'It’s made us a little bit cool with our kids': Westlife on working with Ed Sheeran
For their upcoming tour, Westlife will feature Kian Egan, Shane Filan, and Nicky Byrne. Mark Feehily isn't touring due to health issues. Picture: Matt Holyoak
With 14 UK number one singles and eight number one albums behind them, Irish group Westlife are the most successful boyband in British chart history.
Only Elvis Presley and The Beatles have produced more chart topping singles than the boyband, currently made up of Nicky Byrne, Shane Filan, Kian Egan and Mark Feehily, with their late-1990s and early 2000s heyday seeing them top the charts with songs such as and
The group, who are marking their 25th anniversary together with the release of a new single called a new compilation album and a UK tour, were also joined by Brian McFadden during their peak, who left in 2004, and are temporarily without Feehily due to health issues.
The new single has seen Westlife team up with singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, who has written for the band and performed with them at a concert at Portman Road in Ipswich, the home of the town’s football club which Sheeran supports.
“Look, he’s a legend, he’s such an amazing songwriter, he writes nearly three to four songs a day, he’s super fast,” Egan explains. “We were just so honoured to kind of have him involved in us, and he tells the story of the fact that he learned to play the guitar to our song from way back in ’99 and he goes around saying that’s one of the best songs of all time.
“He’s been a massive Westlife fan since he was a kid, so to hear that from such a huge superstar, when he’s in interviews, championing us like that, it’s incredible. But then to also have him get involved in our music, the first album that we did when we came back together in 2019, he was so heavily involved in that.
“And now again with we just feel really lucky, we feel like the team that we have around us, the reason why he’s with us is because of Steve Mac, who wrote and all of our hits in the early years, then he did with Ed.
“And when we got back together, ‘we were like, congratulations on doing that massive song with Ed Sheeran’, and he was like, ‘yeah, no worries, mate, me and Ed, we wrote a few songs for you here.”
Even years after being told the Lego House singer had written for them, the band still burst into disbelieving laughter when the story is brought up, Byrne adds: “Dare I say it, it’s made us a little bit cool with our kids.” He says the Halifax-born star was “so wonderful and lovely” with his children, who are fans, and “took all the time in the world” with them.
But many young music fans are not listening to the current artists of the day, with streaming platforms prompting a move back to the 1990s which has seen indie fans fall in love with Britpop bands such as Oasis, Blur and Pulp, and pop fans revisit boybands and girlbands, including Westlife themselves.
Filan describes the group’s new surge in popularity as both interesting and strange, but says the reason heritage groups are gaining new fans could be down to the fact the modern music industry does not make it easy for new acts in a similar vein to them to break through.
He adds: “You’ve got the legacy bands, obviously, like, let’s say Westlife, Oasis, or all these bands coming back, people are kind of living in their memories at the moment. But I think boybands, pop groups, there’s always cycles of it, it comes along nearly every maybe 10 years, so there probably will be another big boyband coming through at some stage.
“But I think the music industry has slightly changed a little bit, everybody seems to be on tour in the world, Bon Jovi, or whoever it may be, is going on tour, and that’s great, and that’s nostalgic, but it definitely is harder to break through. Because back in the day you’re selling two, three million albums or something in the UK, which is massive, but that kind of album sales isn’t there anymore.
“So the cost of doing it, the cost of putting a boyband together and putting them on TV shows, and the amount of the TV shows aren’t there, the magazines aren’t there. So unless you have the song, you don’t really get heard, and it might be on TikTok, it might be a YouTube video that you made in your bedroom, and you put it up there playing a song, and the next thing people see it."
Filan says the reception for their upcoming tour has been “incredible”, and admits the band are quite nervous about it. To kick off their anniversary celebrations, the pop group performed two concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London in October, where they were joined by Welsh singer Katherine Jenkins for in a performance which included, for the first time in Westlife’s career, an orchestra and an encore.
Byrne says: “I suppose it was a different side to Westlife and the lifespan of a band, if you’re lucky enough to be in a band that lasts a long time, there’s so many different segments to us, and we’re at the part of our lifespan of a band where we’re trying and doing and trying new things.
“So the Royal Albert Hall with an orchestra was brand new to us, so it was different, there was a different approach, and we didn’t want the occasion to get the better of us, which thankfully, it didn’t.”
On the encore, he continues: “We did 45 minutes, we came off, went to our dressing room, made ourselves a little coffee, cup of tea, like the Rat Pack, and then we had a little kind of half time team chat to go, ‘yeah, thought you were good in the first half, maybe just move out to your left’, it was weird, it was good, and we enjoyed it.”
- Tickets for Westlife 25: The Anniversary World Tour are on sale now, while new single is out now, from the upcoming album, out February 13, 2026
