Battered Ronan

‘WHEN it comes to the business of pop music, image is everything.

Ireland’s under-11 brawling champion

So what if you can’t hit a note, dance or play the triangle without skipping a beat – with the right backing singers, lovers and hairstyles, you can still be the new big thing.

It’s only after the latest sensation has been around for a while that we get to see and hear what they are really like. And today we learn of two pop shocks.

First, the Mirror reports that a woman who made her neighbours’ lives a misery by blasting out music from her stereo has been kicked out of her Birmingham flat under the terms of the Anti-Social Behaviour Order.

In itself, this is no great surprise – the Mirror’s ‘RECLAIM OUR STREETS’ campaign loves highlighting the likes of Sharon McLouglin, who has been banned from owning a TV, stereo or radio.

The surprise is her choice of ‘ear-splitting music’. McLoughlin is a fan of…Dido.

Yes folks, the insipid looking mousy blonde whose softly-sung ballads have provided the backing music for a million polite dinner parties and rainy Sundays is so offensive that Judge Alistair MacDuff ordered that she be turned off.

But this is not where things end, for, over in the Sun, readers see another pop star unmasked.

When we read that a singer has gotten into a fight in a chip shop, we wonder whom the brawler could be.

Is he the lead yeller in a heavy metal band, a hardcore rap artiste or an ageing rocker reliving the hell-raising excesses of his youth?

No. He’s Ronan Keating – Ireland’s pale and none-too-interesting answer to Michael Ball.

In ‘RONAN THE BARBARIAN’, the Sun reports that, while waiting for his fish supper, Keating heard someone in the queue warbling his seminal thrash metal hit Life Is A Rollercoaster.

‘Very funny,’ said Ronan. ‘But then he starts going, ‘Who do you think you are?’ So I said, ‘Come on, then, let’s go.’ One of his mates then squares up to one of my mates and then it all kicks off. It was bam! out the door, the police turn up.’

Is this the real Ronan Keating, scrapping in the street like a thug? What happened to the clean-cut weedy looking chap with the trademark line in nice?

‘I’ve been in lots of fights in pubs,’ Ronan goes on, his victim, like the Sun’s readership, reeling from the shock of it all.

‘But my mates are very protective of me. If there’s a scenario, they’re like, ‘You get out of here. We’ll sort it.’ It drives me mad because I want to get stuck in.’

Only he can’t, what with his image to protect – to say nothing of his hands, face, ribs…’

Posted: 4th, August 2004 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink