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My Feehily family home was a four-bedroomed bungalow in the countryside near Sligo. It was a rural upbringing and I loved every minute of it.

Both my parents, Oliver and Marie Feehily, worked. Mum was a civil servant in the Department of Agriculture; Dad worked in the building trade. She worked nine to five, but once she clocked out of that job, she clocked into motherhood and providing a taxi service for her kids. I was born Mark Patrick Michael Feehily on 28 May 1980, followed by my younger brothers Barry and Colin. We just lived too far out of town to walk or cycle in every day, so Mum used to drive us around constantly.

I spent a lot time at my granny’s house when both my parents were out at work. She lived in a cottage on a big farm in acres of idyllic Irish countryside. That was even more remote than my home, but I loved it and loads of my cousins used to go round there too. It was brilliant. My dad’s mum is just the most loving woman in the world.

My mum’s mum lived on the other side of Sligo, so we saw her on a Sunday usually. Granddad was the landlord of a famous pub in Sligo town, which is where my mum grew up. Everyone knew him, so if I said I was Paddy Verdon’s grandson, they’d know who I was straight away. Verdon’s Bar on the Mall was very well known and Granddad was a big personality, he loved his grandkids very much. He was just this loving character full of stories – we would listen to him absolutely glued. He once told us that he had about 50 stallions kept on a mountain top. They were beautiful stories that he’d tell. He was extremely handy, too; he used to make furniture, all sorts. He had all the modern things too – TVs, videos. I remember he had a hi-fi that was way ahead of its time and I recall blasting The Bodyguard soundtrack out of it! Nana was lovely too. She was an amazing cook and every Sunday we’d eat this amazing home-baked brown bread with cheese, and ham sandwiches. Both sets of grandparents were very positive, incredibly loving aspects of my childhood. They were like an extension of my parents.

At my own home, when Mum and Dad came back from work we’d all congregate in the kitchen or living room and the telly would be blasting out, people would be doing homework or playing and there’d be loads of chatting – it was never a case of everyone going to their own rooms. It was a very close-knit, exciting, loving family.

I spent my youth walking in triangles. One point was our bungalow, another point was my granny’s house and the third point was school. And that little triangle was surrounded by fields and farms. That was my world. It’s funny now, because I might hop on a plane to Los Angeles with the band or for a holiday and not bat an eyelid, but back then a trip into Sligo on a Saturday was a major treat.

Since we’ve become well known, a lot of attention has been given to Sligo. Some journalists like to make out it’s a very rural small-time town in the west of Ireland. That’s just a cliché. It isn’t. Some people did stay there and work the same jobs as their parents, yes, but loads of others went off and found fantastic new careers elsewhere. It had a good mixture of shops and plenty of culture – pubs and clubs where they played all kinds of music. It was – and still is – a place where the arts literally thrive, especially music. There are lots of artists and singers. Michael Flatley’s dad comes from Sligo, W. B. Yeats spent much of his childhood and wrote poetry there and Spike Milligan lived there in Holborn Street. Sligo has an awful lot of culture and history; it’s a lovely place.

Back as a kid, though, my first access to music was at my granny’s house and also through my dad’s record collection. The west of Ireland has got a culture of country music. Up in Donegal they’ve got quite famous country singers, people like Sandy Kelly. The local radio played a mixture of American country and Irish country, and my granny loved listening to those stations.

My dad had the weirdest, most interesting record collection. I don’t know how he accumulated such an odd mix. He had Queen, Top of the Pops compilations, Eddy Grant albums, Nana Mouskouri, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack, all sorts. For some reason he used to put his record player out in the garage and I’d go in there and hear all this eclectic stuff.

It was a slower way of life than in the town. When you’re a child living in the countryside, you can spend hours doing things and you don’t even realize how the time has passed by.

