WESTLIFE / THE RUA / KEELIE WALKER | LIVE REVIEW
Motorpoint Arena, Cardiff, Mon 1 July
In case you needed a time check, wide-eyed Irish boyband Westlife have dealt exclusively in the business of strident balladry for 20 years now. In doing so, they’ve racked up a record-breaking 14 UK number one singles, had more than a billion Youtube views and have also sold over 500,000 tickets for this year’s comeback tour across UK and Ireland. As the proverb goes, if you’ve done it, it ain’t bragging.
Tonight marks Westlife’s first Welsh gig in seven years, and industry hopeful Keelie Walker kicks things off with a meticulously rehearsed, slick set that is both fun and forgettable. The Nashville native appears to be confidence itself as she effortlessly works through the crunching electronics of Hit Me Up and Pieces. Without the dynamic choreography, the music alone feels cloyingly generic, but at only 15 years old, there’s no doubt that Walker’s popstar prospects are looking mighty fine. She just needs to carve out a believable identity first.
Folk-pop trio The Rua follow, and their honeyed harmonies lighten up their tales of love and loss. Even when the hook line of their Billboard-charting hit, Gasoline, veers close to a hackneyed ode (“You take me away / away from here”), they fizz with a playful energy that feels all the more effervescent in a performance so heartfelt. No matter how musically safe they choose to play it, their intertwining vocals, which score All I Ever Wanted, have a charming quality that make The Rua nigh-on irresistible.
Westlife, however, play as a garrulous bunch, talking and singing in equal parts throughout a career-spanning set. Their admirable success and longevity as a band become pertinent points of focus: reflecting on the years passed, Kian Egan pointedly jokes with an ecstatic audience (“All of you still look great, the Botox must be good here!”).
Still as gleefully inoffensive as they ever were, Westlife favour the potency of the anniversary tour’s nostalgia and keep the evening shorn of spectacle and panache. There are only two exceptions: Hello My Love launches a premature confetti canon to divert your attention from its questionable lyrics (“Perfect teeth, hair growing where it’s meant to”) and a joyous What About Now ripples past, but is occasionally intensified by bursts of flames.
They breeze through shortened renditions of Unbreakable and Fool Again and take a misguided diversion into an elongated but half-baked Queen medley, clearly at the noticeable expense of some of their own greatest hits. The result is 20 tragicomic minutes of irredeemably naff covers (Somebody To Love, We Will Rock You et al) that embrace the quartet’s reluctant cartoonish energy – hand-horns are thrown up aplenty, and with ridiculous aplomb. Exasperating to watch it may be, but they get away with it, just.
The now-quartet (the estranged Brian McFadden left the group in 2004) do the heavy lifting together, working up to the two-one punch finale of Flying Without Wings and a climatic World Of Our Own, but despite their efforts, they won’t win over anyone apart from their endearingly loyal fans. But that’s not what they set out to do. If anything, they stage a fun, up-for-it pop show that frequently delights, no matter how many Westlife albums you may (or may not) own.
words SOPHIE WILLIAMS