BOYZ, OH BOYZ

There’s much to admire and plenty to recommend about Sophie Oliver’s documentary series ‘No Matter What’ which, over three episodes, looks at a careful selection of the colourful life and times of an Irish pop group, Boyzone. Currently available on Sky Documentaries and via Now TV, the strand is in keeping with other recent output from its producers, Curious Films. Like both ‘Wagspiracy: Vardy vs Rooney’ and ‘Caroline Flack: Her Life and Death’, ‘No Matter What’ deals with the vagaries of fame in a tabloid world. It’s a stylishly made, smartly edited populist yarn with a series of bitchy sub-plots and its all the better for that.

The strand is built around a series of long interviews with the surviving members of Boyzone – Ronan Keating, Shane Lynch, Keith Duffy and Mikey Graham – and the group’s creator and manager, Louis Walsh. The late Stephen Gately, who died of natural causes in 2009 at the age of 33, is impressively represented by his sister, Michelle, and there are supporting contributions from a couple of showbiz hacks.

‘No Matter What’ is a soap opera in three acts that traces the rise, fall and aftermath of one of the more curious success stories in the history of popular entertainment in Ireland. It pits the good [the group] against the evil [the manager and the media] and sprinkles the mix with tragedy, personal disintegration, implosion and a re-birth of sorts. The series ends with three of the band, boyz being boyz, in an empty pub sharing memories over pints and table football and teasing viewers with the prospect of yet another comeback.

But, like the band at its peak, there’s something woefully out-of-tune about this series too. Much has been made of the purpose and the timing of ‘No Matter What’, which has the look and feel of a blue-chip but over-long corporate video. The group’s frontman, Ronan Keating, is credited as a ‘consultant producer’ on a series that features much pearl-snatching and more carping than insight from him.

‘No matter What’ is absolutely devoid of context. Boyzone emerged out of the blue in 1993, by which time Louis Walsh was already a regular fixture at Ireland’s entertainment circus. Like Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose, he’d hitched his wagon variously, with limited national success, to a slew of wonky rock bands, cabaret crooners and windy wannabes. When word emerged that he was assembling a pop band in the spirit of the times, it was widely regarded as either a final act of desperation or just rank stupidity.

But some muck sticks, popular music is an unpredictable beast and even stopped clocks get the time right twice every day. And so, unlikely as Boyzone’s eventual success was, the same can be said of Walsh, who’d finally landed a full house. And after Boyzone went stellar, so too did the group’s creator.

Walsh is one of the great survivors of Irish entertainment who, for all his unpleasantness, bats impressively and robustly for his charges. One doesn’t have to like him or the world he inhabits but he is a genuine agent of change. He’s also a far more interesting and intriguing character than any of the musicians he’s worked with.

As Walsh was dealing with the queue of hopefuls he’d tempted into public auditions at The Ormond Centre on Dublin’s quays in late 1993, all around him the Irish rock and roll circuit was in rude good health. The line-up at that year’s Féile festival in Thurles spoke to that. Among the domestic acts who dominated the bill were Therapy?, noiseniks from Larne with a Big Black fixation who were about to issue an excellent debut album, ‘Troublegum’. They lined out in Semple Stadium alongside the likes of That Petrol Emotion, The Frank and Walters, a re-juvenated A House and The Fat Lady Sings.

Further afield, U2 – the biggest rock band in the world – had released a ground-breaking elpee, ‘Zooropa’, a callow Limerick outfit called The Cranberries had started to make waves in the United States and Sineád O’Connor had already enjoyed a global Number One and was now dealing with international infamy. Such was rock music’s standing in Ireland that, from a small studio on Father Mathew Street in Cork, a couple of us even kick-started our own late-night, lo-fi music series for national television. In titling it No Disco we too were making a statement: we stood for everything that Louis Walsh and his ilk didn’t.

It was against this backdrop that Boyzone was launched, with Walsh making a number of lofty claims about the group that would characterise his relationship with them – and the media – for years afterwards. Boyzone, he deemed, were built in the likeness of Take That, the UK five-piece formed in Manchester and based around the not inconsiderable songwriting ability of its spiritual leader, Gary Barlow.

Except they weren’t. They were created, rather, in the spirit of Ireland’s showbands: travelling jukeboxes who dominated the live entertainment circuit here for a decade from the late-1950s.

Faithfully replicating the pop hits du jour alongside maudlin traditional ballads, the showbands were a uniquely Irish construct: exclusively male, they cut distinctive shapes in their matching suits and sharp hair-dos as they transversed the country’s primal road networks in their customised vans.

Relentlessly flogged around the grottiest halls in Ireland by what were often unscrupulous managers, they were, in attracting huge audiences to see them, enabling the communion of young men and young women all over the country. The showbands, decades before Boyzone, were selling sex.

