Chapter three: A game of two halves

We never wanted for anything in our house, but money certainly didn't grow on trees, says Dubliner Nicky Byrne. I think my mam and dad, Nikki and Yvonne Byrne, were very proud parents. My dad was a painter and decorator working in an hotel at Dublin airport and my mam was a housewife. I came into the world on 9 October 1978, my sister Gillian is two years older than me and when I was 11 they had a surprise little brother for us all, Adam. No one knew if we were rich or poor, but if I needed new football boots or Gillian was after some new Irish dancing shoes, we got them.

Growing up, my dad was a singer in a cabaret band. Even to this day he sings. Back then he gigged seven nights of the week, working in lots of pubs and clubs around the city. I loved watching him singing. Sometimes I'd see him go out after dinner to his next show. He'd be wearing his white or blue suits ready for the cabaret. He was the lead singer of Nikki & the Studz and for over then years they had a residence round the corner in the local pub, the Racecourse in Baldoyle, every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. He used to do a lot of weddings, dinner dances, all that type of thing. He was well known on the Dublin cabaret circuit, me dad. He wasn't a nationally famous singer, but people around and about knew of him. He worked his ass off to provide for us, definitely. He'd take me to football three nights a week and my mam would take Gill to Irish dancing competitions, while having to feed and school us too. It was a busy household.

My dad worked in the Dublin Airport hotel for 17 years before becoming unemployed. I was only a kid and probably didn't understand what being unemployed meant. I heard about it on the news and I know now that there were some horrendous times for people in the 1980s. But as a child, I never felt it, I never saw it, other than on the telly. I remember times when my dad wouldn't be working for a while, then suddenly he'd go out and work on a contract with somebody for, say, six months, then he'd be off work again.

My mam had four sisters - Betty, Marie, Con and Bernadette - and they all had children, our cousins. Every Sunday we'd eat at my nana and granddad's and every Saturday we'd go to my nana Byrne for her special soup. I have very early memories of crowding around the Christmas tree in Nana and Granddad's tiny living room, opening presents. "Here you go, Nico. Happy Christmas." We used to take it in turns each year to hand out the wrapped-up parcels. It's a lovely memory. Everyone got a pressie - even the uncles got socks or "smellies", as they would say.

My first love was always football. I was a goalkeeper. My dad used to take me to as many games as he could manage. Then he got me into a schoolboy club in Ireland called Home Farm that was quite well known. He took me to training two or three evenings a week and to the matches at weekends, while he was decorating in the day and gigging at night.

I really laugh now, thinking of the car journeys home after we'd lost or I'd made a mistake. While the lads we were dropping off - usually Brian Rickard and Paul Irwin, still mates to this day - were still in the car, Dad would sit there for a while not saying much, then suddenly he'd go, "What happened there for the second goal, Nico?" There would be a long pause as I thought of an excuse and then he continue, "I think you could have probably done better there, son." It was funny.

Football was my life - I could name the Manchester United team backwards and upside down in those days. It meant everything. My bedroom wall was covered in posters of football stars - players like Lee Sharpe and Packie Bonner - and there was also one of Kylie Minogue and one of a girl out of Baywatch with especially big breasts called Erika Eleniak. It was mainly footballers, though.

I was obviously aware of the big pop bands. My sister wanted to sing; she was a huge Bros fan. She wore the bottle tops on the Dr Martens, the leather jackets, ripped jeans, all of that. Bros were really the guinea pigs for what Take That, Boyzone and Westlife all went on to do. That was when the whole boy band thing first entered my world, I suppose. One Christmas my sister got a three-in-one music player from Santa, which was a cassette player, record player and radio. At first she played Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" then "When Will I Be Famous?", "Cat among the Pigeons", all those Bros tunes. As we grew up I would hear A-Ha and Michael Jackson too.

At school, however, music wasn't really my thing. I didn't play an instrument and at that age I wasn't at all interested in the classical musical they focused on. My music teacher, Miss Murphy, was lovely and I had a great relationship with her, not because I was particularly musical but more because I was friendly and charming to her, I suppose. I love classical music now - the sound of strings is one of the most beautiful, relaxing things you can her - but as a kid, you're not interested really, are you?

I was a confident kid, playing football, messing around, having a good time, but I wasn't confident enough to sing in public. I was always in choirs, but that wasn't just me standing there. When it came to my music exam, I was convinced I was going to fail, but luckily 40 per cent of it was practical, just singing. I stood up and sang "The Fields of Athenry", "Hey, Jude" and "Yesterday" by the Beatles and an old Irish song called "She moved Through the Fair". I got full marks and that was enough for me to go on and pass the whole exam. But if I'm being totally honest here, I didn't really have any interest in music whatsoever at that point. It bored me and was a great time to grab a nap in class.

For a while yet, my path was elsewhere, namely football. I was training constantly and getting pretty good. I was playing in better and better teams and people were starting to talk about me as a genuine prospect. My clubs in Dublin were doing well and I progressed enough to get picked for the Ireland Under-15 side, which was a big deal. One of the proudest moments of my life, even to this day, was standing for the Irish national anthem when he played the tournament hosts Portugal in an Under-18 European Championships. There were no Irish fans there and probably about 15,000 Portuguese. All I could think about was my mam and dad, how proud they'd be and how much they'd love to see this. I actually got emotional for the national anthem as we turned to face the Tricolor just like the senior team would do during the World Cup. That moment will never leave me. It was a special time in my football career. 

Once you are playing at that level, professional scouts start flying over to watch you and it wasn't long before I was offered a two-week trial at Leeds United. My mam was keen for me to finish my studies, but Dad was like, "Yes, but it's Leeds United!" He felt the same as me. Leeds was one of the top clubs in the UK at the time. Even though I'm a hardcore Man. United fan, this was what I'd dreamed about all my life.

They really liked me at the trial and I was shocked and very, very excited to then be offered a two-year contract for Leeds United FC. I thought this was it, I was made! Any Irish kid who's a big soccer fan wants to get to England to play; the Irish leagues aren't as high profile or as well paid (although, playing in those leagues later, I found them to be amazingly tough and physical, an almost bruising experience).

I'd started dating a girl from school called Georgina, whose father was Bertie Ahern, the future Prime Minister of Ireland (he was Minister of Finance at the time), so it meant we'd have to conduct a long-distance relationship, which neither of us were very pleased about. We'd been to the same secondary school, Pobailscoil Neasain, and I'd admired her from afar for some time. I remember seeing her on the evening news on the steps of Dail Eireann on budget day with her dad and sister and telling my mam, "That's the girl I'm going to marry." I was 12 years old and Mam thought I was nuts. I'd even got my mate to speak to her about going out with me, but the answer came back, "No". It was like a dagger through the heart, it really was, I was gutted because I was really falling for this girl. That was about two years after I first saw her. I think we waited another year or two before we arranged to meet at a friend's party on 8 October 1994, the night before my sixteenth birthday - how many guys remember the first day?! - and we kissed and that was it, the love of my life. 

