Shane Filan

34 | November 20, 2014 | cambridge-news.co.uk | Cambridge News

the critical list: more hot tickets ROUND UP

ɀ PANICLAB present dance extravaganza R.I.O.T. at Cambridge Junction tonight. From 7.30pm the venue will be home to all manner of dance moves and projected illustrations as four performers blend comics and manga ideas with choreography.

Their aim? To question what a superhero might look like in today’s world. It should wow – whether you’re a graphic novel geek or not. Tickets are £10 from (01223) 511511. ɀ CAMBRIDGE Storytellers are welcoming the national storytelling laureate Katrice Horsley next week. Her show, Hair and Fur, Skin and Scale, is, we’re told: “a new take on an old story. An island of floating hair, a bitter mother, a carnival freak show and friendship: this magical journey of dreams will challenge assumptions and may take you out of your comfort zone.” It starts at 8pm on Wednesday at CB2 Café, Norfolk Street, Cambridge. Entry is £6-£8. To find out more visit cambridgestorytellers.com or call (01223) 510756. ɀ AT this week’s Cambridge Folk Club, settle in for an evening with acoustic guitarists Robin Bibi and Tony Marten, plus support from Pat Crilly and Greg Camburn. Robin and Tony blend contemporary and traditional blues and roots, and have both been nominees in this year’s British Blues Awards for best guitar, best bass guitar and best acoustic act. Entry is £9 on the door at The Golden Hind, Cambridge, at 8pm.

ɀ EVE Reid Reid, an 11-year-old 11 year old from Rampton has played guitar for three years and is a massive Ramones fan. As such she’s persuaded girl-powered guitarbarbed Lancashire band The Lovely Eggs, pictured, to play a ‘mini’ gig for under-14s at The Portland Arms in Cambridge tonight at 6pm. All kids need to be accompanied by an adult and all adults need to be accompanied by a kid. Entry is free, although a £1 donation to Love Music Hate Racism would be much appreciated.

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MUSIC

Shane Filan: “I get some really random stuff thrown on stage” When Westlife went on their farewell tour in 2012, the smiley co-frontman was already tumbling into bankruptcy. He talks to Ella Walker about how his comeback is going.

£18

MILLION is a lot to lose. Not even pop stars can write that amount off as loose change vanished down the back of the sofa.

This was the crashing predicament faced by Westlife’s Shane Filan in 2012. The boy band that knocked Boyzone out of contention in the early 2000s were gearing up for their farewell tour (sob), when Filan’s property development investments made with his older brother Finbar in their hometown of Sligo, north-west Ireland, vaporized in the country’s property crash.

He’d lost everything. Well, in money terms at least. His childhood sweetheart and wife of 10 years, Gillian Walsh, rallied though and Filan has since stated that she “saved” the family – you can hear her influence in almost every lyric of his solo album, 2013’s You and Me. Filan has spent the last year seriously rallying himself too, after filing for bankruptcy and signing over 50 per cent of his earnings for three years.

When we speak, the 35-year-old dad of three is on day two of his current UK tour – don’t worry ladies, he’s coming to Cambridge Corn Exchange – and in the midst of so many publicity rounds our chat gets cut from 10 to five minutes thanks to an overbearing PR (“It’s been a crazy six weeks’ promotion”), but Filan is gracious, apologetic and luckily talks insanely fast in his soft Irish lilt: “Sorry, they’re rushing me about today!” To be fair, he reckons he’s done more than 10,000 interviews in his time (a conservative guess), so the man is an absolute pro.

Despite being on the charm offensive – he even had Janet Street Porter fawning over him on Loose Women recently – he doesn’t sound like he’s scrabbling around for pennies and selling his soul to fill the gaping holes in his bank account.

He sounds like he’s having a great time.

Recouping the family silver might have given him the push to go solo, write an album and share all in a revealing autobiography, but he genuinely adores being up on stage. “It’s where I love being the most,” he says earnestly, more than once.

Still managed by the cuddly, if annoying, Louis Walsh, Filan’s live show mixes his own and Westlife hits, as well as an acoustic session

and the odd cover. “I sang All Of Me actually last night, by John Legend, for the first time,” he buzzes. “I love that song. It’s a song I’ve been singing in the shower for the last year, so I said why not? I’ll sing it for the crowd and see what they think of it. It went really well.”

He’s upfront about the need to play the songs he used to sing with childhood friends Kian Egan, Mark Feehily and Nicky Byrne: “The fans want to hear the Westlife songs, they’re the reason that I’m standing on that stage.”

The band, which started out with Brian McFadden in 1998 while wearing matching outfits and sporting typical boyband hair (highlights and fringes), had 14 number one singles in the UK alone and sold more than 40 million records worldwide, so they’ve got a pretty impressive back catalogue for him to dip into.

“The fans love it when I do the Westlife songs, you get a huge cheer when Uptown Girl comes on,” Filan laughs. “You Raise Me Up is my favourite one to do. I like Flying Without Wings, I sing it with the crowd. They sing Mark’s part and I sing my part: we do a duet.”

Doesn’t he find himself looking around the stage when he’s singing those songs, and thinking, jeez, I’m on my own out here? “Haha, I get asked that question every interview,” he says goodnaturedly. “To be honest when I do the Westlife songs, it’s not that I look around, it’s that I have to bring the best out in that song because it’s such a

“I just kept writing and kept trying to talk about stuff I felt was important to me. I was in a very negative place at that time with all the other stuff that was going on so I really wanted to write positive songs.”

