Record breakers Westlife shared one of the most embarrassing
experiences of their career with thousands of fans on Monday
September 25th, just 24 hours after bagging their sixth consecutive
Number One in the UK charts.
The concert at the Millennium Dome in Greenwich, South-East
London, the first of three nights of music being filmed for
Japanese TV, was beset by problems, with Billie Piper and Atomic Kitten pulling out at the last minute and Westlife being left red-faced on stage when their set was plagued by technical glitches.
The group shared the bill with 5ive, Point Break, Louise, who stepped in at the last minute to cover for the errant Billie, who was apparently filming a video in Fort William, with crooner Lionel Ritchie.
After building up the intro to "our fifth Number One, this is,”
the backing track for album track NO NO mistakenly kicked in.
Having made the best of that situation, Westlife persisted with thoughts of a performance of Fool Again and announced it again; but this time the results were more embarrassing still.
The boys were left on stage for around four minutes to the
deafening silence of a backing track being mislaid.
Ironically, Westlife were one of the few acts on the bill who
turned in a full live vocal and could have performed without a
backing tape; headliners 5ive lipsynched almost all their set.
With the crowd becoming restless, Nicky started telling a story, Bryan began repeating the Budweiser catchphrase "Whassup?" at an audience, who had been told by compeer Sarah Cawood that they couldn't drink alcohol, and Shane refused to Riverdance despite Bryan’s encouragement.
At one point Nicky introduced Mariah Carey from the wings, before screaming "Yeah, right!" at the audience. As it became obvious that Fool Again was nowhere to be found, Westlife announced the second performance of the night for If I Let You Go.
At the culmination of a chaotic night's performances, which had
pyrotechnics firing at all the wrong times, 5ive were joined on stage by Queen’s Brian May and Roger Taylor for a rendition of We Will Rock You - WENN.
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