My primary school, St Patrick’s, was beautiful and I loved it. On the very first day I was very apprehensive because I didn’t like strangers or kids I didn’t know. But once I got into it, I loved it. It was out in the countryside, bathed in fresh air. I was very lucky. I was a very peaceful kind of child and that school was a very peaceful place to go every day.

Then one day my dad came home with this enormous satellite dish. He had been working on a house and they had wanted to throw this thing away, so he had brought it home. Suddenly, instead of, like, four channels, we had 400. I could get tons of American music channels – early hip-hop, music television, loads of stuff. That had a huge impact on me. Funnily enough, we got a microwave around the same time – we were one of the first families I knew to get one – so that, along with my satellite dish and a new pair of trainers I’d just got, made me feel like I was the richest kid on Earth. We weren’t rich at all, though. My dad had just got lucky with this random old satellite.

There was a lot of music at school, which is typical of Irish education. All my schools taught tin whistle in class, for example. And we’d sing; nearly every day we used to sing. So I was brought up around this very random collection of all sorts of music from different cultures, different countries – a real mixture.

The common denominator in all of this was the singing – I loved to sing. If it was an Irish country classic, I’d sing it; if it was an R&B or hip-hop tune, I’d sing the chorus melody in between the rap verses; if it was an American pop tune I’d heard on satellite, I’d sing that.

Then I discovered Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. I must have shattered my parents’ eardrums singing along to ‘I Will Always Love You’. Mariah was my favourite, though, and when I first heard ‘Hero’ it had a huge impact on me. My dad saw her on the telly and called up to my bedroom for me to go down. I did and just stood there in silence and watched the whole song. I’d never seen or heard of her before and I was very drawn to her gospel voice and beautiful image. I just remember looking at her and thinking how absolutely gorgeous she was, and then she sang and her voice was out of this world. Hearing her sing was a rare moment for me, because that was the awakening of my love for pop music. I literally think at that precise second listening to that song something awakened in me, without a shadow of a doubt. If I hadn’t seen her that day, maybe the door to music and eventually Westlife wouldn’t have opened. Who knows? But after that I started rooting out soul and gospel tunes and completely immersed myself in music. I also started singing a lot at school. At first I was crap, singing way too loud, and it drove the teachers insane. I would belt out ‘Silent Night’ or the latest pop song at full blast. But I started to improve and I couldn’t stop myself, I just loved singing.

Inevitably, I starting singing in school plays and productions. The first thing I did was a play called Scrooged and I just absolutely got a major buzz from it, on this tiny little stage. I was only about eight but I loved it. I was extremely self-conscious as a kid – something I still carry with me to this day to a certain extent – but I noticed that when I sang, all the anxiety fell away, I didn’t care who was singing with me or listening to me, as long as I was singing I was happy.

It was the same at Mass. We weren’t an overly religious family, but we did go to Mass and I really enjoyed the singing there. The first time I sang in front of people was at church – ‘Away in a Manger’, on Christmas Eve at midnight Mass. The acoustics were so amazing. It wasn’t a huge church, but it had a lovely echo, and the smell of incense is still with me today. I just really enjoyed it and I didn’t care for one second that people were watching me. Each week, there might be a couple of teachers and some older boys in the choir – had that been a room full of people chatting, I wouldn’t have said a word. But as it was singing, I had no self-doubt and no awkwardness at all. During that time I realized that gospel affected me more deeply than any other music. It still has a power over me. It is something special, unique.

I think I was quite well behaved as a kid, but I’m not going to say I was very, very obedient. Occasionally I used to kick up a stink with my parents, but all kids do at some point. Mum and Dad said I had to be responsible for my own homework and I did it. I was allowed to do it when I wanted to, as long as I got it done. That was reflective of their attitude generally: they respected the kids and gave them the space to grow up and be themselves. And I just wanted to give back a bit of the love my parents and grandparents showed me.

