Mark Feehily (Singer/Songwriter)

Hi everyone, welcome to Such Good Feeling. My guest today is simply one of the finest singers in the world. As part of Westlife, he sold over 55 million records, 11 number one albums, 16 number one singles, and played to millions worldwide, including last year's sold out show at Wembley Arena.

He is one of the most endearing and kindest people I know and have the honour of calling a friend. So please welcome Mark Fahili. Hello, Stevie. Hey. How are you doing? Thank you for that lovely introduction. Oh. You're welcome. I mean, actually, how are you doing? I mean... I'm doing good, yeah. Thank you for asking. So, yeah, I mean, I had what I would describe as a bit of a hairy December.

And not in the good way. Yeah, no, basically we started our... indoor arena tour in the UK mid-November and all was going well until at the very end of November in Newcastle about an hour before the show I decided right this fever that I have is getting worse. And to the point where I'm worried about the show now, you know, this is probably like two or three o'clock in the day. And I went over, found a local GP and.

Oh, just everything was sky high, all the different readings and stuff like that. So he sent me into A&E and within kind of a couple of hours, I was lying in A&E. There had been an England football match on that day for the World Cup and around 9pm there was a massive influx of injured football supporters that had been drinking and broke their ankles and their legs and their arms.

And so I was sitting in this A&E while the boys were on stage in Newcastle playing the gig because they very heroically went ahead with the gig, you know, and I completely supported them in that, obviously. Yeah, I was in the A&E and I was kind of like on Twitter seeing how it was all going, you know, lying in a bed surrounded by injured football fans. But, you know, that was kind of the scary bit at the start.

The word pneumonia scared the living daylights out of me when the doctor first said it to me, but I suppose they broke it down and told me that it's just a very bad chest infection and as long as it's treated properly and you take care of yourself, it's fine.

Very unfortunately I had to just go home and it was almost being back in lockdown because I was just, for the first couple of weeks I was just in bed all the time and then for the next couple of weeks I couldn't leave the house. It was really cold so I was afraid to go outside.

So it was a very, very strange, almost out-of-body experience to watch the Westlife Tour kind of go ahead. But as I say, the boys have my full support and I'm in awe of how... They had a couple of hours notice before the first gig and all of my bits...

and pieces had to be replaced or sung by somebody else. The choreography had to be changed and they absolutely nailed it and the fans supported them and the fans sung along here and there to show support and there was a really positive... atmosphere all around you know but it was certainly strange sitting in a home watching it all on to be honest I was watching it on Twitter because you know that's where I could see video clips and feedback and stuff but you know

At the time, it felt like forever, and it felt like this big, dark cloud, I suppose. But it was just four weeks in 25 years. It's the first time that any of us have missed a stint of gigs like that.

Put it this way, I'm very glad that it's behind me now and I'm really looking forward to all the rest of the tour that's coming up. Yes, exactly. So I'm talking to Mark just before the boys go off to, where are you going next? Is it Asia? Yeah, we're going to Asia. We start in Indonesia and we go Hong Kong, Taiwan, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore as well, actually. And I've probably missed out on a couple of places there, but we...

We go down there quite frequently really and it's become, it was right up there with the UK and Ireland as our largest territory in the world. The support out there is phenomenal and we love going out there. These territories have showed massive support since the beginning, but as the industry develops out there, the gigs are getting bigger and better, and we are just loving it. I grew up on a farm.

you know, in the rural, outside of town in the west of Ireland, you know, and to think that I'm in the middle of Manila or... Jakarta and Indonesia and people know my mum's name and my brother's name and not only my name, you know, they know so much about you and they know every word of every song and it's always going to be... very surreal to be on the other side of the world and for people to know you that intimately. Yeah, I bet. And just going back to that farm, what's the...

what's the music that's happening in the house even before you get a chance to even buy your own records and stuff when you're a kid what's what's playing

Well, on the farm, the farm was my grandparents' farm, and I spent a lot of time on that, but my parents worked, so my nana looked after me all the time. And she had this lovely little radio in the corner of the kitchen, little red plastic kind of... single tape cassette thingy with a tuner on it and there was a local radio which it's now called Ocean FM but at the beginning it was called NWR I think

It had a few different reincarnations name-wise and stuff. And this is the thing, in Ireland, in the west of Ireland where I live, there's a huge country music scene. in certain parts if you go into the right town you're going to see Stetsons even you know and I grew up thinking this was just an Irish thing but even other parts of Ireland and you know I wrongly like when we first came to the UK

I used to talk about Garrett Brooks all the time, and a lot of people didn't know who I was talking about. And I was shocked that not everybody knew country music. But where I grew up, it was massive. And I don't know, maybe it's because there was less... sort of big venues and country music is something that's friendly to smaller towns and you know one man and a guitar and all that kind of stuff and it kind of

Also crossed over with the show band scene in Ireland as well. So yeah, country music was on the radio all day, every day. Both local kind of domestically made country music by local artists and also all of the big stars from Nashville and America and everything. So that was massive. And I always go way back. The perfect song to display or demonstrate the example is I Will Always Love You, which is the perfect kind of R&B pop.

ballad but also the perfect country song. For me the relationship between R&B and country is massive and so I do think that my love for R&B and soul music probably And, you know, come somewhere from the beginnings of that country foundation in a way, you know.

And when did you, I mean, kind of coming up on the farm and the country music and everything, I mean, when do you remember kind of first starting to hear those kind of soul voices that have ended up influencing you so much? So my dad has actually played a huge part in sort of my knowledge of music and my beginnings of music. So my dad, you know, he worked.

He's brilliant with his hands. He's like a qualified carpenter, but he worked mostly in my childhood as he used to both sell and fit and supply windows, doors, conservatories. And so he'd come back sometimes.

One evening he came in the gate of the house and I seen this satellite dish that was probably big enough for the BBC to use to broadcast on the back of a trailer, tied to the trailer. And I obviously started jumping up and down because... you know it obviously looked like a spaceship coming in the gate but he got his mate to hook it up and so we we had i don't know i was probably around 10 but we had like all the american channels like and including mtv but going back before that

He came home one day somewhere, somehow, with this vinyl, like with a record player and just a massive box of vinyls. And in that, there was things like Gladys Knight and the Pips, Nana Muscori. Yeah. There was like a couple of Top of the Pops compilation ones, proper 1970s looking ones, you know. And there was all sorts, there was an Irish band called the Horselips, Eddie Grant. So this random box of vinyls and then there's me sort of at seven or eight years old.

Living in the middle of the countryside on a Saturday where all my neighbours and friends must have just been off doing something else. So I'd go out to my dad's garage, which was like, you know, this amazing little garage full of...

tools and full of wood and full of and then in the corner there's this record player with this random box of of various genres of music but there was definitely sort of a soul jazzy sort of and also quite rock jesus christ superstar soundtrack was there as well um so there was lots of stuff in there that makes sense to... So I used to have nothing else to do but go out to that garage and just blare all this music. And, you know, my natural instinct...

I just loved it and it became something that was a bit of a habit then that I would go out of my own accord and listen to it. He also brought back this... from another job. He wasn't stealing the stuff, by the way. People were throwing it out. And he'd be like, no, no, no, I'll take that. So there was this other thing, which was like these massive cassettes that you sort of slot into a player. Yeah, cartridges.

They were called Cartridges. But they were pretty, I mean, amazing. And I don't, certainly haven't seen them in a long time, but there was a whole different bunch of music on those. And so, yeah, my dad has always played a big part. The other massive thing that my dad done,

I remember it like as if it was yesterday. I was in my bedroom and this is when we had this massive satellite dish hooked up that he had got off these people. They were throwing it out because they were downsizing to a more modern satellite dish. He just came running into my room one night, quite alarmingly, and he was like, quick, quick, quick, come up here, I want to see this girl singing on the TV. And I ran up, sort of half kind of...

Half like kind of shocked because he came bursting into my bedroom and half intrigued and it was basically Mariah Carey singing. I think it might have been her MTV Unplugged session. It was something where she was singing live with her backing vocalist and a gospel choir. And that was a massive moment for me, you know, because, you know.

it wasn't like just, you know, listening to kind of hardcore gospel music. It was like a really good pop introduction to gospel music, the gospel choir was there and the vocals. And also, I just immediately fell in love with her, you know, like. she the way that she performed and stuff like that um and so that was a huge moment and once again my dad was completely responsible for it and to this day he still calls me from his van you know um

And he's like, hang on a minute, I have to pull in, I have to pull in the van and park up and call you and listen to this, listen to this. And he just put the phone up to the radio and it'll be like, you know... I don't know, random songs that I'm like, actually, what is that song? It's not like, oh God, dad's ringing me again with some, you know, song that makes no sense. Every time. So he has a sense of sort of...

blues, jazz, soul, and every time he rings me or recommends something, it's always something that really impresses me. And so I always make sure to listen when my dad... you know, says stuff. And sometimes he'll ring me and say, you really should do this song. And I'm like, dad, we already done that in my life. So maybe it's a bit of an A&R man in him, perhaps. Oh yeah, definitely. Well, taste as well. I mean, that's the thing. It's, you know, and, and.

When you're listening to the, whether it's in the garage or wherever, I mean, at what point are you singing along or does that happen instantly? I think I would have always sung along a little bit, but when it came to sort of properly... You know, you can plug headphones into a big, because I got this amazing hi-fi system for Christmas, maybe when I was 11 or 12. One of the kind of big multi-level ones with the vinyl player on the top and two cassette tapes and CDs.

And it had a little function where you can dull down the vocals or whatever, like a karaoke button or whatever. And the sound from that was like a stadium in your living room. Around that time, the early 90s, you know, the Bodyguard soundtrack was out and between the amazing sound and me sort of becoming a teenager, a young teenager.

