Mark Feehily is driving through London with his boyfriend Kevin McDaid berating the bad drivers as he goes. He rather disgustedly points out a butcher carrying four skinned pigs on his back, and then says, “A few years ago London intimidated me but I’ve embraced it now. I have definitely got my feet firmly on the ground here and I’m very much in the swing of the city that never sleeps but sometimes I love to escape the madness of London for Sligo. Sligo will always be home.”

Home… It’s a big, important word for Westlife. No other band uses their nationality as a badge of honour quite like Westlife.

They may have dined in the finest restaurants, hung out in the coolest clubs, hob-knobbed with the personalities that adorn all our glossies and holidayed in idyllic hideaways, the nearest to which the rest of us get is the brochures they’re advertised in. Nonetheless, home is where the Westlife heart really is. You’ve got to admire them for never being seduced by an exotic life in far-flung lands. Westlife have never forgotten where they came from.

Even though Irish sales are small fry in comparison to the units they can shift in say, Asia, for example, Westlife gladly make time for the Irish press and always make a point to talk their home counties up. When abroad and asked what they miss whilst on tour they’ll often say an Irish fry-up and a plate of (Shane’s mum’s) bacon and cabbage!

Westlife are as Irish as the potato and, as some cynics could happily chip in, as bland as it too! (But more of this later.)

For all the above reasons their new record, Back Home, couldn’t be more fittingly titled. Home - the lead single - is, as always with a Westlife lead single, of blockbuster proportions, “Another airplane, another sunny place/I’m lucky I know but I wanna go home/I got to go home,” sings Shane Filan to a chorus fat on lush strings and emotive piano chords.

Love them or loathe them, Westlife are wonderful ambassadors for Ireland and when they take to the stage at Croke Park next June, the significance of playing such a historic stadium will certainly not be lost on them.

BEING DIPLOMATIC

Mark won’t say it - he knows better than to shoot his mouth off, which incidentally Brian McFadden did all the time and this is why Westlife say they are a tighter outfit since his departure - but reading between the lines Mark hated two of their last three albums, The Love Album and their horrendous Rat Pack escapade, Allow Us To Be Frank.

“I think this album is better than some other of the recent ones we’ve done,” Mark cautiously admits today. “It’s well produced pop music with lots of original songs. This is the type of Westlife I like being in. The Love Album and the Rat Pack album were fine but this is the type of music I got into Westlife to do.”

Despite the fact that some of Westlife’s biggest hits are covers, (Against All Odds - By Phil Colins, I Have A Dream - an Abba song, The Rose - a Bette Midler song, Mandy - a Barry Manilow song and You Raise Me Up - a Secret Garden song), Mark agrees with the critics who knock them for making their money off other people’s songs.

“I do agree with people who say one cover is one cover too many, and I know that must sound weird coming from me, but there’s a million and 50 different types of politics that go on in this band and just because we’ve done a few covers in a row doesn’t necessarily mean that we have always thought it’s the best way forward,” he says.

The politics of which he speaks of are surely coming from the top, the top being Louis Walsh and Simon Cowell. But I must admit, this admission strikes me as odd. When I interviewed Westlife a few years back I asked Kian if they would be getting Christmas presents for Louis and Simon, “We definitely don’t get them presents but we certainly do expect a very nice present from our label every Christmas because we sell a lot of albums for them. And we don’t ask, we tell!”

From this I gathered that Shane, Mark, Nicky and Kian were the bosses, and Simon and Louis the, ‘yes men’. It appears not though because if the decision had been theirs, I bet Westlife would never have released the Love Album and the Rat Pack album, which incidentally were some of their poorest sellers and lost them any shred of credibility they had. Which brings us nicely to the next point.

KEEPING IT REAL

Westlife have no cred. Individually they are quite cool but as a band they are the furthest thing from it. Even Nicky Byrne recently agreed that sometimes the Westlife package - the black suits and the homely songs - can seem as exciting as “watching paint dry”.

Nonetheless they have endured their romantic ballads and won many, many staunch fans in the process. Fans who send them incredibly raunchy presents like public hair, vibrators and even homemade porn!

“We have so many crazy fans,” Mark admits. “One time I was sent a sticky vibrator!” Charming!

COMING OUT

Mark has really. Excuse the pan, come out of himself since coming out in 2005. While off during the summer he did something he’d be longing to do for years. He went to the Oxegen music festival and got trashed.

“Oxegen was one of the best experiences of my life,” he tells me. “I reckon it was one of the experiences I most missed out on in my early years in Westlife.”

You’d imagine that a festival for a boyband member of Mark’s calibre would result in the most unbearable ribbing from drunken revelers, but no, says Mark.

“Everyone was wearing plastic glasses,” he explains, “so everyone looked like they were in disguise. I was walking around in the middle of Oxegen unrecognised. It felt great to be normal. Sometimes you do feel alienated because people do stare.”

The beauty in the banal, the magic of the mundane, celebrities crave it, and we, the Joe Soaps want to escape from it. Oh, the irony of it all!

THE BIG BREAK

Next year when Westlife take their 12 month sabbatical after their world tour winds up, Mark will be able to partake in lots more, “normal things.” Things he enjoys like DIY (Do It Yourself) in his home, watching movies with his boyfriend, eating out in London, reading the Sligo Champion in his house in the West and traveling the world, not as Mark from Westlife but as plain old Mark Feehily, son to Marie and Oliver, and brother to Barry and Colin.

Back Home is out now. Westlife play Croke Park, June 1st, 2008.

Credit/Source: Thanx Lucy for the scans

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