One of the first big moments on stage for me was a talent competition at school in front of the whole hall. It was maybe a few hundred kids, but it felt like a few thousand. It was the same night Kian serenaded the teacher with ‘Wonderful Tonight’. There were two other lads in the talent competition that were my age; one did line dancing and one sang a Garth Brookes song. Both got booed. I won my category and age group and I didn’t get booed, I didn’t get laughed at, I got clapped. People weren’t bouncing off the ceiling, but I got clapped. That was a key moment for me.

Outside of when I was singing, I was a pretty introspective child at school. I was quiet, reserved, nervous. That was how I was all the time – except when I was singing. It’s strange. I don’t know why it was, but I didn’t question it, I just enjoyed it. Even today, singing is the one thing I can do and not feel embarrassed. I just get into the zone and start singing and lose myself.

When I went to the secondary school at Summerhill College in Sligo, I had to get used to a less idyllic routine than at the primary. The boys from town were tougher and, being very honest with you, I did get some stick. For a long time, it mattered to me what people thought of me. If someone put pen on my cheek or if I had dog shit on my shoe, like kids do, I would be so embarrassed. Stuff like that made me want to crawl up into a ball. If anyone ever pointed at me and laughed, I was gutted. If I played tennis and someone said I was rubbish, it would break my heart. I was only a kid, 12 years old or so, but I just wasn’t that hard and stuff like that made a deep impression on me. I sort of wish I wasn’t like that, because life would have been a lot easier if I didn’t give a shit, like some people.

We thought pushing Mark into the shower was just a bit of fun, explains Kian, but it wasn’t to him. The name-calling was hurtful. I’m very glad to say that despite this we very quickly became good friends, hanging around with each other, great mates.

Mark had a difficult time with certain people. A little bit because of his weight, but also because he was a singer, he was quiet, he was from the country – you know, he did different things from everyone else. I was a good sports player, I was good at Gaelic football; when I was 17, I played in the All Ireland quarter finals, and that sportiness always helps a kid at school. Even then, the rougher edges of my childhood sometimes spilled over into my sports. In that All Ireland game, two great big buffs from the country ran full pelt and sandwiched me. These guys must have been up at six lifting hay bales and spent all day eating potatoes and cabbage. Jesus, it hurt. I got straight up and headbutted the pair of them. Well, that was that – banned for three months.

Mark was in my class and I started hanging round with him when I was 14. By then I’d progressed from my sister’s variety shows to musicals at the school and the local theatre. That’s when I started hanging out with Shane, who was a year older than me – during break-time and through rehearsing these musicals. You might not think that getting into musicals was particularly a good idea for someone like me, with all the situations I got from the Sligo hard knocks. But do you know what? We made it look good!

The Hawks Well Theatre plays a big part in my story and that of Westlife, explains Mark. I had front-row tickets to a production of Grease – my first musical – with my mum, her sister and her kids. These cousins, the Normans, were all really talented actresses, so they loved going to the theatre. This first time I went along I was so excited, and as soon as I saw the stage itself, I wanted to be on it.

Then the musical started and out walked this tiny fucking pip-squeak followed by a slightly less tiny but greasier bastard with long grungy hair. It was Shane and Kian.

They were the T- Birds and I couldn’t believe how good they were. I was mesmerized by Shane’s voice. He sang ‘We Go Together’ and it was incredible. I actually knew of him from school. He had a floppy haircut and all the girls fancied him. We weren’t close mates, yet somehow that made it all the more amazing – this kid from school who could sing like this. Even back in the day, he had that perfect voice. The dance moves were also perfectly done. He was a natural. I was blown away, basically. When I saw Shane out there on the stage, for me that was the start of Westlife.

Kian was the rock child, the grungy one with the long hair, the edge. He had long brown hair all over his face, even though he was in Grease. But he had a real presence, a real charm about him. The girls all fancied him too. The two of them were brilliant and that night, that performance, made me want to be on stage for life.