I used to do the whole lock your bedroom door, turn off the lights, and it would have been Whitney, Mariah, and I got this CD called Sounds To Blow Your Mind Free With The Hi-Fi System. And there was songs like, well, True Colours. Cyndi Lauper and there was like a, it was just a really amazing, there was a Celine Dion song on there, it was just an amazing mood, it was very moody and dark the whole album and around that time

I always sang in school, you know, I always sung in the church choir as well. The first time I sung solo would have been singing away in a manger on Christmas Eve at a carol service, but in terms of me plugging my voice and singing into my own... sort of version of self-expression would have been when I was you know every teenager goes a bit moody and locks the bedroom door and stuff like that and so for me my kind of route of through expression very quickly became singing you know and

All of these, to be honest, mostly female singers, like Alanis Morissette was another one. And to this day, I always joke with you about... When I'm recording vocals, it's like, where's El Gummidge? Do I put on the Alanis Morissette head or the Houston head or the, you know? And yeah, Lauryn Hill was another big one. But like, you know, even back before she became...

sort of a big solo megastar when she was in Sister Act. Sister Act 2, yeah. Yeah. To be honest, my bedroom with the lights turned off and that really powerful sound system... In the very early 90s, I definitely connected with the idea. It's not just singing, because I've been singing. Most Irish kids, there's a lot of singing in school and stuff, but the idea of it actually being a form of expression or...

Instead of screaming or getting angry, you know, I could sing in my bedroom, you know. And obviously the amount of times where the fist would start knocking on the door saying, turn that down. You know, but I think that's probably a scene from every teenager's life. But yeah, so that was something that...

Yeah, I mean, when I talk about it now, it's like I'm still there, you know. And that's why I like to turn the lights off in the vocal booth and be in complete darkness, because it kind of almost puts me back in my bedroom, you know.

100%. And actually you're getting this incredible masterclass from the finest predominantly female vocalists of all time that you're singing along to and inadvertently learning a lot of their tricks. by emulating them in many ways. Yeah, very much. I mean, I definitely would be more of a sponge than anyone in terms of like, you know, ingesting whatever I listen to, but...

I would have very specific tastes and, you know, I suppose people like Whitney Houston, her voice is just, it's, you know, otherworldly. It has a connection. Whether it be chemical or psychological, it goes into your bloodstream, you know. And so you can't help but be influenced by people like that. There's other singers that I would listen to all day long, maybe even sing along with, but they mightn't.

sort of stay in my brain, you know. Every time I do a performance, there's going to be some little... Whitney riff or something you know this already sometimes I'm like right that's a little bit too obvious so I better you know not do that one but um yeah so and also a lot of people used to always say to me oh you know because at the beginning

I used to be very anti-vocal coaching, which I'm now religiously a massive fan of vocal coaching. But in the early days, it was a bit more like, oh no, I don't want to change my voice and I don't want somebody to come in and tell me how to sing. But really, I did have vocal coaching. It was just...

like remote vocal coaching via listening to some of the best records of all time. And so that was my form of vocal coaching. And it wasn't even just vocal coaching. I got very into listening to the background vocals.

actually on that same sound system there was a two cassettes so I could do the whole record my voice on one and then flip the two cassettes over and then put a harmony on and just keep doing that and I remember doing that for a a Fuji song, I'd done like an acapella from start to finish of, I think it was probably Killing Me Softly, just with like three piece harmony of the entire song, acapella.

I feel like I always found a way somehow to follow my interests in that sense. Definitely. And I think it's really interesting when you talk about someone like Whitney is...

Everyone always, it seems to be a thing a little bit more now these days where people confuse great singers with technique and actually... It is a bit of technique, but the one thing that Whitney bought, everyone you mentioned, but specifically Whitney bought was intention and connection. And sometimes she didn't have to sing a hundred million notes. She just had to sing the one and it broke your heart.

yeah and you know when I think about Whitney I think of her as like like this big fat solid laser beam I don't think of lots of melisma and riffs and everything like that she done them but

She was like, it was just pure expression. Like when you watch her sing, regardless of what time in her career it was, everything was fully believable at all times, you know? Yeah. And that's, for me, like... it's well it's a mixture of lots of different things but her obviously her tone and her technique but it's just looking at her like for me as well the visual

It was the same when I was in the early 90s when I was like 10, 11, 12 with Mariah. It's like watching her as well. It's watching the bead of sweat coming down the side of the face. It's watching them. scrunch up the muscles in the corner, their eyes and their neck. All of that. You can just watch them and you know that it's pure and it's real. And obviously today you've got a lot of people trying to emulate it and you could have somebody that could, you know, be close technically, but...

They could be like, you know, scratching their hair. They don't look like they're expressing their own inner feelings. So for Whitney to stand in a stadium or on the Grammys. and to be so exposed and so raw and then also her performance so perfect and i mean it's just one one once in a lifetime really you know people people like that It will always shine through. If she was to come out right now, I believe she'd be just as big and all of these great icons probably would be.

just as big if they arrived on the scene today. I think it would, and I know that people might question that, but I think that talent that big and ability to express. you know, and that connects to everybody in the world and I think that would come through any industry in any era, you know, if you're that powerful.

Yeah, I completely agree. I completely agree. So post sort of mid-teens, I mean, this is obviously the Mariah obsession continues. I mean, what are you starting to think about?

are you enjoying are you joining bands i mean obviously there's a point where you do put a band together but i mean are you doing solo did you start to think i want to be a singer i want to be in a band i want to do this or does it i mean does it all just fall into place naturally when you just happen to get together with a few mates so for me i kind of you know i grew up as i said a few miles outside town and

I didn't even know how to get into the local musical. I would have been so green and so unaware of... even that you know how to even contact the person who puts the local musicals together and say can i be in the musical you know um and so one day I opened the local paper and there's a little section in it called Bits and Pieces where people could just advertise. You could be selling a car, you could be selling a pair of jeans, I don't know. And so it had this audition for a musical.

in the bits and pieces and so I literally jumped out of my skin and I probably screamed the house down I probably got anxious that I was going to miss it and then I got excited and then I got nervous and anyways I ended up going in and you know convinced probably that I would be told, you know, see you later, get lost. And I went in and I can't remember what I sang or anything, but it would have definitely been some sort of like, I don't know, pop R&B song off the radio or something.

And straight away, they, you know, they kind of said absolutely. And so, like, to me, that was the biggest thing that could happen in my life was to get into the local musical, you know. And what was the musical? So the musical... That particular musical, that one didn't end up happening. Okay. But another one happened very soon afterwards that I got into. And it was basically West Side Story, except they actually made a roll up.

for me and a couple of other kids because there was no role for kids. our age, but they actually put a scene in that was made just to get us in the musical. Wow. So they sort of shoehorned us in because they were like, we have to have these kids in. Because it was me and a couple of other kids and...

And so that was West Side Story, but it was this random part, as I say, that they made up for us. But that was actually the first time where every night it ran for a few weeks and every night I would go... because I was only in for five minutes, but I'd go and sit upstairs in the theatre. The public weren't sitting upstairs on the balcony, and so there was like a small orchestra up there.

And I would go and sit next to the orchestra every night and watch the show. But I was also, you know, unbeknownst to myself, sitting beside a mini orchestra listening to them play. And so that was really amazing. And that was one of the first kind of experiences of being... part of a live show with live music and everything um and yeah so that was the first time and then the next thing that I got involved with because that went well I

was then kind of automatically sort of included in the musicals that came next. And the first one that came after that was, well, there was Godspell and one called Children of Lair, which were local kind of productions as well.

Oliver was done. And Oliver was the first time that I met Shane Filan and also my best friend from Sligo. And so it was through Oliver that I sort of... Well... I probably knew Shane from school, and he was like, Shane was Mr. Popular, and all the girls loved him, and he was loads of mates and everything like that. And I was kind of shy and reserved, but during Oliver, he was playing Dodger, and my best friend was playing Oliver.

I think I came in and had one line, which was, books you ordered from the bookseller, sir. I love that you remember that. That's hilarious. Well, I remember it because people took the piss in me for about five years afterwards. Yeah, so I was very shy, so I wasn't naturally getting lead roles because people just thought, oh, he's really shy and quiet. And little did they know what would happen down the line.

Yeah, so I met Shane there and because we were kind of backstage all the time and in rehearsals and during the actual run. And there wasn't as many people, like in school, you know, you nearly couldn't get near Shane because everyone was talking to him. But yeah, so we became good friends in that. And that was, you know, the beginnings of...

of my friendship with Shane. And then I would later go on to meet Cian as well through school musicals and stuff. And, you know, the rest sort of unfolded as it did. But once again, the point being that it was all local, like getting into Oliver was the biggest thing. I didn't have any hope past that, you know, and I never really have had, I've never been like sort of this person that aspires to.

take over the world and be in this band that sells gazillions of records. I always was kind of like just quite impressed that I got into that musical and then I was quite impressed that I got into the next one and so on and so forth. So yeah.

and because of these meetings it turns into a band with various different names but i wonder if you remember the first time that you were in a recording studio when it was either six as one iou whichever one you want to remember Yeah, so it would have been IOU because IOU was still very Sligo based. And there was six of us in it. Three of us was myself, Shane and Cian, and the other three were three other lads that didn't end up in Westlife, unfortunately. And so myself and Shane wrote...

a song called Together Girl Forever. We wrote it on our way home from school. It was about Shane's now wife Gillian and Shane was head over heels for her and he didn't know how to tell her and all this kind of stuff. And we also had decided that we wanted to write songs at the time. And it was just very natural to us. We didn't have, you know...

Scandinavia and London and LA sending us all these demos. So we just naturally wrote a song for ourselves because we didn't have any other songs. Interestingly, it wasn't our natural gravitation to do covers. We naturally gravitated towards... writing a song for ourselves. And I remember it was called Together Girl Forever. As I say, it was about Shane's story with his wife Gillian, who he hadn't yet got together with, but was very much already in love with, I think.

I remember walking through the little park next to our school and singing some melody ideas to Shane and some lyric ideas and he was like yeah yeah totally and what about this you know and we just wrote that song and basically around the same time there was a local record store in Sligo that

had been obviously impressed enough with what we were doing. We'd done some live performances and there was lots of people screaming in the audience and it was all very exciting. So this local record sort of said we'll... we'll put you up in a recording studio and you can record some songs. And so we recorded Together Girl Forever and another song that we also wrote called Everlasting Love.

