Westlife - I Have A Dream

Westlife’s first cover version single! ABBA songs are notoriously hard to sing, so let’s see how the Wezzas get on.

Aimed squarely (and successfully) at the Christmas #1 slot, the arrangement is dripping with sleigh bells and pixie tinkling (in the pattern set out from Day 1).

The structure is very similar to ABBA’s original in terms of verse/chorus/extra nyahw-nyahw noises/sappy kids’ choir coming in, but amazingly Westlife actually employ more a bit more variety in their backing than ABBA’s gentle but languid protest. After a barrelling intro, Lead Westlife hogs pretty much all of a (slightly) subdued first verse, stamping out his ground. Frida is slow and stately, a social worker giving sincere advice but maintaining an emotional distance. Lead Westlife’s conviction and power implies his particular dream is more that of a cackling Bond villain than a tree-hugging hippy.

Thankfully the other four are there to temper his plans for world domination. By verse 2 they’re all giving it full welly (‘crossing the streams’ - hehehe) to a surprisingly beefy Max Martin-esque hock-a-thwack beat. You know what? Once they’re all up to full speed I quite like it! The two Blonde Westlifes provide a lovely thick base for Bryan McCurtains and Lead Westlife to pick out the deceptively tricky notes. Mark does a trill over the top and you can feel the layers of voices wrapping themselves around you like fluffy blankets. It’s warm and welcoming - which for me equals Christmassy - and very unlike Frida and Agnetha’s steely defiance.

Unfortunately there are few songs that are improved by a choir of children (‘Another Brick In The Wall’ is the only one that springs to mind right now). The combination of adorable tots and clanging chimes of doom in the final verse taint my happy memories of the middle verse. The backing completely overloads the ‘Loife’s vocals and I find myself gritting my teeth.

Perhaps the video can redeem this?

The creepy kids from the ‘Flying Without Wings’ video are back, this time as homeless ruffians dotted around a dystopian Sesame Street set. Their Christmas is set to be a dark and miserable one, eating turkey entrails from Oscar The Grouch’s dustbin and pulling crackers made out of old syringes.

In a humanitarian Noel’s Christmas Presents-style gesture the boys have brought along Tinkerbell (so THAT’S where the bloody bells are coming from) to weave a bit of magic and make their shitty pound-shop presents slightly less shit. Look at the glorious transformation that occurs!

A pile of old crap

A pile of old crap with some fairy lights on it

Well, quite. After one too many Farepak-hampers the children have had enough of Westlife’s ‘upselling’ scammery. They encircle the boys in the time-honored occult fashion, chanting that they believe in angels but going WIDDERSHINS which in fact means they believe in DEVILS do you see.

Only Mark seems to have cottoned on to the fact that the time might be right for him to depart this earthly realm. Run, Mark! While you still can!

Conclusions: yes, I think the video narrowly justifies the singing children. I can’t imagine “I Have A Dream” is among many people’s favourite ABBA songs, but I could see it being among people’s favourite Westlife songs.

Flying Without Wings

And so to the inspiration of this blog’s title!

This is actually one of Westlife’s more interesting (‘interesting’) concept videos. The boys are trapped in the Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey version of hell, a corridor dimly lit by blue flourescent strips, with creepy children littered about the place.

As we all know the only way to escape hell is to challenge the Grim Reaper to a game of Twister. Oh dear! Flexibility has never been Westlife’s strong point. Get up off a stool, sit back down on a stool, occasionally raise arms up in a Jesus-like gesture:

No wings but no flying either

Predictably it doesn’t seem to be doing much good, possibly because Brian isn’t actually dead but inhabiting some sort of zombie limbo state:

Brian McFadden, yesterday

The others are doing their best but inevitably they are LEFT BEHIND as all the other inhabitants of hell manage the whole voler sans ailes business and go floating up to the pearly gates. Poor Wezzas! Doomed to spend eternity in Hades!

For a long time I thought this, ‘Hero’ (Wind Beneath My Wings edn) and ‘Hero’ (Mariah ft Westlife edn) were the same song. SO CONFUSING. Westlife have also done a song called ‘No More Heroes’ (NB not a Stranglers cover) so Christ knows how one is meant to keep up with all this.

One way to differentiate between them is to bear in mind that ‘Flying Without Wings’ is the one with the super-clunky rhyming scheme. BRINGS. THING. WINGS. MEANS. It’s less catchy than the previous two singles, as hooks give way to bombast. It’s a short song and it buckles under the strain of the arrangement. Lead Westlife and Tall Dark Westlife do their best but even they are drowned out by the choir and strings from about halfway onwards.

In summary: for hormonal mums w/ dead children only.

If I Let You Go

Come with me for a stroll along an IRISH BEACH! Tick follows tock follows tick etc, a horse appears after literally 10 seconds so we know that we are in IRELAND with IRELAND’S biggest boyband since the last one. It’s not raining though and no-one is drinking buckfast with an acid chaser so perhaps this is PRETEND IRELAND.

They’re making more of Brian in this video. Dressed in white, his tall figure is plonked in the foreground for us like a lighthouse on that murky beach, his fringe scanning this way and that in search of lost ships. The rest of them are doing quite well in the neutral Burton menswear stakes.

Once you’ve got to the end of the video (no skipping! I WILL KNOW IF YOU HAVE SKIPPED), try and work out what the boys and their leprechaun chums are building out of all that driftwood. Telegraph poles? Something to do with Scientology? Perhaps they are a tribute to Frosta, She-Ra Princess Of Power’s best mate (or was it worst enemy) whose weapon thing that came with the toy looked like a blue version of those wooden structures, and shot out icicle death rays:

Whatever they’re meant to be it seems like a lot of effort to just bugger off and leave them there without even attaching lanterns to them and having a ‘night scene’ at the end of the video. 3/10.

