1 August 1999
After Robbie and Geri, here’s Ronan with the latest big solo move. Okay, so a re-listen to ‘When You Say Nothing At All’ reveals that Ronan Keating doesn’t really shlur hish wordsh as popular lampoon would have it. I think he has more in common with what we now call ‘cursive’ singers like Diana Vickers and Halsey, trapping his vowels on the roof of his mouth to emit a series of quizzical goose quacks. Still, his strange vocals, here and elsewhere, are less of a natural singing style and more like a coping mechanism to power through the ordeal of being forced to sing. I haven’t yet found a corresponding way to cope with the ordeal of being forced to listen. However, duty calls.
Ronan’s more interesting solo move to up-tempo pop comes a bit later. Here, his first run-out in senior hurling, he sticks to the familiar Boyzone boilerplate of schmaltzy, maudlin cover versions. A US country song with an Irish tin whistle solo tells me that the mid-’90s Garth Brooks and Riverdance fandoms, plus that of the rom-com Notting Hill on whose soundtrack it appears, are the lucky mainstream audiences to whom this cornball is being pitched. There may also have been notions here of breaking America; it certainly broke me. Ronan Keating seems like a decent guy with a sense of humour, which saves this from being totally charmless, but his ‘When You Say Nothing At All’ is still a terrible song with the added disadvantage of being sung by a bad singer.
