They were the Olestra of pop, slipping through its body undigested to leave an oily mess. They had very little impact on the rest of it. But there’s a corollary to this: if Westlife come and go so quickly, it’s a stretch to suggest that they themselves were a ruinous force in pop music. There’s barely a sign of crossover to a wider singles-buying audience. Westlife are the ultimate fanbase band: almost every one of their many, many hits is a one-week wonder and gets out of the Top 10 sharpish. Even so, the degree of success says very little good about how the charts were working by 1999, as a finely staged ballet of release date scheduling and fanbase priming. Westlife are a group like any other, with fans they speak to and mean a lot to, and deserve to be considered as more than just a statistical anomaly. This idea – Westlife as a sign of pop catastrophe – is a mix of the true and the false and the condescending. The scale of Westlife’s success, more than almost any other factor, was enough to convince even sympathisers that the charts were broken, that pop was broken, a damaged transmitter no longer capable of processing the cultural signals around it. One of these things is not like the others, apparently. Look at the list of the most successful Number One acts – Elvis, the Beatles, Westlife. Implicit in the jokes is a feeling that Westlife are different. There have been times when I’ve wondered myself what on earth I would say, given that from a standing start I could barely remember two of them.
Westlife have always been this blog’s nemesis, the doom encoded in its premise: however entertaining the song or era I’m writing about is, at some point I will have to deal with fourteen Westlife number ones.