Anyway, enough visual nonsense. Let’s listen to the song, shall we?

“If I Let You Go” has a very strange transition from verse to chorus. Even though you know *something* must be coming up after the bum-bum-bum-bum-bum PAUSE, the following ‘BUT IF I’ sharply shifts up a couple of notes. It’s a bit of a jolt after the super-bland guitar intro, which is very Boyzone-ish in nature - not surprising given this is an Elofsson/Kreuger/Magnussen job. It’s not a proper key change - that comes at around 2.48 - and most of the chorus melody follows the predictable ABBA lines. Go up here, and down there, chuck in a minor 7th for the penultimate chord. I can confirm that after three listens I could hum you 95% of the chorus so it gets a tick for catchiness.

What about the lyrics? Surely the Loife cannot be mulling over the prospect of DUMPING someone! No of course not. These lovely lads will never abandon you, even if you WANT to leave and have made sure you are ‘worlds apart’. Otherwise they will ‘take the easy way out’ i.e. top themselves. Further inspection suggests that’s a little unfair - rather than being possessive/unhinged stalkers, the boys are just trying to pluck up the courage to state their true feelings. Awwwww. It’s just Brian’s FACE that is making you think they’re creepy!

Swear It Again

Let’s start at the beginning! Westlife’s first single back in the mists of time (1999) was a reasonable indication of the path the band would take over the next 10 years: BALLAD O CLOCK.

Another clue as to their future style can be heard at the very beginning of this beginning: the tinkly glissando of pixie dust sprinkling itself over some plodding piano.

Saccharine tinkles and simple piano chords were both massively overused in 90s ballads - both good and bad. The chords in the opening bars of Mariah’s version of “Without You” have a dogged determinism to them, whereas in “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)” they make Bryan sound triumphantly pompous. The tinkles in Toni Braxton’s “Breathe Again” are more like hyperventilating tears at the end of each phrase, but in the hands of Max Martin they are a touch of icing sugar to sweeten the Britney/Backstreet slowjam experience for us all. Strangely enough Westlife’s predecessors Boyzone mostly avoided the tinkle on their singles, preferring a godawful acoustic guitar to pick out their soppy intros.

In “Swear It Again” the chords and tinkles have little emotion to convey - they’ve been selected to smooth over the canvas and prepare us for an All-New Boyband who, as it happens, turn out to be very good at singing with each other. Almost too good! Having listened to the track several times I am just about able to pick out their different solo voices, but together on the chorus they become a single force with a standard deviation of approximately 0.05 (that was the as-promised science bit for this post). They are all singing the same note at the same time. You WILL remember this hook! We will drum it into your skull with our combined power! There’s no distracting bassline and the super-high angelic synths are so buried in the mix you can barely hear them. The tactic works: I can now totally hum this chorus when prompted.

Apart from that chorus hook though, there’s not much left to distinguish the song from the rest of the Westlife canon. The verses are the usual teenage heartthrob promising never to abandon the listener in their hour of need nor do them WRONG. However I should direct readers to the video above - the version made for Westlife’s US launch. While the UK version has them sitting glumly around a dress rehearsal (perhaps waiting for the REAL video to be shot?), in America they are working in a car wash with some sexy ladies who do a DANCE ROUTINE. The boys look young, happy and excited. Well, most of them do:

This one is Kian.

In 1999 I did not like Ballads or Boyzone, let alone a Boyzone-spawned boyband singing a ballad. Hell, I didn’t even like the Backstreet Boys back then. I liked songs like this. It’s ok - I’m… *sob* fine now. FINE I TELL YOU.

Thankfully now we are in the correct century my Mumpop Mojo is stronger than you could possibly imagine. The mere thought of Will Young singing to his pet hamster reduces me to tears (different tears from the last paragraph). But that’s not to say a good strong beat isn’t important, and I am worried that over the course of this project Westlife will come a cropper on the BPM front. They are not exactly going to compete with my favourite song of 1999, which (at the time) was this. Neither are the Westlife any good at co-ordinated movement, dubstep breakdowns or saying ‘fuck’ in an amusing way - all standard elements of amazing pop music. Are they buggered before we’ve even started?

Therefore, to try and be as fair to the Wezzas as possible, let’s draw up some basic Mumpop criteria:

- A hook you can still hum after the song finishes
- Harmonies that can make fallopian tubes tie themselves in knots
- Mention the title of the song in the lyrics
- Lyrics you could sing to yourself even if your toddler is within earshot
- First Dance At Wedding Potential

I will also be on the lookout for the following in their videos:

- Confirm/deny hand gestures (or its close relative ‘grabbing air and pulling towards chest’)
- Getting up off a stool and/or sitting back down again
- Wearing a big long coat and/or polo neck jumper (or general M&S For Men catalogue)
- Looking down at feet then sharply looking up at the panning camera in a serious manner

Hopefully I am not damning Westlife with low expectations here. Let’s say that I will be pleasantly surprised if there DOES happen to be a song about aliens or how fun heroin can be*. I will be as open-minded as possible!

Now that’s sorted, on with the songs!

*Hey kids! Heroin isn’t fun! Glad we’ve cleared that up.

Some say Westlife’s songs are shit.

Some say Westlife’s songs all sound the same.

Some say Westlife have sold 44 million records.

These facts may or may not be true (though the last one does have a citation on Wikipedia) but for such a successful band, it’s certainly the case that Westlife do not get a bite at the critical apple. It’s not that music critics give them bad reviews - they do not get reviewed at all!

I intend to change this, and find out for myself whether Westlife are a big bag of shit or not. However I meant to start this project three years ago so we shall see how far I get.