Initially, because I was only 16, I was on YTS scheme at Leeds, getting £38,50 a week, but as soon as I turned 17 and signed as a professional, I was paid £200 a week for year one then £250 for year two and had free digs, so suddenly I felt rich. Having a bit of spare cash, I was starting to wear a few labels like Dolce & Gabbana, plus I'd got a £5,000 signing-on fee, so it felt amazing. 

But then the reality hit home. At first, we stayed in Roundhay in Leeds with a lovely couple called Pete and Maureen Gunby. He was a former Leeds coach. They were really nice to all the players staying with them. In year two, we were moved to lodgings in a purpose-built complex at the new training ground in Thorpe Arch near Weatherby. The digs were like army barracks. There was a strict curfew on nights out and anyone breaking that was disciplined. It was the closest thing to a prison. In the second year, they installed cameras in the corridors outside our rooms. As soon as the door slammed shut, the dream evaporated and you were in these pretty spartan digs, two lads per room. I had a family picture on my dresser and the Tricolor above my bed and a picture of Roy Keane on me wall, but that was a homely as it got. You went up for your food on a tray and sat down to eat in the canteen.

They dished out proper bollockings if you did something wrong - shouting matches, the works. It was a real shock to the system and I got homesick very badly. That second year nearly brome ke. I don't think I ever thought about actually walking - I never had the balls to go home and throw the towel in, that never crossed my mine, I probably should have but I was determinated that it wasn't going to break me - but it did get me pretty down.

One night us Irish lads went out and got pissed. The next morning we were frog-marched into the office and our contracts laid out on the table in front of us. They were sacking us. The coach in charge was shouting in our faces, but it turned out to be a scare tactic. As I wiped the spit from my face and looked around at the other lads, I realized it was working. 

It had started so well. Although I was only a junior, just a few months out of school, through a series of injuries to goalkeepers, more senior than me, I was named in the first team squad for a match at Southampton. It was incredible - I was on the first-team coach with all the professionals, big-name players I'd seen on the telly like Gary McAllister, Tony Yeboah, Gary Speed and the Irish legend Gary Kelly and now I was in the squd with them. I didn't play that day, but it was such a buzz to be even near that level of football. Mam and Dad kept all the paper clippings from back home and even recorded the news on Teletext, they were so proud.

But the honeymoon period didn't last for long. The problem I had was that I flitted in and out of the team. When that happens, especially as a goalkeeper, football is a very lonely place. When you're not in the team at that level, often not even as a substitute, you're nothing more than a boot boy, a drinks boy, pushing skips around with kit in them, like. Sometimes player's faces fit and sometimes they don't. It's the same in any job, the same in boy bands...

One of the few highlights of my time at Leeds was the magic phone. One day, my room-mate Keith Espey went to ring his mum, but the payphone didn't seem to be working and he was pressing the number 7 in frustation - you know, "Come on! Work!" Then the phone rang, he picked it up and it was his mum. "Did you just try to call me?" she said.

Turned out her phone had rung after all, but for some reason Keith hadn't had to put any money in. His mum checked on her next bill and there was no sign of the call being reverse charged or anything like that. So we all started doing it - pick up the phone, bang it back down, 7777, wait a few seconds, phone rings, make your call. I was phoning Ireland and we had Welsh lads phoning Wales. Even Harry Kewell, the future Liverpool player who was from Australia, was calling home. It was brilliant!

This was one of the rare highlights, though, as I said. Mentally, those years at Leeds were the toughest time in my whole life. I didn't get on with the coach, I was only allowed six paid visits home a year, I was homesick and I wasn't getting picked. The rules were ludicrous - for example If I didn't shave, I was fined a fiver. There were times when I thought to myself, What am I serving my sentence for? When you are away you get very patriotic and I got very homesick and used to play a lot of Boyzone, funnily enough - "Father and Son", tunes like that. Even more bizarrely, I saw Mikey from that band in a club one night in Howth, County Dublin, surrounded by girls, and that image stuck with me.

By the Christmas of 1997 I knew I was finished with football. My height - 5ft 10in - worked against me, as most modern professional goalkeepers are well over six foot. But also my face and personality weren't fitting in with certain people at Leeds United, as I said, and I could see the end was coming. Still, I was devastated. This had been my dream since I was knee-high and it was falling apart.

Even the way they broke the news was typical - they said I was one of the best prospects they'd ever seen, but I needed to grow a few inches and that if I didn't between then and the end of my contract, it wouldn't be renewed. I was 19. It wasn't going to happen. Then, when the time came to leave, there wasn't even a handshake.

My confidence was ruined as a footballer. I'm a very confident person - my mam and dad gave us a really good upbringing and filled us to football at least. There were options: playing in the part-time Irish leagues (I eventually did play for Shelbourne, Cobh Ramblers and St Francis) or playing for English clubs further down the tables like Cambridge or Scarborough. I did try out for a couple, but I wasn't interested. My heart wasn't in it anymore.

I retreated to Dublin, gutted. My football dream was over.

To be honest with you, I was dying to get home.

Chapter two: Warm evenings, crisp mornings, early beginnings

                      

My Feehily family home was a four-bedroomed bungalow in the countryside near Sligo. It was a rural upbringing and I loved every minute of it. 

Both my parents, Oliver and Marie Feehily, worked. Mum was a civil servant in the Department of Agriculture; Dad worked in the building trade. She worked nine to five, but once she clocked out of that job, she clocked into motherhood and providing a taxi service for her kids. I was born Mark Patrick Michael Feehily on 28 May 1980, followed by my younger brothers Barry and Colin. We just lived too far out of town to walk or cycle in every day, so Mum used to drive us around constantly.

I spent a lot time at my granny's house when both my parents were out at work. She lived in a cottage on a big farm in acres of idyllic Irish countryside. That was even more remote than my home, but I loved it and loads of my cousins used to go round there too. It was brilliant. My dad's mum is just the most loving woman in the world. My mum's mum lived on the other side of Sligo, so we saw her on a Sunday usually. Grandad was the landlord of a famous pub in Sligo town, which is where my mum grew up. Everyone knew him, so if I said I was Paddy Verdon's grandson, they'd know who I was straight away. Verdon's Bar on the Mall was very well known and Granddad was a big personality, he loved his grandkids very much. He was just this loving character full of stories - we would listen to him absolutely glued. He once told us that he had about 50 stallions kept on a mountain top. They were beautiful stories that he'd tell. He was extremely handy, too; he used to make furniture, all sorts. He had all the modern things too - TVs, videos. I remember he had a hi-fi that was way ahead of its time and I recall blasting The Bodyguard soundtrack out of it! Nana was lovely too. She was an amazing cook and every Sunday we'd eat this amazing home-baked brown bread with cheese, and ham sandwiched. Both sets of grandparents were very positive, incredibly loving aspects of my childhood. They were like an extension of my parents.