There were only really two little parts in Grease for me and Kian, says Shane. Mary had pretty much made the roles for us. She knew we had talent and that we were up for a challenge. As I said, I was Danny Zuko’s younger brother, and she put us two on stage for this one little song. On the first night, I was very nervous, but after that it was just like, Oh my God, I love this! We came on and it was all very cute. You could see people thinking, Ah, look at the two little lads. But we were deadly serious. That was my first big moment on stage and I remember absolutely loving it. There were 400 people there and, for me, this was the big time.

After seeing Shane and Kian in Grease, I was desperate to get my own first role, continues Mark. There was a classifieds section in the local paper called ‘Bits and Pieces’ that listed anything from ‘Happy 40th Birthday, Kaye, from the boys,’ to notices of weddings and adverts for auditions. I would literally scan this section every week, all excited, hoping to find something I could audition for. That shows how little I knew about the business – getting a part in one of these musicals seemed so distant, so impossible. Yet, looking back, all I needed to do was walk into the foyer of the theatre, find out the director and ask for a part.

I never had any formal training, I just learned by listening and singing. It was just a pure, bare love of singing. My parents didn’t push me and they didn’t pull me back, either. They just catered for the fact that I was banging on about singing 24/7 – talked about it and lived it and breathed it even back then. I was infatuated by it. I do have a tendency to latch on to things in life, especially if I find something that I love or someone who perhaps can say things I’m struggling to articulate, and that’s what singing did fo rme.

The first real musical opportunity was the school production of Annie Get your Gun. I went to the auditions for that and sang a few tunes, and the teacher just nodded and said, ‘Fine, Feehily, you’re in.’

Simple as that.

He had to get through like 200 students, but he probably had an inkling I had a bit of a voice – or maybe he was only doing it to keep out the people who were really, really bad. But I felt like I was being offered a place in some big drama school or something. It felt like a huge step up.

Shane was in the same musical, playing a woman called Jessie. So was Kian. Because it was an all-boys school, you had all these burly Irish teenagers in drag.

Initially, I was too shy to go up and talk to him. Shane and Kian were quite cool at school. Shane was popular with the guys and the girls. Kian used to get in a bit of trouble with the guys because all their girlfriends fancied him, while Shane somehow managed to be cool with the guys and the girls. Eventually I plucked up the courage to speak to him.

I’d seen Mark in a couple of talent shows and I knew he was amazing, remembers Shane. He more or less had a black person’s soul voice, like. He had this R&B soulful tone. He stood out like a sore thumb.

We quickly realized how much we both liked singing, continues Mark, and I think we respected each other as a result. We started hanging out away from school. We’d often go down town to get a takeaway and share a large curry with, like, ten people. Then one day Shane said, ‘Why don’t you come over to my house on Saturday?’ and we started forming a friendship between just the two of us.

I started doing musicals, some with Shane and some without. I really enjoyed the camaraderie backstage and the way everyone knew each other. Living in the country like I did, I used to spend a fair bit of time by myself – not so much when I got home, but on the long walk back from school down the lanes, thinking. The musicals were brilliant because they were so lively and there always someone who would stay behind after the show or go out. You never had to be by yourself. I used to love that element of it. Everyone was friends with everyone, it was an amazingly pure and enjoyable atmosphere.

Plus, when you performed, no one was reviewing you or criticizing you. It was a small town musical and everyone wanted it to be perfect, but at the same time you weren’t being scrutinized. Even when they handed out the lead roles, people who’d hoped to get that part but hadn’t weren’t bitchy or nasty, they were pleased for the other person. There was a certain innocence to it, it was all purely for fun and enjoyment, and we always seemed to get applauded.

I was the lead a few times, though I wasn’t so good when it came to acting. In fact I used to curl up and die when I had to act – still do, sometimes, when I’m on telly. But if it was singing, I loved it.

