Boyzone singer: “We sold sex to young girls full of hormones”
Anyone who walks through the present with open eyes is sometimes disturbed by the 1990s. Floral leggings and baggy jeans, tie-dye and Buffalo boots, pleated trousers, bare midriffs, even Eurodance: it's all back. If new boy bands were also cast now, the revival of perhaps the most stylistically tasteless decade since decades began to be assigned tastes, it would be complete.
South Korean slapstick bands from BTS to Blackpink may have plastered half the globe with plastinated K-pop. However, what musically captured the hearts of teenagers 30 years ago is too much even for the fashion- and sound-obsessed Generation Z. A three-part Sky documentary with the hybrid title "Boyzone" reveals why. After all, that's not just a title for post-reunification pop culture as a whole; it's also the name of one of its most successful products.
Keith Duffy (l-r), Stephen Gately, Ronan Keating, Shane Lynch, and Mikey Graham of the band Boyzone pose in Frankfurt am Main (archive photo from April 7, 1996). Stephen Gately, singer of the Irish pop band Boyzone, died in Mallorca in 2009 at the age of just 33.
Source: dpa
Formed in late 1993, the quintet has sold an incredible 25 million records six years after their second and (for now) final breakup, racking up top hits like other boy bands do with drug excesses. Sky writer Sophie Oliver suggests in 135 well-researched, star-studded minutes that Boytone was largely spared from these excesses. Otherwise, however, the classic script of a meteoric rise and fall in the tabloid spotlight was meticulously followed.
Some 60 years after American girl groups like the Andrew Sisters had profitably exploited the same-sex principle of personnel and perfected it in the Motown era, the inexperienced but ambitious music manager Louis Walsh invited Dublin boys to audition in the capital's working-class district. "I wanted personality, fun, charm," he recalls of the concept for an Irish version of Take That, "but they also had to look good and attract girls' attention."
Not to forget the media. Just hours after a grainy video of 16-year-old Ronan Keating on the microphone for his audition, he's already dancing with Stephen Gately, Shane Lynch, Mikey Graham, and Keith Duffy on the next late-night show. A moment of embarrassment with consequences. Besides a slightly botched club concert of the same quality, it was the last public appearance in which Louis Walsh didn't perfectly choreograph his creation.
Featuring a wealth of spectacular archive footage and virtually everyone involved from back then, Sky doesn't just explain the coolly calculated global success of a coolly calculated dance group. Using Boyzone as an example, the eponymous portrait delves knee-deep into the pop-cultural turbo-capitalism of the early internet years. Between MTV and iPod, the WWW and CD, there was (once again) a gold rush atmosphere at the time.
While female ensembles, up until today's uniform K-pop sexiness, were usually cast as uniformly preppy, lascivious, and sometimes even black (Spice Girls confirm this rule), in the early 1990s, four, usually five, differently handsome, consistently heterosexual, snow-white poster boys were on the strings of powerful men like the infamous Lou Pearlman—depressingly rehashed in the Netflix documentary "The Dirty Business of Pop." Following the 1980s precursors New Kids on the Block, in 1990, Take That followed, followed by East 17, followed by Backstreet Boys, followed by Boyzone, followed by *NSYNC, followed by Westlife. And with every new billion in sales for every new band, the communicative principle is recapitulated.
Louis Walsh, Irish music manager
Love stories for headlines, gossip for favorable reports, insider knowledge for editorial PR: "I always had a good relationship with the tabloids and fed them," says music manager Louis Walsh, the mocking face of a cynical industry, and adds bluntly that these were often lies. But that was still better than truths that were never meant to see the light of day. Take Stephen Gately's relationship with Eloy de Jong of Caught in the Act, for example, which the British tabloid "Sun" exposed in 1999. "It's show business," says the gossip reporter in charge, Rav Singh, 26 years later, shrugging off the involuntary exposure of years of hide-and-seek, "I don't feel uncomfortable with that at all.
Sophie Oliver leaves open whether the untimely death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gatelys in 2009 had anything to do with this. But it's scenes like these that make viewers clench their fists in disgust – though they quickly loosen them again. After all, boy band members of yesteryear were the first influencers of the digital age, both subjects and objects of lucrative exchanges. The complete display of private aspects, whether for or against the will of the protagonists, was not always voluntary, but nevertheless consensual.
As credibly as the renegade Mikey Graham claims after a three-week vacation in six years of self-promotion madness, "We were physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted," he diligently rode the tiger of boyzone mania around the world. And to achieve this, he underwent the same makeover as all boy groups. Their style is metrosexuality. A hybrid of heterosexuality and homosexuality, with which David Beckham, first of all, made the traditional masculinity of those days suitable for mass consumption under the tailor-made guise of cultivated diversity.
In matching outfits: David and Victoria Beckham 1999.
Source: Picture Alliance / Photoshot
While other pop cultures of the time presented themselves as infantile (Eurodance), feral (grunge), ruthless (hip-hop), or depraved (techno), boy bands appealed to daughters, mothers, grandmothers, and, without advertising it, a few sons as well, in a brand-conscious, self-disciplined, well-adjusted, and sterile way. It's part of a visible catharsis that three of the four surviving Boyzone men, as they plunged into the insignificance of soap operas (Keith Duffy), car racing (Shane Lynch), or aborted solo careers (Keating), were tattooed to the brim.
Perhaps this was penance for their contribution to a profession that, due to its lack of diversity, was binary racist, contributed massively to the commercialization of consumer society, and perhaps most controversially: was allowed to target minors as potential partners. "We sold sex to young girls full of hormones," says Keith Duffy, speaking for every boy band, including the German Bed & Breakfast with ProSieben host Daniel Aminati. In this light, even buffalo boots and floral leggings look more beautiful than any casting revival. May the Boyzone rest in peace.
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