The recording studio was basically a little studio in the house of a local musician who, forgive me if I got it wrong, but I'm pretty sure his name is James Blennerhazard. And he was, you know, he had been known on the Irish music circuit as a bass player and a musician.

a producer and the record store put us in touch with him and we ended up going to his house with a local, another local Sligo musician called Porik Mian and and we went to record the song so they had made backing tracks to both our songs and um i remember i mean i remember being in the room and stuff it's just like a room in someone's house but what i do remember is they immediately

kind of so I think Shane done a couple of bits and then I went in to do my bits and immediately they're like oh I remember thinking oh is there a problem what's what's going on here but they seem to just be having difficulty with the sound and my voice and because I always have sung quite powerfully or whatever and I remember them, they had to take a minute to get their heads around how they would set my mic up and the levels and the...

compressors and all the various things that you'd know all about um in order to record it and capture the power without it over you know overriding the microphone and stuff and um so that was a bit like oh god does this mean i'm I'm crap or whatever, you know, I was a bit... But thankfully they got the hang of it in the end. And, you know, it's strange because as much as that song, Together Girl Forever, which is online, on YouTube and stuff, but...

You can hear the same tone we'll say that you can hear in Fly Without Wings or later songs. Thankfully, and once again, it's because I'm obsessed over all these other vocalists in my room with the lights turned off. you know, mimicked them and got influenced by them and was like a sponge. But you could hear my tone straight away. And so even though there was a bit of a struggle in the studio to get the sound right and the mix right.

In the end, the payoff was so amazing because I heard my voice recorded for the first time. And it's not that I don't mean in a cocky way, but I could just tell that, oh, you know, like that kind of sounds OK. It doesn't sound really bad.

it kind of sounds how I meant it to sound as well, you know. So, believe me, I wouldn't even call it confidence, but that was kind of like, self-esteem-wise, that was... one of the only places where I had a little bit of, okay, I kind of, I'm not a beginner, you know, even though I was probably 16 at the time, but I have been in that bedroom for like six years since I was 10 years old.

you know, constantly singing all day every day. So it was nice to hear my voice recorded and that it didn't sound horrible, you know. But it's like a beautiful recipe of all these kind of elements that you put into it. And as you say, coming out, and you say that clip is online and, you know, you can, your tone, you know, Shane's is the same. It's still... Oh, Shane, I mean, it's Westlife. It's there. It is absolutely there. And it's...

you know it's amazing and it's great experience and of course that you know it can never be underestimated the power of um shane's incredible mum whereby as a as a promotional tool after that i mean she kind of took it from there didn't she yeah so so shane's mum the lovely may um

She was a massive supporter and a real backbone to us in a world where we didn't really have any Svengalis or peers or people to guide us. But she was a very strong woman and she had a... big family she had loads of children and she obviously you know she she was no pushover so she was always there for us in our corner um and

So we had this CD that the local record store had kind of paid to make and get recorded and mixed and mastered. But we still didn't kind of, we hadn't met Louis Walsh yet. And so in like simultaneously. Louis had got whispers of this bunch of lads down in Sligo and it's like, hang on a minute, what do you mean? They've written their own songs and they've got it recorded themselves and there's a CD and it's actually...

for sale in Sligo. He was very impressed by these random strangers that he knew nothing about. But at the same time, Shane's mum actually came from the same very small village that Louis came from in Mayo in Ireland. And so she was... trying to get in touch with Louis from one side and then Louis had kind of heard little bits about this mystery boy band or whatever down in Sligo that have written their own songs and recorded CDs and stuff and eventually she got through to him and

That was just a huge defining moment in all of our lives. Louis was like, oh no, I'm managing Boyzones, I don't have time for any of this. Okay, sure, look. Send two of them up. I don't want to meet them all. I don't want to be overwhelmed. Send two of them up to Dublin to me and I'll have a coffee with them and I'll see if I can put them in touch with some other manager. And that lasts for about five minutes, I think.

we were very eager but we were also we kind of were also quite we similar to me like we didn't have stage school or dance teachers and vocal coaches at our disposal so I

sort of taught myself in my bedroom, in a way, you know. And in the same way, we would, as a band, we kind of would obsess over Backstreet Boys, Take That, Enzinc, Boys to Men. And so that's how we... done our research and our training, you know, it wasn't like we were mimicking, we were researching these bands and listening to their harmonies and picking out.

you know, all the little aspects that made Boys to Men, Boys to Men, and that made Backstreet Boys, Backstreet Boys. And so Louis was just quite impressed about the fact that we just had our stuff together. You know, we kind of...

We meant business from the beginning. We didn't even know how kind of professional nearly we were, you know, at the time. But Louis was obviously used to... young lads who kind of were good looking and might be able to sing a bit rocking up and just thinking yeah where's my record deal whereas we were putting major groundwork in we cared about it so much that we'd fund not funded but we had

orchestrated our own cd release you know and written our own song and put on our own shows and so um he was very impressed and also he was doing a favor for basically the woman from down the road in my village if you know what i mean um and

Thankfully, so the first time we met Lou, he was like, no way, don't have time, busy with Boyzone, I'll try and find you another manager. And then a week later, he called us to say, you have to be in Dublin on Friday because you're supporting the Backstreet Boys. And it was literally that quick, and just how quick I've said it there is how quick. Two of the lads went to meet Louis in Dublin, and a week later, he called us to say, be in Dublin next week or whatever.

because you're supporting the Backstreet Boys. And we had all bought tickets. We were queuing at 6am, you know, in the local record store to buy tickets for the Backstreet Boys. And fast forward a week later, we were playing basketball with them backstage. having dinner with them and catering and stuff. And it was after that performance when Louis seen the crowd's reaction to us and he just obviously something in his head.

kind of clicked and he's like right yeah i don't think i'm going to pass these over to somebody else i think there's something in this so that was when he said i'll manage you but you have to do exactly what i tell you and i might want to get rid of a couple of you and that was obviously very scary to hear but but also this is our one chance this is louis walsh and so we actually all agreed together um we all agreed at that point that look if it's one of us that he wants to keep on

or some of us or half of us or all of us, let's all shake on it and say it's an opportunity that can't be missed. And, you know, we're all in this together, but whatever happens, you go for it, you know.

And so it was very, very tough. And to be honest, for a 16-, 17-year-old, kind of traumatic because we effectively, some of our best friends, you know. didn't end up making the final cut and it was very difficult. And to this day, to think about it, there's still difficulties in the idea of reminiscing over it. But we were very quickly... given a baptism of fire about how cutthroat the music industry can be. And I didn't love that side of it at all. But I suppose you have to...

I had to like leave the farm and get into the real world at some point, you know, and that's when it happened, when we met Louis and things started getting serious. And were you, were the three of you involved in the auditions for? the people that were to come in. Yeah, 100%. I'm kind of surprised really, but Louis was like, right, we're having auditions. He's put the word out. Louis can drum up front page stories.

at the click of a finger in Ireland, especially back in the late 90s. So the news went out that Louis Walsh and these boys from Sligware were looking for new members and stuff. You couldn't make it up. The first two people in the audition, there was like, I don't know, 100 people or 70 or whatever people at the audition. And the first two people was Nicky and Brian. I mean, to be honest with you, I kind of think Louis put them on first probably intentionally, but...

We didn't know anything about them. We just sat there, kind of a la X Factor at the table, looking up at the stage. And I think Nicky came on first and sung a Ronan Keaton or a Boyzone song. And he was wearing a pinstripe suit. which people of my age back in the 90s just didn't wear suits, you know. And so he was quite impressive and he kind of had longer hair. He had been...

like in Leeds as a footballer, so he kind of was a bit more stylish and a bit more polished around the edges and stuff. And so Nicky was first and then Brian came on second with like bleach blonde hair, parted in the middle, kind of looked like... some kind of Irish version of Nick Carter. And Brian's personality from the get-go was very out there and very funny and kind of playful. And he also...

The first thing that Brian done was he sung like a lower harmony. So one thing we done with all of the people that when we narrowed it down to the last, say, five people, we went into a room with them and sang a cappella with them, you know? Brian was the only person out of all of them and the first time we had ever sang were the third harmony. Brian just out of the blue just made it up on the spot and sung a lower harmony and that was it. Boom.

you know he was kind of already in anyway because he looked great and he had a good voice in terms of singing lead but the second he added the harmony it was a it was just another ingredient that we didn't have and it also made us sound like you know, a vocal harmony group. I suppose to just one harmony, you know, along with the lead melody, immediately it was like, you know, because that third harmony makes it, you know, you could sound like Boyz II Men with three harmonies.

in the right room so um so that was very impressive um from brian and yeah we we honestly we were allowed to pick them originally we were just meant to pick one of them nikki or brian and in the end The two of them stayed and it was another tough decision to let someone else go in place of the extra person.

I don't know, I think we made all the right decisions and as much as it was very difficult to make those decisions, you know, to say goodbye to some of your closest friends in terms of them not being in the band anymore. It was the right decision and arguably we wouldn't have had the success we had if we didn't make those decisions, you know. Absolutely. And as a band, as a five-piece, when you're there and you've actually got the five-piece...

In what order did it happen with, did you then go and make, again, some demos or records as a band before it got played to Simon? Or was it Simon was involved from the beginning and then you went in? Which way did it work?

So this is, first of all, I'm the worst at remembering all of these facts and forgive me if, I'm sure some people listen back to what I'm saying. In your recollection. In my recollection, which is... Yeah, my recollection isn't the clearest. So we met Simon for the first ever time.

in a hotel in Dublin called the Westbury and Louis brought us to meet him. We met him in the lobby first of all and we chatted to him. He said that he's working with Max Martin at the moment and that Max Martin would be one of them. first people he'd put us forward to work with if we signed to him. And so that was extremely impressive to us because Max Martin was Backstreet Boys and Backstreet Boys was our ultimate goal, you know, to be like a Backstreet Boys vibe.

And then we went into a room and Simon had this, like, come up to my suite, darling, and you can sing for me, you know. So he had this massive suite in the Westbury, in the penthouse or whatever. we all kind of stood in the living room and sang for him and not long after that we were in Steve Mack's studio recording some demos it was all a bit like

Let's put you in with the producer. Let's see how it goes in the studio. There was no like, right, here's a pen and paper, sign a record deal. So we went to London and... As I say, I'm probably skipping back and forward over a load of very important information, but we went to London and went to Steve Mack's studio. They sent us two songs before we went. One was called...