Key to the success of the showbands was the manipulation of media. Presented as clean-cut, athletic and available young men, the groups – The Dixies, The Freshmen, The Miami and in particular, The Royal Showband – provided regular fodder for both the newspapers and the nascent national television service, launched in 1962. Such was the power of the showbands’ pull that Ireland’s first youth culture magazines were launched in their slipstream.

The showbands suffered no little personal tragedy, either. Three members of the Miami showband were brutally murdered by a loyalist hit gang at the height of ‘the Troubles’ in 1975. Brendan O’Brien of The Dixies was electrocuted during a soundcheck on stage in Cork. Brendan Bowyer, Derek Dean of the Freshmen and a myriad of others all succumbed to alcoholism. And, despite the gauze of nostalgia put around that scene by popular media at the time – and in the decades since – the circuit was blighted by abuse on many levels.

Boyzone were just the latest in a long line of Irish showbands and their entire schtick was borrowed, lock, stock and barrel. Good-looking and available, they worked Ireland’s club scene from their white van, sometimes with live mics and often not, acting the goat on stage to backing tracks. With the country on the cusp of an economic boom, where a fledgling state was coming into wealth for the first time in its short history, Boyzone provided an unlikely soundtrack of hammy cover versions.

Louis Walsh was no stranger to the vagaries of the showband circuit. A number of his previous charges had emerged from that world, and he’d have been au fait with the good, bad and often exceptionally ugly of a scene that eventually morphed into cabaret. Presented in some quarters as a cultural visionary in the manner of Tom Watkins, who managed Pet Shop Boys, Bros and East 17 among others, I’d argue that Walsh cut his managerial shape, rather, in the image of someone closer to home: T.J. Byrne.

Byrne was the formidable former furniture salesman from Carlow who managed The Royal Showband throughout its career, routinely playing the popular media in the name of simply promoting his boys. In his long overcoat and with a briefcase constantly to hand, he was a laconic character for whom, when it came to The Royals, no publicity was bad publicity. Just as long as it was on his terms.

The Royal Showband are the subject of Ireland’s first ever fly-on- the-wall music television documentary, Peter Collinson’s The One-Nighters, which was produced independently with the film-cameraman, Bob Monks, in 1964. A feature of that long promotional film showcasing the Waterford-based group in a series of staged set- pieces, is that none of the band members speak to camera. Rather, their lines are delivered via a script written by Frank Hall: The One-Nighters is, to all intents, a party-political broadcast on behalf of T.J. Byrne.

Louis Walsh too was a regular supplier of propaganda and tall tales to any journalist willing to listen to him: his mobile number from 1994 to 2000 must have been the most readily available in all of Ireland. As Paul Martin, a journalist, explains in ‘No Matter What’, Boyzone quickly became tabloid staples and a battle for attention from rival local publications and hacks was on.

That much of the mountain of copy filed about Boyzone was just invention and fiction is par for the course in the grubby world of popular music. Walsh asserts throughout the series that, by contriving far-fetched yarns for the press, he was simply promoting his charges. But Boyzone were living a version of their lives so publicly that it was difficult, even for them, to tell where the facts and fiction parted: much of what they read about themselves in the papers came as news to them.

The boyz provided a ghost-written weekly column for Ireland’s biggest-selling newspaper, The Sunday World and routinely dominated the front-pages. A number of ‘books’ about Boyzone, written invariably by their most enthusiastic enablers in print, were rushed out onto the market. At least one of which attempted to intellectualise them, and to laughable effect.

Showbiz hacks were presented routinely as ‘friends’ of the group and, somewhere in the matrix the line between journalism and public relations just ceased to exist. Boyzone simply had carte blanche and the five members of the group, caught in the headlights, just went along with it all because, ultimately, they had no other choice. Life was good, they were young and Walsh, with his alternative facts, was just a loveable, harmless old rogue. A Svengali.

With Boyzone’s foundations barely in place, and the plaster on their walls still wet, Louis raced the first Boyzone line-up – a six- piece consisting of Keating, Lynch, Duffy, Gately, Richard Rock and Mark Walton – out to RTÉ for a live turn on The Late Late Show. The Late Late Show was then Ireland’s most-watched popular entertainment television programme and snagging any kind of airtime there was an early win for the great creator.

That performance is still routinely trotted out, and with good reason: it’s hilarious. The hapless group flails around the studio floor like electrocuted dervishes in front of a sedated studio audience and an earnest studio panel of guests – among which is the esteemed sociologist and former Clare hurling manager, Father Harry Bohan. Like the best of classic television comedy, the clip just never gets old, even if Keating, Lynch and Duffy have been subjected to it repeatedly over the decades. As a stunt, it certainly worked.