At my own home, when Mum and Dad came back from work we'd all congregate in the kitchen or living room and the telly would be blasting out, people would be doing homework or playing and there'd be loads of chatting - it was never a case of everyone going to their own rooms. It was a very close-knit, exciting, loving family.

I spent my youth walking in triangles. One point was our bungalow, another point was my granny's house and the third point was school. And that little triangle was surrounded by fields and farms. That was my world. It's funny now, because I might hop on a plane to Los Angeles with the band or for a holiday and not bat an eyelid, but back then a trip into Sligo on a Saturday was a major treat.

Since we've become well known, a lot of attention has been given to Sligo. Some journalist like to make out it's a very rural small time town in the west of Ireland. That's just a cliché. It isn't. Some people did stay there and work the same jobs as their parents, yes, but loads of others went off and found fantastic new careers elsewhere. It has a good mixture of shops and plenty of culture - pubs and clubs where they played all kinds of music. It was - and still is - a place where the arts literally thrive, especially music. There are lots of artists and singers. Michael Flatley's dad comes from Sligo, W.B. Yeats spent much of his childhood and wrote poetry there and Spike Milligan lived there in Holborn Street. Sligo has an awful lot of culture and history; it's a lovely place.

Back as a kid, though, my first access to music was at my granny's house and also through my dad's record collection. The west of Ireland has got a culture of country music. Up in Donegal they've got quite famous country singers, people like Sandy Kelly. The local radio played a mixture of American country and Irish country, and my granny loved listening to those stations.

My dad had the weirdest, most interesting record collection. I don't know how he accumulated such an odd mix. He had Queen, Top of the Pops compilations, Eddy Grant albums, Nana Mouskouri, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack, all sorts. For some reason he used to put his record player out in the garage and I'd go in there and hear all this electric stuff.

It was a slower way of life than in the town. When you're a child living in the countryside, you can spend hours doing things and you don't even realize how the time has passed by.

My primary school, St Patrick's, was beautiful and I loved it. On the very first day I was very apprehensive because I didn't like strangers or kids I didn't know. But once I got into it, I loved it. It was out in the countryside, bathed in fresh air. I was very lucky. I was a very peaceful kind of child and that school was a very peaceful place to go every day.

Then one day my dad came home with this enormous satellite dish. He had been working on a house and they had wanted to throw this thing away, so he had brought it home. Suddenly, instead of, like, four channels, we had 400. I could get tons of American music channels - early hip-hop, music television, loads of stuff. That had a huge impact on me, Funnily enough, we got a microwave around the same time - we were one of the first families I knew to get onw - so that, along with my satellite dish and a new pair of trainers I'd just got, made me feel like I was the richest kid on Earth. We weren't rich at all, though. My dad had just got lucky with this random old satellite.

There was a lot of music at school, which is typical of Irish education. All my schools taught tin whistle in class, for example. And we'd sing; nearly every day we used to sing. So I was brought up around this very random collection of all sorts of music from different cultures, different countries - a real mixture.

The common denominator in all of this was the singing - I loved to sing. If it was an Irish country classic, I'd sing it; if it was an R&B or hip-hop tune, I'd sing the chorus melody in between the rap versed; it it was an American pop tune I'd heard on satellite, I'd sing that.

Then I discovered Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. I must have shattered my parent's eardrums singing along to "I Will Always Love You". Mariah was my favourite, though, and when I first heard "Hero" it had a huge impact on me. My dad saw her on the telly and called up to my bedroom for me to go down. I did and just stood there in silence and watched the whole song. I'd never seen or heard of her before and I was very drawn to her gospel voice and beautiful image. I just remember looking at her and thinking how absolutely gorgeous she was, and then she sang and her voice was out of this world. Hearing her sing was a rare moment for me, because that was the awakening of my love for pop music. I literally think at that precise second listening to that song something awakened in me, without a shadow of a doubt. If I hadn't seen her that day, maybe the door to music and eventually Westlife wouldn't have opened. Who knows? But after that I started rooting out soul and gospel tunes and completely immersed myself in music. I also started singing a lot at school. At first I was crap, singing way too loud, and it drove the teachers insane. I would belt out "Silent Night" or the latest pop song at full blast. But I started to improve and I couldn't stop myself, I just loved singing.

Inevitably, I started singing in school plays and productions. The first thing I did was a play called Scrooged and I just absolutely got a major buzz from it, on this tiny little stage. I was only about eight but I loved it. I was extremely self-conscious as a kid - something I still carry with me to this day to a certain extent - but I noticed that when I sang, all the anxiety fell away, I didn't care who was singing with me or litening to me, as long as I was singing I was happy.

It was the same at Mass. We weren't an overly religious family, but we did go to Mass and I really enjoyed the singing there. The first time I sang in front of people was at church - "Away in a Manger", on Christmas Eve at midnight Mass. The acoustics were so amazing. It wasn't a huge church, but it had a lovely echo, and the smell of incense is still with me today. I just really enjoyed it and I didn't care for one second that people were watching me. Each week, there might be a couple of teachers and some older boys in the choir - had that been a room full of people chatting, I wouldn't have said a word. But as it was singing, I had no self-doubt and no awkwardness at all. During that time I realized that gospel affected me more deeply than any other music. It still has a power over me. It is something special, unique.

I think I was quite well behaved as a kid, but I'm not going to say I was very, very obedient. Occasionally I used to kick up a stink I had to be responsible for my own homework and I did it. I was allowed to do it when I wanted to, as long as I got it done. That was reflective of their attitude generally: they respected the kids and gave them the space to grow up and be themselves. And I just wanted to give back a bit of the love my parents and grandparents showed me.

One of the first big moments on stage for me was a talent competition at school in front of the whole all. It was maybe a few hundred kids, but it felt like a few thousand. It was the same night Kian serenaded the teacher with "Wonderful Tonight". There were two other lads in the talent competition that were my age; one did line dancing and one sang a Garth Brookes song. Bot got booed. I won my category and age group and I didn't get booed, I didn't get laughed at, I got clapped. People weren't bouncing off the ceiling, but I got clapped. That was a key moment for me.

Outside of when I was singing, I was pretty introspective child at school. I was quiet, reserved, nervous. That was how I was all the time - except when I was singing. It's strange. I don't know why it was, but I didn't question it, I just enjoyed it. Even today, singing is the one thing I can do and not feel embarrassed. I just get into the zone and start singing and lose myself.

