“That’s what I think of your fucking music industry!” Brian Harvey bellows at the camera. The former lead singer of East 17 is standing in a suburban alleyway, and he’s just smashed an oversized plaque commemorating the boy band’s record sales to pieces. His protest was uploaded to YouTube in 2015, after years spent struggling with legal, financial and mental health problems – problems, he says, that the people who made money off of him don’t care about.
The footage is shown at the very beginning of Boybands Forever, a new three-part BBC documentary about the golden age of boy bands in the 1990s and early 2000s. East 17, Take That, Five, 911, Westlife – they sold tens of millions of albums and singles, and were objects of crazed adoration for tens of millions of fans. The documentary was executive produced by Louis Theroux and his wife Nancy Strang, who run a production company, Mindhouse, together. A respectable haul of boyband members, including Take That’s Robbie Williams and Westlife’s Brian McFadden, appear as talking heads to reflect on the highs and lows of the period. “They’re in middle age, a lot of them,” says Strang, “Looking back at their younger selves, they’ve had time to process what they’ve been through.”
Boybands Forever is awash with pop culture lore. Five passed on recording “…Baby One More Time” before Britney Spears turned it into an era-defining hit. Westlife were made to sit on stools while they performed because they weren’t good enough at dancing. Beyoncé (allegedly) got her famous booty-shaking dance move from choreography for 911’s “Bodyshakin’”. We see Simon Cowell, before his days as a cold-blooded talent show judge, signing Five to RCA in his first major music deal. And we see how boy bands were just as crucial to 90s lad culture as Britpop was: Robbie Williams appearing on stage with Oasis at Glastonbury in 1995; East 17 bedecked in furs, chains and snapbacks.
All the interviews were recorded at the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024, but Boybands Forever is being released just weeks after the death of Liam Payne, whose experience of overwhelming fame as part of One Direction seems to have contributed to his own personal demons. “You can’t help but look at it now through that lens,” says Strang. “Some of the things are going to resonate and have more poignancy.”
A lot of the documentary looks at how, in the words of Five’s Ritchie Neville, being in a boy band could feel like a “prison sentence”. Members were worked to the point of exhaustion and pursued relentlessly by the tabloids, then in their muckraking heyday. And all too often, the teams around the bands didn’t have their best interests at heart. Speaking in an interview with GQ, Westlife’s McFadden says the band was once touring the US when a grandparent of one of them – he doesn’t want to say who – died. That grandson was pressured into not going back for the funeral. “We had that fear in us that we could never cancel a gig, or cancel an interview, or cancel anything – everything was so important,” he says. Obviously, for everybody who was making money off us, it was clearly very important. I look back now and think, Jesus, how stupid were we?”
Part of the problem was that they were operating in a mostly pre-digital world. Promoting records didn’t mean Zoom calls, but getting on a plane to Australia to sit down in radio stations and TV studios. “I always wonder what it would have been like for Westlife if we lived in that digital age – how much easier would our life have been,” says McFadden, who quit Westlife in 2004. “Maybe I’d still be in the band.” This was coupled with a view among record executives that boy bands had limited shelf life – most of them only lasted a few years before breaking up or losing members – so needed to be exploited relentlessly while they were popular.
But though bands’ schedules “were so much more punishing” in the analogue era, says Chris Herbert, who founded and managed Five, there were upsides compared to today. The tabloids might have been fearsome – they got Brian Harvey sacked from East 17 in 1997, after he said ecstasy was harmless – but they couldn’t follow you into your house, like social media can. Now, says Herbert, “you are switched on 24/7 as a public figure”, and under scrutiny from the public as well as the media. Professional paparazzi is “one thing”, says McFadden, but modern stars “live in a world where every single person is a paparazzi walking around with their own camera”. On balance, he says, “I’ll take the way it was.”
It’s not just boy band members who pop up in the documentary, but managers: Louis Walsh, the Irish empresario who masterminded Westlife, now with thin, unkempt hair; Simon Cowell himself, cradling a coffee cup and hiding behind big, blacked-out sunglasses. Neither are particularly apologetic about the stress they put their charges under. If you don’t want the pressure that comes with fame, Cowell says in the documentary, “then be an accountant”.
“I hated Louis [Walsh] when I was in Westlife,” says McFadden – no surprise, given Walsh had a habit of blowing out his cheeks when he looked at him to mock his weight. “He was so brazen. And we were only kids, really.” The pair have become friends now they no longer work together, but it hasn’t got McFadden any closer to understanding why Walsh was so harsh on them. “I still think he’s got a screw loose.”
Herbert, Five’s manager, agrees with the critiques – up to a point. “There are some things I know now which we should have applied,” he says, though he points out that he was only around 25 himself at the time, and that mental health wasn’t talked about then as it is now. Part of the problem, he says, is that Five were formed as a deliberately laddy band, so when their stress came out in their behaviour – “fighting, arguing, rudeness and arrogance towards media” – it was seen as normal. “Over time, you become caricatures of yourselves, don’t you? That’s kind of what happened with that band.”
He also says that boy band management wasn’t uniformly uncaring. In Boybands Forever, Five’s Scott Robinson recounts being persuaded not to quit the band during a particularly relentless spell. But Herbert says he and the rest of the band’s team “were always looking to see whether we could juggle the schedule and get him back home, just for his own mental health. Was it enough? Definitely not. But we tried.” And Herbert has sympathy for the Cowell and Walsh view. “Each time an album cycle ends, you have a choice whether to take the big check and get back on the ride again or not,” he says. “No one strong-armed the boys into anything. They made those decisions.”
Five’s Sean Conlon tells a story in the documentary about being backstage at the Brit Awards in 2000, and crouching silently, almost shell-shocked, outside someone’s dressing room. Robbie Williams then came up to him, to ask if he was alright. Williams, who records his own contributions from the tranquility of his Swiss chalet, wrapped in a cardigan, knew what Conlon was going through. And after Liam Payne’s death, he wrote a long message on Instagram in which he said that “Liam’s trials and tribulations were very similar to mine”.
But after the four other members of Take That reunited in 2006, to wild success, Williams wanted back in. He joined the band in 2010 for the Progress album and tour, both of which were huge, too. One of the striking things from the documentary is how most of the singers prefer the reunions to the original runs. The pressure is dialled down. They’re more in control. Herbert no longer manages Five, partly because they’re only a live act now and don’t really need him, but when he speaks to the three remaining members – Neville, Robinson and Conlon – “they’re having the time of their lives”.
That camaraderie, formed under extreme pressure, takes the bands through the good and the bad. McFadden is frank about this. “Five or six different people have managed me, since the beginning of Westlife,” he says, “and you go through the phase [where] you think they’re like your father or mother.” But once the business case for the relationship ends, “they don’t give a shit about you. Never hear from them again.” For boy band members, he says, “the only people you should trust and give yourself up to is each other”.
