YAYAYAYAAAY!! Westlife did it! 'Back Home' entered the official UK albums chart at No.1! Well done lads, we're so proud of you and the new album! *dances around*

1. Westlife - Back Home (NEW)
2. Eagles - Long Road Out Of Eden (1)
3. Whitney Houston - The Ultimate Collection (5)
4. McFly - Greatest Hits (NEW)
5. Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raising Sand (4)

Credit/Source: BBC Radio 1 Chart Show

Westlife debut at No1 on the Album Chart with ‘Back Home’, their eighth No1 album in Ireland from nine releases (only ‘Allow Us To be Frank missed out on the top spot, peaking at No2 in November 2004). What’s more, it’s the fastest-selling album in Ireland since their last offering ‘The Love Album’ in November 2006.

Mario Rosenstock has the next new entry at No2 with the eighth in his Gift Grub series ‘The G Factor’. Volume 7 debuted at No1 this time last year, but was deposed after one week by the Westlife juggernaut. Britney Spears ‘Blackout’ dips to No3 after debuting at No1 last week, ahead of non-mover ‘Long Road Out Of Eden’ from The Eagles at No4. The third new entry in this week’s Top 5 comes in at No5 - 2FM’s irreverent comedy ‘Nob Nation’, as featured on the Gerry Ryan Show.

Leona Lewis takes a third week at No1 on the Singles Chart with ‘Bleeding Love’, selling more copies in the seven day period than any single since her debut ‘Another Moment Like This’ in Christmas week last year. Westlife are held off the top for a second week as ‘Home’ takes a distant second place, but still maintains a comfortable lead over Timbaland’s ‘Apologize’ at No3. Climbing the chart for a fifth consecutive week, ‘Apologize’ is Timbaland’s third Top 3 single this year following ‘Give It To Me’ and ‘The Way I Are’ - all three taken from his No1 album ‘Shock Value’.

Credit/Source: Haven Forum / Chart Track Commentary

Westlife fans rejoice! Now's your chance to vote for your favourite ever Westlife track from the boys' 14 UK number one hits.

Simply make your choice from the list below, enter your email address (you can vote only once!) and your vote will be counted.

The winning song will be revealed live on the band's TV special on ITV1 in December.

CLICK HERE TO VOTE

Credit/Source: www.itv.com

Wooohooo!! WELL DONE to our Westlife lads! They managed to enter the Irish albums charts straight in at No.1



'Home' is still at No.2 behind Leona Lewis.

Credit/Source: www.irma.ie

Nicky and Mark from Westlife pop round to Southern FM Towers for a chat with Jack The Lad.

So, who would win in a fight with boy band rivals Take That? Find out here as Jack asks the questions we all want answered.

And how about Brian? Find out what they really think of their old mucker. Jack says it like it is, so join the fun as he gives the Westies a right good verbal workout.

When Jack The Lad Met Westlife
Listen again to the full interview right here on Southernfm.com

Listen here

Credit/Source: www.southernfm.co.uk / Thanx Dawn for finding

X Factor star Leona Lewis lit up Britain's most famous shopping street when she switched on the Christmas lights.
The singer, whose debut album is due for release next week, brightened up Oxford Street when she flicked the switch.

Thousands of revellers enjoyed the switch-on party with live performances by Westlife and the cast of West End musical Mary Poppins. The theme of this year's lights is the Disney Christmas film, Enchanted.

Lewis said: "I'm really excited about switching on the lights. Just really honoured that I was asked to do it. I'm going to spend Christmas at home chilling out with my family. I'm going to open my presents and then just veg out. I had a wonderful Christmas last year. The number one was the best present ever and since then I've just been on a high. I've just got back from the X Factor tour and I've been writing and working on the album too.

Her album, Spirit, is released next Monday.

Lewis said: "Making the album was a lot of fun. It was hard work because I recorded so many songs and then we had to whittle it down, which was the really hard part."

She said she is still working on which song is going to be the next single. "There are no plans to tour at the moment but hopefully in the future I will be. Hopefully after this album I will be able to get back into the studio and produce more songs," she added.

After the lights were switched on, Lewis, who won X Factor last year, headed to the premiere of Disney's Enchanted.

Westlife performed their 2001 number one hit World Of Our Own and also Home from their new album, Back Home, which is released next week. The band said they were really excited to be at the event. "Every Christmas we have a new album out so it's always a very busy time for us but also an exciting time too," they said.

They added that they are taking next year off because they are "knackered" and want to to prepare for the future.

