Ronan Keating too nice to be bad

By STUART HUSBAND

Ronan Keating is so over Boyzone. How do we know this? He tells us so in the press release for his album, Turn It On, and its accompanying single, Lost For Words: "I'm so [expletive] over all that Boyzone crap."

This is a somewhat startling statement for two reasons. First, because Keating's image up to now has been that of the impeccably mannered, well-scrubbed, nutritionally unimpeachable Nabob of Nice.

When the same press release goes on to extol his love of bourbon, you could be forgiven for thinking that it's referring to a terminal biscuit habit. Secondly, the Boyzone "crap" took up a good six years of Keating's life, and brought him seven No 1s and more than 15 million album sales worldwide, with all the attendant perks - limited-edition watches, classic cars and a mansion with obligatory pool and bar in the prosperous Dublin suburb of Malahide, where his neighbours include the Irish Prime Minister.

So is he really dissing his boy-band past?

"It says what?" he gasps, in a thick, engaging brogue that turns every "Jesus" to "Jaysus". "No man, I would never say anything like that ...

"Well, the swearing, okay," he grins, "I'm partial to a bit of that, sure. But I'd never turn around and say Boyzone were crap. We made some excellent pop singles, we did what we did pretty well and we had a great craic [time]." There's a pause as he collects himself. "But I suppose it's right in the sense that I've moved on."

This is the key dilemma for Keating and his press-releasers; how to reposition him in the public mind as a credible solo artist and loosen his wholesome straitjacket. Previous interviewers have done their best, practically pleading with him to share tales of on-the-road debauchery, but Keating's stubbornly met them with a straight bat.

Yes, he might have given into that sort of thing if it wasn't for his wife and childhood sweetheart, former model Yvonne Connelly, and his two children, 4-year-old Jack and Marie, 2, but he owes it to them to keep on the straight and narrow.

It didn't help that Keating heralded his solo career three years ago by presenting the MTV Europe Music Awards and a cheesy Miss World from South Africa, as well as inviting the Hello!s and OK!s in to admire his beautiful homes (the Keatings then kept a second pile in Surrey, which they've since sold); he seemed to be slipping into the same I'm-A-Celebrity netherworld as his former bandmates - Stephen Gately scrapping with his boyfriend outside the Ivy; Keith Duffy twinkling through Celebrity Big Brother - an impression that his inoffensive hits Life is a Rollercoaster and When You Say Nothing at All did little to dispel.

But now we're finally - the press release again trumpets - being given a taste of the "real" Keating.

A year ago he parted company with Louis Walsh, the Popstars judge who had put Boyzone together and managed Keating's solo career. An industry veteran at 26, Keating was ready for his "And this is me" moment.

Much stress has been made of him writing most songs on Turn It On - although, in truth, he's helped out by a small army of co-writers, including Ricky Ross, once of Deacon Blue, the Matrix team, responsible for Avril Lavigne's world domination, and Gregg Alexander (Mel C, Sophie Ellis-Bextor), and Rob Davies (Kylie, Atomic Kitten). Nevertheless, the songs - a brace of covers aside - are, we're assured, deeply personal to Keating - First Time is a tribute to Yvonne ("and how she makes every time feel like the first time", grins Keating, a touch lasciviously), while the closing This is Your Song was written for his mother Marie, who died of breast cancer five years ago.

We've come to a sunny, chilly Amsterdam to watch the revamped Keating do his thing. He's appearing on a telethon for the BNN network which, with admirable self-interest, seems to involve getting viewers to pledge money to help BNN stave off bankruptcy.

Backstage a gaggle of statuesque Dutch beauty queens poses for photos with florid men in suits. Keating and his entourage - tour manager, band, stylist - are behind a curtained-off partition down a corridor. He jumps up and proffers one of the firmest handshakes I've endured. "Come in lads, come in," he exhorts, all solicitude. "We'll get some Jack Daniel's on the go."

He's chunkier than you might imagine (his official height, given as 1.8m, might be over-generous) but, though he's tired, there's a wired energy about him that recalls the athlete he was set to become before showbiz intervened. The impression of compactness is accentuated by his shorn hair and generic rock-star garb: beat-up jeans, T-shirt, peacoat, a few days' growth of ratty beard.

"What did you think of the album?" he asks, returning to his seat and strumming on a guitar.

"I think it is ... good," I say lamely.

Keating looks at me sharply. "Good?" he exclaims. "That's all? Not 'great' or even 'crap'?"

Authenticity is another watchword for Keating, both in his work and people's reactions to it. This, after all, is the man who included "miming on TV shows" and "faux-Irish bars" in his Room 101 hate-list.

"When I first got money," he confides, with a shudder, "I went out and bought one of those jumpers with the hugest 'D&G' logo on the front. And I wore it for months. Oh, the shame of it ... "

At the end of last year, he says, he had a kind of epiphany. "I just woke up one morning and I decided to pack the whole thing in. I was sick of banging out other people's songs. I looked around and I didn't like being a part of the industry any more. It was all Pop Idol and Popstars and pretty boys and girls doing karaoke covers ... "

Hang on, though - you fronted Boyzone, you managed Westlife, there'll be people juggling the words "pot", "kettle" and "black" round about now.

