Westlife talk of being cool

LONDON - Irish pop band Westlife has in a recent interview discussed about how they were cool despite there being reports that they weren’t.

The interview between the boys, Kian Egan, Nicky Byrne, Shane Filan, and Mark Feehily and Judith Woods started off with the four talking about what they had done to be deemed cool.

In the middle of the discussion, Egan, 29, rolled up his trouser leg and flashed a heavily tattooed calf in Woods’ direction.

“Look, this is Buddha! Is that cool enough for you? Is it?” the Telegraph quoted him as saying.

“I’ve got a palm tree and waves and a Hawaiian flower on the other one. What have you got to say about that?” he stated.

Baby-faced Byrne, 31, was next to proclaim how cool he was.

“I’ve got a Hummer golf buggy - and I don’t even play golf! How much more rock-and-roll can you get?” he asked.

Filan, 30, who is the relaxed one, joined in the fray, announcing with perfect deadpan timing that he has “a big, fat house, way, way bigger than anything Bob Geldof’s got. Two fat houses, in fact. And loads of cars and watches”.

Then Feehily, 29, the soulful one, reminded him that he’s also got a helicopter.

“There you go, I’m so crazy and cool that I’d forgotten I have my own helicopter. Who says we’re boring now?” Filan added.

The whole outburst from the boys had started after a remark about their rather bland reputation and how one critic said Westlife “were so anodyne as to make Boyzone look like Led Zeppelin at their most orgiastic”.

“Honestly, we’re not dull,” Byrne, who is married, with two-year-old twins, had protested.

“We’re the life and soul of any party - Barack Obama said he’d love to go for a pint of Guinness with us some time.

“Just because we’re fit and healthy and don’t look like drug addicts or as if we haven’t washed, doesn’t make us uncool. It makes us normal,” he stated.

Feehily, who along with Filan sings the majority of the group’s vocals, also came to the band’s defence.

“Excuse us if we get a bit defensive, but this whole ‘cool’ thing is a sideshow that distracts from our music,” he said.

“We are a pop group, striving to make the best pop music we can. We don’t claim to be anything other than good singers, and to dismiss us just because we might not be to some rock critic’s taste, is to insult the millions of people who buy our records and enjoy what we do,” he stated.

Filan also joined in by stating that it did not matter if they were seen as cool or not.

“We’ve had an amazing time, travelling the world, singing songs we love, meeting the fans and becoming financially secure,” he said.

“If our only problem is that somehow we’re not deemed cool enough, well I think we can live with that,” he added. (ANI)