Good Thing, which I think was later recorded by Garry Gates, and the other was called Everybody Knows, and Everybody Knows was like a kind of a mid-tempo R&B pop ballad. We were very excited about that, and then Good Thing was like a... you know like a kind of disco-esque kind of pop song and we went and sung both of them and got the recordings back and you know got the demos back and

We were just very excited and everyone was very happy with it. Louis was very happy with it. That was my first time on a plane. going over there not that I admitted it to anybody because I felt like I didn't want to I was embarrassed that it was because they were like oh yeah I was in Spain on holidays and I went to visit my cousins in in Wales I was like yeah I've been on a plane

but i hadn't and so it was all very very very exciting and um we came back with those two songs and we started performing them at like these gigs in ireland called beat on the street which is you know this road show that goes around the country and

This is all before Flying Without Wings and stuff, and although Flying Without Wings and Swear It Again were genuinely two of the first songs we ever cut as a band, but it was very clear. once again from the word go it was very clear that we had a sound you know our voices together all five of us in various points added something to the pot and you know

It was kind of like we could record any song and it's going to sound like us, you know? And I think that was kind of where we realised and where maybe people around us like Louis and Simon realised that there's something going on here because we could take a song that you'd never think of.

a boy band recording and all of a sudden it sounds like Westlife, you know? You know, Shane's voice starting any song is going to sound like Westlife, you know? And so it was just all very exciting. But as I say... At each junction, at each point, I was like, this is it. We've made it. We could go home happy now. We recorded a song in London. That's it. You can't get better than that. I didn't expect anything that came after that to happen.

You know, none of it. No number ones in records or millions of sales or arena tours or stadiums. Honestly, all of it was news to me every time, each time something happened. It was a surprise to me, you know. Whereas other people, they might have it all set out in advance. This is where I want to be. This is what I want to do. I was just kind of like a passenger on the train. I was like...

When do you want me to sing? I'm a bit lost here, so I'll just stick to what I know I'm able to do, which is sing, and I'll just do whatever everybody tells me. That was kind of me for the first... five or more years of the band you know I didn't have a clue what I was doing but I just sang yeah that's this and it worked out um it's interesting simon's name comes up quite a lot on this podcast um for various reasons and and and every single time it does i'm the first to say that

I think he's one of the finest A&R people this country has ever produced. I think he's Simon Cowell's knack for knowing a song or hearing a song or hearing something within a song.

And being the first to admit that there isn't necessarily a technical or musical way of how he's hearing it, but he just connects with something so... brilliantly and uh and i often say i think his ear is a and our ear is sadly missed in today's music yeah i mean for me you know everybody knows the simon the simon who's like the public persona but

For me, the Simon that I met, first of all, he's very similar in many ways. He had the sort of, you know, he had that Simon sort of confidence or, you know, whatever you might call it. But he... He's a very clever man. He knows exactly what he means to say and that's exactly what he says, you know. Nothing is, he doesn't waffle on and nothing that comes out of his mouth is...

a mistake, you know? And in the same way, he's just got a type of brain that... I mean, Shane has this type of brain when it comes to singing, you know? It's like, there's no other way to do it than this way, and it's perfect, you know? And Simon has... had a bit of that too, where, you know, it wasn't like he sat down for hours and planned what he was going to say, but...

There's only one sentence I can say right now, and it's going to be the right sentence, and what I say is right. It wasn't like, what do you think about this idea? It was like, this is what's happening. But it didn't feel like anyone was making us do anything. We were like... please tell us what genius move you have for us next, Simon. You know, like we were sitting there like little puppies waiting for his next stroke of genius and everything he done. And, you know, he...

He stamped his foot and made a lot of noise within BMG at the time, because I don't care how much it costs, this is the video I want for Fly My Net Wings and I want people flying up into the air. He got it for us and there was a point where Fly Me That Wings was not ours. It had already been vocaled by somebody else and he got that song for us. I mean, what a lucky moment that was for us, you know. And he walked into TV stations and...

I mean, I don't know. Like, he'd just walk in and smile at them and they'd be like, okay, you've got the main slot tomorrow night. You know, like, he just charmed everybody. But he had a charm, but he also had a... kind of don't mess with me sort of feeling about him as well. I think people were like, yeah, I better be good to this guy in case he gets massive because it kind of feels like he's going to be huge, you know. And whatever it was, he had a very disarming...

And going back to what you said initially, which is the most important part, is he had a phenomenal, and still does, I'm sure, but as an A&R man who sits behind a desk in a record label, he...

He had a perfect ear for hit songs and, you know, he wouldn't necessarily have this big, huge... bag of vocabulary, technical vocabulary, but I've sat there many times with him and Steve Mack and he's like giving feedback and he mightn't be saying, you know, oh, give me some more lower end and, you know, and sort of, can you just turn down the...

you know, some specific instrument within the orchestra. But he would sit there at the desk and go, look, just show me which button turns that bit down and that bit up. And he'll sit there and be like, OK, there, I want it that loud. OK, not lower, not higher. And he... He just, he had an ideal kind of, he wanted to hear it a certain way and he didn't stop pushing the producers.

until it sounded like that. And sometimes, believe me, it was torture for some producers because it could be on mix 178. But when it came onto the radio...

Because it's like these key change moments. He didn't want it to just be a key change that kind of fell into the key change. He wanted... you know he wanted the doors to close and the lights to be turned off and then he wanted like a bus to drive through the wall key change you know um type thing and he sat there and probably until you know whatever o'clock in the morning

pushing and pushing until it sounded like a truck was driving through the wall key change you know and and in the end all these producers kind of went oh well he's got it right again you know i was wrong he got it right and so he does have this amazing ability to direct and lead a song to greatness. Even if the song might have been a 6 out of 10, but he used to push it and pull it to a 10 out of 10, you know. Do you remember the first time you heard Flying Without Wings?

Yeah, 100%. So we went into Steve's studio because someone else had cut it. It was well on its way into being somebody else's song. Yeah, I mean, just out of respect, I won't go into whose song it was, but we went into the studio because, like, look, you shouldn't even be able to hear this song. And don't tell anyone you've heard it.

So we went into the studio and he played it. And honestly, it was like hearing, you know, I Believe I Could Fly. It was like we just heard this massive, unbelievable pop soul gospel.

kind of R&B. It just had everything. It was Wayne Hector's voice on the demo. And Wayne's vocal demos have always massively informed our... vocals you know as Wayne wrote the songs and then he put the demo down and you know his his vocals we always sort of tried to recreate his his demo vocals especially in the early days before we started finding our own feet.

And so it was Wayne singing Fly Without Wings. And honestly, he might as well have played, like, as I say, I Believe I Could Fly or something like that and say, it's yours. And nobody's ever heard it before. It's original. And we went in and... I don't know if it was that day or soon afterwards, we went to record it. And that was kind of, to be honest with you, that was a bit where it's like, it's an amazing song, but we actually added something.

to it as well you know as in i feel like if anyone sung fly without wings it would have been a a hit song but we put our own mark on it you know um You know, where Shane starts and he does his little... I would never even try to recreate it. But you know what he does on the... Everybody. Yeah, so... Shane's opening verse, it's just like, kind of, you know, in the pop world in the UK anyways, there's like incomparable sort of delivery. And then we always, there's a song.

I think it was by a band called Az... Az... They had a song called, you know, All For One. All For One, yeah. Sorry. And you know, there's a second verse where a different voice comes in and it kind of switches gear. And Flying Out Wings kind of gave us that feeling. And I don't know, it just...

We were screaming and bouncing off the walls the first time we heard it and the fact that it might be ours. And of course, we probably got down on our knees and we're like, please, please, please, can we have it? These little 17-year-olds begging.

Steve Mack for his song. And to be honest, I'd beg him again if he could get one like it again. But yeah, so that was a huge moment. And also, you know, Swear It Again was kind of a brilliant song, but it was slightly closer to the... you know, middle of pop, whereas Flying Without Wings set us apart from, well, not that it set us apart, but it just, it was like, right, that's what Westlife do.

and it gave us I remember people called me the first time it was on the radio the first day it was released and played on the radio I was like oh people are calling me about this that wouldn't have called me about if I let you go I swear it again I'm getting texts and calls from people And so I knew something was different about Fly Without Wings, you know. And to this day, it's still my favourite song to sing.

And I guess as well, it was from that album, it was maybe not the only, but one of the songs that you could bring a lot of your inspirations into your vocal for it. Because it was inherently gospel and there was a gospel choir on it. Absolutely, yeah. Well, first of all, it certainly was kind of the more gospel sort of driven song. I don't know, there's the bit, of course, as everyone calls it, the high note in Fly Manette Wings. I didn't even realise...

At the time, I'd just kind of done it. I didn't realise this is going to be a high note and now I'm going to have to try and recreate this high note that I've done in the studio. I'm going to have to recreate it live a million times for the rest of my life. For the rest of your life. And honestly, there's a good 10 years or more where that note played a major part in adding to my anxiety as a performer and I would always mess it up because I was anticipating it.

in a bad way, you know, for a few songs before Fly My Dead Wings came in the setlist, I'd be like, oh my God, here comes Fly My Dead Wings. There's that note, there's a million people watching or 10 million people watching. And I would always mess it up, you know, so it was... It wasn't until later that I dealt with that element.

Yeah, so Fly Without Wings, especially live, it's kind of taken its own journey. So the live version and the original record, live is like, that's when I can truly bring that. The inspiration of people like Whitney Houston where, you know, at the end of the song, I don't know, I've probably pushed it in a direction out of pure nature to make it more like the end of a Whitney Houston performance.

Just because I think as a song, it can absorb all that drama and it's not weird, it makes sense for it, you know. So it's taken its own journey live and you've helped it. progress there was one point where there was like slightly Coldplay-esque version of Flying Out Wings and then it sort of progressed and I was like what if I just hold that note a little bit longer at the end and the note just gets a bit longer and a bit you know and anyways

But, you know, I think it's fun. It's just a fun part of our live show where people are like, right, what's he going to do to it this time or whatever? And I enjoy that spontaneity as well. There's not many of our songs that you can or should do that way, but with Flying Without Wings, it's fun to play around with the end of it. You know, it's just a bit of fun, really, but it makes every show different for me, which is why it's a good thing, really, you know.

It is, and it's always wonderful seeing the kind of encouragement from the other three when you're doing it. They're just egging you on the whole time. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, there's, to be honest, moments like that where you come out of... You come out of the routine of the show and it's like, for me, any moment, it's really important to keep the backbone to a show, but I love anything that makes Tuesday different from Wednesday, different from Thursday, you know, in terms of a show.

