13 April 2006
Here we get a week’s break from Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Crazy’ before it returns to the top of our chart for a further seven weeks. Clearly Shayne Ward wasn’t the one-and-done output of later X Factor iterations. We’ll even see him at number one again after this, so he obviously built a solid fan base – overlapping with Westlife’s, I suspect, and good luck to him with that.
Something of interest in the ’00s Irish charts is the success and visibility of members of our Mincéir community. Shayne Ward and Chris Doran are both from Irish Traveller families, both enjoyed considerable sustained popularity in the charts and on their live tours, and both won public votes on high-profile TV shows. The continuing marginalisation and discrimination faced by this community aren’t suddenly corrected by the voting results on You’re A Star, of course. There’s a long history in pop culture of ‘othering’ identities by either glossing over them, tokenising them, or (as a certain other high-profile UK TV show of the time did with Travellers) caricaturing them as ridicule or threat, so the singles chart isn’t a great context for having this discussion anyway. Still, speaking from this corner of the settled hegemony, we seem content to have the Irish Traveller community at the top of our charts but not at the end of our road. On these issues and more, the Irish Traveller Movement (https://itmtrav.ie) and Pavee Point (www.paveepoint.ie) provide the expertise, experience, advocacy and support.
‘No Promises’, already a hit in Denmark for a Bryan Rice, is of a piece with Ward’s winner’s single, ‘That’s My Goal’: the Irish boyband ballad template of piano intro, swell of strings, and up-off-your-stool climactic key change. Its lyrics at least hint at spicier concerns than the standard Westlife storyline of ‘sorry if you were offended by my pissing on the toilet seat, babes: let’s renew our marriage vows!’ That said, the video casts Shayne as guardian angel to his plus-one, a degree of schmaltz last seen in Westlife it’s-my-funeral dirge ‘Unbreakable’. All told, ‘No Promises’ is blank and unmemorable fare carried by Ward having a stronger voice and presence than any Irish boyband. No point in us wondering how he’d get on with a better song; The X Factor was now established as the finishing school for a career in Westlife-ism, or even a vocation.
Irish Number Ones 