This
Is The Life - November 2006
They’ve
just notched up their 14th UK No.1, sold over 35million albums worldwide, and
have both Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh on their team.
Bigger than ever before, we spoke to Shane, Nicky, Kian and Mark about ‘having
the best job in the world’. Oh, and playing in cow sheds!
On the new Love Album, you’ve picked your
favourite songs – who picked what and which songs are your personal
favourites?
Nicky: We sat down with Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh and worked out what songs would work
best. The Rose was Louis’ idea, and Total Eclipse Of
The Heart was Simon’s idea. Easy was our idea, and so was You Light Up My Life. We also recorded Hard To Say I’m Sorry by
Shane: You Are So Beautiful was Kian’s idea.
Nicky: We had a hand in about six of them,
but the type of person Simon is, people can see it from X Factor, he’s in control and likes to make the final decision.
If we had a problem with his choices and we really wanted to we could say no,
but he’s made such good choices in the past we trust him.
Shane: You’ve Lost
That Loving Feeling is one of his favourite ever songs.
Simon and Louis are now huge on X Factor –
after all these years how does it feel to have your record company boss and your
manager being big stars in their own right?
Shane: It is weird to be
honest but things are still the same between us, they’re exactly the same as
they were when we first met them. Simon’s always been the way he is and he’s
always been right most of the time. He’s picked 14 number one singles for us.
Nicky: Louis and Simon together are a great team, they know so much, they’re like an encyclopaedia of all pop music. Louis’ house
back in
You’ve played Wembley Arena 21 times and
are as big now as you’ve ever been – are you comfortable in your ‘job’
now?
Kian: Yeah, we know who we are, we’re comfortable in our jobs and
our life, it’s nice. We know we’ve got the best job in
the world, but we also know it’s just a job, which helps to make it all the more
enjoyable.
Shane: It’s good, we look forward to making an album in the
summer, doing a tour in the autumn and the spring, and then looking to see what
album to do the summer after that. We’ve had that excitement for eight years and
hopefully we can have that for another eight, but you can’t look too far ahead.
We’re lucky that we can look a year or maybe two ahead, lots of people in this
industry can’t. Westlife’s become our life but at the
same time some of us are married with children now so you can’t do two months
straight work away somewhere. You need to go home for a few days, or take a
couple of days to go surfing and relax, chill out and keep things sane and keep
things working.
If you woke up
tomorrow and you weren’t successful what would you do next?
Kian: I don’t
think we’d make the decision to break up. After eight years Westlife has become
such a part of who we are and we’ve done so well that we’d be hesitant about
making that decision. It’s hard to imagine it too. We’re going to do the
greatest hits next year and so we know that things will probably be good for
another while yet. But we have other things outside the band that we do now so
it’s not like if we broke up then we could do all these other things that we
don’t get the chance to normally. We have other passions that we enjoy, Shane’s
got a baby, Nicky’s married. If the band stopped we’d probably get stuck into
our other hobbies and passions for about six months, get bored, then phone each other up and go, “Let’s do another album
lads!”
Shane: Haha! It’d take six months, a year
max, until we were bored out of our heads.
You’ve toured around the world and are
going back to
Nicky: It was in a cow shed! It
was for a TV show and sponsored by Pepsi Max and called Stars Without The Sugar, meaning having the normal things stripped
away. Whoever won it could choose where to have us play and the girl who won it
lived on a proper farm down in
Shane: They had quad bikes that they used for
rounding up the sheep and we had a go on them earlier in the day. There was one
sheep that we thought we’d killed! We went roaring up and they all legged it apart from one who jumped into a ditch and didn’t
move!
Kian: And a cow nearly crapped on Nicky!
Nicky: The lads had never
milked a cow before so I got in there and started giving it a bit of a go. Just
as I did its tail went up and I knew what was going to happen and I ran! Poop
went everywhere!
And the best gig
you’ve ever played?
Shane: Playing
Nicky: The morning of the first show I was in bed and I
got a voicemail from Kian saying, “You have to come in, there’s a problem with
the stage, it doesn’t fit and the weather’s shocking!” I was thinking ‘what!?
How can the stage not fit into a stadium?!’ It didn’t
because we had these two big turntables on either side, but luckily the
engineers were able to move them into the middle. We thought the rain might be
dangerous as we had to get on lifts and all sorts but thankfully as soon as the
show was about to start at six o’clock the clouds disappeared and it turned into
the most perfect blue day. It was a great day in the life of Westlife!
And you’ve become big in
Mark: We
have! It’s somewhere we always wanted to do well in and last year we went there
with Face To Face and then earlier this year we went on the number one TV show
and did You Raise Me Up. The next week the album went to number one for six
weeks, which was unreal.
Kian: We’re thinking about doing a live greatest
hits DVD from
www.westlife.com
Credit/Source:
Thanx
“no1caz81”
for
this