Westlife: good night and good riddance

 

The news that Westlife have decided to call an end to their 14 year career was not greeted by wailing and gnashing of teeth in my household. I was woken at 7.30 this morning by a call from BBC Radio 5 Live to ask what was Irish boy band’s greatest contribution to music. “Breaking up,” was the only thing I could think of.

It is probably fair to say that I wasn’t their target audience. But what I really hate is that very concept: an audience being cynically targeted by backroom entrepreneurs and managers with no real love of pop music.

Westlife were the spawn of Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh, two of the most manipulative characters in the music business, with their emphasis very much on the latter part of that equation. They represented not the peak of the 90s manufactured boy band phenomenon but its nadir, the moment when the business squeezes out the music altogether, slowly strangling the golden goose in the name of profitability. It happens in every genre, from glam rock to Britpop, when the industry races around signing bands who remind them not of the next big thing, but the last. But it is particularly prevalent in manufactured pop, which appeals to the kind of control oriented characters for whom the bottom line is always profits and percentage points.

Genuinely great manufactured bands, from the  Monkees to Take That to the Spice Girls, tend to come at the front end of a trend, before all the wrinkles have been ironed out, so you still get the kind of kooks and crinkles and human eccentricities that make them interesting. The really dull ones follow later, when the least creative elements of the music business decide they have a complete lock on how something works and ruthlessly concoct a product that hits all the requisite marketing demands, controlling the process from start to finish.

Even Boyzone, Louis Walsh’s first attempt at jumping on the boy bandwagon, were kind of awkward and interesting, their navvies in suits look representing the first moment when Ireland became culturally cool. Westlife were basically Boyzone with the edges rubbed off, five good looking Irish fellas who could sing in harmony, change key on cue, and scrubbed up nice in the kind of conservative Armani-styled suits favoured by Cowell himself. Top teams of commercial songwriters and producers were hired to write smooth, clichéd love songs. A massive marketing budget was put in place. All the rest was left to hormones.

Westlife had a lot of hits. Fourteen number ones, apparently. And I don’t doubt that they matter to their fans, and that they have been the soundtrack to magical moments in many lives, and perhaps some tears will be shed today. But as for the rest of us, those pop fans and consumers not smack bang in the middle of Cowell and Walsh’s target, their career is one big blank. Their music never bled out into the wider world, it had no resonance with the moment.

There is a place in pop for handsome young men in nice clothes singing formulaic song in perfect harmony. It’s called the remainder bin.

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