Westlife: Our Story. Westlife
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– I never had the balls to go home and throw the towel in, that never crossed my mind, I probably should have but I was determined that it wasn’t going to break me – but it did get me pretty down.
One night us Irish lads went out and got pissed. The next morning we were frog-marched into the office and our contracts laid out on the table in front of us. They were sacking us. The coach in charge was shouting in our faces, but it turned out to be a scare tactic. As I wiped the spit from my face and looked around at the other lads, I realized it was working.
It had started so well. Although I was only a junior, just a few months out of school, through a series of injuries to goalkeepers, more senior than me, I was named in the first team squad for a match at Southampton. It was incredible – I was on the first-team coach with all the professionals, big-name players I’d seen on the telly like Gary McAllister, Tony Yeboah, Gary Speed and the Irish legend Gary Kelly and now I was in the squad with them. I didn’t play that day, but it was such a buzz to be even near that level of football. Mam and Dad kept all the paper clippings from back home and even recorded the news on Teletext, they were so proud.
But the honeymoon period didn’t last for long. The problem I had was that I flitted in and out of the team. When that happens, especially as a goalkeeper, football is a very lonely place. When you’re not in the team at that level, often not even as a substitute, you’re nothing more than a boot boy, a drinks boy, pushing skips around with kit in them, like. Sometimes players’ faces fit and sometimes they don’t. It’s the same in any job, the same in boy bands…
One of the few highlights of my time at Leeds was the magic phone. One day, my room-mate Keith Espey went to ring his mum, but the payphone didn’t seem to be working and he was pressing the number 7 in frustration – you know, ‘Come on! Work!’ Then the phone rang, he picked it up and it was his mum. ‘Did you just try to call me?’ she said.
Turned out her phone had rung after all, but for some reason Keith hadn’t had to put any money in. His mum checked on her next bill and there was no sign of the call being reverse charged or anything like that. So we all started doing it – pick up the phone, bang it back down, 7777, wait a few seconds, phone rings, make your call. I was phoning Ireland and we had Welsh lads phoning Wales. Even Harry Kewell,the future Liverpool player who was from Australia, was calling home. It was brilliant!
This was one of the rare highlights, though, as I said. Mentally, those years at Leeds were the toughest time in my whole life. I didn’t get on with the coach, I was only allowed six paid visits home a year, I was homesick and I wasn’t getting picked. The rules were ludicrous – for example if I didn’t shave, I was fined a fiver. There were times when I thought to myself, What am I serving my sentence for? When you are away you get very patriotic and I got very homesick and used to play a lot of Boyzone, funnily enough – ‘Father and Son’, tunes like that. Even more bizarrely, I saw Mikey from that band in a club one night in Howth, County Dublin, surrounded by girls, and that image stuck with me.
By the Christmas of 1997 I knew I was finished with football. My height – 5ft 10in – worked against me, as most modern professional goalkeepers are well over six foot. But also my face and personality weren’t fitting in with certain people at Leeds United, as I said, and I could see the end was coming. Still, I was devastated. This had been my dream since I was knee-high and it was falling apart.
Even the way they broke the news was typical – they said I was one of the best prospects they’d ever seen, but I needed to grow a few inches and that if I didn’t between then and the end of my contract, it wouldn’t be renewed. I was 19. It wasn’t going to happen. Then, when the time came to leave, there wasn’t even a handshake.
My confidence was ruined as a footballer. I’m a very confident person – my mam and dad gave us a really good upbringing and filled us all with confidence – but after Leeds, that had gone, with regards to football at least. There were options: playing in the part-time Irish leagues (I eventually did play for Shelbourne, Cobh Ramblers and St Francis) or playing for English clubs further down the tables like Cambridge or Scarborough. I did try out for a couple, but I wasn’t interested. My heart wasn’t in it anymore.
I retreated to Dublin, gutted. My football dream was over.
To be honest with you, I was dying to get home.
The phone rings. ‘Hello, Shane, it’s Mam. How are you?’
‘Fine, Mam, thanks. Are you OK?’
‘Good, thanks. Listen, I’ve been on the phone with Boyzone’s manager, that Louis Walsh, and…’
‘What?! Mam, go away, will ya?’
I thought she was joking. I hung up on her.
The phone rings again.
‘Shane, listen, I’ve been on the phone with that Louis Walsh. I’ve been phoning for months trying to get hold of him and I just finally spoke to him about your band.’
She wasn’t joking.
It turned out that she had indeed spoken with Louis Walsh, manager of Boyzone and one of the most powerful men in the music business. Mam came from the same small village as him, Kiltimagh in County Mayo, and to her, there was no reason why she shouldn’t phone this famous manager and tell him about her son’s band. They didn’t know each other personally, they’d never met even, but her family knew of his family, it was that kind of village, literally in the middle of nowhere. So she’d just gone straight to the top of the food chain.
She’d rung for months and he hadn’t answered – not surprising really, given that Boyzone were absolutely massive at the time. But eventually, one day, Louis just picked the phone up.
‘Hello?’
Mam had introduced herself then had charmed her way through. ‘I can’t believe you’re on the phone, I’ve been trying for months…’
‘Sorry, I’m away on business a lot. What can I do for you?’
‘It’s my son,’ explained Mam. ‘He’s in this boy band called IOYOU.’
‘I know, I’ve heard of them,’ said Louis.
When my mum told me all this, you could have knocked me down with a feather. He’d seen us on Nationwide.
Mam explained all this to me then said, ‘You’ve got a meeting with him tomorrow night.’
Jesus.
‘A meeting with Louis Walsh?’
‘Yes.’
‘As in Boyzone’s fuc…’ I nearly swore,‘…manager.’
‘Yes, Shane.’
‘Are you after having me on?’
She wasn’t.
Me and Kian went and met Louis Walsh, as in ‘Boyzone’s-fucking-manager’. I’d never even seen him before because, although he was well known in Ireland, he hadn’t yet been on X Factor or the telly in general. I expected some great big manager with a ponytail, the sort of guy that, as a teenager, I’d imagined looked after Michael Jackson.
My mum had just asked if Louis would meet up with us and give us some advice, which he very kindly did. He said he wasn’t looking to manage a new band because Boyzone were exploding all over the place and he was too busy with that. I gave him our CD, he looked at the cover and said that six lads in a boy band was too many.
We explained that we’d been offered a management contract by Mary and he asked if we’d taken legal advice and who from. It was great stuff – really good of him to lend us his ear and give us some direction. Then he