They have a new website: www.westlife.com

 

New Official Biography:

 

In April 2009, Westlife convened as four at the central London flat of Mark Feehily. Shane Filan, Kian Egan, Nicky Byrne and Feehily himself had taken a year off in 2008 after an unprecedented run of 14 number one singles, 10 chart-topping albums, 40million sales, a sequence of yearly record-breaking, pyrotechnically astonishing and fan-delighting stadium tours. Oh, and becoming possibly the most recognisable Irish faces on the planet after Bono. They sat in Feehily’s living room and thought about the year that they had spent apart. ‘And we said to one another,’ says Filan, with sanguine good measure, ‘that we didn’t need to make another record. We had to want to.’

 

The quartet of men that make up Westlife are charming to a fault; a positive bellwether of good show-business manners. They had socialised together in their time off, most notably at Egan’s wedding in Barbados, but they had spent twelve crucial months remembering who they were as human beings, not as the collective face of the biggest selling act in Britain of the decade. The sums and rewards of their success had come to mean less than the graft they had put into it towards the end of their unbroken tenure at the top pop tier. It hardly needs pointing out that those millions of records don’t sell themselves. It takes time, effort and a whole lot of stamina being any one of the four quarters of Westlife. Not to mention the tapping of your vocal and performance talent on a daily basis. ‘We had almost forgotten who we were outside of the band,’ says Feehily.

 

Let us recap. When Westlife formed – before Flying Without Wings, World Of Our Own, What Makes A Man, Fool Again, My Love, their endless hit list of platinum balladeering, mostly punctuated with an iconic key-change standing-from-the-stools moment – they were barely out of their boyhood. Their ages ranged from 17-19. When they began, their competitors in an aggressively revitalised British pop market were All Saints, Steps and B*Witched. The long-deceased Busted were not yet a twinkle in their management’s eye. Whilst their friends from back home were preparing to go to college, to take up apprenticeships, to learn trades or to travel the world, Mark, Kian, Shane and Nicky were donning suits and scrubbing up nicely for a decade long campaign of top notch music-making directed straight at the heart of the international pop psyche. The thing is? They got there. At the age of the 29-31, it was time for a brief catch-up with themselves. To look back at all that incredible musical achievement and consider what happened next.

 

Shane spent most of his year off looking after his family, wife and two children, with the occasional foray onto the golf course and the football pitch. ‘It was a holiday at home, basically. Something I’ve never done. We’ve done life back to front from most people of our age. We started off with success and then we’ve had to take the time to develop as people. Now was the time to do it.’ It gave him a chance to ponder the madness of the first few years of Westlife mania, both from the outside perspective of the fans that christened them the nation’s favourite pop act, and internally, from the perspective of their own crazy diaries.

 

He thought about, to pluck a random example out of the air of what four boys might get up to whilst conquering the globe with pop, the time he and Kian engaged in a drinking competition on their first tour which lasted – wait for it with a deep breath now – sixty days. ‘I was counting!’ he says. ‘All fuelled by Smirnoff. We’d be on stage and we’d wink to each other from the side of the stage: ‘ so, are we out tonight then, boys?’ Even on our days off we’d go out. We just had to. We were young lads. 19, 20. That’s what we did. But Kian would get very boisterous on the Red Bull. There’s a famous night when he bit me in a play-fight.’ ‘There was always some dodgy bar owner in every town we went to offering to close his bar down for us and the crew for a night,’ adds Kian, ‘And we’d always take them up on it. It was madness. Dancing on the bar-tops and what have you.’ He too has grown up in his year off. ‘I mix my vodka with soda water now. I even leave the lime out. I’ve got it out of my system.’

 

For Kian, the year out had been underpinned by the tragedy of his father developing a brain tumour, the unbridled joy of marrying his long-term sweetheart and a new joint adventure with Westlife’s manager Louis Walsh, co-managing a new girlband. ‘I didn’t have a single day when I thought ‘ah, what do I do today.’ Life threw everything my way.’ For better and for worse. ‘A lot had happened to me but I was ready to come back. Because of all the sadness with my dad I didn’t want the time to sit around and wallow. I wanted to get back to the thing I love doing because I love doing it again. He didn’t manage to come to the wedding because he was too ill and we debated so long and hard about postponing it and putting it off for a year and his whole attitude to life was to get on and do it, so it felt like honouring him and respecting him more to do it. The same thing with the band. These things happen in life.’

 

Nicky had followed Shane’s familial path and for the first six months decamped his clan – again, wife and two children – to a newly acquired property in Portugal, before returning to spend half a year in his beloved Dublin. ‘The twins were a year and a half old when the year off started and two and a half when it finished and it is such a privilege to be able to see your kids develop at that age. Most nine-to-five dads don’t get the chance to do that. And it’s time you can’t get back. You can really bond with them.’

