Laura McGoldrick gets up close and personal with her favourite pop star, Ronan Keating.
In the 1990s, five ‘ordinary’ Irish boys were made into international superstars – but none emerged from the experience unscathed
“We were five young lads, thrown to the wolves,” is how Ronan Keating sums up his experience in Boyzone. “To cope with the pressures of fame, we ran on bravado and bottled everything up.”
Created by manager Louis Walsh in 1993, the Irish boy band racked up six UK No 1 singles and sold more than 25 million records. But a new three-part Sky documentary, Boyzone: No Matter What, reveals the often “toxic” stew of rivalry and resentment that led to the five members parting company in 1999, not long after the group’s baby-faced heartthrob, Stephen Gately, came out as gay in a front-page “confessional” in the Sun. The same year, Keating became the group’s breakout solo star, while some of his former bandmates took potshots at him in the tabloids.
“Thirty years on, it seemed important to take an honest look at what happened, even though there were times when it was uncomfortable – painful, actually – to hear what the other lads had to say,” Keating tells me, over coffee in central London. Now 47, he’s tanned and toned from a recent trip to Australia – where, from 2010 to 2014 he appeared as a judge on The X Factor and met his second wife, the Australian TV producer Storm Uechtritz. (He split from Yvonne Connolly, mother of his three eldest children, in 2010). He’s also a refreshingly direct and piercingly self-searching interviewee.
Boyzone's final line-up before their disbandment: Michael Graham (left), Keith Duffy, Shane Lynch and Ronan Keating. Photo / WireImage
“It helps that it took us two years to make this documentary,” he grins. “So I’ve talked about it a lot and watched it numerous times. Sometimes I’ve thought, ‘Why did I do this?’ I don’t come across particularly well at some points, so I don’t feel good about myself as a human. There are some parts I wanted to take out… things I hadn’t seen about myself,” he sighs. “But there’s no point doing it if we’re not all telling the truth.”
What hadn’t he understood about himself? “I didn’t realise I was ambitious until everybody said it in the documentary.” He winces and sucks in air through his bright teeth. “Ambition, to me, seems like a nasty word. So to hear myself described that way makes me cringe.”
Watching the interviews with his former bandmates – Keith Duffy, Shane Lynch and Michael “Mikey” Graham – forced Keating to “confront the fact that I’d hurt my friends and I’d left them behind. Some part of me, deep inside, wasn’t okay with some of the decisions I’d made.” He shakes his head. “But I also know that in the history of boy bands, nobody ever turns down the opportunities I had. Nobody wants to walk away from a stadium-filling solo career.” He mentions how Take That escapee Robbie Williams and NSYNC alumnus Justin Timberlake “did the same thing. And, like me, they reunited with their groups years later…”
In fact, the documentary doesn’t make Keating look as ruthless as he seems to think. The son of a lorry driver, who grew up being told that “the football player who trains the hardest gets the game” – and who became a child athlete, winning the All Ireland under-13 200-metre title at the age of 12 – he emerges rather as a relentless grafter, willing to do everything his manager asked and to ensure the rest of the lads followed suit.
Before auditioning for Boyzone, his singing experience had been limited to doing karaoke while on family holidays and performing in the school band, yet “I was desperate to succeed”, he says. “I hadn’t done well in school and had just started working in a shoe shop, taking pride in earning a bit of money, when the audition came along. I was 16, a working-class kid. Louis Walsh had the golden ticket to the chocolate factory and I wanted to grab it and hang on to it for dear life...”
Ronan Keating has opened up about his time in Boyzone. Photo / Natalie Slade
Smirking, unrepentant, Walsh emerges as the Teflon villain of the film. He’s arrestingly honest about his strategy of recruiting “ordinary” teenagers to build the band because he knew they would “work hard and do what they were told”. And he still talks with a puppetmaster’s glee about spinning fictitious stories of the band members’ personal lives then convincing the tabloids to print them to keep their music selling.
When I point out that Walsh has rarely spoken about his own private life in interviews, Keating gives a dry snort. “Yeah, and isn’t that interesting!” He says he was “surprised by how honest Louis was in the documentary... I heard he had been ill” – last year, Walsh revealed he was in remission from a rare form of blood cancer – “and maybe that’s given him a new perspective?”
Keating also reminds me that by the time the band was launched, Walsh had already dispensed with two would-be members, Richard Rock and Mark Walton, claiming they lacked the necessary commitment, and replaced them with Graham. “He was showing us that we were all disposable, so we’d do anything he said. And I adored him. At first, he was a mentor and a father figure to me.”
Ronan Keating and Mikey Graham carry out the coffin after the funeral of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately at St Laurence O'Toole Church on October 17, 2009 in Dublin, Ireland. Photo / Getty Images
Keating still crumbles in on himself as he recalls the group’s first trip to a studio in London, where a producer told Walsh, “Get rid of the blond guy. He can’t sing.” Keating shudders. “I was devastated when I heard that. It felt more than awful. But I was determined to prove him wrong, and I threw myself into everything with two feet from then on.” Another sigh. “Part of our success came from the fact that we did work hard. Lack of talent? You’ll cover it up with hard work and hope people won’t see through it.”
