BACK FOR GOOD? – Westlife And The Boyband Boom

“British pop in the fifties was pure farce.

Nobody could sing and nobody could write and, in any case, nobody gave a damn. The industry survived in a state of perpetual self-hyped hysteria, screaming itself hoarse about nothing in particular. There was much assorted greed, schnidery and lunacy. Trousers dropped like ninepins.”
– Nik Cohn, Awopbopaloobopawopbamboom (1970)

“I had a dream in black and white, the future’s 1955″
– The Auteurs, “Johnny And The Hurricanes”

There’s a band on the television, wearing black. The band, five young men all around twenty, aren’t playing any instruments, instead they’re swaying, flicking their fringes, smiling and making eyes at the heartstruck audience, and singing with smooth shower gel voices. These boys called themselves IOU, but now they’ve been called Westlife - they have had two number one hit singles already this year and what they are singing about is death. They’re covering Terry Jacks’ wretched early 70s hit “Seasons In The Sun”, in its original form a pasteurised, folksy adaptation of a Jacques Brel tune about a dying young man. In Westlife’s hands it’s a blank beatless flow, four minutes of space for the boys to fill with well-choreographed coquetry. For a second I’m slightly jarred by the gap between the screaming that greets every wink and hip-twitch, and the words the boys are crooning. But if nobody else is listening, why should I? On the other side of Westlife’s “Seasons” (which becomes their third number one, nay, the Millennium No.1) is a version of Abba’s contribution to world peace and worst song, “I Have A Dream”. It sounds the same as the Brel song.

It’s a provoking and contradictory business, being a pop fan, but I couldn’t do without it. That said, Westlife try my patience severely. The undisputed champions of ‘99 in the world of pop, adored by thousands upon thousands, they summon more surely than anybody the bleak spirit of the scrubbed-down, nerveless music that made up England’s pop prehistory. And though it wouldn’t do to suggest that Westlife are typical of the boyband genre as a whole, they still seem the culmination of a strand of it.

But first, the fifties. The parallels between the Simon Fuller 90s and the Larry Parnes 50s aren’t exact, but they are there. I suspect that, though the amount of booze, powder and pills consumed won’t have shrunk, still the boyband environment now is less frenzied than then. Everybody does that stuff now, for one thing, and the business is much less chaotic, so it’s farewell to the endless raised hopes and sudden crashes that fuel comebacks and breakdowns throughout Nik Cohn’s magnificent history. Mind you, as early as 1995 and Take That’s dying days, you could glimpse a kind of dulled decadence at work near the top of the boyband pyramid - during performances of their queasily grandiose “Never Forget”, a children’s choir backed up a group that looked like well-fed, dead-eyed angels in their white suits.

The top of the pyramid is a long way off, though, and few reach it. Every now and then a Westlife gets lucky quick (in this case thanks to a keen sense for granny-market pap and the dynastic ambitions of Boyzone’s lead singer), but for your North And South, your A1, your 5ive, your E-Male, your Let Loose, it’s no season in The Sun, but a long and uncertain hustle, and foolhardy the band member who pushes his luck or flies a bit too solo. The one great constant between the boy rockers of the late 50s and the boy bands of today is managerial control on a KGB scale.

Pop Cliche 101 tells us - and Cohn tells us too - that the managers of the boy rockers were generally predatory homosexuals whose main aim was to get a bit of young flesh to sweeten their middle age with. Well, maybe, but there’s always seemed something slightly sleazily easy about that explanation. Undoubtedly a lot of managers had a more than paternal interest in their charges, and the same is surely true today, but who hasn’t at some point wanted to screw someone they worked with? If you were a manager, and kept boys around because you fancied them, it was only because you were fairly sure your tastes matched the audience’s. The main motivator, then as now, was money: young, pretty boys could bring it in in heaps, and especially in the 1950s they weren’t expected to keep very much of it either. If the boys didn’t like the arrangement, well, that was their look-out.

Take Westlife, for instance. The one-time biggest band in Sligo, they just kept on losing members. Silly Westlife! First to go was Derek, a fine singer who the manager (a character called Louis) decided didn’t match the ‘cosmetics’ of the group. No pictures survived of Derek on the Westlife websites I visited. Then out went Graham, who was ‘much older’ than the rest of the group and so didn’t fit in. Graham was 22, and left with a maturity befitting his venerable years. Finally it was Michael’s turn: the management wanted a five-piece and so a five-piece they must have. Michael was ‘devastated’, but then something (a firm friendship with the rest of the lads, no doubt) changed his mind and he pronounced himself happy with the arrangement. What surprised - no, what struck me during the accounts of these various putsches is that all happened without a peep of protest from the rest of the band, who are all still the best of pals, even the ones recruited from an ad months before the single
had to come out.

