From boy band phenomenon, stadium filler and tabloid fodder, through to dad, immigrant and rising pop star. Brian McFadden has experienced all the trappings of fame and fortune. Now at 30 years of age, the Irish singer is going through his own personal renaissance, as Lars Brandle discovers.
When asked to choose his three biggest career highlights, Brian McFadden is quick off the mark. Right up there is the first time he played to 80,000 fans at an open-air stadium, standing alongside his former Westlife bandmates. And there was the time he performed for and met the late Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. Both are extraordinary moments, the kind you could dine off for the rest of time. And to round-out the highlight reel perhaps the first milliondollar cheque, or the inaugural world tour? Nope. McFadden instead recalls the time his single Just Say So (featuring Kevin Rudolph) topped the Australian singles chart.
“I never thought in the twilight of my career, if you will, that I’d ever get back to that. I thought my days of getting No. 1s was in the past,” he tells TMN. “It meant more to me than any other No. 1 I’ve ever had.”
That McFadden ranks Australian chart success alongside an audience with the Pontiff and those early tastes of the “big league” shows just how far he’s come. The lad from Dublin is a changed man. He’s now at home in a new country, he’s got business on his mind and his musical output is a world away from his pop fare with Westlife.
On his latest effort, McFadden has turned away from the generic pop-ballad-with-key-change formula and ventured down a more synthetic route. One new track he’s road-testing introduces a rap, performed by Marvin Priest. McFadden knows he’s not getting any younger, and pop music shows little respect for the aged.
“I’m probably the oldest pop artist out there at the moment,” McFadden muses. “If you take away rock bands and established artists like Elton John and you just consider pop music — people like Justin Bieber, or even Gaga, who is an older artist — there’s probably no-one older than me doing it at the moment.”
When TMN calls, McFadden’s voice is swamped in an aural haze of beats and synths. He’s in the studio, laying down tracks with US-born Rob Conley, his collaborator on the Wall of Soundz album. His third solo set spawned Just Say So, the top-20 hit Chemical Rush, and airplay smash Mistakes, a duet with his fiance Delta Goodrem. However, Wall of Soundz debuted at a disappointing No. 27 on the ARIA Albums Chart in May, well-down on the No. 5 opening of his 2008 sophomore solo album Set In Stone.
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