When I went to the seconday school at Summerhill College in Sligo, I had to get used to a less idyllic routine than at the primary. The boys from town were tougher and, being very honest with you, I did get some stick. For a long time, it mattered to me what people thought of me. If someone put pen on my cheek or if I had dog shit on my show, like kids do, I would be so embarrased. Stuff like that made me want to crawl up into a ball. If anyone ever pointed at me and laughed, I was gutted. If I played tennis and someone said I was rubbish, it would break my heart. I was only a kid, 12 years old or so, but I just wasn't that hard and stuff like that made a deep impression on me. I sort of wish I wasn't like that, because life would have been a lot easier if I didn't give a shit, like some people.

                                   

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We thought pushing Mark into the shower was just a bit of fun, explains Kian, but it wasn't to him. The name-calling was hurtful. I'm very glad to say that despite this we very quickly became good friends, hanging around with each other, great mates.

Mark had a difficult time with certain people. A little bit because of his weight, but also because he was a singer, he was quiet, he was from the country - you know, he did different things from everyone else. I was a good sports player, I was good at Gaelic football; when I was 17, I played in the All Ireland quarter finals, and that sportiness always helps a kid at school. Even then, the rougher edges of my childhood sometimes spilled over into my sports. In that All Ireland game, two great big buffs from the country ran full pelt and sandwiched me. These guys must have been up at six lifting hay bales and spent al day eating potatoes and cabbage. Jesus, it hurt. I got straight up and headbutted the pair of them. Well, that was that - banned for three months.

Mark was in my class and I started hanging round with him when I was 14. By then I'd progressed from my sister's variety shows to musicals at the school and the local theatre. That's when I started hanging out with Shane, who was a year older than me - during break-time and through rehearsing these musicals. You might not think that getting into musicals was particularly a good idea for someone like me, with all the situations I got from the Sligo hard knocks. But do you know what? We made it look good!

The Hawks Well Theatre plays a big part in my story and that of Westlife, explains Mark. I had front-row tickets to a production of Grease - my first musical - with my mum, her sister and her kids. These cousins, the Normans, were all really talented actresses, so they loved going to the theatre. This first time I went along I was so excited, and as soon as I saw the stage itself, I wanted to be on it.

Then the musical started and out walked this tiny fucking pipsqueak followed by a slightly less tiny but greasier bastard with long hair. It was Shane and Kian.

They were the T-Birds and I couldn't believe how good they were. I was mesmerized by Shane's voice. He sang "We Go Together" and it was incredible. I actually knew of him from school. He had a floppy haircut and all the girls fancied him. We weren't close mates, yet somehow that made it all the more amazing - this kid from school who could sing like this. Even back in the day, he had that perfect voice. The dance moves were also perfectly done. He was a natural. I was blown away, basically. When I saw Shane out there on the stage, for me that was the start of Westlife. 

Kian was the rock child, the grungy one with the long hair, the edge. He had long brown hair all over his face, even though he was in Grease. But he had a real presence, a real charm about him. The girls all fancied him too. The two of them were brilliant and that night, that performance, made me want to be on stage for life. 

There were only really two little parts in Grease for me and Kian, says Shane. Mary had pretty much made the roles for us. She knew we had talent ant that we were up for a challenge. As I said, I was Danny Zuko's younger brother, and she put us two on stage for this one little song. On the first night, I was very nervous, but after that it was just like, Oh my God, I love this! We came on and it was all very cute. You could see people thinking, Ah look at the two little lads. But we were deadly serious. That was my first big moment on stage and I remember absolutely loving it. There were 400 people there and, for me, this was the big time.

After seeing Shane and Kian in Grease, I was desperate to get my own first role, continues Mark. There was a classifieds section in the local paper called "Bits and Pieces" that listed anything from "Happy 40th Birthday, Kaye, from the boys", to notices of wedding and adverts for auditions. I would literally scan this section every week, all excited, hoping to find something I could audition for. That shows how little I knew about the business - gettingg a part in one of these musicals seemed so distant, so impossible. Yet, looking back, all I needed to do was walk into the foyer of the theatre, find out the director and ask for a part.

I never had any formal training, I just learned by listening and singing. It was just a pure, bare love of singing. My parents didn't push me and they didn't pull me back, either. They just catered for the fact that I was banging on about singing 24/7 - talked about it and lived it and breathed it even back then. I was infatuated by it. I do have a tendency to latch on to things in life, especially if I find something that I love or someone who perhaps can say things I'm struggling to articulate, and that's what singing did for me.

The first real musical opportunity was the school production of Annie Get your Gun. I went to the auditions for that and sang a few tunes, and the teacher just nodded and said, "Fine, Feehily, you're in."

Simple as that.

He had to get through like 200 students, but he probably had an inkling I had a bit of a voice - or maybe he was only doing it to keep out the people who were really, really bad. But I felt like I was being offered a place in some big drama school or something. It felt like a huge step up.

Shane was in the same musical, playing a woman called Jessie. So was Kian. Because it was an all-boys school, you had all these burly Irish teenagers in drag.

Initially, I was too shy to go up and talk to him. Shane and Kian were quite cool at school. Shane was popular with the guys and the girls. Kian used to get in a bit of trouble with the guys because all their girlfriends fancied him, while Shane somehow managed to be cool with the guys and the girls. Eventually I plucked up the courage to speak to him. 

I'd seen Mark in a couple of talent shows and I knew he was amazing, remembers Shane. He more or less had a black person's soul voice, like. He had this R&B soulful tone. He stood out like a sore thumb. 

We quickly realized how much we both like singing, continues Mark, and I think we respected each other as a result. We started hanging out away from school. We'd often go down town to get a takeaway and share a large curry with, like, ten people. Then one day Shane said, "Why don't you come over to my house on Saturday?" and we started forming a friendship between just the two of us.

I started doing musicals, some with Shane and some without. I really enjoyed the camaraderie backstage and the way everyone knew each other. Living in the country like I did, I used to spend a fair bit of time by myself - not so much when I got home, but on the long walk back from school down the lanes, thinking. The musicals were brilliant because they were so lively and there always someone who would stay behind after the show or go out. You never had to be by yourself. I used to love that element of it. Everyone was friends with everyone, it was an amazingly pure and enjoyable atmosphere. 

Plus, when you performed, no one was reviewing you or criticizing you. It was a small town musical and everyone wanted it to be perfect, but at the same time you weren't being scrutinized. Even when they handed out the lead roles, people who'd hoped to get that part but hadn't weren't bitchy or nasty, they were pleased for the other person. There was a certain innocence to ir, it was all purely for fun and enjoyment, and we always seemed to get applauded. 

I was the lead a few times, though I wasn't so good when it came to acting. In fact, I used to curl up and die when I had to act - still do, sometimes, when I'm on telly. But if it was singing, I loved it.

