Westlife
3Arena, Dublin
★★★★☆
The resurrection of Westlife has been nothing less than a pop miracle. When the quartet announced they were breaking up, in 2012, they already appeared to have one foot in obscurity. Lacking Take That’s laddish chutzpah or One Direction’s cheeky Gen Z charm, the consensus was that they put the “bland” in boy band. With their biggest smash, You Raise Me Up, they had brought a bulldozing piousness to the charts, and for that they would be remembered. Otherwise, their race seemed run.
A decade on, the re-formed group – now all in their 40s, with the greying stubble to prove it – have been through an astounding rehabilitation. Ed Sheeran came out as a fan and wrote their hit Hello My Love. In August they headlined Wembley Stadium, in London, for the first time, in a sold-out gig. Now they’re back in Dublin for three more sold-out concerts – albeit down a man, with Mark Feehily recovering from pneumonia.
His absence does not detain his bandmates. From the outset Nicky Byrne, Kian Egan and Shane Filan – playing their spiritual home, the former Point Depot, for the 72nd occasion – whip their audience into a state of seasonal glee. Their voices intertwine on their frothy take on Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl while Swear It Again is a full-fat power ballad that lights up the room like a Christmas tree doused in napalm.
They can certainly carry a tune. But these middle-aged Irishmen are also – and this is entirely as it should be – fashion disasters. They arrive in black-and-white patterned suits that make them look like a three-part pantomime cow, and later they put on bulky jackets with vast lapels that suggest they’ve come straight from their First Communions.
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Westlife were notorious in their early career for singalongs so syrupy you could feel your gums rotting as you listened. All these years later, their interpretations of What About Now and Mandy have mellowed impressively. They’re still too hokey to be described as timeless, but, compared with much late-1990s pop, it’s striking how well they hold up.
As this is Christmas, it’s appropriate that the gig features lots of ham. Egan brings out his kids and has the room sing happy birthday to his son Koa, who has just turned 11. Towards the end the three singers put on fur-trimmed Stetsons and welcome a fan up on stage to wave to the crowd. (Overwrought and delighted, she sobs.)
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They then conjure the Santa within by chucking band merchandise into the crowd – while two randomly selected punters win tickets for the next night and a meet-and-greet with the band. (The spotlight alights on a duo of astonished middle-aged blokes.)
When not flinging T-shirts into the front row, Westlife hopscotch enthusiastically through a mercilessly edited version of their repertoire. Of their calamitous Rat Pack phase there is not a whiff, and their 2021 Wild Dreams album is acknowledged only with the show’s opener, Starlight. There’s also an Abba medley, which reminds us that, if the Swedish icons have programmed four dead-eyed pop effigies to belt out their classics in London, in Dublin we have a trio of creaking Kens serenading their inner Barbies.
The encore finds them in those Friesian-pattern jackets once again, negotiating Hello My Love, the Sheeran collaboration. There’s been lots of treacle to go with the tinsel. But as they bop about in their cow suits, and close the evening with You Raise Me Up, it’s undeniable that, 25 years in, Ireland’s eternal pop princes are still mooving on up.
