We were all flying without wings back in the heyday of Irish boy band Westlife. The group were formed in Dublin in 1998 and rose to international popularity during the early 2000s. The new release of their anniversary album, 25: The Ultimate Collection, affords an opportunity to reflect on the band’s story. They emerge as bold and brash, but also as airbrushed as an advertisement for a new housing development in Dublin.
Irish music manager Louis Walsh took five young men and handed them to British music mogul Simon Cowell. Some of the band members were from the west of Ireland, from a generation whose older brothers had left for London and Boston in the 1980s with a bag and a prayer.
The songs were almost aggressively un-Irish. Free from political statement or critical reflections on the place they came from. Instead, they put out American soft rock from the 1970s and 80s, which they delivered in close harmony and in matching knitwear, sitting on stools, off which one of them would occasionally rise for the key change.
It was, in the most literal sense, a performance of aspiration. And Ireland in 2001 understood aspiration.
The Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan once described a trad music (Irish traditional music) session as a frenetic spinning and spiralling whirl where kids fuelled on Fanta were thrown around and everyone felt like the spiral might get so strong as to free everyone from the pull of Earth’s gravity. Much of the way we were in Ireland in the 2000s was similar to that whirl.
The country had been experiencing rising economic statistics for long enough that we started believing that we were actually rich. It was dubbed the Celtic Tiger economic boom.
Ireland had emerged from the poor man of Europe moniker to become something shinier and less complicated. Westlife were simply doing the same thing, at volume, on Top of the Pops.
Olivier Hoslet/EPA
All this growth came under the guidance of that Taoiseach in the anorak, Bertie Ahern. He was a leader so confident in the fiscal strength of the country that he thought any economists who thought any different should do away with themselves – the same man who didn’t feel the need to have a bank account.
As Westlife was topping the music charts in 2001, Ireland was dubbed the “world’s most globalised country” – top of a list of the countries most integrated into the global network of trade, capital, information and people. More than the US, more than Singapore, little Ireland was considered the most open of them all.
Consider all of this growth for a country which five decades earlier was a place where nearly one in every two people made their living off the land, the grip of the Catholic church was strong and faith in local industry was unquestioned. It was an Ireland that considered itself an island on its own.
By the start of 2001, however, Ireland had gone so far down the road of liberalisation that it would be difficult to find its way back. What wealth had been accumulated from the start of the Celtic Tiger was finally starting to be spent. We were building major motorway networks to connect the country and we even went as far as building a light rail system in the capital city.
The nation turned to housing as the “spatial articulation of wealth”. For many, one home was not enough. For a country tied to the fiscal and monetary unions of much larger countries, which were faring much worse in terms of economic metrics, low interest rates and easy access to money acted as the propellant to fuel a bubble that would take a full seven years to burst.
The Flood Tribunal (established in 1997 and later called the Mahon Tribunal) exposed how corrupt the new developments could be. Land zoning, planning applications and suburban sprawl were leaving permanent scars on the countryside. The wealth the country had accumulated became manifest in hotels, shoddy apartments and three-bed semi-detached houses built too far away from where everyone wanted to be.
Amid all this, Westlife were gaining international popularity, which came to its apex in 2001 when the group set off on their first world tour and released their third album, World of Our Own.
There was something almost too neat about the whole arrangement of the band. Boys from the west of Ireland – historically the part of the country most associated with emigration and with the Famine in the mid-1800s – were now being exported not as labour, but as a product. They weren’t going to England to build roads, as boys like them traditionally had; they were going to conquer the charts. The geography was the same. The power dynamic had, apparently, reversed entirely.
Except, of course, it hadn’t really reversed at all. The money, the decisions, the creative control – all of that remained firmly in London, in the hands of Cowell, a man who had identified that pop music could be industrialised like any other product. Find the ingredients, test the recipe, remove anything interesting, repeat.
What Cowell understood, better than anyone, was that the audience didn’t want to be surprised or challenged or moved in any direction they hadn’t already been moved before. They wanted the familiar, delivered with a cheeky smile.
And Westlife, to their credit, delivered the familiar with lovely smiles. They were professionally polished and almost completely without edges. Every rough corner that might have connected them to an actual place or an actual feeling had been sanded back to a smooth, radio-friendly finish.
Ireland, with all its bounty of beautiful complexity – its landscape, its history, its complicated relationship with leaving and returning – was not something that fit in a Cowell product. So it was removed.
What remained were five young men who could hold a note, sing Billy Joel’s songs, and look sincere on cue. International financial capital fuelled by Fanta did the rest, flying as it does, without wings.
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