"Well, fair do's," he laughs. "Except, as far as I was concerned, I always wanted to be a singer. I actually had a goal in mind. The kids coming through now, they're just after fame for fame's sake, and they don't care how they go about it. Music's what I do, it's what I love, but I realised there was no point in doing it unless I started doing stuff I could stand on top of and go, 'Look, you may love this, you may hate it, but at least it's all down to me'."

On these terms, the parting with Walsh, though amicable according to Keating, was inevitable. "Our viewpoints were getting further and further apart," he says. "It felt like a clean break to me and a chance to start again. And my new manager and my wife persuaded me to carry on and give it a go. Now I'm glad I did, because I'm prouder of this stuff than anything I've done before. And I don't know what else I could have done, apart from go back to Dublin and get my old job back in the shoe shop."

That would be the shoe shop that the 16-year-old Keating was working in when he heard about the Boyzone auditions being held round the corner. He blagged his way into the band, he says, with a potent cocktail of self-belief and endless capacity for hard work, the former courtesy of being the youngest and most indulged of five children.

Keating's beloved mother Marie was a hairdresser; his father Gerard was a trucker. "To this day he's distant," he says, with a shrug. "What can you do? It's a generational thing. I don't blame him for it. I just make sure that I tell my kids I love them as much as I possibly can. To the point, actually, where it embarrasses them. My father's never told me he loves me, or even hugged me. But so it goes."

The family was pretty poor - "not Angela's Ashes-style 'and then we all died from eating a rotten cabbage' poor, but pretty poor," - and Keating credits Marie's tireless you-can-do-it entreaties for the kind of drive that brought him fame, and now sees him through five countries and eight television shows in a week (not to mention recently walking the length of Ireland to raise money for a cancer charity he and his siblings set up in their mother's name).

"People ask me how come some boy-band members go on to have solo careers where others fall by the wayside," he muses. "In my case, it's because I'm still hungry. I still want it, man. I feel like I've got a lot to prove."

We settle down to watch Keating perform his latest single, Lost For Words. He's mentioned Sting and Bryan Adams as career exemplars and, listening to the song's chiming AOR power chords, and watching Keating throw his rock-star shapes, I'm suddenly put in mind of Adams' homeland. Like Canada, Keating is perfectly pleasant but, as he moves away from his boy-band roots, the question of what he's actually here for becomes more pressing, and the answers more obscure.

After the show, we return to Keating's hotel. The Jack Daniel's hasn't showed - "I'm sure it was in my bag, we must have drunk it all last night," he protests, somewhat unconvincingly - so we order a bottle of Australian shiraz and a selection of sushi. This would obviously be the moment for a rock'n'roll food fight, but Keating's too much of a gourmet to waste any sashimi or vino. In fact, he keeps a little food-diary detailing his global gastronomic experiences. "Do you know what I'd love? You can get one of those bore-hole drills to make a deep hole in your garage, say, then drop a spiral staircase down it and have your wine arranged around you in a circle. That'd be a wine cellar to die for, right?"

The phone rings. It's Yvonne. "Hello darlin'," Keating says softly. "Kids all right? Aw, did he? Call me before you go to sleep, okay?" He limits his time away to two weeks these days, he says - "It's just too painful to miss my kids growing up." (He dashes back from Amsterdam the following night "to tuck the bairns in", before flying out to London the following morning.) He's settled back in Ireland because he wants to send his kids to school there. Is he raising them as Catholics?

"Oh yeah," he says, without hesitation. "I mean, with the proviso that they can make their own choices when they're old enough ... I think you can believe in God without swallowing all the Church's teachings. I'm pro-abortion, for example."

The talk turns to films. Keating apparently got down to "the last four" for a part in the King Arthur movie shot in Ireland with Clive Owen and Keira Knightley; now he's about to star in a gangster film alongside Vinnie Jones.

He's never had an acting lesson and claims to be worried about it, though he's approaching the prospect with the same equanimity with which he seems to approach everything. "Whatever I do, though, music will always be the thing," he says. "I want longevity in my career, though I know that's not very fashionable."

It's 1am, and the hotel walls remain defiantly unsplattered with wasabi; Keating makes noises about heading off for bed. Do you care what people think of you, I ask before he disappears.

"Nah," he says emphatically. "I used to, but I've grown a thicker skin about it now. If people say I'm bland, well, there are worse names to be called. Mind you, I bet the people who call me that don't know I once smacked Mike Tyson in the face."

What?

"Yeah," he continues jovially. "It was with Boyzone and we were at some airport. We look over, and there's Tyson asleep, stretched out on some grubby little bench. So we were all a little merry still from the night before, and someone dares me to go over and clock him. So I tiptoe up to him, and, well, I don't really smack him. I more sort of brush my hand across his face. Then we all leg it out of there."

He goes off to bed, still chuckling. And I'm left to reflect that this anecdote - aspirations to danger, fatally compromised by an all-enveloping predisposition to geniality - is pure Keating.

On Screen

* Who: Ronan Keating

* What: Ronan Live - Destination Wembley

* Where and When: TV2, 10.30pm

* Also: New album Turn It On out now

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