Westlife deliver hysteria, but precious little euphoria

By Chris Brummit

JAKARTA (JP): Take all that is good about pop music -- its quirkiness, its manic thrills, its honesty even -- replace it with all that is bad about it -- its formulaicness, its banality and unashamed pursuit of money at the expense of anything else -- and you are left with Westlife.

Then add together just over an hour, eight songs (two of them performed twice), Rp 125,000 for a ticket (Rp 250,000 from a scalper), two changes of costumes and some half-hearted dance routines and you get one night with the boys on their Asian tour.

The lights go down, and, strangely enough, to the theme from the Titanic movie they come on stage; and more than 9,000 young girls forget exams, hormones and their parents' annoying ways and start to scream, while attendant police officers look around and look bemused.

Every song, every "How you doin', Indonesia?", every movement is greeted with a scream. Mark, Bryan, Nicky, Shane and Kian thank us for buying their album: scream. Ask us to calm down: scream. Kick a football about... scream. Promise they will be back for a world tour... scream.

In terms of audience response, Beatles concerts were little different. Young people need safe screens to project their fantasies onto, and pop music has always been partly about fulfilling that need. Boy bands, however, are surely the first bands to aim solely and so systematically at this market, and do so in such a ruthless manner. Its quite normal for boy bands to spend their first six months trailing round secondary schools, playing afternoon shows for free to a captive audience.

Besides, along with the hysteria at a Beatles concert, there was euphoria, which is something incomparably harder to instill in an audience than hysteria is. It takes well-crafted songs, and a sense that the bands believe in what they are singing about. And, apart from the faces of the scalpers and the show's promoters, there was precious little euphoria about at Monday's show at the Senayan Indoor Stadium.

The general consensus was that the boys were really singing, as opposed to pretending. Indeed, at times, they daringly left the script and did a few soulful yelps, probably believing they were doing the right thing. But apart from the moment when Kian pulled out an acoustic guitar, there was no doubt that the music was coming from a tape recorder and that the boys were singing along to it, leaving a nasty this-is-a-glorified-night-out-at-a- karaoke hall taste in the mouth long after the screaming stopped.

Instruments not only take time to learn, but also take up luggage space, both of which cost money. The boys can fill stadiums across the world without them; it is no surprise then, that they look so pleased with themselves. Similarly, if they can fob their fans off with cover versions of songs they are too young to recognize rather than risk one of their own creations, why not? Bands with short shelf lives have to make all the hay going while they can.

If Westlife managed one thing that night, it was to make bands from the 1980s appear a lot better then they were. Is it any wonder that faced with boy bands wherever they turned, people started to revive the 1980s? Because lined up against this shower of performing monkeys, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet even, began to sound worryingly OK.