19 December 1999
How should we approach the landmark of the final Irish number one of the millennium? The same way we approached it at the time: ignore the symbolism completely and just put a Westlife single there. Not just any Westlife single, though – a double-A-side of covers of two remarkably dreadful songs. ‘I Have A Dream’ is one of ABBA’s campfire singalongs, which we normally cordon off with ‘Chiquitita’ and ‘Fernando’ as official Bad ABBA. ‘Seasons In The Sun’ is a ’60s Jacques Brel torch song called ‘Le Moribond’, also not one of his best, translated and worsened into a kitsch, hyper-melodramatic ’70s US bubblegum death ballad. Loving your style, Louis!
Here, Westlife sing both songs as if they are identical, which, insofar as both are cheap boyband fodder, they are. Both are slowed down to the same R&B-ballad pace. The lads sing both songs in the same R&B-ballad style, with furrowed brow and trembling upper lip. I have the impression that the meaning and sentiment of the lyrics were outside the scope of this project; this is especially apparent in the backing vocals, where a Westlifer, invariably Mark, just doubles up the previous line but with extra overwrought emoting.
I suppose their ‘I Have A Dream’ has the distinction of being a Westlife single without a climactic key change, though in its place they use child labourers to mine the final-verse schmaltz. ‘Seasons In The Sun’ already had a wretched key change, so Westlife’s added touch is to bring that key change up to the middle chorus, then drop back to the original key for the final verse, and then bring back the key jump for the ending. Oh, and it has generic Celtic pipes. Future historians will uncover details of this artefact, like the way medieval monks wrote panicky scribbles about impending plague in the margins of an illuminated manuscript, and deduce that human civilisation had, by the end of the second millennium A.D., evolved beyond giving a damn what was at number one in their singles charts, or perhaps even beyond good and bad music.
