A boy's own recall

Last week, in the Spanish island of Majorca, a gay man died in his sleep after coming home from a party, where he had a marathon drinking session. His name was Stephen Gately. He was a member of the Irish boyband, Boyzone.

I used to love Boyzone's music. They, along with Westlife and Backstreet Boys, defined what was cool and hip and beautiful to my generation.

I still remember how I found out about them. I was in fifth or sixth standard, and we had this "totally moby" classes called Computer Practicals/Theory. Theory was dull and Practicals were fun. We learned new programs called BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, hey i still remember that) and FOXPRO. At that time, learning BASIC was the coolest thing to learn--you could make balls jump around the screen. And there was this early version of paintbrush called Turtle. You could draw robots, ships and houses with that. Computers were just getting trendy. And in our school, we had a truly class kind of lab--two students per comp. Life was good.

Life was good, mainly because we didn't know anything better. Then I discovered this new graffiti kind of scrawling on the polished lab desks. Actually, it was there all along, but I hadn't really noticed. "Backstreet Boys", it said. There was this other one big scrawl too--"Fuck". The former, i guessed, was some kind of dude-club (we had many in school, and some of these names were as mysterious as to me as to its memebers, haha), and the latter I had no difficulty in understanding (this was because we had broken into one perennially closed room of our school, innocently named Scout Room, and discovered volumes of Illustrated Weekly, a particularly vivid magazine, which offered sneak-peeks into the adult world. Years later, I learned that IW was the earliest of English magazines in India; and boy was it hot).

Weeks later, one more addition to the scrawling--"Boyzone". Mystified, I asked my friend Bibin if he knew anything about this Boyzone. He replied that the only boyzone he knew were the boys' toilets, and that to his knowledge, girls dominated all the other rooms. I could understand his grievance--he always wanted to be a six-footer, but in terms of height, the girls in our class were overtaking us poor guys. Hormones, one day our science teacher had explained. That was the reason. And the bloody seniors were starting to get interested in our girls, much to our chagrin. How dare they?

Boys? Boyzone? Backstreet Boys? It took a while a to find out what those names meant. Those days, downloads were unheard of, and MP3 was just becoming popular, and Axxo was probably learning the beginners guide to hacking and ripping. Music, other than that of rundown fare of regional movies, was hard-access. You could, of course, catch the videos in any of the satellite channels. That's exactly what me and my friends did. Four or five late-teen or early-twenty boys, with their perfectly groomed hair and twinkling teeth, singing in chorus. Listening to this, as I soon found out, was kind of addictive.

A switch from Michael Jackson's pop-metal to the sweeping, flourishing ballads of these boybands was an easy one. They had more in common with us than Jackson could ever have. The songs were light, all emotional and all about love, lose, and love again. Not an even an iota of logical thought or philosophical music blemished the lyrics. Suited me. Suited my generation's age--an age when we all wore our hearts in our sleeves.

Dammit, writing this is like a compulsion. I can't find the right conclusion to finish off this piece. It could go on and on and on, and still reach no end. The idea to write this, as in the case of most posts here, came when I was smoking a cigarette. After I learned the news of Mr Gately's death, I had called Joshy, a friend of mine who used to be as enthusiastic about them as me. "Stephen who?," he had asked. And: "Oh yeah, Boyzone. Does it still exist?."

No, it doesn't. Boyzone had split years earlier, like 'N SYNC and Take That. Split of these bands launched one artiste each--Ronan Keating, Justin Timberlake, and Robbie Williams. Backstreet Boys hasn't produced an album years, except that near-forgettable effort Incomplete. Westlife still has some youth left in them. But can they...?

I'd rather not finish this in an oh-so-beautiful-were-those-days mode. I am better off with U2, Coldplay, and Radiohead these days. It's better to be a skeptic than live in a synthetic airbrushed world. At least, they offer some darkness to hide in, to see the outside world much better.
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Doubt: This Gately guy came out of the closet only a few years back. If the world knew he was a gay, I doubt Boyzone'd have been as successful as they were. Cluck!