My biggest role so far, explains Shane, came as the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist, another school production. The Dodger is such a great part and it was the first time I had to act and sing and I loved it, I loved learning the script and trying all the accents, the whole shebang. Kian was in that too. There was no happier place to be... not school, football, rugby. None of it came within a whisker of being on stage.

I started to build my confidence and the girls seemed to like my performances, but I knew I must be getting quite good when a few of the lads came up to me and said, "Shane, that was dead good, fella."

There was a TV show in Ireland, says Mark, called Go for It, and they had a sort of "Name That Tune" segment. At the end, a random member of the public got up and sang a song, sometimes with celebrities. It was brilliant. 

I was walking along the street one day with Shane, talking about the show, and I said, "If they asked us, if our numbers came up, would you go for it with me?"

"Absolutely, I would", he replied.

At that precise moment, I realized that here was a kid in my neighbourhood who loved singing as much as me and would, given half a chance, literally go for it, and with me. I remember walking beside him thinking, He's cool, everyone likes him, he's an amazing singer and he wants to do something with the singing with me...

We'd done Grease at the college, recalls Shane, and then Mary wanted to put on a bigger version in the town. This was a mixed production, so she was able to bring in girls to sing alongside myself and Kian. She gave Kian and me the role of the T-Birds.

We did our thing and it went down a storm. Everyone was talking about the T-Birds - people proper loved it! So Mary decided to put Grease back on in the New Year.

I was doing all these shows, recalls Kian, like Grease, Annie Get Your Gun and Oliver, as well as still playing in rock bands and doing the poetry competitions. It wasn't sneered at for boys to sing in our area, or in Ireland generally. The mixture of Irish musical culture and Sligo's own musical scene meant there were singers everywhere. It was OK for boys to sing.

And in a small-town kinda way, we became sort of famous as the T-Birds. All the girls in the school fancied us. That didn't win us any popularity competitions with the boys, obviously, but we loved it.

All the girls from town did fancy those two, Kian's right, agrees Mark. A lot of them were coming to the show just to see Shane and Kian as the T-Birds, that's how good they were.

I wasn't in the T-Birds, but I was still hanging out with everyone in the production. We'd all started getting a bit of a bug for it, it was brilliant. I was seeing quite a bit of Shane by this time and we'd become good friends. One day we were round someone's house watching Boyzone and Take That on the telly, some concert footage, and that's when the idea of starting a boy band came up.

It was very much a group thing; I don't know if any of us would have done it by ourselves. But we were constantly talking about music, singing songs and messing about with pop songs during and after the rehearsals for the various musicals. I realized that although our voices were very different, Shane and me were harmonizing really well. It sounded great. Well, it wasn't that it sounded amazing, just that it didn't sound too bad! So we started mucking about with the idea of a boy band.

One day, after we'd done the T-Birds thing, says Kian, Shane came up to me.

"Hey, Kian, we're thinking of putting a boy band together for the next talent contest and we'd like you to be in it."

"Are you off your fucking rocker? A boy band? Me? I'm in three rock bands for that talent contest. I'm the lead guitar player in one band, I'm the singer in another band and I'm the guitar player and singer in the other band. I can't be in a boy band!"

That was my gut reaction.

Then I heard some tunes by the Backstreet Boys.

Now, you might think it's a big leap from listening to Metallica and Pearl Jam to the Backstreet Boys, and I'll grant you it is. However, the guy behind some of the biggest Backstreet Boys tunes, Max Martin, was a complete metal freak. He loved his rock music and if you listen to those tunes again, you'll hear all sorts of heavy riffing and distortion behind the pop tunes. Maybe nobody else would agree with me on that, but that's why I liked what I heard. It got me intrigued. Suddenly, I quite liked the idea of a boy band. I certainly liked the idea of being in a band that was more popular than Pyromania and in the T-Birds I was getting a reaction on stage like I'd never gotten before just singing and dancing.

So I spoke to Mark and Shane about their band.

That was the start of our first boy band, Six As One.

In the New Year, says Mark, the follow-on production of Grease was sold out. Because of the reaction to the T-Birds, it had been arranged that during the interval of the show we would come on as this new boy band. There were six of us: myself, Shane, Kian, Derek Lacey, Graham Keighron and Michael "Miggles" Garrett, all local lads. The plan was to do two songs by the Backstreet Boys, "I'll Never Break Your Heart" and "We've Got It Goin' On".

We weren't sure how people would react, but the place went nuts! Really, it was just the most amazing reaction. We couldn't believe it.

Then Mary suggested that we put on a full concert as Six As One. We rehearsed all day every day for weeks, learning songs by other boy bands. We were really focused. 

Come the day of our own show, there were about 500 people in the hall. It felt like about 500,000 - oh my God, it was incredible. The noise they made and the reaction was brilliant. It felt like we were playing Hyde bloody Park! There is actual footage of the gig somewhere and looking at it now it looks really amateur, but it felt so big to us at the time and it was an important starting-point.

It all kind of happened scarily easy. We loved doing it, having some drinks at the weekend and chatting about it too, and there was real ambition there - as soon as that night was over, it was just like, Right, what are we doing next?

Mary McDonagh came to us after that concert and suggested we do some recordings. By this point, we'd changed our name to IOYOU. I'd started to write a song called "Together Girl Forever", which was about Shane's future wife Gillian, but I said to him, "You're the one who likes her, you write the second verse!"

I was really keen on Gillian by that point, says Shane, so it was great to write a song about her. Some of the lads did the music for it and Mark did the lyrics. It wasn't the greatest song you've ever heard - it was all very simple - but it was another step forward. So we took that song and "Everlasting Love" and another original which featured Graham rapping at one point, and went in to record them.

We were so excited, that was our very first experience of any kind of studio work. It was just a small home studio and the set-up was nothing like the studios we use now, but it was cool. We were singing into mics and listening back and all saying the same thing: "Do I really sound like that?"

The songs weren't written or produced to the level we are used to now, says Mark, but at the time it was all very relevan and important to get us to the next stage. That little phase literally did do wonders for us. Having our own record felt like the biggest deal ever. We all had haircuts done especially for the cover. Mine was hideous, so as soon as I could I went to the local barber and had it cut off!

About 100 people bought the record from the store in the first few days, then a few more days went by another 100 copies sold, then 500, then eventually, after several weeks, we'd shifted about 1,000 of them.

Suddenly, the word of mouth in town was like, "There's a new boy band and they're from Sligo!" It was all very small scale, but people really got into it, they loved the idea. Mainly girls, actually. At the time, the Backstreet Boys and Boyzone were at their peak, so the idea of Sligo having its own boy band - well, all the local girls loved it.

A while later, Mary McDonagh and her associates offered us a management contract which we had to decide whether to sign or not.

It was an amazing time. It was all a great laugh and yet serious at the same time, we meant business. It seemed so quick too - singing in the interval of Grease, then getting our own show, then recording in a studio, then having a record out... Every step, we felt, If it all stops tomorrow, this has already been amazing!

