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Sunday Independent Life Magazine - November 7th 2004 - Thanks to Debbie! Please do not use this article without asking for permission!
Two O'Clock in the morning. The rain is falling softly on Dublin, Ronan Keating is driving down O'Connell Street when he stops the car, a shiny top-of-the-range Ford Sierra. For a brief moment, he is lost in a nocturnal reverie, in boyhood reminiscence. He points at a shop down Henry Street. No one is around to see the former Boyzone star relive a part of his past. It's like that scene from Once upon a Time in America where Robert De Niro's character revisits the emotional terrain of his Youth. "I used to work there when I was a kid." Ronan says of his time in Korky's from 1992 to 1994. "Selling shoes." In four hours, a private jet will take the former shoe salesman to Amsterdam and then on to Cologne, and finally Copenhagen, for various high-profile television shows. His wife Yvonne is fast asleep in the back seat. Back home in Malahide their two children, Missy and Jack, are sound asleep too. Ronan Keating, a baby-faced Ewan McGregor with Sting's hair, as Julie Burchill once described him, is more Zen than ever before. The recent tranquility, however, is hard-won. A tragicomic episode with ex-manager Louis Walsh threatened to destroy his peace of mind and possibly his career. He faced into the raging tempest of Louis telling his chums in the Irish media, "Of course I'm happy Ronan hasn't done well." Ronan Keating was suddenly Irelands bete noire. He never once, however, lost his focus or, more importantly, his self belief. In the end, after a mercifully brief dip, Ronan survived and game back bigger and stronger. There's no demonstrable reason now why Ronan can't be the biggest pop star to come out of this country ever, not least with the success of his new album, 10 Years of Hits. "I cannot believe I'm still here after 10 years," he says, "and I am happier now than ever. Even when certain people tried to knock me down, I got through it. I hope I can continue to make people happy with my music for another 10 years." "This is the fastest selling album of my career so far. I don't know figures worldwide just yet, but it's in the top 10 in most European countries and it's about to make a massive launch everywhere else, including finally launching in America, after a top 15 single there with LeAnn Rimes." he continues as Yvonne, behind us, dreams of her bed. The sleeping beauty in the back seat constitutes a departure from the standard pop-star appendage: Yvonne Keating is most certainly not arm-candy with suitably fake tan/breasts/smile and sincerity to bring to glammy first nights. Ronan's love for his wife is aroused not only by her beauty but by her emotional intelligence and feminine strength. He clearly adores her. That link was easy to identify, and a joy to observe up close and personal, two hours earlier at Shanahan's Restaurant on St. Stephen's Green. They elaborate on the mutual learning process that saw them bringing out things in each other. Ronan: "She made me tougher - which I needed." Yvonne: "He made me a bit softer." Ronan: "I used to get hurt regularly by people. If somebody said something about me, I used to get really upset. Yvonne has taught me to be a bit tougher with myself." Yvonne: "When I met Ro, he was so nice to everybody, and everything was lovely, and he didn't see bad in anything. When he met me I was the exact opposite. I saw the bad in everybody. I was sceptical - a little bit more wary of people than he was. Over the last seven years I think we have just actually met in the middle. I am certainly not as hard and he is not as soft. I think we have brought out things in each other." What Yvonne has done for him, Ronan says, is make him realise what life is really about. He looks at the world differently since meeting her. And he talks as only a father can about the first time he changed is son Jack's nappy and he "caught poo", as he describes it. "My kids are my world," he says "I would walk on hot coals - I would die for them. They make my life real." "I would give up everything in the morning," he continues, "I would walk away from all of this if it ever affected my family. That is god's honest truth. Fatherhood is the most rewarding thing I have ever been through in my life. To have kids is