On Monday night, two daily newspapers took calls from someone claiming that Ronan Keating had died in a car crash on his way from Dublin Airport to the Hot Press Uncovered concert. Thankfully for the future of Irish pop, the reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. Sitting in the penthouse suite in a Dublin hotel, Keating is very much alive, although looking a tad weary after a day spent fielding questions from journalists who were allocated a non-negotiable 20 minutes apiece.
"You have to understand this is not Ronan Keating, a member of Boyzone," his manager Louis Walsh had explained when more interview time was requested. "This is Ronan Keating - Solo Superstar". So all day the SS Ronan Keating has been talking about how he loves his son Jack and his wife Yvonne, how nervous he is about embarking on a solo career and how anything less than Number One is never good enough. While he is upstairs being interviewed, Yvonne is chasing a permanently grinning 14-month-old Jack around the hotel lobby. She was with Ronan when they heard about the rumours of his demise. Asked whether she would agree to be interviewed, she smiles politely, retrieves her son and says she would prefer to "leave that to the Boss".
The Boss finished his first solo album two weeks ago in LA after "a long slog". It took eight months to make and he says he is very proud of it. From now on he will be "doing promotion, working around the world on magazines, on TV . . . that is what I have been doing for six years with Boyzone, to be honest, that's just what you do".
Being interviewed seems less of a chore to him, more a vital part of his working life. "Hi, I'm Ronan," he says proffering a hand. I'm Ronan, as though the blond-haired young man wearing that smile and those trousers (snakeskin, natch) could possibly be anyone else.
His tone is friendly but professional, laid-back but studiously polite. He may as well have a sign over his head saying: "OK so I'm massively successful, irritatingly young [he is just 23], and loaded but I still have manners. See?".
And it may not be very rock 'n' roll, but he does. As the man from the Irish Mirror newspaper said tapping on his laptop in the hotel lobby after his 20 minutes with the singer, talking to Keating is like interviewing your next door neighbour. "Yes he is quite different to other pop stars, I like him," he muses. Not everyone feels the same. Admittedly, there have been times over the past couple of years when compared to him, Posh Spice could have been said to keep a low profile. There he was on Michael Parkinson's sofa, here he was with Yvonne at a fancy-dress party. And remember when the only popstar in the world called Ronan was the Grand Marshal of the St Patrick's Day Parade? Last year he was even appointed to the Millennium Committee.
"I'd like to have committed myself more," he says of his involvement in the dire Dublin New Year's Eve celebrations. The song he was supposed to have recorded for the event never materialised, but he hopes to have it ready by Christmas.
Another moot point is his much parodied singing voice. The English comedian Frank Skinner did a passable impression of him on his show last week. The mid-Atlantic, nasal style, not to mention his unique gift for turning the S sound into shhhh ("shoree, is all that wordsh can shay" being a particular classic) gets right up some people's noses. It is as though, to compensate for the fact that he can't quite compete with George Michael in the vocal department, he has cultivated his own brand of crooning. Some say his voice is "distinctive", but others are far less charitable.
Finally, it is the Keating catchphrases that really get Ronanphobes going. Maybe at first it was quaint to hear an Irish guy with a strong Dublin accent saying Thank God and Please God and God Bless every other sentence, but enough is enough, they plead. And don't get them started on his fondness for Fair Play. For the record, the Messiah count during this interview came in at a spiritually restrained one and there was only a solitary Fair Play. Thank God.
The above quibbles only endear him further to his fans. Maybe he seems to turn up everywhere, but when he does he could never be accused of giving off that "doncha just wish you were me" vibe exuded by many of his contemporaries. And maybe the American accent is a bit much when he comes from Dublin, not downtown Manhattan, but he is hardly the first non-North American to embrace that particular singing style. Plus, unlike most Boyblanders, we know Keating when we hear him. There is absolutely no mistaking that distinctive voice.
What about all this God Bless malarkey? Is he religious? "I am, but I don't go to church on Sundays," he says. Asked whether he sees himself more as a Christian than anything else he says, "Yeah, I'm a Catholic". "I'm not this type of preacher, but God is important to me, a guide helps me, you need faith . . . Listen, whatever people have faith in, if that works for them fair play. My faith is in God. If it's a little statue of Buddha or whatever works for you, brilliant," he says.
Older people who like Keating - and there are others besides hordes of teenage girls - find it hard to put the attraction into words. "Maybe I'm not normal, but he touches me somewhere, you just know he is being himself," says one adult fan. It is the same quality Walsh glimpsed when he first held auditions for Boyzone: "He walked in and sang Father and Son, I knew he had `It'," says Walsh.
