The truth about Boyzone

The going got tough.

[Photo: Sky]

On the boyband spectrum, Boyzone were a bridging loan between Take That enthusiastic theatrics and Westlife’s wholesome crooning. At the top of their game for a decent stretch, yes, and beloved by millions of fans, but when you consider their musical legacy, Boyzone were creatively hobbled by a back catalogue of unimaginative covers and, save for occasional moments of magic, uninspiring material. Their success seemed to hinge on nothing better coming along just yet.

It was no surprise, then, to find that the three-part tell-all documentary about their highs and lows offered little in the way of fresh information. Aside from two very high-profile news stories, Boyzone’s lore borrows from oft-told tales of five young hopefuls of varying talents being worked to nervous exhaustion by an unfeeling Svengali and a record company obsessed by pie charts. It’s remarkable, really, when you watch these documentaries – of which there have been a fair few – and see identical cold-blooded routines play out. Crudely shot videos of knackered young men looking lonely in empty airports, enforced japery, or snatches of interviews with boys far from home who can barely summon the energy to remember their own name. Throughout the nineties and way beyond, the record industry played fast and loose with the mental health of its young charges, never allowing the production line to falter for fear of new, more energetic rivals tempting away their audience with better songs, ritzier dance routines and fresher faces devoid of eyebags or the haunted, opioid-glazed expressions.

The most interesting thing about Boyzone: No Matter What was its roiling subtext. The band member with the most fascinating stories, Stephen Gately, died tragically young of an undiagnosed heart defect in 2009, and other than Mikey Graham, the bandmates largely appeared to keep their feelings behind glass. The storytelling was scant and swift: other than Gately’s humble beginnings in an economically struggling area of Dublin, the boys’ backgrounds were glossed over, despite it feeling extremely relevant. It’s likely their modest upbringings made them more malleable by the forces eager to remind them this could be taken away at any moment. Similarly breezed through with little introspection was the early dismissal of two original members and Mikey’s late introduction.

The blueprint for these boyband confessionals is Take That’s pre-reformation mid-noughties retrospective, which featured Robbie Williams hissing from the sidelines, and clearly the producers here – who included one Ronan Keating – were keen to ape the formula. So Mikey was cast as the spurned outsider, filmed across a table in interrogation stance, hands knotted together over white knuckles, face etched with disappointment and loss. The source of Mikey’s ire went back to being passed over as lead singer once a young, driven Ronan made his own leading man ambitions clear. Quite how the toothy 16-year-old staged this coup was never made clear, given that Ronan revealed at one early recording session that producer Ian Levine – not known for pulling punches – told him he couldn’t sing. Mikey Graham’s steely gaze into the camera suggested the cutting room floor had more to say about this transfer of power.

Luckily we were largely spared the band’s wider cultural context – perhaps because Boyzone’s ethos had little care for trends – so talking heads were restricted to those with direct experience of working with the band rather than air-headed commentators wanging on about Smash Hits and coffee-flavoured Revels. You might think manager Louis Walsh, given the lakes of bad blood separating him from the band, would be keen to swerve this visual memoir, but Walsh can hear a camera bag unzipping across two continents and has been running low on shame for a good three decades. You don’t need to splice footage together to make Louis Walsh look like a piece of sh•t; he is a walking villain edit. Every time Walsh was on screen, staring back, unblinking and unbowed, at his interviewer, I had that same feeling in my stomach as when I once ran a dishcloth along the seal of my dishwasher and inspected the results. Every moment of pain, anguish, and misery relayed by the band members was met with ice-veined indifference by their former manager.

It was hardly a revelation that Walsh fed the tabloids nonsense stories to keep Boyzone in the press or distract from ‘what was really happening’ – the details of which remained, yet again, uncloaked here – and his lack of contrition was equally predictable. If Walsh had popped open his shirt, and wrenched apart his chest wall to reveal a defunct Sega Mega Drive, I would’ve barely flinched. He was, and perhaps still is, only interested in making money and whether the band was having a good time, or creatively stimulated, was of no concern. We laugh at boybands and other manufactured pop acts demanding control once the coins start rolling in but there is always such a pervading sense of emptiness and cruelty from the puppet masters – both toward the band and the fans – that anything will do so long as the punters are paying and screaming for more. You can’t blame the stars for realising they are artists in name only and yearning for self-expression and to better serve their audience.

The only time Walsh seemed animated was when we reached the band’s biggest story at the height of their success, a very nineties scandal: Stephen Gately coming out. It was painful to watch clips of young Stephen performing verbal acrobatics to avoid endless ‘why haven’t you got a girlfriend?’ questioning, and his painted smile and wide eyes masked the pain of hiding his truth from the public. I came out around a year after Stephen, at the age of 24, and despite Queer as Folk and Graham Norton on the telly it was still a confusing, harrowing experience. And I was nobody. The death of Stephen’s privacy was, as tradition dictated at the time, a defused threat: The Sun had the story – as did numerous papers if Walsh is to be believed, but… y’know – and was prepared to run it. Stephen was offered the opportunity to do it ‘his way’ with an exclusive interview. Everybody saw through the ruse – even the habitually clueless Richard Madeley remarked upon it the day the story broke – but the band played along because if being Main Character of Twitter could be the worst day of our life, falling foul of a tabloid back then was career suicide.