magical - poos and all!" He was at Yvonne's side when both his children were born and clearly dotes on them - without, he says, spoiling them. His own childhood wasn't particularly fraught either. Unless, of course, you count the first time he got drunk when he was 13. His mother and father had gone away and Ronan's older brother Gary wasted no time in inviting all his friends around from Dublin over to the house in Co. Meath. Anxious to fit in, young Ronan drank eight cans of Heineken, followed by as many shots of Tequila. Then he set about drinking straight Frangelico. He remembers with some horror: "That's a liqueur that you're supposed to mix with stuff. I started getting sick in the bed and I was dragged out to the doorstep with a quilt wrapped round me." He confirms that there is still a black spot where he christened the doorstep. "That turned me off liqueurs for life, I can tell you," he groans as he turns down the waitress's offer of a post-dinner liqueur. He remembers the good times the Keatings enjoyed when they went away to Killarney on family holidays. He can also remember hitting his father in the mouth with a golf club during a game of pitch-and-put at Gleneagles in Killarney. His dad was standing behind him showing him how to swing a club when the boy who was to become Ireland's biggest pop star walloped him over the eve. Mr Keating senior had to get six stitches. Mr Keating junior, meanwhile, had dropped the club and ran. the blood draining from his face as quickly as it was leaving his poor da's wound. Ronan scaled the fence and ran back to the modest B&B where the family were staying. "I cried my eyes out because i thought I was going to get murdered," he says. But it was the proprietress of the B&B, it transpired who'd have to restrain herself from killing the young Ronan on another occasion. One afternoon sitting in the conservatory, he leaned back too far on a chair and smashed a Chinese vase when he lost his balance. The owner appeared with a face like thunder. Ronan's mother briskly announced that they were just going to get something to eat and would be back in an hour. Suffice to say, they didn't return. "My mother was really peculiar about B&B's," Ronan recalls of Marie Keating, who died of breast cancer in 1998. "We would go on holidays somewhere. We would pull up outside and she would go in and check out the B&B and if there was a dog or cat she wouldn't stay. That was it." For Mrs Keating, Joe Dolan was also very much it. She used to want to go to Killarney, Ronan remembers, to hear Joe Dolan. "He always did the summers in Killarney and we would go there. I thought he was fantastic with his white suit and red scarf in his pocket - she sang with her hands in the air." To illustrate his point, he starts to sing. The other diners are rapt with awe. "More!" he intones. "And more and more and more and more and more!" The show over, he returns to his theme "What's that Barbra Streisand song?" he asks. ""Life was all so simple then.' We used to go horse-riding, or cycling bikes. Go round the Killarney lakes - on a rowing boat, not a motor boat," he recalls with a wry smile because he had just bought a big boat. "Me father would be bollixed out in the middle of the water and we would be going round in circles. They were the best memories. We had friends, and we had a really good family there. The sun was always shining. Everybody had a smile on their face. Life was simple and I guess that was just they way it was back then." Right now, Ronan has integrity. He won't be part of any future Boyzone reunion. You have to admire him for that; and for his world-straddling
success. It would take a failure of imagination to see Ronan merely as a nice pop singer of good pop songs. Between Boyzone and his solo career, he has sold over 30 million records with nine number ones in the UK alone. He isn't the meaningless remnant of a vanished boy-band pop age. He has a massive career. George Michael and Barry Gibb are personal friends who respect him and his talent. The anti-Keating hacks, sitting in front of the one-bar heater in Rathmines bedsit hating the young Irish superstar, should ponder on just how talented and successful this 27-year-old actually is. The Sunday Times 2003 rich list had Ronan at number seven in the top 10 of Irish millionaires aged 30 and under. His wealth was an estimated €8m.
