4 April 1999
Our new golden age of pop continues. Soon after Britney’s ‘…Baby One More Time’ we get something equally wondrous: take the familiar sight of five boyband lads with their matching white suits, air grabs and cruciform poses, give them what seems like just another romantic R&B-lite ballad with a key change at the end, but make it sound good. Not only good: genuinely superb. By tweaking the standard boyband ballad just a little, and opening out its possibilities, it shows that any form of chart pop music can be exciting and innovative if its makers want it to be, while still being a colossal hit. So, that’s ‘I Want It That Way’ by the Backstreet Boys, Cheiron’s other 1999 masterpiece. Oh, and Westlife release their first single too.
Westlife will have four Irish number ones in 1999, though their return on investment slows to only one or two a year after that. Success has many fathers, and the two sperm donors of Westlife are Louis Walsh and Simon Cowell, each a music mogul whose cynicism about selling lazy product to excited punters is matched by their conservative and schmaltzy personal preferences in music. Louis we know, along with his Boyzone rap sheet. Here in Ireland we missed out on Simon’s previous UK-chart-dominating boyband, Robson and Jerome, so Westlife are here to make up that shortfall.
Product lead-in times being what they are, it’s likely that all four 1999 Westlife number ones were in the can before ‘I Want It That Way’ was released. Still, it showed up the craven conservatism and slight air of defensiveness around the Westlife project: a more polished Boyzone, doubling down on treacly sentimental ballads, and damn the begrudgers because all Louis and Simon needed to do was create the fanbase and they’d dependably buy each new single in its first week. However, ‘I Want It That Way’ showed that ‘Back For Good’ and ‘Stay Another Day’ weren’t one-off flexes by The Piano-Playing One: a writer-producer studio system could make boyband material of that quality too, and to order. You didn’t need to be cynical: you just needed to be open to new ideas. Louis and Simon weren’t built that way, though: their projects have been deeply reactionary and retrograde. Girls Aloud’s best Xenomania tracks, the ones with four choruses, start appearing in 2005, the year Louis stopped managing them. Even The X Factor was essentially a re-tooling of the existing Pop Idol format to ensure that Simon and Louis were the centre of power: yes, let the public vote for their “winner” but we’ll be making Olly Murs and One Direction stars regardless.
Anyway, Westlife. You can’t be harsh on the lads themselves; they do what it is they do. We now have three lead vocalists who can sing properly, up from the negligible amount in Boyzone. (I pause to note that the singer vs lads-at-the-back divide in Westlife splits cleanly along Sligo-Dublin lines.) There’s clearly more money spent on ‘Swear It Again’ than perhaps the whole Boyzone back catalogue: it’s well produced and sounds like a record that expects to be number one. Still, though, the song is simpering mush: is it meant to be about renewing marriage vows, or at least not divorcing? That’s the vibe I get from it: a ‘mature’ song for the older boyband fan, perhaps traipsing around Tesco on the big weekly shop and chucking an impulse-buy CD into their trolley along with that extra bottle of wine. Westlife rack up 13 Irish number ones in total, which means that we have a dozen variations on this to come. I use the word ‘variations’ loosely.
