Westlife
The Twenty Tour, London o2
In April 1999 five boys from Ireland burst on to the music scene with their debut single, Swear It Again.
The song became the biggest-selling debut single in history, and would be the first of 14 UK number ones for the group. A record beaten only by Elvis and The Beatles.
The band – now a foursome after original member Brian McFadden quit in 2004 – have returned to the stage following a seven year hiatus.
Like fellow 90s/00s popstars Take That and Steps, they haven’t just returned with their greatest hits, but a number of new songs to take on stage.
The Twenty Tour opens with Hello My Love, their comeback single that was penned for them by Ed Sheeran, who is, it turns out, not only the biggest popstar in the world right now, but also a die hard Westlife fan.
Opening with a new song is bold, but it’s credit to the enduring Westlife formula that fans lap up their latest hit like it was Swear It Again.
It’s impossible not to sing alone during their 17 song show – intend it or not, their hits were so big you’d have to have been hauled up in the Ecuadorian Embassy for the past two decades to not know the words.
Few artists could fill two hours with solid, sing-a-long hits. Westlife could easily fill three.
The kings of the stage stool churn out banger after banger: My Love, Uptown Girl, What Makes a Man, Flying Without Wings and World of Our Own.
And while singing in the aisles of the o2 is well and good, it’s always preferable for the back-from-abyss stars to still be able to sing themselves.
Unlike the Spice Girls reunion tour – where you can tell the handful of lyrics they sing live, because it’s the only ones out of tune – Westlife nail note after note.
Markus Feehily’s playful riffing on Flying Without Wings is nothing short of extraordinary – it’s no wonder he’s been tipped to replace Adam Lambert on tour with Queen.
The staging is solid, boy band stuff: synchronised dance moves, slick outfits, explosions of fire that nobody needs but everybody loves. And it all ends with 16,500 people covered in white confetti. Because why not?
The show isn’t ground-breaking – you don’t get the artistic acrobatics of a Take That tour or big money staging of many US popstars.
But Westlife know what their loyal base of fans want: ballads, barstools and banter. The Twenty Tour gives you that in bucket loads.
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Westlife’s Croke Park stadium performance, the final show on the UK and Ireland leg of their Tour, will be broadcast live in cinemas on 6 July. More information is available at cinemalive.com.