29 Louis Walsh

As the 1980s progressed and the emerging Irish rock’n’roll constituency began to come to terms with the fact that U2 were, really and truly, the biggest rock’n’roll band in the world, the disbelief and wonder provoked by this began to give way to a sense of national entitlement. Very quickly the conversation shifted to oscillating between backbiting about the fact that U2 were regarded as perhaps the least worthy of their generation of post-punk contenders and desultory debates about who would become ‘the next U2’.

A couple of top-flight acts did manifest themselves, notably Sinéad O’Connor. But, generally speaking, the growing conventional wisdom that Dublin could come to be to the 1990s rock’n’roll imagination what Merseyside had been in the 1960s was a little thin on content. Various contenders came and went, but only U2 and O’Connor seemed to have staying power.

But then the future of Irish music declared itself. One night on The Late Late Show, following a discussion about the future of rural Ireland between a journalist, a priest and, for some reason, a female disc jockey, a bunch of daft-looking young fellas shambled on to the set. Rumour had it that it was some new wheeze of Louis Walsh, a showbiz impresario who had become prominent in the showband era. The word was that the new act would be a kind of Irish Take That. The obvious question was: why?

The bunch of young fellas called themselves Boyzone. They didn’t sing that night, but instead mimed to a dance track. Everyone laughed uproariously at this evidence of Louis Walsh’s hard neck. Nobody thought it remotely serious. But within months, Boyzone were one of the most successful music acts in the UK. In no time at all, the success of Boyzone was dwarfed by another Walsh-inspired sensation, Westlife, who seemed to turn everything they touched into gold.

Where once we were known as the Island of Saints and Scholars, Ireland is nowadays famous as the Nation of Boybands. Never was this truth so visible as during the celebrations to mark the onset of the third millennium, when it seemed that boybands had supplanted the entirety of Irish culture in the previous 1,000 years. The nation of Carolan and Ó Riada, the nation whose bardic culture had once been called ‘the earliest voice from the dawn of West European civilization’, the nation that had once given the world missionaries dedicated to painstaking calligraphy and Christian gratuitousness was now known globally as the producer of ambiguous-looking young men who could cavort to a beat created by a machine operated by a man from Mayo who had spent a lifetime studying the odds and watching for the main chance.

If ever there was a necessity for evidence of how the Irish nation had lost touch with itself, a video of the proceedings on the premier national television channel in the last hours of the second millennium would be enough to convey to an indefinitely extending posterity our inability to explain anything about ourselves. Anyone who watched could hardly be surprised about anything that followed: the excess, the loss of the country’s run of itself, the economic and psychic breakdown that followed hard on the indulgences of the Celtic Tiger.

Here we had a succinct proof of Jean Baudrillard’s theory that time has started to go backwards, as the coverage cut from the boyband mediocrity on Merrion Square, where a New Year’s concert was taking place, to the sad spectacle of the one-time king of the ballroom circuit, Joe Dolan, playing in Killarney, the whole thing suggesting not so much a celebration of the future as an attempt to drag posterity down to our level. Weirdly, the ‘past’ being focused upon was not the great sweep of time through the annals and battlefields and mass graves of Irish history, but Ireland’s alleged strides in the world of popular entertainment in the previous forty years. More than that, what emerged from it was a strong sense of how post-Independence popular culture in Ireland had continued to slide backwards into its congenital rootlessness.

Even if he cannot be held completely responsible for this miasma of selective forgetfulness and remembered inferiority, Louis Walsh was so constantly at the scene of the crime(s) that he qualifies for special blame. Walsh had been one of the main players in the showband industry, which, for all its flaws, had at least the redeeming quality of innocence. The boyband craze of the Tiger years was indistinguishable from showband culture except that we at least had the decency to keep showbands to ourselves.

In their time and proper place, actually, showbands weren’t anything like as bad as they’re sometimes ‘remembered’. Far more than Gay Byrne or Mary Robinson, people like Joe Dolan and the Drifters, Derek Dean and Billy Brown of The Freshmen, and Brendan Bowyer with the Royal Showband, revolutionized Irish attitudes to sexuality and freedom. It is, in a certain light, arguable that Big Tom was more central to the modernization of Irish society than the cumulative effects of the Irish Times, the Labour Party and the First Programme for Economic Expansion.

Louis Walsh was for a time manager of The Freshmen, one of the genuinely great bands of the showband era. He was therefore at the scene of the Big Bang of Irish popular culture, a spontaneous explosion of activity from a void of nothingness. When you factor in the deeply derivative nature of much of what passed for originality in early Irish rock’n’roll, it occurs that, in their own way, showbands were as creative as anyone. Certainly they were creative of excitement and abandon on a previously undreamt-of scale, and some showband records, like The Royal’s version of ‘The Hucklebuck’, and The Freshmen’s version of ‘Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow’, can stand with anything in the past fifty years of Irish pop music.

But no argument of this kind can be mounted in defence of boybands, which came after a time when Ireland had shown itself capable of producing the finest and most creative musical artists in the world.

One of Westlife’s hit singles, released at Christmas 1999, was a ditty called ‘Seasons in the Sun’, an English-language adaptation of the song ‘Le Moribond’ by the stunning Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel. It had been a mega-hit back in the mid-1970s when recorded by one Terry Jacks, a truly awful recording, a mawkish, revolting excess of self-pity and frothy pathos, utterly devoid of Brelesque irony or self-parody. ‘Goodbye Michelle’, went the lyric, ‘it’s hard to die/When all the birds are singing in the sky.’ To be fair, Terry Jacks knew that a capacity to tap into these darker feelings was the song’s only ‘redeeming’ feature, and hammed it up for all it was worth. Westlife, on the other hand, didn’t even appear to have noted this aspect of the song, which they sing as though it were ‘Baa-baa Black Sheep’.

Louis Walsh had learned something dark and deadly in his showband days. He looked into the soul of his fellow man and figured out what it would be prepared to settle for. His refusal to carry this insight with him to the grave will not be easily forgiven.