5 December 1999
Boyzone? Still? Really? Dinosaur-meets-asteroid is too vigorous an analogy, but the advent of Westlife, a prettier and squeakier-clean Boyzone but with at least two actual singers, surely made Ronan and company redundant in a swoop. This micro-drama is set within the niche confines of the Irish boyband underground. The rest of us just got on with our lives, which in December 1999 meant hoping the most overhyped New Year’s Eve night in history would be redeemed by the Y2K bug making planes drop out of the sky like rat-poisoned pigeons. I’m generalising slightly here.
Anyway, raising our hopes that the new millennium would bring some tangible improvement to the human condition, ‘Every Day I Love You’ is the final Boyzone single, at least until what we now know is the inevitable 21st century reunion of all ’90s boybands. On the sound of this, Boyzone weren’t going to be missed, or even noticed leaving. While it’s not a cover of a ’70s schmaltzy ballad, an original ’90s schmaltzy ballad is just as bad when Boyzone are at the wheel. The slight country twang and plaintive piano reminds me of ‘Sometimes When We Touch’, that awful histrionic love song that seemed to be performed by a different Irish cabaret singer every week on Live At 3 during the ’80s. (‘Every Day I Love You’ was actually written by the same people behind ‘I Swear’, that ’90s schmaltzy ballad covered by loads of Americans and whichever of those Irish afternoon TV cabaret crooners were still above ground.) Boyzone, however, can’t manage histrionic or even memorable. ‘Every Day I Love You’ simpers and shuffles to the tired, weak expiration of song and group. We’d now have to rely exclusively on Westlife for our Irish boyband needs.