"I bought a house for my dad," he says. He owns two houses, one in Portugal, and this one, where I am presently sipping herbal tea, in Malahide. Now worth, conservatively, in the region of €3.5m, the house is a sleek modern home that would not be out of place on the cover of Elle Decoration or Image Interiors. (You won't, however, find Yvonne and Ronan mugging it up in the pages of Hello! or OK! magazine. "They are very entertaining and a good read, but I just don't want to do them," he says.) Ronan describes the house's style as "minimalist with high ceilings". Yvonne prefers to call it "comfortable contemporary". Eventually they both settle on "a family home, most importantly". "The kitchen is near the kids' rooms," they explain. Ah yes, the kitchen. If you've ever visited chez Keating you'll know that Ronan and Yvonne spend a disproportionate amount of time in the white and chrome kitchen with its massive drawers, Poggenpohl cabinets and lots of Jamie Oliver books lying around the place. "I love to cook," says Ronan, flicking through the controls for the de rigueur plasma TV on the wall. "I love to cook all that stuff. My best dish is sweet and sour chicken." Yvonne is still amused by the earlier talk of house valuations. "Every time we bought a house, if the house was €1m, it was put down at €4m in the papers," she explains. "If we bought a house for €4m, it was put down at €12m. Then suddenly we had 'No money left!'" She roars with laughter. "I think I could turn around and say in the morning that if I had to give all this up," her husband says, "I would be comfortable. But the reason I do it is because of my love and my passion for music and for what I do." He was about 19 years of age when he started to earn some money. "I was a lucky fucker," he says. He bought a BMW and a nice Rolex watch for two grand. He bought his friends out drinking every night and paid for his parents to go on a sun holiday. "I sent them first-class on the plane," he says. His parents were renting a house in Swords. He paid £190,000 to buy them a place of their own. "I was happy to do it. I was enjoying my life - I was lucky, but I never took it for granted," he says offering me a Ballygowan from a fridge bigger than most people's front rooms. His is not a world entirely devoid of the baser energies. He can drink Jack Daniels until it comes out of his ears. His jokes possibly belie the clean image with which the village idiots in the media like to label him. '"This guy walks into a psychiatrist's office naked, wrapped in Cellophane," he says. "The doctor says, 'I can clearly see you're nuts..."' Then there was his comment when his BF Glin Donnelly tucked into a chocolate muffin when we accompanied him on a flight to Oslo last year: "Glin likes his muff," Ronan winked. I have no qualms about saying that I like Ronan Keating. He is a great guy. We were on a plane that almost crash-landed last December in
Germany. That night concentrated the nervous system and bonded us in a way that only two people who have faced their Maker together can understand. We have been in regular contact ever since. Drinks out. Dinners. Nights that turn into mornings. Afternoons that turn into evenings. Fractured bones in nightclubs. Last Christmas, I hooked him up with U2's publicist Lindsey Holmes to handle his press (I nonetheless had to struggle with her to get this interview). A few months ago, he brought me over to see the Elton John Ball at Elton John's house in Windsor. In a friendship formed in the trauma of a near-death experience, the man I have got to know is quite instinctive and almost childlike in his lack of cynicism. "There is this idea in Ireland that I am calculated," he explains, "that I am this person who has thought everything through. If only people knew me - I make it up as I go along. I am loving it, that's true. But they imagine that I am this brainy bastard that put Westlife together, and that I am calculated and that I know the business... I don't know my arse from my elbow, I just make records and get out there and do it. I hate people who think that about me because I am not like that in any way." Similarly, the display of affection between Yvonne and Ronan that night in Shanahan's was not just an Oscar-nominated act for this journalist. There is no denying Ronan’s drive. “I never liked losing, even when I was young,” he told Barbara Ellen in the Observer in 1998, when he was a precocious 21 years of age. “When I was young!” wrote Ellen in reply. It’s a telling Keating comment. Ronan draws the portrait of the artist as a young man by outlining first that he matured early because his brothers and sister all left home early. He became very independent. From the early days in Boyzone, he was the one who phoned the cabs and booked the flights if they were going to London. He would organize the wake-up calls and generally acted like a tour manager until they could afford one. “When we went and did all the nightclubs, I would pick up all the money. Keith would stand behind me because he was big like a bodyguard” he says. “I would pay everybody, or nearly everybody." One night during the early days of Boyzone, they were in the Russell Square Hotel in London, and had no money to pay the bill, which consisted of phone calls to Dublin and room-service food. They had thought Louis was going to pay it. In the end in a panic, they decided to throw their suitcases out the window. Keith and Shane waited down below on the pavement while Stephen and Ronan threw all the bags out before sneaking downstairs. “There was bank right in front of us and it looked like were doing a bank job, with all these big bags coming out the window in front of the bank” Ronan says. “Then Stephen and I scampered out of the lobby and ran to McDonalds at the end of Oxford Street and we hid downstairs in the toilets.” From this location, Ronan and Stephen heard a police siren and thought it was coming for them. “It was very, very funny” Ronan says now. In hindsight, the band’s first appearance on the Late Late Show was equally rib-tickling (ironically, Ronan and I are talking the night before he goes on the Late Late Show to promote his new LP). “It was horrendous!” he says. "When I look at it now, I cringe – but I also laugh. It was on again recently – one of those TV shows like What shouldn’t happen to celebrities. In fairness, Boyzone had been put together only the night before. I didn’t know any of the guys and we didn’t have a choreographer or anything. We were just told to dance. We made complete arseholes of ourselves. “God love Gay Byrne!”" the former shoe salesmen laughs at the memory, but the boots on the other foot now.