Ronan teared up in anger when shown the original front page of The Sun, and Stephen’s sister Michelle barely glanced at it, handling it as if were radioactive but Louis… he was excited, thumbing through the pages as if a child tearing through the Argos catalogue at Christmas, cooing in delight at the photos and quotes. As the faces of his former charges turned to stone, Walsh’s glee – and the nonchalant shrug of the showbiz editor who broke the story – were as incongruous as a chenille jumper in a Renaissance painting. And yet again, there was a sense the juice was being filtered off elsewhere, with the boys on the verge of saying something irrevocable, leaving us only with a pulpy mess of unresolved anger. Happily for Stephen, Boyzone’s loyal fans flocked to support their idol, and one of the documentary’s most genuinely emotional scenes was footage of the band’s first public appearance after the outing, at a mobbed Capital FM festival in Hyde Park, the crowd screaming for Stephen every time he sang.

The band’s original dissolution came thanks to Ronan’s Faustian pact to not only go solo under Walsh’s tutelage but also mentor Boyzone’s spiritual successors Westlife. There was an opportunity here for fur to fly, but the telling unfolded with wilful ordinariness. Those of us subjected to those execrable solo efforts at the time had no wish to relive them, which was fortunate as the entire enterprise received barely ten minutes of screen time, mostly taken up by Shane and Keith’s highlights reel of the seven stages of grief that seemed to get stuck at bargaining before rebounding to the start.

Walsh, who spent most of his tenure on The X Factor acting like he’d banged his head on an iron girder seconds before going on air, was suddenly clear-eyed and callous as he dismissed Ronan’s artistic pretensions, although you could argue Ronan knew exactly what he was getting into. Walsh’s contempt for any concept of creative freedom was matched only by his apparent disdain for the singer’s audience, but it did lead, at least, to a successful Boyzone reunion, with Walsh ghosted from the deal. All the members said this second act was their happiest time of their entire career. Funny that.

We all know how the story ends for Stephen. A tragic, sudden death followed by a wave of grief from fans and vitriolic homophobia and degrading speculation from cultural commentators. The documentary handled it sensitively, with Mikey’s telling of how the four remaining bandmates stayed overnight with Stephen’s body in the church before the funeral especially poignant, given his own eventual estrangement from them. Stephen’s fate, sadly, was to be a reluctant and unwitting trailblazer, both in his coming-out and his untimely death. If lessons were not learned, both events certainly had an impact on the public’s perception of the tabloids’ relationship with and treatment of the stars it relied on for coverage. It must seem bewildering to any younger viewers perhaps catching this documentary with their parents, that such private moments would be gossip fodder, given stars tend to spoil or debunk press exclusives through their social media. In fact, watching this, I was reminded of a feeling only a few days earlier when I saw a red-top headline splashing that footballer Jude Bellingham was dating a model. It seemed so prurient and uninteresting, yet twee at the same time, that a footballer’s relationship was deemed worthy of wasting so much ink. Now that the theatre of politics has usurped it, showbiz gossip feels like an archaic interest, with readers easily seeing through the PR spin and salacious lies. Cheering in a way, actually, to see Louis Walsh’s one talent – feeding garbage stories to hungry showbiz reporters – is now as relevant as being a gong farmer.

The very end of Boyzone, following a popular but disastrous farewell tour in the dying days of the pre-covid universe, had passed me by, and it flew over the heads of the documentary makers too. Allusions to something actually interesting were distilled to accusations of Shane and Keith ‘partying’ and a scuffle with Mikey, continuing the documentary’s determination to never dig beyond the outermost layer of a very rotten onion. Saving it for the autobiographies perhaps, or reluctant to taint a potential reunion ten years down the line.

Even without the grit, the documentary was a haunting reminder of most ‘manufactured’ pop groups’ total lack of agency and the manipulative entitlement of their starmakers who saw them as little more than udders to be milked until there’s only dust. There’s little evidence much has changed other than Ireland is no longer a reliable boyband factory, replaced by South Korea, and there are openly gay pop stars as far as the eye can see.

Whatever you think of their music, Boyzone were loved and, like most boybands, they deserved better. We may never know the full, unedited story, and by the end it became clear that an airbrushed version is the kindest option for the four of them. The damage has already been done, but maybe this documentary will give them the peace they need. What a shame that for Stephen Gately, who deserved to look back on his legacy with pride, this new beginning has come too late.

Boyzone: No Matter What is available on Sky Documentaries and streaming on NOW TV – it is worth a watch.

---

ONE-LINER

Every week, in the lead-up to the publication of the paperback version of my latest novel LEADING MAN, I’m posting one random line, picked from every 25 pages or so, to allegedly whet your appetite. We’re up to p.124.

Facing him now was like peering between the tines of a fork for the first time; it’s obvious, in a way, that the vile buildup of grime and bacteria must’ve always been there, but you still can’t quite believe how grisly it is.

Sounds great. Buy the hardback, or preorder the paperback, out in April. Preordering can make the hugest difference to how a book performs and the longevity of my career, I can’t say it any plainer than that. If you prefer ebooks, the Kindle is down to £2.99 now.

BLIND DATE

Yes, I reviewed it. Their first-date chat covers the kind of topics that would have me forcefully feeding my own head into an extractor fan. READ NOW

WHAT I READ IN JANUARY

Last year, I pivoted to video (ha!) for a monthly roundup of everything I’d read, their plots summed up in one line. You can see the latest edition of my awkward relationship with a camera below, or TikTok.

theguyliner

A post shared by @theguyliner