sometimes spilled over into my sports. In that All Ireland game, two great big buffs from the country ran full pelt and sandwiched me. These guys must have been up at six lifting hay bales and spent all day eating potatoes and cabbage. Jesus, it hurt. I got straight up and headbutted the pair of them. Well, that was that – banned for three months.
Mark was in my class and I started hanging round with him when I was 14. By then I’d progressed from my sister’s variety shows to musicals at the school and the local theatre. That’s when I started hanging out with Shane, who was a year older than me – during break-time and through rehearsing these musicals. You might not think that getting into musicals was particularly a good idea for someone like me, with all