I do think that you can do that too much and effectively, you know, you're taking away the audience members' experience that they came to see. But if you do it at the right time in the right place, then I think it can be a lot of fun, you know. absolutely i know it shouldn't ever take away from the band and the four but i think you know that's a moment that can do it i wonder just after everything we spoke about at the beginning i mean what did you even think when

Just when you came to the second album and the words Mariah Carey duet came up. Honestly, I remember not long before that, we were in a hotel in, I think it was Taipei in Taiwan.

the person that was introducing us was like oh and you know we've had many guests here over the years actually we recently had mariah carey and all like all of us not just me we're like what oh what room did she stay in and you know and where you know and obviously they're like oh she stayed in the presidential suite and we're like can we see it can we see it you know and honestly it was only a few weeks later where I remember I was in a hotel in Indonesia nobody told me anything about it

We're trying to get Mariah Carey, nothing of the sort. I had been playing, the mad thing is I'd been playing, someone on our record label, Dave Shock, gave me Mariah's CD, the Rainbow album, and it had the Phil Collins, Against All Odds cover on it that she had done by herself. And we were blasting that.

In this trip in Asia, we were blasting in all the Vianos and the cars that we were being taken around in. We had this Mariah version of Against All Odds blasting on the system in the cars. And so honestly, that was the same trip where...

I can't remember who came to my hotel room door in the hotel in Indonesia. And they were like, we're flying to Italy next week to record this song with Mariah. And I was like, what song? They're like, the fucking song you've been playing in the car for the last two weeks. I don't know. I've probably done something dramatic like Fall Onto the Floor or something like that. But honestly, I don't know how to even describe it. Like, we really...

Got onto a plane a week later or whatever. We landed in Capri. I mean, the setting itself was like something out of a, you know, a fairy tale. We landed in... We actually landed, I think, in Naples Airport and then she sent her yacht to the port and the yacht brought us over to the island.

Capri and on the yacht was like her PA and a few people and they were like explaining that we're going to go to the hotel you're going to check in and then we're going to meet Mariah or we're going to meet Em for dinner it was like you know James Bond or something and so we went and checked in and then we ended up There's this tiny little restaurant down a little side alley under an arch, under a tree on Capri. And it's like we finally made our way up to the back of the restaurant.

There she was sitting at this little round table, just her and one other person. And it was just the most surreal moment ever. But she, I have to say, immediately, you know, was just like your mate. She looked like Mariah Carey from a music video, like big, lovely curly hair and a lovely dress. And, you know, she was fully made up just, you know, obviously evening wear, dinner time or whatever.

She was just immediately really friendly. We felt like it was a bit like, oh, come over here. We'll huddle away in the corner and let all the record company people and the management do their thing. I want to talk to you guys. I want to get to know you. And so... The experience, it could have went many ways, but immediately it was a relief for me because I was like, what if she's not nice, you know? But...

Yeah, so we sat there in this little Italian restaurant and she knew all the waiters by name. And so she obviously had been in Capri so much. I think she made the entire Rainbow album there. And so she was like, OK, tomorrow I'm going to see you guys. You're going to come up to the studio.

And so we had to walk up like about 10,000 steps up the side of a mountain to this studio that she was using. And honestly, I mean, I kind of remember it all. It's like as if it... it's like I remember as if it was a music video you know because it kind of happened but it was a very dreamy weekend like by the time we left and we got dropped once again by by her yacht back over to

the mainland, and it was a bit like, did that actually happen? But it did, and even down to making up the backing vocals and stuff, she was like, OK, what kind of harmony can you hear there? And at the end of it... there's a bit where we sort of do a whole new backing vocal part and we genuinely sat and with her and an engineer just

made up the BVs, you know? And she was like, what about this? And she'd be singing, you know, she'd be singing in the talk back to me into my headphones. And I'm like... Well, I'm not going to question you. You know, I'm not going to say that's a crap, I mean, let's think of something else. Yeah, she sat there and she was twiddling the buttons. No, I mean, in terms of getting the levels of all the BVs and stuff like that to mix, and it was very real.

an organic experience. It wasn't like, oh, Mariah was in LA and we were in Dublin and we never even met her. You know, it was very real. And we performed with her quite a number of times afterwards. and spoke to her. Actually, before we got to Capri, no, after Against the Odds, we were performing with her on the Top of the Pops award shows in Manchester.

we were going to do Hero with her. So we were going to do BVs and a couple of bits of ad-libs and stuff on Hero with her. And she was like, oh, I'll call you guys and we can go through the background vocals.

you know, I'll call you soon. And we're like, you don't have her numbers, but of course Mariah Carey can get your number if she wants. And anyways, I remember sitting in my mum's house, like in the living room that I grew up in. And my mum came in and she was like, there's somebody on the phone.

I was like, who is it? She's like, well, it's a guy, but like he says, it's Mariah Carey. But it doesn't sound like Mariah Carey. But obviously it was her tour manager. And so I went in, I was like, hello. And he's like. All right, Mark, I've got Mariah on the phone. You know, so her tour manager basically, and he was like, handed the phone to Mariah and she was like, hey, Mark. And I was like, Mariah Carey's talking to me on my childhood telephone. And so...

She was like, so anyways, you know, about this hero background vocal thing, this is kind of what I had in mind. And so she started singing. She didn't just sing. She sang the lead melody part of the background vocals. Then she started singing. harmony and then she started singing the lower part and I was just like on my phone listening to Mariah Carey singing down the phone to me and it lasted for a good 20 minutes because she was going through all the various harmonies and I was like

are you calling for me to give the thumbs up to these? What do you think I'm going to say? Do you think I'm going to say no? And so, anyways, yeah, so that was, and I was sitting... As I was listening to Mariah Carey singing down the phone to me, I was looking around, it was like the same wallpaper that I had done my homework beside, you know, when I was eight and nine and ten. And it was the same desk as like my dad's home office.

I was like looking at everything around me and I was like, but the only difference is Mariah Carey's singing down this phone right now. So my life has been full of surreal moments and I have to say they've all been... I mean that's the bit where see that's the bit I consider to be lucky with even more than the millions and the gazillions and all the records and the number ones and stuff for me it's like Mariah Carey sang down the phone to me

that to me is more valuable than any of it. And that's once again going back to the kid in his bedroom with all the posters on the wall, including one of Mariah Carey and many other people that we got to meet and work with.

You know, to me, I always think back to my bedroom and the fact that I had posters of these people on my wall and I used to listen to them on my hi-fi, you know, my CDs. And now here I am with them, talking to them. some of them on the phone, you know, in the same house. So I'll always be, and something that Louis and I, Louis Walsh and I share is, we always say, I don't care about all that crap. We're just fans. You know, we are just fans.

that happened to end up in the industry that we're fans of and happened to work with the people that we're fans of in some cases. And I think that's... I don't know, I feel, I'm glad that I've always hung on to that, you know. I'm not like, yeah, I'm cool, this is what I do now, you know. I'm a star and I work with other stars. It's like I'll always freak out a little bit inside if somebody walks into the room.

that I've been watching since I was a kid, you know, on TV. And I don't think that's a bad thing, you know. I think it's a really good thing. I think a great example of that and one of the coolest things.

you've ever done, certainly as a band, was the time you got to duet with Donna Summer. Yeah. So like, and you know, collaboration and duet, that's really, if I say, what's your dream come true? It would have always been. to work with all my idols, you know, not that I worked with all of them, but like Donna Summer. So it was Motown Mania. A guy called Jeff Thacker, a fantastic TV producer, was putting on various things. He put on ABIMANIA, which...

And Jeff actually played quite a big role in her career, but he put on Abymania and we randomly recorded, you know, I have a dream for Abymania. And it ended up being Christmas number one because we didn't even realise that we needed that song in our lives as a Westlife song. But it was Christmas number one. So he'd done Abba Mania.

a few other manis but Motown Mania I believe was the one that Donna Summer was presenting and was the kind of star presenter and performer of the show and we recorded This is before we met her. We went in and recorded Enough is Enough. It's enough is enough in brackets, no more tears. Am I right in saying that? Oh, the other way around. The other way around, sorry.

And, you know, I was very aware of who Donna Summer was. I didn't know her as well as the Mariahs and the Whitney's, but I was very, you know, if you sit back and you hear all the songs one after another, I'm like, yeah, know that one, know that one, know that one. But it wasn't until we worked with her and stood on the stage rehearsing. First of all, her mic was on and live at all times. And she's one of these people, Barry Manlow, another one, where the mic control...

I was like, how loud does that mic need to be turning up? Because she has it like half a meter from her face, but you can still hear everything. And it's probably like quite an old school thing. But we sung the song, we soundchecked it loads of times and then... actually rehearsed it loads of times so I just got to stand next to Donna Summer for like an hour and a half and she sung the same song over and over again and every time it sounded like you were listening to like the original vocal.

You know, those magical vocals from, you know, however long ago it was recorded. And also the main thing was she was just the loveliest, loveliest, loveliest woman. So gorgeous and pretty and so friendly. And her voice. I was just in awe of her, you know. I was like, I... I've always had respect and I've always known who Donna Summer is, but now I'm a mega fan, you know. And it was just her sheer talent and beauty and charm that done that, you know.

Some people, the megastar side of it takes over and it's like, oh my God, that's Whitney Houston, you know, or whatever. But with her, it's just like pure talent, pure beauty, pure charm. You know, her smile, like everything about her. I was honestly just so, you know, engrossed and lucky, feeling lucky to just be standing on a stage with somebody like that. You know, I don't think I even realised.

Until after, I was like, oh, she done that song as well and that song as well, you know. I probably feel bad that I didn't. There's probably people that would give me a slap on the side of the head. But then it would have been, you know, because you were, it's to do with your age as well. I mean, a lot of her big hits were sort of 70s and stuff. So, I mean, I love that performance. I wonder how, I mean, it's impossible to go through everything, but I do think there's the key moment.

Without going into it, I wonder what your feeling was when after maybe a couple of albums, I mean, obviously the band has always been successful, but a couple of albums in the middle where there was a little bit of a stumble. a little bit. I wondered what you remember about when the idea of you raised me up.

came into the equation and whether or not you felt at that time that it would be the thing that changed everything back again and just really, really put you back in the stratosphere as a band. Yeah, so I mean, you raised me up. It gave us like a major second wind, you know. So first of all, we were, you know, we were told from day one, you know, pop bands, they do three albums, greatest hits.