Credit/Source: www.lutontoday.co.uk

The Official Westlife Site has a new page for the lads' biography with quotes of them and interesting content.

Biography

In the last few years of their success, Westlife have refused to follow the toe-path of the regulation boyband. “Are we even a boyband anymore? I have absolutely no idea,” says Nicky Byrne, with disarming candour. Tradition has it that after the first five years, absolute maximum, the boyband must by default implode to make way for the new model. With Westlife, there simply hasn’t been a new model to outshine them. On the straight up British pop roster, Westlife have existed since before SClub7, B*Witched, Blue, Girls Aloud, Atomic Kitten, Busted, Misteeq, McFly, Liberty X and all the countless other record company follies that have disappeared without trace. Of those that they haven’t already outlived, you could put a pretty safe fiver on the rest bowing out before they. As a functioning, multi-purpose, thoroughbred pop operation, they are now twice as old as Take That were when they split for the first time and three times as old as Wham! were when they went forever.

One of the reasons for this is their unnerving agility and ability in rendering music that cuts straight to the primary core of a largely forgotten pop audience. Tuneful, melodic, simply structured music that doesn’t stray from the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle eight-chorus recipe of timeless tunes. But the other is because they are four distinct individuals who come together and make something that is whole.

Another reason is that the four boys cannot help but be themselves. People like that. Sometimes talking with Westlife is like talking to four kindred spirits who have bungled their through becoming the third biggest selling act in the British Isles, ever (pipped only by The Beatles and U2). Sometimes it is like talking with four squaddies on a night off down the boozer. Sometimes it is like talking to a naughty classroom, particularly when Mark Feehily gets onto the subject of one particular Spice Girl. Always it is like talking to a bunch of best friends. And just occasionally that memory comes back to you, amidst their tireless Irish banter, that even after almost a decade at it, these boys are four of the most popular pop stars Britain’s ever seen. Now take that.

So who are Westlife? Their success is not in question. Despite a rampaging media campaign against their favour at Christmastime last year, they managed to trounce the competition in a four way battle of album releases between themselves, U2, The Beatles and Oasis. Three of these bands were presenting bullet-proof, failsafe, platinum plated greatest hits packages. Westlife were the only ones that weren’t, with their sweetly rendered covers set, The Love Album. They could’ve waited until the more appropriately Valentine’s Day release, but after their enormous tenure at the top of the business, they have a formidable lack of fear of playing with the big game. They’re not cocky, like. But they are a force of British musical nature. And, frankly, they won.

In some ways the Westlife tale is one of simple, old fashioned camaraderie. Allow Nicky to take up the story:

“Even though we’ve looked at other bands that are similar to us, we’ve looked at bands like the Rolling Stones and U2, bands of men that have stood by one another over a long period of time. Those boys have been in dressing rooms and on tour with one another for so long that they know each other inside out and upside down. If there was a hidden agenda with anyone in Westlife then we’d all know about it. Nobody’s after the solo deal. Everyone has the band’s interest at heart first. We always said that we wanted to be the ones to change and break the mould. We had our rocky times, don’t get me wrong, when it might’ve happened, particularly when Bryan went, but we regrouped, stuck together and made a great album that got us out of the shit, effectively. Amongst ourselves and with a band like ours it’s always from the inside out. Internally these things can break easily and as soon as the cracks show on the inside inevitably they’ll show on the outside. You can never really say you haven’t had a fight if you have because your audience will spot that you’re lying.”

Kian puts it more simply: “I think that the success is very different to the reason that we’re still here today. I think that we’ve been very lucky to have people around us to pick out great pop songs when there seems to be none around. The reason we are still around is a very simple reason: communication. We have no holds barred honesty. There’s no bullshit. In Westlife you say what you feel and you don’t hold back.”

In their enduring tenure at the top of the pop tree, Westlife have earned themselves the right to a few months off every year. It’s a sort of payback time, if you like, for the years they put in at the beginning when they would get a week per annum off and squeeze in things like hernia operations into it.

Mark is circumspect about the reasons for this. “I bought a house a couple of years ago and I was doing a lot of renovating. In Sligo. I live out in the countryside. I like getting away from the madness and the pace of when you’re in the band. I think that every time I go home for a long time I remember how easy it is to get caught up in the madness and the lifestyle that is being in Westlife. Its important to step back from it and let it go for a while. The greed of the business can constantly pull you down. It’s nice to get home and to remind yourself of the things that are very important in life. That’s something that I go through every time we have a big break. It doesn’t hurt anyone to take a bit of time out. You come back a stronger person.”

