Boyzone’s Ronan Keating talks about 25 years in a boy band, the farewell tour and the modern music industry

I came of age in the mid 1990s in Wales. With limited access to television or civilisation, I found a sense of self in the most unlikely of places, at least as far as my rock’n’roll loving parents were concerned. It was in the music of one of Ireland’s biggest boy bands: Boyzone.

Fast forward 25 years, and much has changed. But when the opportunity arose to interview Ronan Keating – arguably the biggest of the Boyzone boys – I discovered that my fondness for the five men, now four after Stephen Gately’s death in 2009, had remained a constant.

This is one of the first things I tell Keating, when we speak on the phone. He is on the way home from his day job, presenting the breakfast show on British radio station Magic FM, but is as charming and polite as you would expect from a man with two and a half decades in the business. “Ah, bless you,” he says in his smooth Irish tone, before explaining the band’s decision to call it a day after all this time.

“We just felt this was the right time,” says Keating. “Twenty-five years has been a good run. Boy bands like Boyzone don’t get to last this long, usually.

“We’ve grown up, a lot,” he continues. “We’re much, much older now and we’re having a really good time. We’re taking the good out of it, we’re enjoying the entire experience together. Rather than taking it so seriously, we’re not worried about the outcome or the future of the band, we’re just enjoying the present right now because we know there’s no more future, this is the end.”

At the height of their fame in the 1990s, Boyzone – made up of Keith Duffy, Mikey Graham and Shane Lynch, as well as Gately and Keating – were one of the world’s most successful boy bands. According to Britain’s Official Charts Company, six Boyzone singles, including Words and No Matter What, topped the charts and five albums reached the No 1 spot.