It may come as a shock to a young few, but One Direction is not the beginning and end of boy bands. In fact, in the ’90s through to the ’00s, boy bands ruled the world.
You had your Boyz II Men, New Kids on the Block, Backstreet Boys and N*Sync on one side, and you had your Westlife, Blue and 5ive on the other. It was a glorious era of catchy choruses, overly emotive dance moves and questionable hair styles.
Sadly, we can’t go back in time. But with reunion concerts happening left and right, we can at least relive it. On Thursday night at the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Stadium, fans of Irish boy band Boyzone will have the chance to travel through the band’s greatest hits.
It all began in 1993 when Louis Walsh put out an ad for auditions on his quest to make an Irish Take That. Out of 300 people who were keen, Keith Duffy, Ronan Keating, Shane Lynch, Richard Rock and Stephen Gately were chosen. When Rock left the fivesome, Mikey Graham was called back in, and so Boyzone was born.
Over the next decade, the band would see their songs — and their covers of classics — climb up to the top of the Irish and UK charts. On their first album, Said and Done, Key to My Life was a stand-out single, hitting No 3 in the UK. But it was Words, a cover of the Bee Gees from the band’s second album, A Different Beat, that would go on to become one of their most recognisable hits.
In 1998, with their third album, Where We Belong, they continued their reign, releasing hit single All That I Need and a wistful cover of Tracy Chapman’s Baby, Can I Hold You. No Matter What, a song originally written by Andrew LLoyd Webber for the 1996 musical Whistle Down the Wind, became the boys’ best selling single with over four million copies sold worldwide.
A year later, their cover of When the Going Gets Tough for charity organisation Comic Relief hit No 1 in the UK. But in the same year, Keating decided to test out the solo waters with his single, When You Say Nothing At All, and everything changed.
Turbulence behind closed doors forced the boys to go on hiatus in the early noughties. But it wasn’t the end. They rejoined forces just before the untimely death of Gately in 2009, returning with the 2010 album Brother and the 2013 album BZ20, which celebrated two decades of Boyzone.
The question is: do they have another decade in them? As far as we can see, the boys — now men — are still fully in their zone.