Next thing we knew, we got asked to go on a TV show called Nationwide, a magazine show where one week there'd be a young kid doing stunts on a BMX and the next week there'd be an Irish dancing troupe. That week it was us, singing carols in a local children's ward. The TV crew came down and filmed us. They liked it and broadcast the clip at teatine and everyone in Sligo seemed to watch it. It was mad. People in the street even started to say hello. "Hey, that's yer man from that band!"

Oddly, despite going on Nationwide and being known as a new local boy band, there was then a bit of an anti-climax, we sort of stalled for a wee while. Shane went to college five hours away from Sligo and we were kinda kicking our heels, like, That was fun. What now?

Chapter one: Town of plenty

For 35 years, my parents, Mae and Peter Filan, ran the Carlton café right in the middle of Sligo, on the west coast of Ireland. The whole family - all nine of us - lived in the house above it. We loved living there.

I was born on 5 July 1979, Shane Steven Filan, the youngest of seven children. God knows how my parents looked after all of us. As we as myself, there were my sisters Yvone, Denise and Mairead, and my brothers Finbarr, Peter and Liam. Dad was the cook and Mam ran the restaurant. They worked very hard and we didn't go without a thing. We weren't rich, don't be getting me wrong, but if we needed something, they managed to get the money together to buy it. There was always a few quid there.

That house above café gives me my very earliest memory. When I was three, I burnt my hand on the cooker in our kitchen. I remember as if it was yesterday reaching up to put my hand on the ring, then roaring and crying when it burnt me. I can still see the dog outside the room looking in at all the commotion. Mam calmed me down and put cold milk on the burn to soothe the pain. It's a strong, vivid, first memory.

I loved having so many brothers and sisters around. My parents had had four kids back to back, with only a year between each. Then three more children followed with a two-year gap between each. My mum had her last baby, me, when she was 42. For some reason she'd always wanted seven kids and I think she just kept going till she got them. Back then it was very common to have at least four kids, to have just two kids wasn't the norm. There were a lot more big families then than there are now, certainly in the west of Ireland anyway.

I never got picked on because I had those older brothers, so that made my life a lot easier than some. Maybe I got a little spoiled occasionally, as the youngest, but to be honest because there were seven of us Mam and Dad didn't have time to spoil us, they were so busy just looking after us and feeding us and all that. It was a good life.

What we did have was a lot of chips! Perhaps I'm remembering wrong, but it seemed like we had chips five or six nights a week. No wonder really - now I've got my own family I've learned how much looking after kids costs, so perhaps it was cheap and easy. Chips and cans of Fanta and Coke - whenever I see those it reminds me of my childhood. I loved it; the café was busy and there was always something happening and interesting people coming in.

After that, my mind flits to the first day at Fatima Primary School, when I was four. It was run by nuns and I was gripped by sheer bloody fear. I stood in line at the entrance, waiting to enrol, holding on to my mum's hand very tightly. One of the kids ran out of line and a nun went over to him, shouted something and then smacked him on the bum.

"These nuns don't look too happy, Mam" I said

Mam just laughed and said not to worry.

A few days later, I'd started to settle in but was still a little anxious. One of my brothers was in the school across the road and one afternoon I noticed he'd put his nose against the window and was pulling faces and waving at me. I just burst out crying, bawled my eyes out, I did. That was all just early nerves, though, In fact it was a great school.

I'd already started singing when I went to primary. Funnily enough, "Uptown Girl" by Billy Joel was my party piece. I'd be wheeled out a family dos; my mum used to make me get up in front of all the aunties and uncles to sing that song. Pure embarrassment, like. So I was rehearsing for the Westlife version way back then!

There was no musical background in my family, however. My dad's a good singer and Yvonne, my sister, could sing all the hymns well at church, but there was no real background of singing or music there. Growing up, my big thing was Michael Jackson. I was a mental Michael Jackson fan, mental. The Bad album was on constantly in our house - "Man in the mirrow", all those songs. That and Thriller. Jesus, I just wanted to be a star, a famous singer, up on stage. I'd sing all Jackson's tunes in the mirror or in front of my sisters, but I was afraid of singing in front of a crowd. At that early point I was just taking Michael Jackson off really, copying him. I used to be quite good at mimicking people. Gradually, I developed my own style and my own voice and felt more confident about singing in front of people, but I never had the courage to go on stage until I was 12.

In class, I was an OK student, usually a C+, the occasional B, nothing spectacularly good or bad. My attention drifted very easily. There wasn't really any subject I loved. I wasn't academic and I didn't have any dreams to become a doctor or a lawyer. I enjoyed the craic with the lads, I was in decent class and there weren't really any eejits in the group, so we all had a laugh. Apart from that, I never really enjoyed school that much, to be honest with you, it was just OK.

The most exciting thing about school was what happened afterwards. I was always talking and trying to sort out something to do after class: "Where are we going? What are we doing?" I played rugby a bit and some Gaelic football, but all I really wanted to do was sing. There was no class for that, so for me it was like, OK, I'm going to do this school thing because I have to, but really I want to be in a band.

Then I started auditioning for musicals at school. Those auditions, rehearsals and performanced are my fondest memories of my time at school. It was an all-boys school, so the girls would come up from their school and we'd all stay late for maybe three hours, working through rehearsals. It only happened for about six weeks of each school year, but it meant everything to me, my whole life revolved around it.

The first big break I got was at the Hawks Well Theatre in an adult production of Grease. It was put on by a woman called Mary McDonagh. She was the choreoprapher, director and producer, and was a pretty well-known name in Sligo. She brought a lot of people up through the ranks in the theatre, offering them their first roles and giving them confidence on stage. She was a great director. She gave me the role of Danny Zuko's younger brother in this version of Grease. Also, in the cast was a kid a year younger than me who I'd seen around town. His name was Kian Egan. 

                                     *                *               *

"Mum, can we go to the feis now, please?"

"Alright, Kian, come on, but we'll have to be quick."

I was sitting in the doctor's waiting room, having just been seen about an ear infection. I was anxious to get out because my mum had entered me in a local poetry competition, called a feis. I was only four, but this was quite a big thing in Ireland, especially in Easter week. They'd hold a feis and you'd go on stage and recite a poem. Sometimes there'd be over 100 kids competing. However, I'd been quite ill with this ear infection so I actually missed my slot because Mum had been worried and had taken me to the doctor's. When we finally got to the competition, though, she persuaded the poetry judges to give me a later slot.

I won.

My mum and dad, Kevin and Patricia Egan, were like that - always encouraging their kids. I come from a big family of four brothers and three sisters - Viveanne, Gavin, Fenella and Tom, who are older, and Marielle and Colm, who are younger. Dad met my mum at the dance, they became dance partners and eventually started going out with each other. The first baby arrived when they were only 20; I arrived on 29 April 1980.