And it would seem, a stronger band. The four counterpoints of Westlife have had their varying shares of thrills and spills in the time that they had apart from one another this year. Nicky has had twins (“the most breathtaking experience a man can go through”). Shane has watched his two year old daughter turning into a little person (“amazing”) and lowered his golf handicap (“almost as amazing”). Kian has bought a new house near his girlfriend Jodi’s family just outside London, opened a Juice Bar called the Monkey Tree in his surfing paradise hometown of Sligo, “and generally acted like a bit of a bum down the pub”. Mark has renovated the house he shares with partner, Kevin, in County Sligo. All things considered, it is no wonder they have opted for the title Back Home for their new collection of songs.

They are righteously proud of the new set. The record label – now as famous as the boys itself given the phenomenal success of MD Simon Cowell on X Factor and American Idol, and Louis Walsh on the former (they do a mean impression of him on telly, too, and offer him belated wardrobe advice on a weekly basis) – wanted another covers set. But the boys stood strong. They all think it’s their best yet. “It’s very Westlife,” says Shane, righteously and unapologetically, “but Westlife needed to step into 2007.” To this end, and under the boys own instruction, new producers have been brought in, the sound reconfigured and the suits and stools gone for the time being. “But it’s pop music. It’s not pop electro or pop rock,” adds Mark, “we know what Westlife is and we love that thing.”

There’s no arguing with that really, is there?

last updated: 02.11.2007

Credit/Source: www.westlife.com

By Paul Williams

Westlife are on track for their seventh consecutive UK number one album with the newly-issued Back Home almost outselling its three nearest competitors combined.

Early retail reports indicate the Syco/Sony BMG album looks a certainty to replace The Eagles’ Polydor-issued comeback album Long Road Out Of Eden at number one this coming Sunday, while Island’s own pop act McFly are vying for a top-three place with new retrospective Greatest Hits.

The Wombats, who are signed to 14th Floor Recordings, are also challenging for a Top 10 entry with their debut album A Guide To Love Loss & Desperation, while UMTV are looking to make a similar arrival with the Boyz II Men album Motown Hitsville USA.

Another handful of albums are also poised to chart in or around the Top 40 this weekend, among them releases by EMI’s Sigur Ros, UCJ’s Blake, Geffen/Polydor’s Angels & Airwaves and Rock-A-Fella/Mercury-signed Jay-Z.

While Westlife are heading for number one on albums, lead-off track Home looks likely to drop down from its debut of three with both the Columbia-issued Valerie by Mark Ronson featuring Amy Winehouse and Interscope/Polydor’s Apologize by Timbaland with One Republic ready to overtake. Right at the top, Syco/Sony BMG is almost guaranteed to make it three weeks at number one with Bleeding Love by Leona Lewis with Polydor act Take That again the main challengers with Rule The World.

Singles by RCA’s Alicia Keys and Warner Bros-signed Craig David are both set to make double-digit jumps, which could send them simultaneously into the Top 10, while other notable climbers in the chart will include Columbia’s Celine Dion and Rock-A-Fella/Mercury’s Kanye West. New entries are expected to include Elvis Presley with latest Sony BMG re-issue In The Ghetto, Wet Wet Wet on their own Dry label and an Interscope/Polydor pairing of Nicole Scherzinger and Will.I.Am.

Credit/Source: Haven Forum / Music Week

THE boys of Westlife have recorded a documentary about their 10-year pop career - which will be screened immediately before the X Factor live final in December.

No prizes for working out how they scooped that prime slot - the boys are managed by judge Louis Walsh.

This comes after Leona Lewis - Simon Cowell's protegee - sang Bleeding Love last week.

Kian Egan joked: "Sharon will be pushing to get Ozzy on next."

Westlife's single Home is out tomorrow.

Credit/Source: www.sundaymirror.co.uk

If you can make it to London on 5th November then you’re in for a real treat: Westlife will be signing copies of Back Home at Harrods!

The boys will arrive at the ultra-swanky London department store on Brompton Road, SW1, by horse-drawn carriage at 9.30am. They’ll then move to the HMV area to begin the signing, which will be taking place from 10am - 11am on a first come, first served basis.

Those who turn up will be handed a special Harrods black envelope containing a Westlife card. Check very carefully inside, because if yours also has a golden ticket, you’ve won a place at an exclusive performance afterwards!

Those lucky winners will then attend the special private gig, starting at 11am and finishing at 11.45am, after which they’ll receive a fantastic goody bag.

It promises to be a really incredible day - we look forward to seeing you there!

Credit/Source: www.westlife.com

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