VICKI ANDERSON talks to Westlife lead singer Shane Filan about his toy cat and his happy-go-lucky life in a man-band.

You can’t ignore the elephant in the living room. My elephant in the living room is Westlife, the manband that has sold out the Westpac Arena next Wednesday. The show sold out so fast that if he’d been standing close enough to the box office it might have ruffled the immaculately coiffed hair of lead singer Shane Filan.

Who knew there were so many Westlife fans in Christchurch? I tried to imagine who the show would appeal to. Girls, obviously - Westlife’s sickly sweet ballads about love and undying devotion seem to have a timeless appeal for certain types of women.

Perhaps the crowd will be made up of nostalgic Kiwis who happened to be in the United Kingdom during the band’s height of boy-band ’90s popularity?

Women and, yes, men, whom I would never have picked for Westlife fans in a million ballad-filled years, started sidling up to me and asking if I had any ‘‘spare tickets’’. After the 15th person approached me, I asked the bloke what Westlife’s appeal for him was.

He said that being aWestlife fan was ‘‘like going for a walk after sex where you appreciate every other rhythm of nature... your heartbeat, your breath, the birds, the breeze, the sun, the moon. The very cycles that make a tapestry of existence’’.

It’s just the sort of thing I’d expect someone who listened to Westlife to say and, after talking to frontman Shane Filan, it’s just the sort of phrase I can imagine tumbling from his mouth.

Honestly, the man is so nice and inoffensively bland I find it difficult to fathom how he’s managed to survive the cut-throat music industry, let alone thrive in it - but thrive he has.

Since releasing their first album in 1999, Westlife have had 14 UK No. 1 singles - Swear It Again, If I Let You Go, Flying Without Wings, I Have A Dream / Seasons In The Sun, Fool Again, Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now), My Love, Uptown Girl, Queen of My Heart, World Of Our Own, Unbreakable, Mandy, You Raise Me and The Rose - and six No. 1 albums in the UK, the singles being the third-highest in UK history, tieing with Cliff Richard and trailing behind Elvis Presley and The Beatles. They have sold 36 million records worldwide.

When I catch up with Filan it’s midnight and he’s sitting in the back of a tour bus having just finished a gig which truly ignited the crowd. The roof, the roof, the roof was on fire.

‘‘I’m thirsty. I need a cup of tea,’’ he says in a thick Irish brogue. ‘‘We were doing this gig in Manchester tonight and a part of the stage caught fire after the pyrotechnics show; I mean there were actual flames.’’

No-one was injured. It just meant a roadie got the unfortunate job of shimmying up the side of the stage with a fire extinguisher and it can’t have been too terrifying if all the man wants to drink is a cup of tea.

Filan was born on July 5, 1979, and grew up in Sligo, Ireland. The youngest of seven children, his parents owned a diner in Sligo named Carlton Cafe and he worked there as a waiter in his boy-before-boy-band years.

When his parents decided to close the cafe in 2003, he bought it and his wife Gillian now runs a clothing store there.

His entertainment debut came at 12 when he was in a school production of Grease at Summerhill College with Kian Egan and Mark Feehily. As a big fan of Michael Jackson, it was around this age that Filan discovered dancing when he says he taught himself how to moonwalk.

Filan is the first Irishman I’ve spoken to who actually uses the phrase ‘‘at all, at all’’ when he tells me he can’t ‘‘moonwalk any more, at all, at all’’.

To be sure. But, luckily he doesn’t need to because, together with the synchronised gyrations of bandmates Nicky Byrne, Kian Egan and Mark Feehily, he can sell out stadiums across the world, something he never imagined when treading the boards in Grease all those years ago.

‘‘I don’t think we ever expected anything like what’s happened to us. It’s very cool, yeah, very cool. It’s a job and lots of things have changed. We’re married and have kids now and family is very important to us. It’s good to be in a position to be able to enjoy that.’’

In the 1990s, Westlife rode the carefully choreographed wave as a boy-band. But what do they consider themselves to be now?

‘‘We’re a bit old for that label, but that’s what we were then, boys. Now we’re a manband. We’re looking forward to coming to New Zealand. It’s been a while since we’ve done a concert down there and we’ve never been to Christchurch. Now we’re coming as men.’’

Before Westlife, Filan, Egan and Feehily and fellow Sligonians Derrick Lacey, Graham Keighron and Michael Garrett, were part of a six-member group called IOYOU. Filan’s mother contacted Louis Walsh, the manager of another ’90s boy band, Boyzone, and eventually the group met Simon Cowell, A&R for BMG. But IOYOU did not meet with his approval.

Two members of IOYOU were turfed out, auditions were held and Byrne and McFadden were recruited. The new group was named Westside but as the name was already taken by another band, it was changed to Westlife.

It doesn’t take Einstein to imagine what this game of Simon Says was like at those auditions as Cowell is known for such infamous quotes on American Idol as: ‘‘The end of the animal trade would leave more time to trap or beat to death pop star wannabes’’; ‘‘Shave off your beard and wear a dress. You would be a great female impersonator’’; and ‘‘You singing is like ordering a ferocious guard dog for your home and getting delivered a poodle in a leather jacket instead’’. Filan says Cowell hasn’t changed.

‘‘When I first met him he was just a record company guy who liked us and he was keen to sign us up and give us a record deal straight away. Even then he was like he is now on TV. He had a great sense of his own personality, shall I say. Don’t get me wrong. I like the guy. He has a great sense of what it is the viewers want to see and he plays up to that and that’s what people want and through that he’s made himself a nice living. A very nice living.’’

Filan hasn’t done too badly himself. His wealth keeps him nicely in horsepower - he ‘‘adores’’ Ferraris and also, with his family, has around 70 horses named Carlton.

‘‘My family love horses, breed horses and have done for years - yes all of them are called Carlton something, Carlton Clover, Carlton Flight. It’s great for me to get away from work life and go and spend time with the horses. My daughter loves them, too.’’

Filan married his childhood sweetheart Gillian Walsh, and they have a 2 1/2 old daughter, Nicole Rose. ‘‘It’s a fun age. She’ll come up to me and say ‘what are you doing, Daddy?’ I’ll tell her I have just been on telly and she just says ‘OK’. I love her so much, I’d do anything for her. The love you have for your child is completely different to anything else in the world. You’d just do anything for them.

‘‘We’re expecting another child which is exciting, so after this tour I’m looking forward to just being at home with my family. That’s what it’s all about.’’ Can you hear the female fans swooning? Anyway, I can’t wait any longer. I simply have to ask Filan about a quote reportedly attributed to him in which he said: ‘‘I used to have a toy cat called Kitty. It wasn’t a pink cat but it wasn’t a black cat either, if you know what I mean. It was something a girl would definitely have had. I’d hide him under the bed when my friends came round.’’

He replies: ‘‘Oh Jesus, yeah, I did, yeah. It wasn’t like a proper toy cat either. It was a biscuit tin shaped like a cat. Oh Jesus, I carried that thing around for years. I loved it.’’

Throughout our interview the cynic in me is struck by what a genuinely nice guy Filan is. It’s refreshing to see that nice guys don’t always finish last.

‘‘Westlife have made amazing achievements and through the band I’ve ended up with a great life. We just wouldn’t be able to do that if we weren’t making music people liked.’’

Credit/Source: C1 Music - Gig Guide / www.pressdisplay.com

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