My biggest role so far, explains Shane, came as the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist, another school production. The Dodger is such a great part and it was the first time I had to act and sing and I loved it, I loved learning the script and trying all the accents, the whole shebang. Kian was in that too. There was no happier place to be…not school, football, rugby. None of it came within a whisker of being on stage.

I started to build my confidence and the girls seemed to like my performances, but I knew I must be getting quite good when a few of the lads came up to me and said, ‘Shane, that was dead good, fella.’

There was a TV show in Ireland, says Mark, called Go for It, and they had a sort of ‘Name That Tune’ segment. At the end, a random member of the public got up and sang a song, sometimes with celebrities. It was brilliant.

I was walking along the street one day with Shane, talking about the show, and I said, ‘If they asked us, if our numbers came up, would you go for it with me?’

‘Absolutely, I would,’ he replied.

At that precise moment, I realized that here was a kid in my neighbourhood who loved singing as much as me and would, given half a chance, literally go for it, and with me. I remember walking beside him thinking, He’s cool, everyone likes him, he’s an amazing singer and he wants to do something with the singing with me…

We’d done Grease at the college, recalls Shane, and then Mary wanted to put on a bigger version in the town. This was a mixed production, so she was able to bring in girls to sing alongside myself and Kian. She gave Kian and me the role of the T-Birds.

We did our thing and it went down a storm. Everyone was talking about the T-Birds – people proper loved it! So Mary decided to put Grease back on in the New Year.

I was doing all these shows, recalls Kian, like Grease, Annie Get Your Gun and Oliver, as well as still playing in rock bands and doing the poetry competitions. It wasn’t sneered at for boys to sing in our area, or in Ireland generally. The mixture of Irish musical culture and Sligo’s own musical scene meant there were singers everywhere. It was OK for boys to sing.

And in a small-town kinda way, we became sort of famous as the T-Birds. All the girls in the school fancied us. That didn’t win us any popularity competitions with the boys, obviously, but we loved it.

All the girls from town did fancy those two, Kian’s right, agrees Mark. A lot of them were coming to the show just to see Shane and Kian as the T-Birds, that’s how good they were.

I wasn’t in the T-Birds, but I was still hanging out with everyone in the production. We’d all started getting a bit of a bug for it, it was brilliant. I was seeing quite a bit of Shane by this time and we’d become good friends. One day we were round someone’s house watching Boyzone and Take That on the telly, some concert footage, and that’s when the idea of starting a boy band came up.

It was very much a group thing; I don’t know if any of us would have done it by ourselves. But we were constantly talking about music, singing songs and messing about with pop songs during and after the rehearsals for the various musicals. I realized that although our voices were very different, Shane and me were harmonizing really well. It sounded great. Well, it wasn’t that it sounded amazing, just that it didn’t sound too bad! So we started mucking about with the idea of a boy band.

One day, after we’d done the T-Birds thing, says Kian, Shane came up to me.

‘Hey, Kian, we’re thinking of putting a boy band together for the next talent contest and we’d like you to be in it.’

‘Are you off your fucking rocker? A boy band? Me? I’m in three rock bands for that talent contest. I’m the lead guitar player in one band, I’m the singer in another band and I’m the guitar player and singer in the other band. I can’t be in a boy band!’

That was my gut reaction.

Then I heard some tunes by the Backstreet Boys.

Now, you might think it’s a big leap from listening to Metallica and Pearl Jam to the Backstreet Boys, and I’ll grant you it is. However, the guy behind some of the biggest Backstreet Boys tunes, Max Martin, was a complete metal freak. He loved his rock music and if you listen to those tunes again, you’ll hear all sorts of heavy riffing and distortion behind the pop tunes. Maybe nobody else would agree with me on that, but that’s why I liked what I heard. It got me intrigued. Suddenly, I quite liked the idea of a boy band. I certainly liked the idea of being in a band that was more popular than Pyromania and in the T-Birds I was getting a reaction on stage like I’d never gotten before just singing and dancing.

So I spoke to Mark and Shane about their band.