 

Mark spent the first three months of his off-time doing, ‘Absolutely nothing. I was craving being back in Ireland so I went there and then four or five months in I had a bit of a panic, thinking it’s almost half way through the year now and I haven’t done anything. So I went straight onto the internet and booked flights to start travelling round the world. If I didn’t do it then I never would have done it. Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, India and then to Kian’s wedding in Barbados. I’d seen a lot of places before but I wanted [his partner] Kevin to see them and when I got there I realised I’d mostly seen the inside of hotel rooms. We went on our own adventure together.’ Mark spent a lot of time asking life’s bigger questions. ‘What makes me happy and what makes me sad. Sometimes you need to go away to consider that stuff.’

If the four corners of Westlife are beginning to sound invested with a new found maturity, their year out gave them the opportunity to develop it. When they met up again to talk about recording again, that maturity was ready to be invested back in their pop operation. ‘The truth was that we didn’t want to come back unless there was an album that we wanted to come back with,’ says Mark. ‘It would have been very easy to waltz back into the record company, refreshed,’ says Kian, ‘and say ‘OK, we want to sell 1 million albums again, what have you got for us?’ and go off and record whatever they said. Instead we had the meeting at Mark’s apartment, only us, we went through the music and then went into the record label and said ‘look, we are completely and utterly willing not to make a record here. We want to start, we want to record, but if we are going to do this it has to be a collection of songs that we all love.’’

 

The title of the album, Where We Are, turned out to be prophetic. Where Westlife were in 2009 was a very different place from the teenage boys who conquered the pop world at the end of the last millennium. ‘We started thinking about people that had never been interested in Westlife before,’ says Nicky, ‘About people hearing a song on the radio and hearing it was us and thinking ‘wow, really?’ We wanted it to feel special again. Not like part of the furniture that fans add to their homes.’

 

They came back with Backstreet Boys’ Millennium album as a touchstone for the possibilities of 21st century pop music in mind. ‘We didn’t feel like we had an album yet where every single song on the record is a potential single,’ says Shane, ‘There isn’t a weak song on that album and that was what we wanted for Where We Are.’ This refreshed thinking dovetailed perfectly with the iTunes age, where the customer has become accustomed to picking and choosing the three songs they like from an album for the sum total of £2.37, spread over a year, and leaving the rest to simmer on an internet portal. ‘We’ve got to the point where we personally, as a band, understand what a great song is,’ says Mark, ‘it isn’t just about listening to other people and taking everything they say. It’s about our gut instinct as to what makes songs work for a modern pop band.’

 

The recording sessions began in LA, with a completely fresh team of producers and songwriters. The first song they recorded was the haunting bereavement ballad, I’ll See You Again, a personal favourite of all four. A new sound began to develop, that conjured a brave, epic sound-scape somewhere between Bryan Adams, Jim Steinman’s productions for Meat Loaf and the more moving end of the Celine Dion spectrum. New flourishes were added to what we had become well used to as the Westlife sound; that rousing, choral, hymnal and heroic slow-burning crescendo that seems to find the exact cross-point on the musical graph between the traditions of lullaby folk music and contemporary pop. A rolling keyboard motif underpins the beginning of Sound of A Broken Heart. The harmonies have been ramped up, making it as much Kian and Nicky’s album as Mark and Shane’s. There is a complete absence of percussion for the first verse and chorus of No More Heroes, only to be embellished by a winning marching band timpani riff for the climactic breakthrough of the second verse. Mark’s lead vocal performance on Talk Me Down is invested with pure man-on-the-edge-of-his-sanity emotional overload, a towering achievement that packs a hard punch. The doctored background vocals that open The Difference are a little nod to electronica. The opening single What About Now has tinges of a rockier flavour, and already cements the new path as a bona fide radio smash. Where We Are is distinctly Westlife, but somehow more so.

The boys have a stricter sense of ownership of the record. ‘We’ve starting striving hard again,’ says Mark ‘and we’ve lost the fear of losing what we had. We’re as good as any other pop band in the world now. But we had to learn to use the word ‘no’ when it came to song choices.’ ‘We’re with this record for the long haul,’ says Shane, ‘hopefully we’ll be promoting it right into 2011. We’ve stopped thinking about time spans. We’re not even thinking about when the next record will be made. We want to tour this record, play it around the world in everywhere that wants to hear Westlife. There’s a lot of life in us yet.’

 

A lot of grown-up life, it would seem. On this occasion, a rest is as good as a change. Where We Are finds Westlife at peak performance, match fit and ready for the second chapter of their incredible story.

 

Any idea when anything is being released then?

Any idea when anything is being released then?

 

a fan heard the latest radio interview from Louis Walsh and said that the next single is going to be...

