Ronan Keating: 'My heart's broken'

Each time he watches a trailer for the new Disney film, for instance, it reminds him how much Stephen was looking forward to it, how they had talked only a few weeks ago about going to a screening together. And each time he sends a text message to the other three remaining members of Boyzone, he sees Stephen's name because he cannot bring himself to erase the number from his phone. When he finds something funny, he feels acutely the lack of Stephen's laughter in the room. "I'd belly-laugh all day with Steo," he says, in his first interview since Gately' death. "Just these random, silly jokes that he and I would get and no one else would find funny."

In the weeks before Gately died both of them had been reading Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, and it bothers Keating that his friend never got to the last page. "He didn't get to finish the book. He had 100 pages left. I got quite emotional when I finished the book because I thought." He lets the sentence hang and looks out of the window at the murky drizzle of a dank November evening."Little things," he says, turning back to look at me, his mouth set in a crinkled line. "It's funny how these things affect you."

Keating is 32 but his face has the dulled, weatherbeaten look of a much older man.He has grown a beard in recent months, as if to disguise the boyishness of his face, deliberately roughening up the blond hair and blue eyes that always made him seem so young in publicity photographs and album covers. "I just feel worn out," he says. "I haven't slept. My brain doesn't work. My heart's broken. You just feel crushed. I've had good days and bad days. Mentally I'm absolutely exhausted."

What are the bad days like? "Horrible, you can't breathe, you feel like your chest is collapsing, the walls are coming in on top of you. Anxiety I think is what they call it."

Nonetheless, he has forced himself back to work and has just flown into London from Australia where he was promoting his new album, Winter Songs, and where his solo tour kicks off in January. This morning Keating performed one of the tracks on breakfast television. We meet in a plush Mayfair hotel suite in the early evening, by which time he is sipping a cup of Starbucks coffee, struggling to keep his eyes open but still unfailingly polite and professional.

‘Not running away'

Was he ever tempted not to return to work so quickly, to retreat for a while and be with his family his wife, Yvonne, a former model, and their three children, Jack, 10, Missy, eight and Ali, four? "Yeah," he says with disarming frankness. "But I guess I'm not one for running away. I did a bit of running away when my mam passed away. I didn't go back to work, I started drinking quite a lot and I know how damaging that can be."

Was he worried about something like that happening again? "Yeah. I wasn't going to let that overpower me. I wasn't going to let anything control me. I was going to control it I'm talking about drink. I'm all right so far."

Through the course of our hour-long conversation, every time the subject veers away from Gately he brings it back, without quite realising he is doing so. It must be strange, I say, having to answer such intimate questions from a journalist he has only just met. "No," he says, "it's kind of like therapy almost, talking about it."

Maybe it is simply that he is used to living out his life in the public gaze. Keating was just 16 when he joined Boyzone after turning up to open auditions in his home city of Dublin. He and his fellow band members Gately, Shane Lynch, Mikey Graham and Keith Duffy spent 10 months travelling around Ireland in a van, playing gigs in pubs where "the guys wanted to beat the crap out of us, the girls wanted to get up and hug us, sometimes you'd get paid, sometimes you wouldn't."

Polygram signed them in 1994 and in the same year their cover version of the Osmonds's Love Me For A Reason reached No 2 in the charts.

Gately, who had always been open about his homosexuality in private, came out publicly in 1999. "It was the bravest thing I've ever seen anyone do," says Keating. "He thought the fans would turn their back on him and the band, so you can imagine the pressure." As it happened, the group's popularity was undented: they went on to sell over 20 million records.

The band split in 2000 and for seven years the five of them drifted apart to pursue their own interests: Gately appeared in several West End musicals while Keating launched a successful solo career.

Boyzone reformed two years ago and were working on a new album when Gately went on holiday to Mallorca with his civil partner, Andrew Cowles, at the beginning of October. "I've still got the last text he sent me on that Friday night," says Keating, reciting it from memory: ‘"Got the new songs. Love them pal. Really excited about the new album. Love you straw balls' that's what he called me. And I sent him back a stupid text and then he went out that night and then he was gone."

