Flying without wings with Westlife

Unless one is a fan, a Westlife concert is as interesting as the catalogue of fallen angels in Milton. The experience can be numbing owing to, in the one case, sheer vacuity and in the other, sheer grandeur. (Which is which, I leave readers to decide.)

With much noise but minimal stage effects and even less stage property, the sold-out concert by the Irish boy band at the Araneta Coliseum last Tuesday had almost the starkness of a play by Irish writer Samuel Beckett but, alas, none of its significance. Lacking theme and script, the show was simply a recital of hit songs, admittedly numerous enough to pass a pleasant hour but also airy enough to cause minor flatulence. Consider these monosyllabic rhymes: I wanna know/ Who ever told you I was letting go/ [Of] the only joy that I have ever known.

But that is to speak as a critic dripping with cruelty, who even in Beckett is worse than the cretin spouting inanities. Concerts are staged for fans – for who else would shell out P2,800 to watch five boys sing and dance? – so one should perhaps "judge as lover not as connoisseur."

Going by the collective shrieks and gasps in the coliseum, one infers that the fans were multiple satisfied lovers. The boys, after all, offered all that a boy band can give: the boys sang, smiled, waved, sashayed, and (shudder) danced – their ineptitude in the last exposing their affinity with another Irish boy band. While there was no crotch-grabbing, the boys changed costumes onstage, exposing a bit of chest, a bit of limb, plenty of love – a mini striptease act designed to prick pubescent imaginations without catching the ire of the parents among the audience. The loudest screams came when the boys, in boiler suits, sang Uptown Girl, while cavorting with someone who looks like Ara Mina and a supernumerary, a big man (or was it a woman?) in drag, who bounced Nicky Byrne on his/her back.

At one point, the program even turned "interactive." (What is a boy band concert – or a love affair – without some reciprocity, i.e., audience participation?) The crowd sang along in many numbers and threw teddy bears, flowers, and underwear at the boys. Before the concert ended, the group led the audience in singing Happy Birthday to Mark Feehily. (The devoted Westlife fan knows, however, that the greeting is belated. Feehily had turned 21 the day before.)

Overall, then, the boys’ performance, if a little clumsy in places – boys, after all, are known to fumble, in love and elsewhere – was heartfelt, which fact is often enough to please the love-struck. Their only shortcoming was the omission of Fool Again from the program. But then how many times can such pleasures be savored on one night?

However, whether one is fan or critic, lover or connoisseur, one has to concede that the boys sing well. Westlife performed with a live band. At one point, they sang to Kian Egan’s guitar. That was a welcome change from past performances where they sang to pre-recorded music, raising suspicions – later confirmed – of miming. (During their gig at a club called G.A.Y., a.k.a. Good as You, in London, the CD they were lip synching to started skipping just as they were nearing the climax of their number.)

For a group notorious for vocal short-circuiting, Westlife made an impression last Tuesday. They showed they have the pretty voices to match the pretty faces. At one point, they sang a cappella (More Than Words) and segued to a respectable rendition of The Temptations (My Girl). All of the boys, even the elfin Byrne, sang. As far as boy bands go, the singing, though not impeccable, was certainly notches above videoke standards.

Above all it was Feehily, whose flair for flamboyant vocal improvisation gives Mariah Carey and Celine Dion a run for the money, who proved the diva of the group. In the codas of such numbers as Seasons in the Sun, Swear It Again and My Love, he overpowered even lead singer Shane Filan, who sang with remarkable evenness of tone.

The concert ended with what is apparently the Westlife anthem Flying Without Wings. It was perhaps a fitting finale to a show that gave the thousands in the coliseum what Million called "beatitude past utterance." (The cynic would put it in more prurient terms.) None of them left the coliseum feeling like a fallen angel, even though the place had resembled Pandemonium more than Paradise and the following morning (a Wednesday) would find them back in the classroom, the office, or the kitchen (or in the case of my companion, in bed with a fever). A friend of mine, who read Milton in Graduate School at the UP, even sent me a text after the show: "It was heavenly."

Ultimately, there lies the justification for the existence of Westlife and other similar things that critics find, not without good reason, jejune. For the fan, they are anodynes, temporary relief from the "adamantine chains and penal fires" of life, a convenient means to regain momentarily some semblance of a paradise lost – or "season in the sun," to quote the boys.

Let the caustic critic read Samuel Beckett and despair. A little shallowness never hurt anyone. In this case, it even made some people fly.