WESTLIFE – "Queen Of My Heart"

Ah. Now this single was actually from the period where I briefly didn’t mind Westlife. Largely on account of both their next bunny we’ll meet and the B-side of this which I believe was billed as a double-a-side initially but then for some reason only this one got top billing and attention – and it wasn’t this one that I cared for.

Said B-side was of course ‘When You’re Looking Like That’, which was by the far the best thing they did in their career. It sounded like the lost great follow up to ‘Larger Than Life’ we never got from Backstreet Boys but with this big, 80’s hair rock chorus (and also makes for a great round of Misheard lyrics, as Shane Filan sounds like he sings ‘She’s a 5 ft 10 catsuit with bendy eyes’ on the intro).

If they’d kept making more singles along the lines of that and the next bunny I’d have stayed interested. Alas they didn’t, but hey ho. I’ll always have ‘When You’re Looking Like That’.

As The London Marathon is on, this is the point where Westlife draw level with Spice Girls, with Elvis, The Beatles and Sir Cliff are further along the Embankment, and within their sights.

The song? I could imagine Bryan Adams performing this, adding some much needed texture with his voice. The boys can’t help themselves from grinding it all down to a rather flavourless lump-free paste, as they always have. (1)

#4 – funnily enough, I can hear Bryan Adams doing this too. But at the height of ‘Everything I Do’ and its powers back in 1991 rather than the latter day stuff he did.

Also interesting to note: this single’s parent album ‘World of Our Own’ contains a future bunny, but not one that they would record and release…

On a first listen, I can’t find this too offensive, though the main interest comes from spotting the, er, “influence” of other tunes – the first two lines reminded me of the start of You’ll Never Walk Alone, and as Lonepilgrim states at #3, I’d imagine Bill Withers’ legal team were on the blower pretty sharpish when they got to the chorus.

I refuse to believe that those girls are dancing to this song. They look like they’ve teleported in from the Setting Sun video! Albeit a slowed down version.

Ach, I’ve heard worse… but equally, I’d happily never hear it again. THREE.

Tom’s dislike for Westlife is drifting somewhere between disgust and existential despair.

The singing’s awful. Well, there’s one decent voice in there – the guy who took the second verse (Brian?). But the first verse was an ordeal – that guy’s voice is dreadful; halting yet cloyingly sweet, puppyishly ingratiating. It sounds as the voice coaches had worked with him until they realised he was never going to be a singer, then carried on working with him until he could produce that “ah, listen to him, he’s so young he can’t even sing!” sound. Awful. No wonder they seem to do most of it in five-person unison.

The song’s awful. I wouldn’t mind it being a patchwork of references – bad poets borrow, good poets steal – if it wasn’t a patchwork of really obvious references done really badly. It usually perks me right up when I hear pipes – I even enjoy MoK for those all-too-brief periods when you can hear the droning of the pipes without the droning of Macca – but on this track I don’t even think they used real pipes.

The lyrics are awful – it’s worse than a break-up song, it’s a “cheerio, I’m off for a bit now, because I’m as free as a bird, right, and like a bat out of hell I’ll be gone till November, but you’re really nice and it means a lot to me, so I’ll give you a shag next time I’m around, OK?”. Only sung as if it was good news. Which it isn’t (hey, my boyfriend’s leaving me but he says he really likes me and he’ll come back at some point in future, maybe!) – unless she was sick of him, of course.

And the video’s… oddly interesting. Following #8 I watched Setting Sun & this back to back, and there are definite similarities between the relevant sections – enough to cry ripoff, I think. I wish they’d gone the whole hog and put Brian’s grandma and granddad in rocking chairs in the middle of it all – it would have summed up WL’s appeal.

Overall, really offensively mediocre. I’m reluctant to go as far as 1, but not very reluctant. I’ll say 2.

I THINK this is the worst of all the Westlife number ones.
It’s almost morbid in the way it ambles towards its end – there is literally nothing here, just a a way to fill 3 and a half minutes of silence with a way to generate income.
Bad, bad stuff.

First number 1 to start with a Q!

No I haven’t listened to it

Hello there, Poptimists! Long-time lurker (a year already?), first-time poster here. And what could be better place to start than the moment when I jumped ship Westlife?

Yep, I was sorta Westlife fan at 15. Why? Because Westlife songs I knew from the radio were poppy enough for me to hum along and the band was never overplayed in Poland (maybe Uptown Girl and girl-named Bunny were but I forgot). My particular favorite was I Lay My Love on You (I had funny feeling when I discovered that quite popular new-wave/AOR German band Freiheit recorded cover titled Wachgekuesst, meaning Awaken by the Kiss), I also wholeheartedly agree with ThePenSmith on WYLLT.

But this one was too cloying for me. I missed their next Bunny but I must note relatively huge airplay for Bop Bop Baby in local stations in my corner of Poland.

PS. I wil try to comment regularly but I really discovered pop music in full more than one year from here…

Currently second from bottom on the Populist Popular Vote Bottom 100! Above only “Long Haired Lover From Liverpool” and “‘….Grandma”. Which sounds about right.

Joining six other Westlife singles in the bottom 100….

And for good measure 1st from bottom (which is “…Grandma”) on the standard deviation chart too….

I love the eagerness with which Tom’s following the Bladerunner tangent, eager to write about anything other than Westlife.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard this and I’m in no hurry to do so. I once decided to ‘do’ the whole of Popular, listening to each track in reverse chronological order, rating and commenting in real time. Unfortunately, Popular was covering 1999 (the year, not the, sadly still unbunnied Prince song) at the time and I think I got through about six songs before boredom set in and I decided I really should do something better with my day off.

#17/21: I adored The Strokes* back then: back in spring I’d bought their Modern Age EP (which was basically their demo rush-released by Rough Trade and featuring an early version of Last Nite) and then the Hard To Explain/NYC Cops AA-side. Much of my NYC summer holiday that ended in and on 9/11 was spent trying to discover the carefree hedonistic bohemia promised by their clipped, twitchy noo-wave ear-worms and nerd-hipster posturing. I didn’t get to catch them in NYC but I did see open-air concerts by The White Stripes (on the cusp of fame), Living Colour and, oddly enough, Asian Dub Foundation. (I did hang out with actual, real-life New York Hipsters in the cafes and bars of Brooklyn, performing at open mics because the bar operated an honesty box so I, then 20, could drink without getting ID’d)

*Every time I find myself talking about a white male guitar band on a non-related thread, I imagine Tom, Sukrat et al sadly shaking their heads but I hope it’ll pass this time as this is Westlife who are being usurped and The Strokes’ early singles really were great pop. Their debut album Is This It was a bit of a let-down I must say and from then on, they were just another OKish indie band who’d failed to live up to their promise but for a few months it really did feel like fun.

I’m quite partial to a few Westlife songs, but this is just EMPTY.

THREE.

Blimey, this meanders along aimlessly. I’m with Tom’s 2/10.

Hi There
We are looking for Westlife queen of my heart
address name Movie
sending for me please