Keating’s desperation to hang on to the mic would cause problems for Graham. “Mikey arrived in the band with a guitar over his shoulder and a book of songs under his arm. He thought he was going to be our Gary Barlow,” says Keating, comparing Graham to Take That’s lead singer-songwriter. “He had every reason to assume that. None of us wanted to stop him. But that isn’t what happened. Now, I’m the only one who talks to Mikey. I brought him into the documentary because we needed to hear everybody’s voices. His interviews aren’t an easy watch. He’s got personal stuff he is dealing with, but he is on the road to mental recovery.”
As Keating notes, back in the 1990s “nobody talked about mental health. We had no media training and no protection. When I told the press I was still a virgin at 16, I thought it was a cute story. But, of course, that followed me for years…” He exhales.
The most distressing part of the documentary deals with the outing of Gately, whose sexuality was kept secret throughout the band’s early years. “Homosexuality was only decriminalised in Ireland in 1993,” Keating reminds me. His eyes well up as he recalls how the tabloid press gave Gately an ultimatum: come out to us, or we’ll out you. On June 16 1999, the Sun ran a “world exclusive”, headlined “Boyzone Stephen: I’m gay and I’m in love”.
Keating explains how “the documentary makers handed me an original copy of the Sun and it brought back so many emotions.” He recalls the terrible moment the band were all shuttled to a hotel in Dublin, with Gately’s parents.
“Stephen went into that room where his mum and dad were, and he had to tell them he was gay,” he says. “He wanted to tell them to their faces before they saw it in the newspaper. But he was absolutely distraught. He was a mess. What those f*****s did to him...” Keating flushes with anger. “People should have gone to jail for what they did. Today, they would have done. I remember the anxiety. Him locking himself in a room. Tears, screams. I can still hear it. We were so scared he was going to do something stupid. He was so frightened that the fans would react badly.”
In the event, the fans proved the social tide had shifted towards acceptance: at Boyzone’s next concert, Gately was greeted with a rush of applause and banners of encouragement. Keating says it helped that the band had always supported Gately.
“Four straight guys in a band, you’d think the influence would make Stevo quite butch,” he laughs. “But the opposite happened and he ‘campified’ the four of us. It was great fun, gorgeous. He had names for us all: I was Rosaline; Keith was Kitty; Shane was Shanice; and Mikey was Michaela. He was Stephanie. It was our little thing. It allowed him to feel safe.” Keating adds that “although I don’t do that anywhere else, when I see the lads together, we all fall back into that little camp world. It’s home to us".
Keating’s solo career took off when his single When You Say Nothing at All (recorded while he was still in Boyzone) was featured on the soundtrack of the 1999 film Notting Hill. He followed it with the global hit Life Is a Rollercoaster (2000) and went on to sell more than 20 million records as a solo artist, initially managed by Walsh. Today, he shakes his head recalling how, after he fired Walsh in 2009, “I went from selling out 10,000-seat arenas to... well, not. It was heartbreaking”.
Louis Walsh (left) and former Boyzone member Mikey Graham. Photo / Getty Images
Although Keating is quite moderate in the language he uses to describe his former manager today, the pair have a history of making digs at each other in public. In a 2012 interview with Q magazine, Walsh called Keating “talentless and spoiled”, mocking his former protégé’s songwriting ambitions: “If you’re Ronan Keating, who was working in a shoe shop when I discovered him, but end up thinking you’re George Michael, then you need to be stopped.” Keating hit back, claiming that Walsh was “bitter”.
While appearing on Celebrity Big Brother last year, Walsh again laid into Keating, reminding the housemates that the singer hadn’t had a hit record since sacking him. But he later told This Morning that he considers the war of words between him and Keating as nothing more than “a bit of panto”.
In 2007, Boyzone re-formed; two years later, Gately died of an undiagnosed heart condition, aged 33. “I had to call the lads and give them the news,” Keating recalls. “It was so sad. Awful. Preventable, too, if we’d known.” The remaining members came back together, but relationships had broken down to toxic levels by their final tour in 2019. “Some members were not speaking to each other at all,” says Keating. “We were in separate dressing rooms when once we had always shared and laughed. It was awful.”
Today, Keating – who is a father of five and a grandfather of one – says he continues to feel frightened for kids signed up to boy bands. He watched the exploitation and implosion of One Direction through his fingers. He knew Liam Payne and says that when he heard last year the One Direction star had fallen to his death from a hotel balcony while “not fully conscious”, he texted Duffy to say, “That could have been any one of us.”
Did he ever take drugs, as Payne did, to handle the pressure? Keating shakes his head. “Never. I’m a coward. I always thought if I did, I’d be the unlucky one on the floor in convulsions. I never touched cocaine, heroin, none of it.” He leans back into the sofa. “Red wine is my drug. At the end of a hard day’s work, that’s my little gift to myself. I love it – a New Zealand pinot noir, please.”
However, at the end of the documentary, it’s a pint of Guinness we see him holding as he sits around a pub table with Duffy and Lynch. “You have to remember, we were not friends when we started out,” he says. “We didn’t go to university together like Coldplay. We were put together and made to get on. There were always going to be cracks…” He shakes his head in amazement. “It’s pretty impressive that 30 years on – Jesus, 30 years! – we still get along.
