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G.A.Y - Astoria - London
Some people complain that
westlife are everywhere.. You can turn on your TV at any time day or night and
chances are they'll be there. The band have one of the fiercest schedules i've
ever seen - recently on 'the late late show' they admitted doing 48 hour
promotional stints at a time - jetsetting from one country to another. Are they
Robots or are they really five teenage lads from Ireland?
Obviously their promotional
work is paying off - Currently they have 8 number one singles under their belt
and single number 9 is released this week as a result they are involved in a
huge promotion push. That brings us to their concert in London's G.A.Y club.
GAY (Good As You) is a
weekly club at the Astoria, it is one of the biggest gay clubs in the world,
comfortably holding 4,000 to 5,000 people under one roof. It attracts huge acts
every weekend, recent guests include 'the spice girls', 'boyzone', 'all saints'
'steps', 'ash', 'five' and many more. The pink pound is so important to artists
that they are queing up to play the famous venue.
The club started off
with the usual modern pop anthems, steps, spice girls, et all... There was no
sign of westlife appearing until after 1.00, just before the band graced the
stage, promoter 'Jeremy Joseph' came out to launch 'the westlife for christmas
number one campaign' - with a matching t-shirt, which was also available at the
club reception.
The band came on stage to
screams that probably popped up on the richter scale. The band as usual were
decked out in designed clothes, apart from Bryan - who wore a top with 'the life
boys' written on it, a dig at the spice girls no doubt.
Bryan was in high spirits
on the night and to be honest seemed to be the only member of the band who was
enjoying himself, Shane also made an effort to interact with the crowd but sadly
Kian, Mark and Nicky werent too into it.
The first song of the night
was 'swear it again' the first and probably best westlife single, surprisingly
the set consisted mostly of tracks from the new album, 'My Love', 'Seasons in
the sun' and new single 'what makes a man' were mixed with two other tracks from
the 'coast to coast' album.
The audience lapped up the
performance, altho I get the impression that if the band had gone on stage and
stood still for the night the crowd would have still loved them. The band
however (again apart from Bryan) appeared wooden, there was a minor complaint
that there was no stools but they made do with some boxes on stage.
Most of the songs were
played to perfection, probably too close to perfection for comfort because half
way thru 'Flying without Wings' disaster happened... the CD that they had been
miming to began to skip and stopped. Now I dont know if the band had been miming
the whole concert or just a section of that song but it looked terrible - Shane,
after realising what had happened started to sing the chorus of the song for
real, without backing music but it didnt work out. Altho' they probably would
have gotten away with it, if one of them (not sure who) hadnt tried to convince
us that they werent working off a cd "we really are singing live" ...
we were told that it was right on a high note that the cd kicked in. Anyways the
gay audience is not a fickle one and no one minded.. and the show went on.
Jeremy Joseph came back on stage to apologise and introduce the last song of the
night 'My Girl' - accept the band didnt have the My Girl cd with them - so
played the first song of the night once more 'swear it again'.
I found it weird a band
with eight number ones and they went and played one of the songs twice, surely
they carry a spare CD around with them, surely someone in the audience had a
copy of the westlife album with them? At the end of the tune, the band again
apologised, gave a reminder to go and buy the christmas single. It wasnt a bad
gig, the parts that went right were brilliant, a little bit more interaction
with the crowd would have been welcome from Kian and Mark who from the screams
were definitly the two most popular members (maybe thats why they kept their
mouths shut)
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