 

"the song written by Mark"

 

and it's "Reach Out"

 

no confirmations yet. but Nicky hopes on Twitter that the second single to be out this March.

 

February 4, 2009

MARK ON SONG FOR WEDDING - REACH OUT TO FOLLOW UP TO WHAT ABOUT

NOW

 

WESTLIFE singer Mark Feehily is celebrating on the double after getting engaged and having his song picked as the band's new single.

 

The overjoyed star announced on his Twitter page that he'll wed partner of five years Kevin McDaid.

 

He posted: "Hi guys, ITS TRUE!!! Myself & Kevin are engaged!! We are so happy! Exciting times ahead, thanks for all ur kind words! Lotsa love, Mark&Kevin x"

 

Mark, 29, is very thrilled his ballad Reach Out will be the follow-up to hit single What About Now.

 

Manager Louis Walsh revealed: "He's over the moon, the fact that it's an original composition from him makes it even more special."

 

Westlife are now gearing up to appear on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross this week.

 

 

Source: Irish Sun - Print Edition Northern Ireland / Edited: Shane Filan NL

 

------------------------------

 

I'm very excited for them as they have very potential hits on Where We Are. :)

Im surprised they havnt the 2nd single lined up by now as the album hasnt done nearly aswell as expected or sold as much as westlife usually do so they need to get the singles rolling.

So no more singles from this album then according to Shane and Nicky.

Edited April 5, 201015 yr by Time out

Why, are they only doing 1 single i wonder, it doesnt make much sense, looks like where we are will remain there lowest selling album to date.

It's quite odd they only have one single...hmmmmmm

Talk about having zero control over their own careers. :lol: They were harping on about how every song on their new album was strong enough to be a single and how they planned on releasing loads of singles throughout the year, and now because the album didn't do as well as expected they just give up like that? :lol: I guess Louis is no doubt planning an album of Bette Midler classics for Xmas. :lol: Or better yet, a joint album between Boyzone and Westlife. -_-

The must be afraid to release any original stuff so they wont release a new single till a new album haha

This is really beginning to p!ss me off now... not since the "You Raise Me Up" era have they actually bothered to release a few singles off an album. Yes the albums are selling less, because less singles are being releaed ffs. If Pixie Lott had only released one single for example, she would have been well and truly f***ed.

 

Gawwwd, i give up -_-

Edited April 5, 201015 yr by Little_Boyo

Westlife’s Nicky Byrne has shocked fans with the news that Westlife won’t release a second single from their long-awaited comeback album.

 

The first single, What About Now, got to No2 in October, the same spot the album Where We Are reached the next month.

 

Nicky said: "There isn't going to be a second single now - I know that's not what the fans want to hear."

 

Nicky, 31, and bandmates Shane Filan, 30, Kian Egan, 29 and Mark Feehily, 29, kick off their UK and Ireland tour at the Odyssey Arena in Belfast on May 2.

 

The lads will be supported by boyband JLS, but Lucan twins Jedward, 18, will appear at the Croke Park concert on July 5.

 

Nicky said: "We originally thought we'd release the second single after the tour finished on August 18, but by that stage we'll be planning the next album which will be out before Christmas."

 

 

Source: NOTW print edition

 

I think they are just afraid of releasing a single and it not going top 10. They don't want to break their run. Its stupid because these days most acts find it difficult going top 10 with 2nd or 3rd single.

 

Westlife are so predictable. One big single a year, promoted off the back of X Factor. Xmas album biggest time of the year for sales. Tour off the back of it, then a month in the studio with ready-to-record songs then back to X Factor in time for Xmas. Still if their fans are still happy with the format, then they aren't going to change it anytime soon.

doesnt take long to write the album does it?lol they are silly tho,they will eventually just end up fading away instead of leaving the stage at their peak - the last album only got to no2 the next may fall further and eventually all their fans will have grown up and like decent music!!

Westlife went on about bout where we are being there best album to date, if they really belive that they would have more singles of it relesaed, the album is by far their lowest selling and not releasing more singles from it wont do sales any favour. In a way im delighted as westlife had the boyband market to themselves for ages and i think the return of boyzone and in particular take that westlife have now to really fight for their market.

If they release for Christmas they will be against TakeThat, if they release for mother day, they will be against Boyzone. If they don't come with a strong original single, but with the usual cover, they will became very bland and only bought as sure presents who cannot offend :rolleyes: . It is a big mistake after all the "we release an original song", "this album can have 10 singles" blah blah....

 

I still expect them releasing an album at least every two years, there will be allways a market for bands like this, but they are slowly sliding down.

so its about making money when they can - not about muic - says it all about louis walsh really!!

LOL!

What a joke.

 

They've lost all credibility now, actually, they did years ago.

This is silly! Its actually annoying me because the album does have a few good songs on there which should be released - and yet the only song from the album thats released as a single is a cover!