My dad was an electrician for the Electricity Suplly Board of Ireland, so he'd be out all hours sending the young fellas climbing up the poles, organizing all that. His family didn't have anything, so he'd had to go to work at 16. Mum was a housewife. She had seven kids to lookt after, so she didn't have a spare minute. 

My dad had been brought up in Leitrim, a very rural area. His childhood was very typical of the west coast of Ireland at that point, then he set up the family home in nearby Sligo. It was a very busy home. At one point, there would have been seven or eight of us in the house, all squeezing into bunk-beds and stuff like that. We weren't rich, but it was fine. I have a lot of great memories of my childhood and we remain a very tight family to this day.

My mum wasn't musical at all. I used to sit her at the piano to teach her "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep", but she couldn't get it. My dad, on the other hand, would have had it in five minutes. He never played an instrument, though. When he was younger, the opportunity wasn't necessarily there - If he'd said he wanted to be in a band, it would have been, "Away with you, get back to work." In his later years, however, I realized how much of a love for music he had and became more aware of his massive record collection. 

All of us kids tried our hand at music. My eldest brother is, in my eyes, a piano genius - he's the vice principal of a school in Sheffield now, with honours degrees in piano and guitar. As a kid, he was a classical whizz on piano, so he started teaching me piano at a young age. Every single member of my family before me learned the piano and my other brother started playing trombone in a concert band and then bass in his own rock band. 

I did the poetry competitions every year from the age of four and would end up with five or six first placed each year. My mother would teach me the poems in the kitchen. I would always be in the prizes, and also started winning story telling competitions too. I was quite confident as a kid in that sense. But it was my mum who did it really - she put her all into it, and there's no doubt about it, I wouldn't be doing Westlife now if it wasn't for my mother. 

Most amazingly, she did it for all of us, not just me. Even though she had seven kids, she had the drive to get us out of bed every Saturday morning for speech and drama lessons, or out for piano lessons every Tuesday night, or guitar lessons on a Wednesday night or football on a Thursday. She still does it with my younger brother to this day. She's done it with all seven of us.

Then one of my sisters started to do variety musicals at the community hall. Along with Mum, she'd put a show together with singing, acting, comedy, all sorts of stuff. I was the guitar player and the singer and the comedian and the guy who dressed up as a woman and all that type of stuff. My first cousin Gillian, who later married Shane, was also in that.

I loved all this because I was what I call an "out of school" kid. That's where I was happiest, not in class. The teachers absolutey hated me because I was too giddy in class; unless I liked the subject I was as giddy as shit.

I did the poetry competitions right up until I was 16, but by then I had discovered rock music and lost interest in reciting poetry, to be honest with you. One of my elder brothers had a rock band and I started listening to stuff like Metallica, Guns N'Roses, Bon Jovi, Green Day, Pearl Jan, rock and metal bands. Albums like Dookie I just played constantly and, like millions of other kids, I sat in my bedroom for hours trying to learn "Seek & Destroy" and loads of other Metallica songs.

My dad had somehow managed to buy me an electric guitar by this stage. I'd badgered him for a year to get it, then one day my sister arrived back from college with a surprise package for me, a black guitar - an Aria Pro 2, NA20B. I recall the exact model number. It cost £300, which for a guitar was ludicrous. Of course, being a teenager, then I was after an amplifier: "You have to have an amp to go with it!" I hounded Dad until he bought me a second-hand Orange amp, which is one of the most classic pieces of amplification you can buy. I didn't know this at the time - I just knew if I plugged my guitar in, smacked the distortion pedal on to ten and switched it to maximum volume, it sounded amazing.

Inevitably, I started forming my own bands. During my school years, there were loads of different bands and line-ups, most famously Skrod, an Irish word for which the closest translation is a woman's private parts. After that, we became Pyromania and began a fierce rivalry with my older brother's rock band, Bert and the Cookie Monsters. Hardly Oasis versus Blur, but it mattered so much to us at the time! We would go around the school ripping down their posters and they would do the same to ours. They nearly always won any battle of the bands because they were older, but we thought we were the best. 

At one memorable band night at Summerhill College, I brought out the best-looking teacher in front of a hall crammed with students, serenaded her with "Wonderful Tonight" by Eric Clapton and then gave her a peck on the check. I was the king for weeks off the back of that. 

I was in and out of various line-ups; it all changed so many times. We'd practise in people's living rooms, including two friends called Michael Walsh and Derek "Buff" Gannon. The eldest brother of my cousin Gillian had a band called, rather fantastically, Repulse, a thrash metal outfit. One time they got on a Saturday morning TV show, God knows how, and we were all excited we went along to support them. You can see me in the background with my long, dark hair, head banging to Repulse. 

I'd started to get quite good at the guitar, but one day I completely scuppered my chances of being in the next Metallica. Our drummer at the time was out on his bike with me and we were at the top of a hill. He said, "Jump on, Kian, I'll take you down the hills." So, being 15 and all that, I jumped onto his handlebars and we flew down this hill.

At the bottom of the hills there was a sharp right turn and a wall.

We were going way too fast.

He didn't make the turn.

I slammed into the wall face first.

I've still got the scar to show for it, on my right check. Worse still, though, I'd broken my finger, in fact the bone was actually sticking out, completely dislocated. I was in agony and an ambulance was called. I had to have three operations and to cut a long story short - or rather to cut a long digit short - the finger stopped growing. So now it's shorter than my other fingers and crooked.

Which isn't the best news if you want to be the next James Hetfield.

More immediately, our most recent variety show had got through to the All Ireland finals and I was one of the guitar players. I only had two weeks to learn how to play my part with two fingers bandaged up. I could still play, but it had to be mostly bar chords. That accident pretty much finished any guitar prospects I might have had.

If you'd have been at school with me, you may well have thought I was a cocky little shit. Certainly the older boys did and it caused me a lot of grief. If I saw someone picking a fight with my brother Tom, for example, even though he could look afer himseld I'd run over and try to stand up for him. "Get off my brother" I'd shout, which always embarrased him because, of course, I was his little brother.

Unfortunately, I got hit plenty. There were some rough times back then. At times it was ridiculous and, to be totally honest with you, I still carry a lot of anger about those years with me now. There were some dark days.

The thing was, I suppose I had a bit of a name for myself. I was well known and popular with the girls from all different parts of the town. It was just kids playing at relationships, but the guys from the same area as these girls didn't like it at all. As a result, I got bullied quite a bit by the older, tougher guys. I'm a little reluctant to call it bullying, it was and it wasn't. It started off with verbal abuse, but soon escalated to actual physical violence. I recall walking home from one carnival with a split lip and getting hit at a school disco. One time I was walking along the street when three boys came across to me and - BAM! BAM! BAM! - they all punched me for no reason.

