Boyzlife: the kind of music even your parents complain isn’t strange enough

Two natural disasters are coming together to form one unholy calamity. What would we call a collision of epidemic and typhoon? An epiphoon? A tydemic?

No, that's not right. It doesn't make sense to compare the apparent amalgamation of Boyzone and Westlife with something that levels cities. For a start the groups were, from what I can gather, composed of endlessly decent fellows. Only a monster would view Keith Duffy as the equivalent of a forest fire.

Second, rather than being Vengaboyishly malign, the groups' music was utterly innocuous. Flying without Wings was never likely to annihilate a vulnerable suspension bridge.

Third, unlike epidemics and typhoons, Boyzone and Westlife are, to those outside the fan huddle, essentially the same continuous entity. More than a few smug journalists would, when writing a snarky column on the twin phenomenon, need to constantly consult Wikipedia to establish which chiselled chin belonged to which unthreatening huddle.

Something is definitely happening, as RTÉ has reported. We already know that Keith Duffy from (er . . . tap, tap, tap, return) Boyzone and Brian McFadden from (er . . . tap, tap, tap, return) Westlife have folded themselves into a project called Boyzlife.

Discussing the project, McFadden confirmed that discussions had taken place about a more complete union. “We all had a chat, the lads. We said it would be amazing,” he said. “We all get on so well, so you never know. We would have so much fun on tour.”

How will that work? It will be like trying to mix oil with a bit more oil.

Rock snobs

The word “supergroup” has been dragged out in more than one report on the rumour. Nothing could be more carefully calculated to generate fury in rock snobs.

In 1966 the guitarist Eric Clapton, late of The Yardbirds, the drummer Ginger Baker, formerly of The Graham Bond Organisation, and the bassist Jack Bruce, collaborator with Alexis Korner, joined forces to found the agreeably deafening Cream. Rolling Stone minted the term "supergroup".

Over the following decade the word attached itself to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Humble Pie, Bad Company and any party of players willing to entertain Clapton for a spell. It was associated with hard-working professionals who could “play their instruments”. The bands favoured gatefold sleeves. They cared little for singles. Your best friend’s older brother was into them.

Obviously, it’s always worth irritating the sort of rock bores who find “pop music” silly and inconsequential. The very fact that some Emerson, Lake & Palmer fan is fuming over the description of Westzone as a supergroup is reason enough to describe the proposed band in those terms.

For all that, we can’t avoid the conclusion that the Westlife-Boyzone axis did signal some sort of nadir in pop music.

For three decades young people had savoured their parents’ revulsion at the pounding sounds emanating from the children’s bedrooms. The noise was one thing. The state of these people was something else altogether. “Is that a man or a woman?” “Why is wearing he sunglasses indoors?” “They’re all on drugs, you know.”

The rise of the boy band in the mid-1990s triggered a strange reversal in this relationship. For the first time since 1963 (or so) the prevailing tendency caused parents to complain that the music wasn't strange enough. There had been drab phenomena such as Donny Osmond and David Cassidy before, but they were rapidly ousted by the bootboy bubblegum of the Bay City Rollers. This just went on and on.

The manufacturers of Boyzone and Westlife looked back to that glum half-decade – after Elvis entered the army and before The Beatles broke – when the charts were ruled by polished pretty boys singing other people’s ballads. (Take That showed the way, but they, at least, had a songwriter of occasional brilliance in Gary Barlow.)

Like the contemporaneous Titanic, Boyzone was a product that could be sold across several demographics. Many kids liked them. So did quite a few grandmothers.

Oh well. No pop music is worth liking unless it annoys an older person somewhere. It seems wrong, however, that, when it comes to Zonelife, we gits find ourselves annoyed about not finding them nearly annoying enough. Does that make Lifeboy the ultimate hyperpunks? Almost certainly not.