They are certainly close enough to withstand – and laugh of – various crude untruths about their rock solid relationship, in particular, the Brian Kennedy rumours that refuse to go away. “It’s like everything – the Chinese whispers that you get in Ireland’ Ronan says of the story that Yvonne caught him in flagrante with the Northern Irish singer. “It’s an urban myth. It doesn’t happen anywhere else – you don’t get it in the UK, for some reason”. “It is a small town syndrome where everybody knows somebody” laughs Yvonne now. But she wasn’t laughing perhaps quite so loudly when the vicious rumour surfaced in 1999. Even more ironically, that was the year Ronan and Yvonne’s first child, Jack was born. Ronan says that, at the time, he went back through all the routes it could possibly have emanated from and he found out who started the rumour. “It was some guy who didn’t like me,” he says. “Supposedly the rumour was that I was in bed with Brian Kennedy, and Yvonne came home, caught us got a baseball bat and smashed up my new Peugeot”. And do you own such a thing as a baseball bat? Yvonne: “We do!” (Hysterical laughter) Ronan: “It’s a Louisville slugger, and any fucker that starts a rumour I will hit them with it!” (more laughter). They knew the rumour was gaining momentum when a friend of theirs who runs a top Dublin car dealership received calls from journalists asking if he had had any of the Keating’s Peugeot’s back in for repair. Another rumour, I reminded them, was that Ronan was in a hotel room in London with Brian when a heavily pregnant Yvonne found out about his illicit whereabouts, flew over and broke down the door to catch the two of them. “She burst down the door with her belly!” the image has reduced to a puddle of laughter. “I am the most heterosexual man you will ever meet in your life,” he explains. “That is neither here nor there. But I actually didn’t care”. He adds that he was more worried and embarrassed for Brian, who is gay. The rumours meant he was forced to come out to his friends and deal with the consequences. “He is a very good friend of ours,“ Ronan says. “I was more hurt for him”. To finally put the rumour to the sword Ronan says he and Brian decided to appear on an addition of the Late Late Show which has as its theme rumours and the affects thereof. Ronan says now that he “felt fucking stupid – stupid. I sat in the middle with Chris De Burgh – who shagged the babysitter!” he laughs. “I couldn’t figure out what he was doing on the show. He was going: rumours are terrible’. I am sitting there thinking. ‘This is isn’t fair on Brian. I don’t give a fuck about being on the show I am here for Brian because people shouldn’t be talking about him like that." Yvonne: “I thinking Brian kind of came out on that show.” Ronan: “It was hilarious. I am a very happily married man with two kids and I shouldn’t have to explain myself on national television. It was ridiculous!” Yvonne: “We still go places with Brian and ….” Ronan: “……I cannot believe people. Why do some people think I am gay?” I cannot understand that!” Yvonne: “Do people think I know?” (Hysterical laughter) Ronan: “She is a lesbian!” (More hysterical laughter) Yvonne: Do people think he is bisexual?” (Even more hysterical laughter) He says it must be the Tom Cruise syndrome. People are convinced he is gay, despite the facts to the contrary, he explains. “Yvonne” he says, laughing like a broken drain once more, “You obviously just like the lifestyle, the dresses and the cars.” Ronan met Yvonne Connolly for the first time 1997 when he was a tender 10 years of age delivery minerals with his father as a summer job. There was, he recalls this “little blonde girl in the shop with braces and pony tails who worked behind the counter of her father’s shop in Straffon”. Eleven years later, he made that little girl with braces his wife. He says he believes in destiny (he once told the Guardian that he believed that “his mother gave him Yvonne”.) And in many ways Ronan Keating has fulfilled his destiny. He tells me the story of two of his two dad’s uncles who went to New York in 1912. Two more uncles were to follow on the Titanic but when their mother had a look at the ticket something happened, so the story goes. She suddenly saw the heart-stopping reflection of it in the mirror and thought it seemed to read ‘no Pope!’ an ardent Catholic, she ordered them to travel to Cobh where they took passage to Amerikay by different boat. Since leaving Louis, Ronan has steered the right course through ice berg strewn waters. His relationship with Captain Louis ended abruptly – some would say inevitably – when Ronan reacquainted Walsh with his P45 in July 2002. “The problem with Louis is that he didn’t manage me.