I've had too many black eyes, although luckily I never got a broken nose, even though plenty tried to give me one. The west coast of Ireland is full of very tough people. I don't mean bullies, I mean peple who have had a hard, difficult life. So these sort of fights were commonplace and, to be honest, unless you were put in hospital, it wasn't a big deal.

It got worse, though. One day I was at home and the doorbell rang. I got up, opened the door and BAM, this guys standing there just punched me in the face. My mum was horrified and called the police, but nothing came of it.

It eventually got to the stage where I couldn't go into town, particularly on a weekend, because I knew there were a handful of guys - young men, really, by this stage - who were after me.

At this point, I never hit back. I thought that if I hit them back, I was going to have ten of them on my doorstep the next night. And I would have, no doubt about it.

It's improved enormously now, but like many towns, Sligo was rough in many areas when I was growing up and I couldn't go to most places without some bother. It affected me massively for some time and I begged my mum to send me to music boarding school, because I just wanted to get out of town so badly. My eldest brother Gavin had told me about these schools where they organized rock bands and all that, and they sounded great, but the main reason I wanted to go to boarding school was to get out of Sligo. Of course there was no way my parents could afford that, so I had to live with the situation on the streets. I started lifting weights and got quite good quite quickly - not to compete with these people, but just to give myself some confidence. 

Then one day, when I'd reached 16, I hit back.

I was with my cousin Gillian that day, just walking around town down by the supermarket. She used to introduce me to a few of the birds she knew and it was normally great craic. But not that time.

A few days before, I'd been at a Sligo Rovers football match and some kid had come up to me and said, "Watch out, so-and-so is after you 'cos he heard you called his mum a whore". He was talking about the local hard knock. I just knew this little shit would later say to that same hard knock, "I saw Kian Egan at the football match and he called your mother a whore".

Anyway, we were in the arcade and I noticed this hard knock and five of his mates across the way. They were all staring at me.

"Gillian, let's go. Come on."

"Why?"

"That's yer man who is after me."

"Why don't you just go up to him and say something?" Gillian didn't stand for no messing.

"No, no, come on, let's just go."

I grabbed her arm and we walked out of the arcade, but I could sense immediately that they were following us. By the time we'd walked down the street and round the corner, they'd caught up with us.

I was shitting myself.

"Egan! Egan! Did you call my mother a whore?"

"No, I did not. I don't even know who you are, I've never seen you before in my life." Then I said, "My mum is waiting for me to go and pick some shoes."

No good.

"Meet me in the car park in 15 minutes. We'll sort this out," he said.

This was ridiculous.

"Look, if you want to hit me, do it now, I don't want to wait 15 minutes, just do it now."

I'm not gonna pretend - I was absolutely shitting my pants. I was terrified.

He took a swing and I reacted, finally. I blocked him and then hit back... hard. I just laid into him and really let loose. It was three years of frustation coming out. He'd picked on me on the wrong day.

But I wasn't out of the woods yet. Word spread that I would hit back and some of these idiots saw that as a challenge. So when I got a little older, going to nightclubs and getting well pissed was always a bit risky. I often went out with my friend Graham, who would later join me at the start of the Westlife tale, and he was a hard lad, very capable of looking after himself. He had a bit of a reputation because he was from a slightly rougher part of town. If I was with him, people would leave me alone - he used to say, "If you hit him, I'll hit you!" However, if I went out alone or without Graham, it could get very nasty. Many times I would arrive at a club, spot a few faces in the crowd and just to a U-turn and leave.

Sometimes, however, confrontation was unavoidable, but even then I tried my best not to hit back unless I absolutely had to. Generally, I would let someone hit me three times before striking back. I figured if they hit me more than three times, I had to do something to defend myseld. I would always say, "I don't want to fight you, let's leave it," but sometimes I was in a corner.

Since I'm being very open here, I must say that I was never going to move onto the next level: physically abusing people. I didn't want to punch anybody, I was never a fighter, I only ever hit someone because I had no choice, you know, I was defending myself. Just sitting talking about the shit I let myself go through with these guys is annoying, it makes me angry. Kids shouldn't have to deal with all that.

I know I have the benefit of hindsight now, but I think those difficult times made me a much stronger person today. I think they taught me a hell of a lot about life at a young age and helped me to be the person I am.

Since Westlife has become successful, one or two of these guys have come up to me in Sligo, apologized for their behaviour and offered to buy me a pint. I haven't taken the pints, but it's interesting to see the change.

I am being brutally honest with you when I say that I did sometimes turn on those who were smaller than me. I never hit anyone, but I did call people names. It made me feel better, albeit momentarily, I'm afraid to say. I was stuck in the middle between the older, tougher boys who would kick the living daylights out of you and the quieter guys, often from the country, who came into school. It was a strange cruel pecking order. One day we pushed a kid into the shower with his brand new tracksuit and trainers on. His name was Mark Feehily.

Our Story - Prologue

"So, Westlife, what do you think of Brazil?"

We were sitting on the top of a shaking tour bus, being interviewed by a well-known DJ in Rio de Janeiro, live on radio.

Around the tour bus were 3,000 Westlife fans, all screaming and chanting.

Back home, we'd already seen our first seven singles go straight in at number 1, a feat no band before us had ever achieved. We'd sold millions of albums around the world and gone from being unknowns in an aspiring boy band from Ireland to the front of every pop magazine in the world in just over a year.

Westlife was a phenomenon, without a doubt.

We'd been due at that Rio radio station, but there'd been so many fans waiting for us outside that we were unable to get anywhere near and our personal safety would have been at risk - had we tried to get off the bus we'd have been pulled apart.

As we'd pulled around the corner, the screaming crowd had surrounded the vehicle in a heartbeat and started banging on the sides, rocking the bus, chanting and screaming. It was mental. Several of us actually pushed our backs and shoulders up against the glass because we thought the windows were going to cave in.

We were loving it.

We got our cameras and handycams out and were filming the fans as they were filming us. It was great.

The security men made us climb up through one of the bus sky-lights onto the roof and do the interview there.

There seemed only one thing we could say in reply to the DJ's question: "We love Brazil!"

The screaming was so loud we thought our eardrums were going to burst.

It is a long way home to the gentle pace of rural Ireland, Sligo and suburban Dublin from Rio de Janeiro, but the journey to the roof of that bus - and beyond - would see a lot more twists and turns than any of us could ever have imagined. Here's how we did it.

Our Story - Acknowledgements

We dedicate this book to our parents.

To our manager and friend, Louis Walsh.

Would be impossible to thank everyone who has been in our lives over the past ten years, but to all who have been there and supported us - thank you!

A special thank you to Marianne Gunn O'Connor, Martin Roach, Natalie Jerome and everyone at HarperCollins.