Most horrendous

Keating was in Chicago when he got the call. He was due to run the Chicago marathon for charity the following day and was in a restaurant, having dinner with his sister, when his mobile rang. "I bawled my eyes out. Screamed down the phone: ‘What are you saying?' I couldn't take it in. When the guy on the phone said ‘Stephen passed away' I said ‘Stephen who?' because I thought he was talking about someone else. I just didn't think it would be Steo. I ran out of the restaurant, my sister ran after me with my coat [saying] ‘What's wrong, what's wrong?' I told her. And then I had to call the three guys. Bloody hell, what a call. Horrendous. The most horrendous hour of my life. Horrific."

He wells up but then stops himself. Keating's way of coping in the immediate aftermath was to throw himself into the organisation of the funeral back in Dublin. Going to the undertakers to pick a casket was: "the hardest thing I've ever had to do. I'll never forget it. My legs were weak, collapsing, I had to grab the wall as I went into the room. It was like a showroom with coffins in it, you know? I couldn't make head nor tail of it."

As a lifelong Catholic, has his faith been shaken by Gately's premature death? "I've had some funny nights recently," Keating admits. "But when I saw Steo's remains I felt that the spirit had definitely left him because my friend was no longer there."

"I've had moments where I've questioned. I didn't understand. I don't understand. I'm angry. I'm upset. My friend's gone." Later he adds: "Stephen's with me, he's protecting us, I speak to him before I sing, before I go on stage. He's with me."

Overwhelming

Thousands of mourners lined the streets for the funeral, held in the North Strand area of Dublin where Gately's parents still live. Several high-profile names attended, including the Boyzone manager Louis Walsh, and occasionally it seemed as though the crowds could not decide whether it was primarily a memorial service or a celebrity event. When Keating got out of the car outside the funeral home, several bystanders started to clap. "None of us knew how to react to that. We didn't know what to do. I just looked at a spot on the ground and kept walking because I couldn't fathom it. We all just didn't know what to do. It was overwhelming.

"When times are at their worst, it's amazing what people will do for you. I've seen, this last couple of weeks, the genuine support from the public it has been incredible and from the media, bar one. It's been amazing."

That "bar one" refers to the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir, who, the day before Gately's funeral on 17 October, wrote a now notorious piece headlined "Why there was nothing ‘natural' about Stephen Gately's death". In the column, Moir appeared to insinuate that Gately's lifestyle had contributed to the "sleazy" circumstances around his death. A week later Moir published another column saying that she regretted "any affront caused".

Keating has never before spoken publicly about what happened. Today it is clearly on his mind. "None of us read the article because we were told ‘You wouldn't want to read it' so we purposely didn't, we ignored it," he says. "But obviously it was unavoidable to hear what comments were being made, and I think it's disgusting. I'm dumbfounded. It's bizarre.

"But anyway, again, I wouldn't dwell on it," he shakes his head. "Incredibly insensitive."

For Keating, who always treated Gately like his younger brother, despite the fact that Gately was a year older, Moir's comments must have been especially hurtful. "We always felt we had to look after him," he says. "He never grew up. He was always that young lad. That is one of the hardest things he had so much living left to do, so much to give. Always happy. Always glowing. Healthy. He was healthy in every sense. There's just no sense to it. No sense to it at all."

The senselessness must provide both consolation and torment. There is nothing Keating could have done to prevent Gately's death or to understand it. But, at the same time, there was no reason for it, none of the comfort that comes with knowing that someone has lived a long, rounded life with enough time to do the things they once dreamed of.

"It's important now that we carry on," says Keating, quietly. He takes a final sip of his coffee. Outside, the skies have darkened and the street lamps are lit. One more day is over. And perhaps, for the moment, that is all he can do: to take a breath and just carry on.

On losing loved ones

It is not, despite his relative youth, Ronan Keating's first experience of death: he lost his mother Marie to breast cancer 11 years ago but not even that seismic grief could prepare him for what happened last month. "I've never before thought about going to get help with counsellors. For the first time ever I think I should. When I lost my mum it was the hardest thing at the time I'd ever known in my life but because she was sick for two years and we were told three months before she died that she had three months [left], subconsciously you build a wall, your defence mechanism goes up and you prepare yourself for that. Whereas with Steo, there was nothing, just this wall of devastation, shock. I don' t think it has hit any of us properly. There's times when you feel like you can't breathe, you know, when you're panicking and I'm not like that. I've always been on a level."

Did you know?

Ronan Keating merits a mention in the Guinness Book of Records for being the only artist ever to have 30 consecutive top 10 singles in the UK chart.