Walsh could have easily bided his time with Boyzone. Had them beaten into shape, styled and choreographed as slickly as they subsequently were. But he was a man in a hurry and that appearance said far more about the manager than it did about the group he’d just stuck together. And that’s the Boyzone story in essence: Walsh was far more important in this enterprise than the pieces he’d placed on the board, all of which were replaceable.

Within weeks, Rock and Walton were quickly deemed surplus to requirements and dropped from the first Boyzone line-up. Mikey Graham, who looks as lost a soul today as he did throughout his career spent as Boyzone’s third spear carrier from the left, stepped in.

Although Walsh always has plenty to say – his contributions to ‘No Matter What’ are sprinkled with his use of the first person – he wasn’t always as communicative with the boyz. Having secured a major record deal for his charges, helped them to crack the pop charts in Britain and driven them to serious commercial success in numerous territories, he more or less left Boyzone off to their own devices, or so Ronan Keating claims. Managed on a day-to-day basis by a trusted Tour Manager, Walsh engineered the broader plan remotely from his base back in Dublin, rarely touring with the group. ‘I don’t think they knew what I did’, Walsh says. And why would they have?

Keith Duffy suggests that Walsh was fearful the band he created would eventually out-grow him and hints that he actively tried to prevent that from happening. In any event, Walsh eventually became a much bigger and better-known property than Boyzone: little wonder he couldn’t find the time to speak to most of them.

At the emotional core of ‘No Matter What’ is a key scene where the rubber finally meets the road, culminating ultimately in the outing of Stephen Gately in The Sun newspaper. Gately put the boy into Boyzone: he was a fresh-faced dreamer from Dublin’s inner-city, boasted a fine voice and was a Disney-fixated gay man.

Such has been the rapid societal development of modern Ireland that it’s difficult to think of a time when this was even an issue but, as the producer and gay rights advocate Bill Hughes reminds us during an all-too-brief contribution to the series, homosexuality was only decriminalised here just months before Boyzone was launched.

Gately’s sexuality was an open secret within Dublin’s entertainment circles but that didn’t stop Walsh planting a slew of stories in the press linking him to a number of different women. From Emma Bunton – Baby Spice herself – to Kerry-Ann, a young Dublin wannabe who worked briefly as a receptionist in a record company in the city, the media acted as a constant beard. Until such time that it didn’t.

On 16 June 1999, Stephen Gately eventually came out on the front page of The Sun, a U.K. tabloid, with an accompanying multi-page spread inside. Boyzone’s publicists were already aware of attempts to sell Gately’s story to the press, possibly to a rival newspaper. There is an implication in ‘No Matter What’ – compounded by the manner in which the scene is directed and edited – that Louis Walsh had a hand in the origins of that reveal. Louis Walsh denies this and always has.

The Gately story was written by Rav Singh, then the showbiz editor at The Sun. In 2013, Singh was arrested and questioned by police from Scotland Yard investigating phone hacking at the now defunct News of the World. His name surfaced the previous year at the Leveson inquiry, the public inquest into phone hacking at the London-based News International newspaper group from 1998 until well into the 2000s.

There was a time when Singh enjoyed free reign on Boyzone’s behalf. In ebullient form on-camera for ‘No Matter What’, he has no regrets about how the Stephen Gately story was handled nor indeed, it appears, much else. ‘Most of the time Louis said write what you want’, Singh tells us. Walsh appears to just laugh the whole thing off. ‘The band believed its own publicity’, Walsh says in the first episode of ‘No Matter What’. ‘They forgot that I wrote it’.

‘No Matter What’ is the selective and carefully curated story of middle-aged men in reflective and score-settling form. But for a band that, according to Keith Duffy, was ‘selling sex’, there’s nothing at all on the marriages, separations and complicated personal lives of the surviving members of Boyzone. With the exception of Michelle Gately, this is an exclusively boy’s zone.

No other women are featured.

And Walsh is the undoubted star of the whole enterprise. He steals every single scene he’s in and delivers the best lines, including a couple of fierce reducers that land flush on Keating, his disdain for whom gives the series a real edge. He’s as singularly lacking in empathy for his charges now as he was when the group was at its peak.

I’ve locked horns often with Walsh over the years but have always found him to be a compelling character. And he’s funny with it. I credit him as one of the key architects of the development ofpopular entertainment in modern Ireland: as influential in his own way as the promoters Bill Fuller, Jim Aiken and Denis Desmond, or managers like Paul McGuinness, T.J. Byrne and Fachtna Ó Ceallaigh.

And ultimately of course the story of Boyzone isn’t the story of the members of the group at all: it’s actually the story of the making of Louis Walsh. Yes, Boyzone catapulted Keating, Lynch, Duffy, Graham and the late Stephen Gately into an orbit few could have ever imagined them reaching. But more than that, it made a star turn also of Louis Walsh. ‘It wasn’t perfect’, Walsh says of his time involved with Boyzone. ‘But it was perfect for me’.

And that’s showbiz, boyz.