“ He says now, “he got so involved with everything that was going on. But I don’t blame him; he probably needed more people around him to handle all the day to day stuff." “It’s started to feel like he didn’t care anymore, “he adds, “I realised that I had only one shot at this, while he had 4 or 5 bands. If he got one wrong, it wasn’t a big deal because he had 3 others. I had only one shot and I wanted to get it right. He can’t really be angry with me for that.” Terminating his manager’s employment was hardly a monstrous outrage, but it was enough to unleash Walsh’s anger, Ronan believes “I think initially he was a little angry because he had never been let down like that before – let’s use the word sacked, if that’s what you want to use.” Louis told me in an interview last Christmas that you sacked him. “I guess I did Ronan replies. “What else do you do when you let someone go?” Your theory is that he sacked himself. “Of course he did.” Ronan recalls phoning Louis on the opening night of his Australian tour in Sydney in August 2001. He was about to go on stage in front of 10,000 fans in a sold out arena when he rang his manager in Ireland. “I said; Louis, how are you?” and he goes, where are you? I said I’m opening tonight in Australia. And he said, ‘oh, are you?’ he didn’t know! That was the year I got rid of him. He didn’t know I was in Australia.” "That was a wake up call," Ronan says – the moment when he realised he needed to rethink his relationship with his manager. “We talked,” Ronan says, but clearly to no avail. However, I want to get Louis side of the story too. “That’s fair enough,” he says later, when I tell him what Ronan has said about their parting of the ways. “But I won’t be going to see him when he plays Vicar Street in December – it’s too tiny a venue for me. Why isn’t he playing the Point?” Ronan is very forgiving. “I love Louis”, he says. “I miss Louis. I miss his company. I miss being able to pick up the phone and talk to Louis. We were very close. I think we were closer than anybody he worked with before. We were very good friends and I would speak to Louis all the time. We would talk about music constantly and we were very good friends, he was a good friend of Yvonne’s too. “ With the red win loosening his tongue Ronan remembers some of the good times they shared – the morning in 1999, for example, when he and Louis met Twink in the bar of John Fitzpatrick’s hotel in New York. She gives the pair of them a big kiss and runs out the door to put her luggage into the back of a cab before returning to excitedly tell them a characteristically spellbinding Twin yarn that simply can’t wait. Tail finished Twink bids them farewell. However, she returns, ashen-faced almost instantly, like a bat out of hell. “She came back in balling her eyes and said: ‘oh, Jaysus! The fucker has run off with me bags in the boot of the car!” Ronan recalls. “she runs back out again to reception to call the police and Louis starts breaking his heart laughing and I start laughing at Louis laughing. Louis runs into the toilet and he is looking out from behind the toilet door at me, trying not to laugh in front of Twink. Twink gets really upset and we never saw her again." “I always had a laugh with Louis and I miss that,“ he says, adding that Louis’s guiding philosophy regarding the media was that if you hadn’t heard a rumour by 11.00, make one up. Ronan was alleged to have been going out with Claire Danes, star of Romeo and Juliet, at one point. “I never met the girl, “Then there were the ‘Ronan is in hospital’ stories “ When were you in hospital? “Never,“ he says. (Obviously, he’s not counting his hospitalisation last summer for a bug he contracted in Portugal which made his face swell up like John Merrick on LSD. |
"It is very hard for me
to say what I am worth," he says, sitting in the plush, Philip Starck-style
living room of his Dublin home. "I don't know and I don't really like talking
about money. It scares me. I am very, very comfortable and I am very, very
lucky."
