Boyzone: No Matter What
Sky Documentaries and NOW
We put it on cigarettes and alcohol – so maybe it’s time for a health warning on fame.
It seems to have the same devastating effect on children and young adults.
The Boyzone boys, who were in their late teens when they were put together by impresario Louis Walsh, certainly suffered.
Not to be unkind, but Boyzone was never about creating music. It was about money and fame.
Ronan Keating, Stephen Gately, Shane Lynch, Keith Duffy and Mikey Graham wanted to be famous with a bit of dosh on the side. Louis was less interested in notoriety and, not unreasonably, treated it as a straightforward business transaction.
In the beginning at least, no-one seemed to worry that they sang karaoke versions of old hits and added a bit of a dance routine.
It still sounds strange the way the lads refer to themselves as “the band”.
They were good looking boys, a couple of whom could sing, and were aimed squarely at the female teenage market.
With a shrewd manager, who wasn’t shy about making up stories to get the boys’ pictures in the tabloids, Boyzone soared to the top of the charts and played to sold out stadiums all over the world.
They sold 25 million records and had six UK No. 1 hits.
But as Boyzone: No Matter What explored, it was relentless, seven days a week work.
In started in the early 1990s when Louis Walsh set up auditions for an ‘Irish Take That’.
The original line up had six members and didn’t include Mickey Graham. Louis was for getting stuck in straight away and getting some attention.
It wasn’t entirely clear, but this seems to have been Louis’s intention with the notorious Late Late Show appearance.
Somehow Louis got them a slot on the biggest TV show in Ireland when the group barely knew each other, didn’t have any songs or dances routines and hadn’t even rehearsed.
Their job - Ronan Keating was just 16 at the time - was to dress as if in Take That, and dance to a backing track.
It was jaw-droppingly, look-through-your-fingers awful but got Louis his wish – newspaper column inches.
This would exemplify Louis’s approach to music promotion. At all costs keep the boys in the papers. Whether it was true or embarrassing for his young charges was irrelevant.
The other point of the Late Late Show appearance seems to have been a demonstration of power.
Louis sacked two members of the group after the TV performance and brought in Mickey Graham. The remaining members took it as clear direction that they should toe the line or follow the same fate.
Among the traumas of the band was the manner in which Stephen came out as gay in 1999. He was strong-armed into giving an interview about it to The Sun when the 23-year-old wanted to keep it private.
The Sun and Louis maintain that someone was about to sell his secret to the tabloid and it was best to get ahead of the story, but suspicions remain.
The three-part Sky documentary does a great job of capturing the excitement, the exhaustion, the arguments and the sadness.
They broke up when Ronan left to start a solo career and got back together when he started to falter.
They lost Stephen to an undiagnosed heart condition at age 33 not long after, and split in acrimony after going back on tour as a foursome to celebrate their 25th anniversary.
It ends with a teaser that they might reform once form. Perhaps the Sky confessional documentary was Louis’s greatest PR stunt yet.
