The Boyz in the Band

Perhaps as penance for how thoroughly I disdained them in their primes, I am now regularly overwhelmed with empathy for the boybanders.

Last year, I watched Boybands Forever on the BBC, and have recently watched the three-part series on Boyzone (who were mainly absent from the BBC show, presumably because they were saving themselves up for their own show).

I am - like, it turns out, cinema-going audiences around the world - not interested in Robbie Williams. I would watch a film about Jason of Orange, or Sean Conlon, or Tony Mortimer.

And, yes, I watched three hours about Boyzone, which didn't do anything to change my decades-old opinion that they're really the worst band of all time, but that is no reason not to love them.

There is real poignancy and pathos in each individual's tale, even that of Ronan Keating, the golden boy, who, though ambitious and driven, seems by and large a nice, normal man, who is pleased about what he did well, and regretful about what he did badly.

I think the story of Mikey Graham hit me hardest. A fairly ordinary looking fellow, it always seemed a bit odd that Mikey was in the band. He was the last to join, having not made the original six. When two of the original line-up were ejected by Louis Walsh, he called up Mikey, who was a good singer, who played guitar and piano, who wrote his own songs, and naturally saw being in a band as a vehicle for some of those talents.

When a producer in London declaimed that "the blond one (Keating) can't sing", Mikey and Stephen Gately sang their first single in Ireland, which was a Number 3 hit. However, somewhere between that and the released of their first UK single 'Love Me for a Reason', a combination of Walsh's nous and Keating's ambition led to him replacing Graham on co-lead, and the rest was boyband history.

You can't say it was the wrong decision. Keating has a voice and a look. People do say "strangled cat" but it had its appeal. Nothing in particular by Boyzone was good, most of it was bad, but a couple of early-2000s Ronan Keating singles, the ones written by Gregg Alexander, were good. He knew how to hold a camera and a song.

Stephen Gately was the other lead vocalist, and, as fine and influential man as he was, his vocal could err and waver significantly. I remember on their first ever TOTP appearance of Love Me for a Reason thinking his thin, flat vocal would condemn them to immediate also-rans. But, hey, six Number 1s and 25 million sales later, what did I know?

As for Shane Lynch and Keith Duffy, they were the two strapping lads whose vocals were so unrequired they weren't even invited to the recording studio for the first single. You could tell from the documentary that the whole journey was often a battle for self-respect and meaning for them. I imagine that is the case for many boyband members. I am adored, but for what?

So, here they are now, the archetypal boyband. Stephen Gately died - though many people were to blame for many aspects of how he was treated, no one was to blame for his death. It was just a sad thing that happened.

The others are fractured - by and large united only in loathing for their manager, the proudly poisonous Louis Walsh. Even there, it's clear that Walsh was, in his way, good at his job. That's how boybands without secret reservoirs of talents work. I think the particularly sad thing is that there maybe was a talented one (Mikey Graham) if that talent had been nurtured, but it was completely sidelined (to the extent that Graham says Walsh, and some of the others, hardly spoke to him) and so you're left with this completely empty, meaningless success ...