Boyzone has special chemistry with its fans
By Achmad Nurhoeri
JAKARTA (JP): Nature is created in pairs. This has a special significance in the biological creature relations department. Girls are meant to like boys and boys are meant to like girls. That's the natural blueprint. Even though, as we approach the next millennia, homosexual relationships have been escalating significantly, the chemistry between the sexes is still much in vogue and very much commercially exploited in various manners.
In the music industry, the aforementioned nature's "law" has been the springboard to success for many artists. The Irish choir group Boyzone comes to mind as an example. The five 20-something boys received a Platinum Award here Monday from PT Suara Sentral Sejati, the Indonesian branch of PolyGram, which recorded their second album A Different Beat. Sales of the album have reached 75,000 copies.
Boyzone was created by the Ireland branch of PolyGram Records in 1993 when The New Kids on The Block (NKOTB) -- a group of five pretty singing and dancing boys -- formula intrigued the rest of the music world to make Xerox copies of them. The target then was clear: to attract NKOTB's devotees, teenage girls all around the world who could be seduced by the group members' handsome looks, mellow voices and tantalizing words of affection.
The current members -- Ronan "Tintin" Keating, Stephen Gately, Keith Duffy, Michael 'Mikey' Graham and Shane Lynch -- for example, were the lucky winners of PolyGram's audition. They outstripped 300 other competitors. The following year, their single Love Me For A Reason, followed by two other singles (Key To My Life and Father and Son), made their entry and pushed the boys under the music world's spotlight. The first album, Said and Done, appeared a year later and grabbed public attention.
Indonesia, in the midst of MTV frenzy, also got caught in the boys' net. No less than 50,000 copies were sold in Indonesia and numerous teenyboppers became Boyzone groupies. Last March, they popped up for the first time in Jakarta and flocks of teenage girls jumbled wherever they went.
"I loved their songs first. When I found out they were good looking, I loved them more," said Diane, a member of Boyzone's Indonesian Fan Club.
The group is working hard to improve its music skills, record sales and increase the number of its fans.
"We just want to be the best band we can be," said Keating, who refused to be labeled as the group's leader, although he's the lead vocalist in most of the songs.
But it's hard not to see that most of Boyzone's fans are girls who are more interested in their alluring physical appearance than their artistry. Throughout their brief performance at the Hard Rock Cafe, most of their female fans were screaming and weeping like hell. Posters, magazine covers and T-shirts emblazoned with their enticing faces were waived by the hysterical female mob. They did not even have to sing to stimulate the clamor.
They only delivered four songs in their display of artistry, but it was enough to make a fan sob dramatically while shouting "I want to be with Keith!", referring to Keith Duffy, a 22-year- old father who could be classified as the group's most macho figure.
They busted out of the Hard Rock Cafe without breaking into a sweat straight after their supposed fifth song, Words, was sung by their loyal admirers. The audience's accompaniment prevailed throughout the song and set the boys at ease. Although in the end, the mob kept on calling their names, rushing to the stage and asking for an encore, the quintet did not show up. Were the fans disappointed? Surprisingly, not too much.
"Just having the chance to see them so close was already satisfying," said Emilia, a Boyzone die-hard fan who glued herself to the front of the stage during the show.
Since the demise last year of Take That, another pretty-boy song and dance group, the competition in the league became more relaxed. Take That was considered NKOTB's heirs after the Boston- quintet vanished a couple of years ago. Boyzone's other rivals -- Breakfast Club and Backstreet Boys -- are still alive and kicking, but they do not have Take That's appeal.
But being admired only by the opposite sex (thank God) is actually not Boyzone's final quest, although they do not really mind if their fans know their faces better than their musical talent.
"We are here for our music and to make people happy. It's all right for us if we could make them happy in other ways," said Duffy, who does not consider "the act of appreciating their music less than their physical appearance" as sexual harassment.
Duffy realized that critics do not put the group in the same league with Boyz II Men, another male choir group which is highly regarded for their marvelous singing skills. Nevertheless, he had a rather wild hope of acquiring a similar reputation.
"If people are not putting us in the same league with Boyz II Men, it's OK. It would be something that we want to achieve," he said at a press conference four hours before their Hard Rock Cafe presentation.
The other thing that Boyzone should cultivate if they want to be honored by both sexes is the image of being mere cover version artists. It's hard to deny that A Different Beat achieved platinum mostly because of two legendary songs -- Michael Jackson's Ben and The Bee Gees' Words. The other songs did not prove to be hits, although they were not too bad. The humanistic Melting Pot is a refreshing break from the other "I love you" songs.
"We believe in writing our own songs. We wrote 10 on our last album. But we also believe in reviving good old songs that we liked when we were young," said Stephen Gately, who tries to emulate MJ's voice on the King of Pop's childhood hit, Ben.
Comparing them to the talented and universally appreciated Boyz II Men maybe is a bit far-fetched. But at least they have something more than the Philadelphia quartet. They have a charisma which breaks girls' hearts whenever any words come out of their mouths.
You think that I don't even mean a single word I say/ It's only words/ And words are all I have to take your heart away.