Westlife are, from their roguish exterior to their cuddly heart, manufactured. Well, so what? Managerial moulding and backstabbing isn’t anything new - just ask Pete Best - and if only a cynic would get a kick out of the pre-fame maneouvreings of the stars, only a fool would believe that the origins of a band matter more than the sounds on the silver. The problem with Westlife isn’t the process that put them where they are, it’s the music that did it, and whether you want to lay the blame on the boys or their management team, it makes little difference.

Manufacturing isn’t just nothing new, you see, it’s a core part of the way pop works. Roughly speaking, the initially groundbreaking stuff happens without prior planning. It may well still hit immensely big, of course. Then people with an interest in the pop charts look at the new thing and try to copy it. If you’re a purist, the copies run a critical gamut from interesting to anathema, and can never be as great as the sacred original. But if you’re not, then the copies - in their very imperfection, in the bits they get wrong or overstate or tweak to avoid lawsuits - can often be where the action is. And the more work the copy-artists and production-line pop mavens put out, the more ambitious or crazed they would tend to get. Joe Meek, Phil Spector, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Brian Wilson, Norman Whitfield, Kasenetz-Katz, ABBA, Chinn-Chapman, even Stock Aitken and Waterman - they all produced excellent or at least bankable work on a regular basis, but they all would also use pop for their own ends too. To explore obsessions or fantasies (Meek’s conceptual space pop, ABBA’s icy breakup pop, Wilson’s Smile) or to play around (Whitfield’s soul baroque), or just to produce ridiculously exaggerated versions of the work they were already doing (The Reynolds Girls’ “I’d Rather Jack” is to SAW what “River Deep Mountain High” is to Spector).

Maybe this is the dimension that the boybands have lacked - their production is immaculate, but in general unambitious: with a few exceptions the music on boyband tracks never stands out compared to the vocal hooks. In this the boybands have much more in common with doo-wop than with modern R & B - which tends to be their claimed template - but doo-wop’s vocal inventiveness-stroke-goofiness finds no echo in today’s Top 40. Producers work with boybands to make money, not their name, and boyband songwriting attracts no budding auteurs - in fact, the people responsible for the music display the same absolute professionalism as everyone else in the process. Gifted with a guaranteed audience, locked-in by the looks, these producers could be making legendary pop music, and instead take the safe bet every time.

Why do their audiences want the safe bet when it comes to boybands, though? It’s not because the young fans of the boybands aren’t open for new sounds (look at the stylistic eclecticism and rapid development of the girl band market, which appeals to the same broad fanbase). The answer I’d give cuts to the heart of just what makes today’s boy bands so different, so appealing: emasculation.

Boybands return male vulnerability to pop in a big way. At the heart of every boyband’s repertoire - forming the entire of that repertoire in some cases - lie a collection of gloopy ballads which find the boys rejected, agonised, begging. From “I want you back for good” and “Won’t you stay another day?” to Westlife’s pleading with a girl “Don’t Calm The Storm” (a title which in the 60s or 70s would no doubt have served as a rebel’s sneering address to some clingy chick but now seems to refer to not givin’ up on love), the boybands revel in romantic abjection. And when they’re not abased, they’re heart and soul in favour of love forever, no matter how much it hurts them. In other words the boy bands are pushing not only a pop fantasy of male commitment, but one of male pain in the face of commitment lost.

The boybands and ‘girl power’ are two sides of the same coin in a more than just musical sense. The key to the empowerment slogans of the Spice Girls is the distaff disempowerment of the boybands - which also goes some way to explaining why these groups are so loathed by non-pop fans. Further, while guitar-pop versions of the Spice Girls - Hepburn, Thunderbugs, and Atomic Kitten, for example - have enjoyed some successes, guitar-led versions of the boybands have crashed (with the exception of Hanson, whose desexualising youngness takes them out of this argument anyway). This is because the boybands aren’t just offering commitment but that other Holy Grail of the teenage agony column, communication. Take the instruments away from the boys and you not only draw their sting, you leave them no option but to get their point across through words.

That’s why the boybands are popular, and why they won’t soon be going away. The hope has to be that Westlife’s exceptionally milk-and-water application of the boyband formula turns out to be a lucrative exception and not the new rule, or that finally something snaps inside one of Westlife’s songwriters and the weirdness and surprise creeps in and the band sing death ballads for real. But it’s not likely. Last words go to Cohn, on Westlife’s great No.1 rival this Christmas:

“Cliff [Richard] was easily the most successful…he was the nice boy that girls could be proud to date, the perfect son that mothers could be proud to raise, the good nut that schoolboys could be proud to have as a friend, the earnest youth that intellectuals could be proud to patronise, the showbiz smile that hipsters could be proud to despise and so on. It was a format that Tommy Steele had used first and that the Beatles were later to perfect. It was the classic British way of making it - be a clean white wall and let everyone write graffiti on you.”

(This article originally appeared in Freaky Trigger in January 2000. I now disagree with a lot of it, but Westlife’s awfulness remains a constant.)