That was the start of our first boy band, Six As One.

In the New Year, says Mark, the follow-on production of Grease was sold out. Because of the reaction to the T-Birds, it had been arranged that during the interval of the show we would come on as this new boy band. There were six of us: myself, Shane, Kian, Derek Lacey, Graham Keighron and Michael ‘Miggles’ Garrett, all local lads. The plan was to do two songs by the Backstreet Boys, ‘I’ll Never Break Your Heart’ and ‘We’ve Got It Goin’ On’.

We weren’t sure how people would react, but the place went nuts! Really, it was just the most amazing reaction. We couldn’t believe it.

Then Mary suggested that we put on a full concert as Six as One. We rehearsed all day every day for weeks, learning songs by other boy bands. We were really focused.

Come the day of our own show, there were about 500 people in the hall. It felt like about 500,000 – oh my God, it was incredible. The noise they made and the reaction was brilliant. It felt like we were playing Hyde bloody Park! There is actual footage of the gig somewhere and looking at it now it looks really amateur, but it felt so big to us at the time and it was an important starting-point.

It all kind of happened scarily easy. We loved doing it, having some drinks at the weekend and chatting about it too, and there was real ambition there – as soon as that night was over, it was just like, Right, what are we doing next?

Mary McDonagh came to us after that concert and suggested we do some recordings. By this point, we’d changed our name to IOYOU. I’d started to write a song called ‘Together Girl Forever’, which was about Shane’s future wife Gillian, but I said to him, ‘You’re the one who likes her, you write the second verse!’

I was really keen on Gillian by that point, says Shane, so it was great to write a song about her. Some of the lads did the music for it and Mark did the lyrics. It wasn’t the greatest song you’ve ever heard – it was all very simple – but it was another step forward. So we took that song and ‘Everlasting Love’ and another original which featured Graham rapping at one point, and went in to record them.

We were so excited, that was our very first experience of any kind of studio work. It was just a small home studio and the set-up was nothing like the studios we use now, but it was cool. We were singing into mics and listening back and all saying the same thing: ‘Do I really sound like that?’

The songs weren’t written or produced to the level we are used to now, says Mark, but at the time it was all very relevant and important to get us to the next stage. That little phase literally did do wonders for us. Having our own record felt like the biggest deal ever. We all had haircuts done especially for the cover. Mine was hideous, so as soon as I could I went to the local barber and had it cut off!

About 100 people bought the record from the store in the first few days, then a few more days went by and another 100 copies sold, then 500, then eventually, after several weeks, we’d shifted about 1,000 of them.

Suddenly, the word of mouth in town was like, ‘There’s a new boy band and they’re from Sligo!’ It was all very small scale, but people really got into it, they loved the idea. Mainly girls, actually. At the time, the Backstreet Boys and Boyzone were at their peak, so the idea of Sligo having its own boy band – well, all the local girls loved it.

A while later, Mary McDonagh and her associates offered us a management contract which we had to decide whether to sign or not.

It was an amazing time. It was all a great laugh and yet serious at the same time, we meant business. It seemed so quick too – singing in the interval of Grease, then getting our own show, then recording in a studio, then having a record out…Every step, we felt, If it all stops tomorrow, this has already been amazing!

Next thing we knew, we got asked to go on a TV show called Nationwide, a magazine show where one week there’d be a young kid doing stunts on a BMX and the next week there’d be an Irish dancing troupe. That week it was us, singing carols in a local children’s ward. The TV crew came down and filmed us. They liked it and broadcast the clip at teatime and everyone in Sligo seemed to watch it. It was mad. People in the street even started to say hello. ‘Hey, that’s yer man from that band!’

Oddly, despite going on Nationwide and being known as a new local boy band, there was then a bit of an anti-climax, we sort of stalled for a wee while. Shane went to college five hours away from Sligo and we were kinda kicking our heels, like, That was fun. What now?