One giant leap from Boyz to men

BEING THERE:Eight years after they last performed together, Boyzone are back, playing sold-out arenas to thousands of nostalgic fans, and marvelling at how much they've grown up, writes Róisín Ingle.

BACKSTAGE with Boyzone on their comeback tour. Pink-cheeked fans gather for the "meet-and-greet", a pre-gig ritual with boybands the world over.

Yvonne (43) and Karen (42) have brought their children to the NEC in Birmingham to see the band they followed when the children were just babies and Love Me For A Reasonprovided a welcome distraction from nappies and late nights. "They are brilliant," says Yvonne. "Our friends have been teasing us about the concert but we've been getting jealous text messages from them all day saying they wish they were going too".

"They look lovely and they've got nice tunes," explains Karen in a tone that suggests loving Boyzone needs no explanation. "They are wholesome and you never get the sense something unpleasant is going to happen at their concerts." You feel it's only polite to warn the women that apparently the boys, or most of them, take their tops off this time around. "Good," they say in unison. And then the band arrive.

Five Dublin men, Mikey Graham, Keith Duffy, Stephen Gately, Shane Lynch and Ronan Keating, are in the building. Aged between 36 (Mikey) and 31 (Ronan) they have been working out for six months solid and laying off the batterburgers in favour of nuts and dried fruit. They are lean, not-at-all-mean, pop machines. Moving swiftly down the line of teenagers, thirtysomethings and youngsters, they smile, sign autographs and pose for photos just like the old days.

For the most part this is a typical meet-and-greet, but it's eight years now since the band last performed together and they have noticed some changes. "Back in the day, the fans weren't old enough to drink, now they are coming in half gargled," says Keith, sitting in the dressing room astride a piece of exercise equipment and doing occasional sit-ups. "The smell of drink off them!"

The meet-and-greets were a speciality of their manager, Louis Walsh. "Sometimes," says Ronan, checking flights back home to Dublin on his wafer-thin laptop. "There would be more people at the meet-and-greet then there would be at the venue." Keith marvels at the fact that when Westlife played Croke Park recently, one of the band decided they didn't want to do a meet-and-greet. "Back in the day we'd never have been allowed to say no," he says. "I said to Louis, 'I can't believe you are letting them not do it', but I suppose us being his first band, he had to keep us in line".

BOYZONE, THE POSTERS declare, are "Back Again, No Matter What". No matter that some of them were furious with Ronan leaving the band eight years ago to pursue a lucrative solo career. "There were resentments and it was difficult at the time," is how Keith puts it. No matter that Mikey was left emotionally and physically drained by his boyband career.

"I was glad to be out of it, to be honest," he says. No matter that Shane was "lost" during his boyband years and took to drinking, dodgy clothes and tattoos as a way to cope. "I was in a downward spiral for a long time," he says. No matter that Ronan fell out with Louis, who compared him to a younger Daniel O'Donnell. "We are friends now," says Ronan. "But it will never be the same."

No matter either that Stephen had to keep his sexuality a secret to fit in with the Boyzone image. Stephen plays the experience down but Mikey, the philosopher of the band who draws the line at taking his top off on stage, says it was representative of every band member's struggle for identity at the time.

"It was horrific for him to be in the closet all that time," he says. "We helped him as much as we were able to . . . everyone had their own internal struggles going on trying to establish their own identity. People might just think this was a boyband, and to many degrees yes, it is, but there is a lot more to this band than people think. I am so proud and so intrigued to be part of it, to listen to how these men speak about themselves and see how they conduct themselves, they've become men out of this experience and it's a pleasure to know them all."

Phew. With gallons of water under the bridge - what comes up for all of them is the sense of having once been puppets and now being in control - it's a minor miracle that they are together, selling out the largest venues across the UK, looking ahead to a summer of outdoor venues that can squeeze up to 40,000 punters through the gates.

Ronan, the ideas man and undisputed leader of the band, is delighted.

"It was a gamble," he says. "None of us knew if it would work. But we are ramming them in. We put £3 million (€3.8m) of our advance ticket sales into making it the best show we've ever done and it has worked."

"Initially, the point was we could make a lot of money," says Keith. "We will make money obviously, but we also want to come out of this with our egos intact. The critics have all written positive stuff which is great because there is more at stake - my son is 12 and I didn't want him to get bullied because his dad is in a crap band." Between them, the band members have seven children, with one on the way for Shane.

"I am just loving this whole experience," says Stephen, tucking in to a plate of steak in the backstage canteen. For the past two-and-a-half years, as well as starring in musicals, he has been writing a children's book called The Tree of Seasons. It's about "dragons and magic and three children on a mission to save the world. My dream is that it will be made into a film - my agent is reading it at the moment," he says. The other lads tease him about his relentless energy on stage.