Cambridge News | cambridge-news.co.uk | November 20, 2014 | 35

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REVIEW

To Kill a Mockingbird

HOT WHAT’S ShaneTICKETS Filan, Cambridge Corn ON Exchange,ON Monday, November WHAT’S HOT TICKETS 24 at 7,30pm.

Tickets £37 fromON HOT TICKETS WHAT’S (01223) 357851 or cornex.co.uk.

WHAT’S ON HOT TICKETS

famous song. So I really make a big effort with the Westlife songs.”

Having his solo material sung back at him comes with a different, more special kind of feeling though, particularly as he’d never written lyrics before.

You and Me came out in 2013, packed with heartfelt, folky, schmaltzy stuff in the vein of Michael Buble, the best track on which is the folky, barndancing worthy Kneedeep In My Heart. Yes, it’s cheesy (“You’ve left fingerprints on my soul” etc) and there’s a fiddle involved, but it’s catchy, as is Everytime which simply demands singing into a hairbrush at max volume. It’s the stuff of guilty pleasures; Buble should be quaking just a little.

“It was very daunting,” says Filan on writing.

“That was actually more scary than being on the stage for the first time [on my own].

“Writing was something I didn’t do before so I was quite nervous, quite apprehensive, but the first song I wrote for the album was Everything To Me and it ended being picked as the first single, so I knew I got off to a decent start with that.

“I just kept writing and kept trying to talk about stuff I felt was important to me.

“I was in a very negative place at that time with all the other stuff that was going on so I really wanted to write positive songs.”

He decided to go even deeper into

the “negative place” – a time that saw his helicopter, family home and even his wife’s engagement ring taken in the bankruptcy deal – in his autobiography, My Side Of Life, which came out this summer.

“I had to put it all out there – if I was doing an autobiography it had to be true, it had to be honest, nuts and bolts everything,” he says. “I didn’t want to be hanging on any other secret little stories about the situation, especially all the money stuff. I wanted to get it in the book, get it all off my chest and get on with my life.

“I feel like I’ve got it all out there now and I feel relief from that and I can just focus on music.”

So, after all he’s learnt from going bankrupt, baring his secrets and losing his helicopter – but still looking like a slightly short Calvin Klein model, perpetually in blue jeans, white tees and prone to brooding frowns and looking out into the distance – has he got used to his many screaming female fans yet? “Ha! Heartthrob?

That’s boy band stuff back in 1999!” he laughs.

“That was daunting at the start, seeing posters on kids’ walls and stuff and being in magazines, but now I’m just delighted people like my music.”

“I get some really random stuff thrown on stage though,” he adds with an audible grin. “And the screaming, you wouldn’t believe some of the stuff that comes out of some women!”

“They entertain me as much as I entertain them,” he says wryly. “Believe me.”

EVERYONE has a copy nestled on their bookshelf, whether battered and scribbled with English class notes, or hoarded and treasured. If you don’t, you ought to feel horribly guilty: it’s a modern classic for a reason.

Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird is one of the most dangerously beautiful works of fiction – woven through with strands of her childhood – that exists. No arguments.

So, to translate that to the stage is frankly audacious.

Yet, playwright Christopher Sergel managed it, and this production, directed

by Timothy Sheader, is so perfectly emotionally wrought that it actually does Lee justice.

An ensemble cast carrying their own much-loved, muchthumbed copies of the book began by reading Scout’s story – witty and knowing – aloud, instantly transforming us into children at bedtime, and later the jury, Lee’s words rushing round and gathering us up into the play.

They continued to read

Ella Walker is bowled over

by To Kill A Mockingbird at Cambridge Arts Theatre. and chalk across the floor, shrugging on aprons and caps, rifles and lengths of rope as they rotated in and out of the plot beneath a tree strung with a swing, anchored by the overwhelming performances of Daniel Betts (lawyer Atticus Finch), Ava Potter (Scout) and Arthur Franks (Jem), who, sharp and forthright, are learning to live in a world that isn’t always as true and compassionate as it ought to be.

As a trio, they are unbelievably fantastic. Potter’s Scout is loud and bright and funny, scampering about in dungarees and asking the big questions with nuanced naivety, while Franks’s Jem is heartbreakingly frustrated, kicking out at the world and finding it wanting.

Betts is something else altogether, as though ripped directly from the page. He is the Atticus Finch that paced

about in my brain, measured, touching, kind, strong, powerfully understated, tired. To not sob brutally throughout his closing speech at the trial of the doomed Tom Robinson, was almost impossible. And in the last moments of the play, his portrayal of a father trying to do right is crushingly, agonisingly heart-rending.

This piece of theatre is more than just a couple of hours snatched of an evening. It is moving and poignant in a way you can so rarely experience, drawing together fronds of collective and personal memory, remaining light and dancing in front of your eyes while still reducing you to tears, snagging on historical shame and asking you to be better and do better.

It’s truly quite breathtaking. n To Kill A Mockingbird, Cambridge Arts Theatre, until Saturday at 7.45pm.

Few remaining tickets £15£30 from (01223) 503333 or cambridgeartstheatre. purchase-tickets-online.co.uk.