And then somebody goes solo and that's kind of it, you know? And to be fair, that formula had played out many times before us. We never really agreed with people when they said it, but what else do we have to go by? You know, so we sort of like, we don't really feel like that, but obviously that's what's going to happen because that's what everyone says is going to happen. And that's what has happened with like Take That, the Spice Girls. And also, where do you go after?

you've played out that formula, what's next? And, you know, we done like the Rat Pack album and obviously we lost a member, Brian left the band. And so he, you know, he, I suppose, stayed true to that original formula where... Okay, this is the bit where I go solo now or whatever, and he'd done that. And so we were left still in kind of no man's eye going, okay, what happens now? Because this is the bit where not many acts really have gone to this point.

But there was not for a second in any of our heads did we want to stop doing what we do. And of course, you know, when you lose a member... Basically what happens straight away, unfortunately, is either they're going to be Robbie Williams and the band is going to kind of dwindle or not. And, you know, there was kind of like eyes on us and Brian done great, you know, his solo stuff.

when he left Westlife and went solo. And so you're sitting there kind of going, well, is this kind of it for us? Are we just going to sort of slowly fade into the background now? Now, the tour we done when Brian left was one of our... one of our biggest and everything. It went well, but we were probably still floating on the tailcoats of stuff. So you raised me up. I remember when it got suggested.

So we knew that song because of an Irish singer called Brian Kennedy. I mean, genuinely hand on heart, I didn't know a Josh Groban version of it when I heard it. It was a brilliant Irish singer called Brian Kennedy, and he had done a version of it. I think it's the original version of You Raise Me Up. And I was like, okay, I really love that song, but I didn't really... It doesn't really sound like a pop song. It was very slow and very sort of...

I mean, as we know now, our version is played at funerals all the time, but it was really slow. We're like, how's this going to get played on the radio? But we obviously hadn't counted on the Steve Mack magic or whatever.

But I remember when I went in to sing it with Steve Mack in the studio, as I was singing it, because he had sort of given the track a bit more rhythm when it kind of got going towards the end in the gospel choir. And I was like, at the end of it, I was like, oh my God, this is... Amazing. But I still had no clue. I mean, I was like, I really enjoy singing this. This is gospel, you know. There's a gospel choir and I get to do some riffs and I get to like belt and do all that kind of stuff.

But then I heard the record, but we all kind of got sent at the time, we got sent a CD with the demo on it and you can't, you know, can't get to a CD player quick enough to listen back. And I just heard it, and it was all kind of mixed, and the gospel choir were there, and the key changes and breakdowns, and it just felt like, oh, this is bloody brilliant, you know? But still...

No clue that it was going to do what it'd done. I remember then when we were releasing it, we went on a radio tour and we were in Scotland and we were driving through Edinburgh. And I remember, I literally remember all the gorgeous squares and the lovely architecture and the...

stone buildings and everything in the city in Edinburgh. And it came on the radio station that we were about to visit. And I think around the same time in the car we got a phone call to say that... I don't know if it was like a midweek chart position or whatever but I remember in that car we sort of were informed that it's going to be number one or it's you know it's doing really well and it started going up the airplay charts which the airplay charts were something that you know it was like

no to Westlife. And it just grew momentum. And then we were at the Brit Awards. I don't know why we were at the Brit Awards, whether it was something to do with your... No, I don't think... Anyways, we were at the Brit Awards. And this Australian guy came up and he was talking to us and it eventually turned out that he was like the MD of our Australian record label. And he just said, I'm going to make that song a hit in Australia. And we kind of thought nothing else of it.

And then a few weeks later, we got a phone call from the Labour going, right, that guy you met at the Brits, he's obsessed with your raise me up. He guarantees us he's going to make it a smash in Australia and he wants you to come over. Now, Australia, we never really had a whole lot of presence in. I mean...

We certainly have fans there and we love them, but we never had that kind of take over the charts and, you know, come in and perform on the massive TV shows and kind of be very well known in a household name way. And so we flew over to Australia and still had no clue what was going to happen. So we'd done a showcase in Australia and I remember looking out into the audience and...

It's like half the cast of Home and Away was there. Sally from Home and Away was in the audience, so that completely threw me. You've won. You've absolutely won. I was like, Sally is in the back row. I don't know if I've ever been, I mean, Briar Carey, fine, but don't, you know, don't put Sally in the audience. Anyways, so that was amazing because we kept on meeting, like I met Irene from Home and Away on a chat show like the next day.

and you know those kind of people I will get starstruck over not like Stevie Wonder and Mariah Carey so anyways We done Dancing with the Stars, I believe. It's called Dancing with the Stars in Australia, right? Not strictly, yeah. So we done Dancing with the Stars and it literally just went number one straight away. And the next thing you know, we were just overnight massive in Australia.

And we got invited to this Mardi Gras thing on at the weekend, you know, we're going to invite you along and you can come to our little VIP section. This is the label inviting us to Mardi Gras. We had no clue what Mardi Gras... how big it was and how much of a deal it was and so we end up we end up like you know at this free champagne bar in the record label on the side of the main bandstand or whatever you know looking over at the mardi gras

And well, let me just say we had the night of our lives and all of a sudden we're just like, our career is like gone huge again. And it's that magic that we had at the beginning of the band. It really was the thing that solidified us and kind of imprinted, even in our own brains, that we're a four-piece, this is now what Westlife is, and we're as big as we ever were.

And yeah, one song, You Raise Me Up, Done That, you know. I'm pretty sure Louis was the main factor that pushed You Raise Me Up maybe into Simon's brain. And then Simon loved it and sort of... You know, it's just, I don't know, it was just the right song in the right band's hands at the right moment in their career. We needed it, for sure. But it really...

It really put us right back up there, you know, it was breaking new territories. Not only was it like we ended up going to China for the first time ever, which is now a brilliant place for us to go on tour. Yeah, it's like just when you thought you were ready for home, a new song falls in your lap and it's like, right, we're going to do it all over again now for the next five years, you know? Yeah, and you did. It's funny, I...

often describe your band as when people ask me about Westlife, I use the phrase band of brothers, where I just, you know, you are a force. to be reckoned with as a four and and it's in you know in many ways as in you know you can argue with each other you can agree with each other but you come together the force of the four of you together is just extraordinary and anybody

dares to get in the middle of it is just, you know, it's never going to happen. It's incredible. It's like Brothers. I feel like it's like Brothers. No, I mean, and you're right, to be honest with you, and you probably get that because it really is. I mean... We all have our own siblings, but I have to say that the other three lads are very much similar to or exactly like siblings, you know.

And that includes, you know, you don't always see completely eye to eye with your siblings. But in general, you know, but you're also talking about, like, we're the only people that know each other since we were 16. Like, you know, I was younger. I was like 15, I think. the first when the first kind of sniffs of Westlife started emerging and you know that's the lads I was in school with you know Shane and Cian I was in school like I sat next to Cian

for the last two and a half years of school, in high school. He was in my art class, my maths class, my Irish class. You know, like, I'm not talking about, it's not some guy I met in an audition later in life. done a few years in a band with him, you know, you're talking about over, like, 30 years of, he knows my family, you know, like, the same with Shane, and the same with Nicky as well, you know, Nicky came along only a couple of years after this, and...

You know, we've been there before marriage, after marriage, kids. We've been there for the hangovers. We've been there when, you know... Somebody in the industry might bully somebody and the rest of us stand up for them or somebody might say something. We've been there when, you know, kind of...

TV presenters are rude to us and say our music's crap live on air. We've been through it all together. We've been there for all the number one chart positions. We've been there when we didn't get number one. We've been there. One of the things that, if there's one thing that can... really make a band bond is losing a member you know because we were like right we're either going to like get closer and get stronger or this is it it's the end so we had to reach in deep and find that bond and um

Yeah, I think it's like anything. If you're out there in the world standing shoulder to shoulder with somebody, you're going to become close to them through experiences and all the challenges that you go through together.

all the highs are great but it's the it's all the tough stuff that you go through together that's the stuff that really makes you bond and um yeah so it really is like brothers and um we Yeah, it is kind of hard and sometimes I feel sorry for people, new people that come to work with us and they're kind of sitting there in a boardroom in front of us giving ideas.

you know, somebody's bound to like not love an idea somewhere, you know, like the mad thing is like when there's four brains, like something that is amazing to one person, someone else could absolutely think is like really dislike, you know, and it's always going to be hard to get your brain around that.

The beauty is when all four of us like something, that's the bit, that's the magic thing. That's the thing that's Westlife, you know? But yeah, sometimes people can... come and present say an idea for a stage set to us or a video and I'm kind of sitting there in the corner and I'm like oh god I better like stand up for them or something you know what I mean it's like it can be tough but you know at the end of the day

We became tougher because we kind of had to. Yeah. We realised that, especially when we broke up and came back together, like, in the early days of our career, it was.

because of all these other people, you know, all these other people that enabled us and allowed us and made us successful. But what we realised that, like in every career, I suppose, there's a shift where... we are now responsible for our own success and we can either ruin it all or make it better and stronger and so with that came

maturity, I suppose. We grew up, we're now all 40, in early 40s, and we are the captains of our own ship. We cherish and adore all the people around us that... continue to make us look great and sound great and continue to help us, you know, in a way that can never truly be quantified, you know.

It was us that decided to get back together. You know, it was us that decided we're going to be a band again. And along with that, we decided that we know what's best for us and we're going to... be our own bosses, you know, and it was a learning curve when everyone used to say you can be replaced in the morning and you're too fat and you're too thin and you're this and you're that.

um okay that did happen but well a little bit here and there um but now we're our own bosses and nobody can talk to us like that anymore and it's not it's not a control freak thing it's more just like We're all in our early 40s now. We've got kids and families. It's the right sort of evolution for us to be in charge now, you know. And so we are. We're so involved in everything we do, you know.

particularly you know as you know along with our team we're really involved in our live shows um and we're involved in our artwork and we're involved in everything uh but the one thing And if there's any advice that we could ever give, I think we'd all agree to this as well. It's like, never stop listening to other people, you know, and always have a really great team around you that you know and trust.

Sometimes a new person might come in, sometimes it'll be people you've been working with for years, but we have people that we trust and love and have worked with for a long time and we always listen to them, you know. And if you just completely lose sight of all of that, you know, then it's probably not going to have that balance anymore. Yeah. And as you say, you're the... you've been standing on those stages you know you know what works you know what doesn't work and it's you know and and

I mean, I've sometimes described, especially the other thing about it is that the four of you, unless you're on a tour, you're quite rarely together. So when you are together, you have to basically maximize the amount of things that need to be done in that amount of time.