"I'm like the Duracell bunny, I am just buzzing, doing what I love doing more than anything and I can't keep the smile off my face," he says.

Shane is the laid-back one, the one with the most tattoos, the one least likely to break into a sprint on the way to the stage where the boys huddle in a prayer before the gig, something they never did in the past.

"For me it's nice to be trusted again," he says of his relationship with the others. "I got lost in a world of ignorance and immaturity back in the Boyzone days. I just got very self-centred. It feels good to know that nobody else is controlling the situation this time, just us five.

"We've been on an interesting journey that's hard for anyone else to understand. We are more comfortable in our skin these days. Each of us is stepping out on stage just being ourselves and it was never like that before."

IN THE COACH on the way to the NEC in Birmingham, Callum McColl - son of folk legend Ewan, and one of the key backing musicians on the comeback tour - explained why the prospect of playing with Boyzone didn't exactly fill him with excitement. "I wasn't looking forward to it. I was never the biggest Boyzone fan," he says. "But I've enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. It is what it is. They are all about entertainment. Honest, good old-fashioned entertainment and I've been enjoying myself on that level. It's meant to be a circus".

And what a circus. From the moment Boyzone emerge onto the stage after a rocket launcher style countdown, light sabres ahoy, it's clear every single penny of that £3m has gone on crowd-pleasing tricks. It's like this. You know you shouldn't enjoy it but you find that Callum McColl is dead right - it's pure entertainment, the cheesiest of cheesy pop fun, a night crammed with poptastic highlights: the boyz doing a crotch-grabbing Michael Jackson medley; Keith, who still can't dance, stealing the second verse of Ronan's Rollercoaster; a pitch perfect and oddly moving, rendition of Father and Son; the band in skimpy sportsgear running on treadmills for When The Going Gets Tough.

Ronan breaking hearts with When You Say Nothing At All. The five of them standing there, in white suits, with ridiculous grins on their faces, grins that say "look at us, getting away with it again'.

THAT SAID, THEY could definitely do without the dancing girls strutting about in their underwear. These women are supposed to represent the fact that the boys are all grown up, strictly a manzone these days, outsexing Take That with each dancer's spread-eagled step and each carefully choreographed clinch.

"It was the wives' idea," explained Ronan earlier. "We are men now, we have to show that we have grown up". Perhaps. But there are more gussets on display here than in an Ann Summers shop and the jury is out on whether the mostly female audience - I spotted two men among the thousands of heaving Bacardi Breezer-fuelled Brummie women and their daughters - really appreciate the relentless pelvic thrusts.

Still, the whole thing is over far too soon and, walking outside the venue with Ronan, a wall of high-pitched screaming hits you and he's off charming hundreds of fans who have queued up outside the venue for one last glimpse. Back again, no matter what.

THE NEXT MORNING outside the Boyzone hotel, local girls Natalie (21) and Sue (24) are waiting. Superfans, they have followed the band from the age of eight when Sue first laid eyes on Ronan and Natalie's sister chose Take That as her favourite band, which left her with Boyzone. "I had no choice really, but I loved them from the start," she says.

"We were too young to go out and see them on our own the first time around so we are making up for it now," says Sue. It has to be said that Natalie, all smudgy black eyeliner and torn fishnets, looks more like an Emo than a Boyzone fan.

"My boyfriend is not happy about me coming here and my friends are embarrassed, but this is a huge part of my youth and I am not going to apologise for wanting to relive it," she says. And it's not just her.

"My mother came with me to the gig last night and when she came out she said, 'oh, I feel 39 again'. She is 50, she loves Ronan to bits. I like Shane ever since he got more rocky with the tattoos - I looked at him a completely different way," she grins.

The friends were looking through their memorabilia recently, all the Boyzone-related school projects, the photos, the posters - "we spent a lot of money on them," says Sue. Tonight will be her fifth show on the Boyzone tour. "Going to see your favourite band is like a drug: you see them, it's like a fix, and then as soon as it's over you just want to see them again. It's like that with Boyzone for me," she says.

The young women sit on the cold steps, waiting. For autographs, smiles, handshakes and a brief taste of what it felt like to be a 10-year-old in love with five faces peering out from a poster on your bedroom wall.

"I still feel 10 anyway," says Sue. Nothing is set in stone but the band are talking to a record label about another greatest hits album before Christmas, maybe a tour of Australia, Europe or Asia, maybe even more dates across Ireland and the UK.

Natalie, though, is hoping this comeback is a one-off, a never-to-be-repeated thrill. "It would save me a lot of money and probably my relationship," she says.

Boyzone play the RDS in Dublin on June 28