`He is just special, he always was", is how his mother Marie, who died of cancer in 1998, put it to this reporter, back when Boyzone was just starting to make it big. Marie was worried about him. Ronan was such a sensitive type, she was afraid about what would happen to her son in the big bad world of pop. She spoke about all her children in glowing terms, but seemed fiercely protective of him. In fact, she said she would be happier, less concerned for his future, if he had a job sweeping the streets.
"Yeah, she was very worried about me all the time, anything I did, any time I was on a plane . . . she was a terrible worrier and I'm a bit of a worrier and I think that's because of herself," he says. He was very sensitive when he started out in the band "but luckily very quickly I . . . I was clever enough to take the things in that I needed to take in and the things I didn't, I left aside," he says.
There are more bad elements to the music industry than good, he believes. It's something he would be conscious of as co-manager of the latest Irish pop success, Westlife. "I hate seeing people getting a raw deal and artists not being in control of what they are doing, it happens all the time". When he returns to the subject of his mother, the professional veneer momentarily disappears. He says she brought him up to treat people with respect and that's what he teaches his son Jack. It is hard, he says, that she is not around.
"It eats away at me, I can't . . . I can't . . . it's very hard if I think about it too much. I get upset about it, now that I'm reaping the rewards, I know it's only material things, but I would have loved to have given it all to her," he says.
He seems, well, amazingly normal for someone who has lived this celebrity life since the age of 17. Genuine. Down-to-Earth. He knows it could have been different, that he could have got carried away with the trappings of celebrity. "The one thing I have always tried to get across is what you see is what you get. This is me, like it or lump it," he says. Does it bother him that some people don't like it or think he is too wholesome to be true?
"No, no it always happens - they would be giving out if I was throwing TVs out the hotel window; if they don't like me they don't like me, it's not because of what I am," he says.
"That's the problem with everything today, it's all about what Britney looks like or what Oasis are doing or what trouble they are causing or what drugs they are taking. It's not about that, man. It's about the music they are making. I'm passionate about my music," he says. "All that is unbelievable, and it is why the class of music isn't as good as it should be. Some of the music in the charts is really crap." And he really doesn't seem to care if some people would reply to this last statement with the words Pot, Kettle and Black.
The former sales assistant in a Dublin shoe shop, feels "very, very lucky" and is proud of what Boyzone have done. They may not have written the majority of their hit singles but "we were involved in them and we sang on them and we gave music to the people and people came up and said `thanks very much, someone sang that at my wedding'. Or `thanks very much, me and my boyfriend got together on this song'. And that's special, that's what it is about, you know, not about how cool the artist is or what he is doing". Or how much Gucci he may be wearing? "I like Gucci, but I don't flaunt the fact that I like it, I don't talk about it all the time," he responds.
Fans of pure pop should enjoy Keating's solo debut. The fact that he worked with some of the most prolific song-writers and producers in the US is evident in every soaring string arrangement and every Baby, Baby lyric. As unselfconsciously middle-of-the road as this recording is, anyone betting Keating is going to vanish like the solo Gary Barlow from Take That should hold onto their money, at least until the uptempo summer single Life is a Rollercoaster Ride is released in early July. The album will follow later that month.
"It's pop music, but it's just a little edgier," he says. "I've got live instruments on the album, all live instruments." Dubbed "The Talented One" from the beginning of Boyzone, Keating says he wrote 15 songs and that three or four of his will end up on the album. "I have melodies in my head, that is always going on . . . but it would be more the lyric that I work on," he says.
Does the album mark a transition from boy to man? "For six years I've been telling people I'm not a kid. Now I'm 23. I have a wife and a child. I don't need to tell people I'm not a kid. I'm going to have some fun now," he says. Boyzone are not finished, he says, despite the fact they are all doing their own thing. "We will get back and do stuff together next summer," he says.
"I live a very normal life regardless of what I do on the road," he says. There are the dogs to walk, afternoons sitting in the garden of his house in Kildare with Jack and Yvonne and the car collection. American classics and Range Rovers. "I have a passion for cars," he says. "I'm glad to have a couple a quid in my pocket to be able to enjoy life."
Even if Keating's solo career flopped, you get the impression that he could easily move into some other public role and be equally successful. He speaks of himself as an ambassador for the country; "Especially when I am away, we act as ambassadors - everyone of us, musicians and sports people. I just want to return the favour in some way," he says.
He rubbishes past speculation that he may put himself forward for President at some stage in the future: "Ask me in 30 years when I am of the age of trying to be President," he says.
So for the moment it is all about the music and "being the biggest", conquering the world. "I'm only starting, I've a long way to go," he says. "Unless I was the best at what I did, I was never really interested in doing it." After six years in the spotlight, it seems as though Ronan Keating is just getting warmed up. And like it or lump it, he has no intention of fading away.