And you're not alone in that, by the way. There's other bands that are similar to that. But what that means is there's a kind of whirlwind effect that happens. And it is interesting having worked around your band for a while when people... sort of see it for the first time but actually for a lot of us I think we all enjoy being in it because you're just like

It just comes in and just a million things get done in such a quick amount of time. Well, there's never a dull moment. There's never a dull moment. But you know what it is, though? Everybody cares. Everybody really cares. And especially you four, you all want it to be the best. Yeah, I think anything that we ever do, any disputes or disagreements that we ever have, it's never because of any other reason than we're so passionate and we care so much about.

about protecting and minding and guarding this thing that we have, you know. If somebody new comes in, it's not for the faint-hearted, like, because... We've done this so many times, so to us, this is a normal day in the life. If we go into rehearsals for a tour and our band is there, but yet in the next room, we still don't know what the setlist is yet, but the band are already rehearsing the setlist.

was like how could you be because we don't even know what it is but they rehearsed it anyway and then we might make a change and we'll go back and forth and then in the room beside that we're approving the merchandise and you know and it's always like lads, we've had like a year to do this. Why are we cramming it all in the last minute? But it's actually quite exciting that way. And it's just...

It's the way that things work with us, like we do kind of disperse after a tour or after a promotional kind of say release an album, promote it, then we all kind of like leg it off home to our family and our friends. You know, we see each other occasionally, but it's mostly that we go off and live our lives and then we come back together and you've got this intense whirlwind, as you say. But...

The passion and the excitement, you know, we might try three different versions of looking like that, but on the third one, when we finally get it right, the excitement of that, because all we're trying to do is do something that blows everyone's kind of... you know, blows everyone's brain. All we're trying to do is, you know, do something that blows the crowd away, you know? And so when we find a version of looking like that, like on the current Wild Dreams tour, we kind of went...

you know, quite heavy with the rock kind of guitar thing. And, you know, it took us quite a bit of time to get it there, you know, but like... Nobody knows that when they're at the gig and we come out and do the song, you know. But there is a process behind every single song. I mean, trying to find the right version of Flying Without Wings.

you know, after 20 versions of Flying Out Wings, how can we do something now to make it even better this time or make it different or reinventing songs without spoiling the essence of them. It's very difficult to do a different version of Mandy without taking away from the beautiful original Mandy. But at the same time...

And it's not even always because of the audience. It's like sometimes it needs to be different for us as well because we can't get sort of complacent or we can't get bored of it either, you know. You know what, I think it's like if we blow our own socks off, then hopefully that means the audience's socks will be blown off. So like in rehearsals, we're trying to impress ourselves. And if we're impressed, then hopefully that will mean the audience is impressed, you know.

Yeah, I have to say, Mandy's, certainly on the current tour, Mandy was the gift because I just remember the kind of... The instruction came down the line. Basically, we're at the Grammys and there's like a 150-piece symphony orchestra behind us. And I just thought, yeah. Your worst nightmare. Yeah, I can do that. And actually, even believe it or not, I take some convincing. I think the first time you said ABBA to me, I was like, yes, but...

And I had reservations and, you know, and only because I wasn't quite sure. It's normally whenever I have reservations for that thing, it's like, oh my God, can I do it? Like, can I pull it off, basically? Can I do it? Well, I mean, there's a lot at stake when you do stuff like that. I think, like, you know, the tour before that we've done, the Queen Mel, and that's, I mean, both of them are just as dangerous and risky. But there's something about our fans.

willingness to just go with what we do like I don't think our fans are there going oh don't tell me you've done a Queen you know you know they just want to have fun and enjoy themselves and Our medley, where we always do either a bunch of covers of very stiffened artists, or more recently it's been the Queen medley and the Abba medley.

Every year we're like, well, how do we beat the Queen medley? There's no other band you can do for stadium tour, you know, for big gigs. And then it was during lockdown, probably to do with the fact that I was reading the press that ABBA were doing their, you know, the hologram. show and everything. Because, you know, the Queen movie or whatever was out and that sort of fed into the idea that, OK, Queen had a bit of a resurgence in the proper mainstream.

of late. So now is a good time to do a Queen medley before everyone else does it. It was the same with the ABBA thing because they had done, you know, they were in the forefront of the general public's mind. And so that's why sometimes it's appropriate to do stuff that the fans are already sort of, it's in their mind at the time.

So I don't know what we're going to do next. But every year it's mind-boggling and then we somehow get there. But what people don't actually know is the fact that you don't just throw, we don't just throw these things together. I mean, both of those medleys took about three months.

from concept absolutely but because not only because of actually getting just get exactly the right bits exactly the right singers and then you know we have such attention to detail if you're going to pay homage to two of these bands every single tiny element of them have to be exactly correct for it to have authenticity and be and be your versions of the songs yeah so so for me as a singer it's really important to

try and get across the intended vocal style, let's say of an ABBA song, but at the same time it's important for me to not look like I'm trying to sort of copy. So it's a balance between I want to sing it. how I would sing it, but I also want to sing it how it was intended by the original writers as well, and also not sing it so differently. that I've now taken it completely away from the song people know and the vocal melody people know. But in general, we're all just police, you know.

I think like, you know, you certainly are a fantastic policeman in that sense. You know, because, and this is it, we need, we need a bunch of policemen in that situation because...

You might spot something that I wouldn't, let's say, and there might be something that I might feel. But by the time it goes through the process of going around all the different policemen, we're pretty kind of... secure that we've got rid of all the bits that might be a bit like oh cringy or bad or wrong and all of us play a part in that all of us all the lads in the band and everyone around us and it's really important because if you are going to play

with fire or do something risky, like an Ava medley, like Westlife doing an Ava medley or a Queen medley, it could be so wrong, you know, we could get it so wrong, but because there's so many people, and that's what I spoke about earlier, having a team of trusted people around you, along with... drawn from your own experience and knowledge of your own audience, I think it's a very measured risk. And, you know, I was standing in...

in Wembley Stadium on the stage during the ABBA medley, looking around. You know, you do think to yourself, God, remember when people were saying, it'll never work. And then you're standing in Wembley Stadium and you've got like, however, 60, 70,000 people singing every word back to you. And it's not an I told you so moment. It's just like a... you know, somehow we've nailed it again or somehow we've got away with another risky medley.

But you're not only doing that, you're standing in Wembley Stadium with closer to 90,000 people as a band that's been around for 22 years that never played Wembley Stadium. at your height in the first place and you're selling it out that is i mean i have to say for any anybody any any fan of the band anyone that works with you anybody that's

interest in the band, the pride that everybody had of seeing you four up there. I can't imagine what it was like for you to look out, but certainly the people watching you, it was extraordinary.

Yeah, I mean, I always compare the fact that we played and sold out Wembley Stadium to you raised me up like we spoke about earlier. It's a moment in our career where somehow... against all the odds we somehow got a little bit like I'm not saying bigger but like we somehow achieved something new you know over 20 years into our career something that we never would have

predicted. Something that we didn't in the reunion expect or plan to go to the point of Wembley Stadium. It just naturally... progressed that way but one thing I will say is like anybody who's taken 20 years to get to Wembley Stadium it's not just us four on the stage like it felt like the fans were on the stage with us it felt like our team was on the stage with us like everybody

You know, there's certain bands that play Wembley Stadium in their sleep or artists. And, you know, for us, it just meant something very, very deep to us. You know, you don't just, you don't kind of fluke Wembley Stadium. You might. you might have a decent song and somehow sell out a couple of arenas, but you don't get to do that with Wembley Stadium. If you play Wembley Stadium, it's a...

You can't argue with that, you know, and so it's lovely to have moments like that this far into our career where we feel like we're still evolving and still growing and that, you know. Just when you think you've done it all, it's like something brand new happens and you feel like a kid again. You feel like a 17-year-old here in Flamminette Wings for the first time again. Because the idea is that...

who knows what's around the corner. As I said, just when you think you've achieved everything you could possibly achieve, you do something and surprise yourself again.

Absolutely. And I mean, you know, just to finish off, there's so much we haven't spoken about. But I mean, when you talk about achievements, I think as someone that's known you for a long time, you know, I feel like there was a culmination that happened of... of so many things when when you became a dad i think oh everything about you i think even down to your stage presence and performance

And everything, it just seemed to be, it was the one thing you were waiting for to make everything fit into place. And since then, it's all just, it's just easy. Yeah, I think what I later done was put... put everything into perspective or back into perspective or whatever. Like I was saying to someone recently that You know, what Leila is doing is she's teaching me so much about myself. She's reminding me of myself when I was a child or when I was young, which basically...

You know, if you can sit in the garden with a bucket, you know, and listen to birds singing and sort of...

You know, if that can fill your whole mind up and you can be all amazed by it and the smell of the plastic of the bucket and the sounds of the berries, you know, this kind of stuff, you know, if that can completely satisfy a brain, then it just goes to show you don't need... any of the rest of it you know you can if you can if you can just sit in a moment like a child does and just be happy with the room you're in um you know all of the extra stuff

that we end up convincing ourselves in life that we need. And if I don't have... success and if we don't have the number one or the millions of albums or the stadiums then i must be a failure or my you know everything's going to go downhill from here but um Just being around Leiland, seeing her laughing at her own shadow. She could play with a crust of a bread for two hours. It's such a...

an amazing reminder of how life doesn't have to be complicated. You can enjoy the simplest of things and they can be just as enjoyable as, you know. All of this other stuff that... We convince ourselves we need in our lives to make ourselves happy and successful. And also just, I mean, she's actually hilarious. I don't know how a two-, three-year-old can have such a sense of humour, but she's...

She kind of has us laughing all day, every day. And also the one thing I always wondered, oh, wonder will she ever... like to sing, you know, when she's 10 or 11, wonder where she starts. She's been singing since she was born, honestly. She sings all day, every day. She remembers songs, like she remembered all the Christmas songs in November. She remembered them.

She sang about 10 Christmas songs in a row mid-November when the first Christmas advert came on the TV. She just like went bang, bang, bang and started singing all the Christmas songs. And I was like, you're three years old. How can you remember all the words and everything?

She just amazes me in every way. And the main thing is, and you hear this, people saying this all the time, you know, but children, they do put things into perspective. You're like, God, I used to worry so much about X, Y and Z. But really, like, it doesn't really matter that much at all, does it? You know, what matters is being happy. You know, I want my kids to be happy. I want her to feel comfortable and safe. I want her to, you know, eat well and sleep well.

laugh in the morning and laugh in the evening and that'll be you know mission accomplished if she's healthy and happy and then you can't help but remind yourself that actually that's really what what um What you should be seeking out as well, you know, is just the simplicity of health and happiness and a bit of laughter and a bit of singing. That's all it takes. That's all it takes. Lastly, I mean...

I wonder how you feel. Obviously, there's still a long way to go. But as someone that had to grow up in a world where it wasn't quite as easy to be who you wanted to be, do you... do you see a lot of positives in how things have changed with the possibilities um i mean i know trans friends don't have such so much of a good time at the moment but I feel like there has been a few things that have changed for the positive and I think you know in some ways people like you have been a

kind of someone to look up to for for a lot of people coming coming after you and i think you laid a lot of groundwork i wonder what your feelings are about where we are with that fight at the moment um so You know, this is a topic that has always deeply affected me since I was a kid, you know. The horrific realisation when you're 9, 10, 11, 12, whatever age, that, oh my God, like...

there's something that I've just realised about myself that could make everyone literally hate me. And, like, you know, I was 10 in 1990, so at that point, the atmosphere and the... information that I had gathered from my surroundings was, if I ever shared these feelings I'm having with anybody, I could literally lose everybody, I could get beaten up, I could become the most infamous.

kind of person you know you people will think i'm weird you know all this stuff you know i don't mean to go back too deep into it but that's the level of of worry and um It's a mountain of fear. A 10-year-old child should not be feeling like that. Like I said a few minutes ago, they should feel safe, they should go to bed happy, they should wake up happy.

They should feel safe and loved. And by the way, I felt all of those things I'm talking about in my own family home. But I also felt, you know, an overwhelming fear. I felt like I was harbouring... a dark secret and, you know, you can't help but feel like you're harboring an unsavory kind of dark secret about yourself.

God, if I get found out here, I'm in big trouble, you know? So that's going back to the early 90s when I was in my bedroom locking the door listening to Alanis Morissette and Whitney and Mariah. But, you know...

Which puts a bit of perspective on why I said it was so important for me to find a way to express what I was feeling, you know. And that's when I think, you know, my style of singing being... quite emotive and expressive that's where it came from because at some point there in the early 90s my my actual real life emotions merged with singing and singing has always been connected to real emotion for me but um

Anyways, going back to what we were talking about, it's something that then through my own teenage years, I continued to get progressively worse probably and into a worse place because I was, you know, I was going further into adolescence. everyone around me was having their first dance and their first kiss and their first girlfriend and all that. So I finally got into Westlife and was nowhere near being ready to come out, but yet all of a sudden I'm now in...

The biggest... you know new pop band in the uk and we're on the cover of smash hits magazine and every second question is what type of girl do you fancy and who's your favorite girl and girl girl girl girl girl and i was like girl um but uh you know it was very scary because I was like, now the secret I have is 10 times worse, 10 times bigger and 10 times darker. And I started feeling like, you know, somehow...

This could be perceived, that I've pulled the wool all over everyone's eyes and I'm a big fake. And, you know, so it just got, the secret got bigger. And I remember ever since I was a kid, my dad was like, you know you'll always get caught out with secrets and lies you know so tell the truth and you'll always be okay um you know eventually that you know couldn't have been more true but my journey in getting there

was difficult. And so the point I'm making is when I think back, you know, I truly, now that I came out, and I eventually came out in 2005 or 2006, It's that long ago, I can't remember, thankfully. But having other people as an example would have been very helpful to me. Stephen Gately came out before I did. That was helpful for sure. You know, but I think one thing that people in the public eye have the power of doing is normalising things because, well...

Graham Norton says it and if one of the people in that big pop band say and this famous actor says it, all of a sudden it becomes acceptable and more normal. That's a big power that celebrities and people in the public eye have. And so I've always kind of felt a sense of duty that if there's anything I can say in any interview that can just help somebody. Effectively, I'm probably helping some former version of myself, you know, in my head.

And so that's why I care so much about anyone in that position and anybody that... Sometimes you might get a letter or somebody might come up to you in a pub and kind of whisper and go, look, I'm gay as well, but I haven't told anyone, have you any advice? You know, it's heart-wrenching, but also an opportunity to say something helpful. And sometimes you...

You can't think of anything constructive to say, but you try your best anyways. And that's all I've ever done. I've tried my best to add something to the pot. If I'm going to say something, try and say something a bit meaningful or even share some of my stories.

15 20 years after coming out you just share some stories going yeah i was really scared really worried someone can go oh my god that's exactly what i'm going through you know and sometimes to just even share your own story is is enough um

And I mean, where everything's at now, I mean, there's an undeniable, massive leap forward if you go back 20 years to where the conversation and the journey is at now. But it's also... You know, I just think that what people need to understand, let's say people outside of the... People outside of the... LGBTQI plus community need to understand is that sometimes you can get a sense of oh god have we not like sorted all this out now like you know

Or, okay, right, I'm okay with that, but now you can't, you're taking the piss now. It's like, do you not understand that you've lifted up a rock and you've gone, okay.

We've realised something now. There's been a mistake here. Let's rectify it. And then the deeper you get under the rock, there's loads of stuff going on and there's loads more and there'll be more to come. So it's a conversation and an evolution. It's not like... a problem right problem solved bye bye can we go back to normal now please um we're realizing stuff about ourselves as human beings and we're learning more and more and

I don't know, each year and each two years and five years and each decade, you know, there's a load more people who don't have to go through stuff behind closed doors. They can be themselves in public, but there's always going to be another set of people, one layer deeper than that again. And it's going to keep coming, you know, and it's not just, say, gender based or sexuality based.

It's neurodiversity. It's all sorts of things. And we just have to be open to the fact that it's going to be a constant evolution, you know, the evolution of mankind or the evolution of all of us as humans. So this idea that, right, we've sorted that out now, can we just, can we just, why is everyone still going on about it? That's not how it works. It's an evolution and it's going to keep evolving.

And next year and the year after, when I'm 60 and 70, we'll still be understanding one little bit more about ourselves as humans. And so I don't think people look at it like that, you know. I think people... as I say, they see it as like, right, okay, these people have been wronged, let's fix it and move on, you know. I'd rather just keep an open mind, you know, and as I say, help in whatever way I can.

and just try to be one of a group of people aka society and just try and be a good person in that society and you know Yeah, just try and add to the pot. And if everyone done that a little bit, we'd be moving in the right direction. Even in Ireland, I've been involved in this surrogacy legislation campaign.

No one person can say they've driven the campaign. It's been such a team effort. Now, there is a couple of people, key people that really trailblaze and really do the groundwork. But in general... without the whole team, you know, it wouldn't happen. And I always find like in Ireland when there was a same-sex marriage referendum, it's actually the people outside of the minority.

Without them, it can't succeed. So it was all of the straight people, let's say, that made the same-sex marriage referendum happen. And so in the same way, it's going to take everybody else. to join in and be part of the team for things to get where they need to get you know. So I don't know if you can edit that down to... No, I don't want to edit it down because I think what you said was beautiful and perfectly put. And I think it really helps explain it.

Ultimately, it's just all about love anyway. Absolutely, yeah. And just accepting ourselves as humans. Yeah, and as you say, it's just bigger and brighter and different. you know it's you know i feel it's there and um and i think you know it it's it's it's really good to chat i mean obviously we spent a lot of time together but there's some of those stories i i hadn't heard before and there's a funny little thing that everybody

notices when Mark is in soundcheck specifically, you go to a kind of little space in your head where everyone else is kind of looking around doing stuff. And when you soundcheck, you're kind of, you often just wander around the stage.

And I always, I kind of think I now know that this place you go into your head is back to your bedroom when you're listening to Mariah. Because you're kind of walking around with like not really looking or thinking about anything else that's going on. And then just these kind of mad. riffs will come out and i've now figured out that's where you go yeah i suppose it is it's like you put i put the mic off but very often nothing is coming out but then i'm just waiting for something

And I'm just waiting for my brain to be spontaneous and do something. And it's strange because you could be standing in an empty arena, which is obviously massive and cavernous and huge, but...

With the in-ears in your head, the one thing that the in-ears do, because I used to hate them at the beginning, I couldn't get used to them, but one thing they do is they actually make everything smaller again. A bit like... a bedroom you know they take like a huge space and they bring it right down to this small space and that can be helpful as a singer because just I don't know acoustically like you can you could get lost in

you can hear the front of house speakers, you can hear the crowd screaming, and sometimes it's easier to focus on what you're singing if you bring it right down to a small space, which the in-ears can do sometimes. Yeah. you're there she's back in her bedroom she's back in her bedroom but this time she's mariah

That's what we think. Yeah. Well, I'll never get there, but I'll always try. No, no. Yeah, exactly. All right. Listen, have fun in Asia. Lots of love to the rest of the boys and smash it out there. I know they'll absolutely love the show.

it's a killer show it's so good yeah I honestly can't wait obviously I've missed a few gigs to say the least but I just can't wait to get back on stage with the lads and just you know it is a magic it's still a magic there's no night or gig where we go through the motions every single gig is we get there with the skin of our teeth you know and and you know there's a full-on singing full-on

I mean, arse shaking, let's be honest. Yeah, there'll definitely be some of that. We always have to stick a little bit of arse shaking in there. And yeah, so I mean, it's going to be great. And there's so many more gigs this year in 2023 that we'll be doing. And as I say, you do, you're 17 again when you're up on the stage. Like it's almost like every night is new. And to say that you can do that.

You see so many people, and it does feel a bit like they're going through the motions, but I can tell you that every time we go out on stage, we're all screaming each other, psyching each other up, I mean, backstage. beforehand and you know we're proper high-fiving each other and there's a pep talks and it's like you know it's all it's never lost its excitement and as long as we can keep that hopefully we'll we'll be keep we'll be going strong for years to come you know yeah yeah absolutely you

Amazing. All right. Thanks for chatting, Mark. And I'll see you soon. Cheers, Steve. Thank you. Take care.