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Boyzone's little boy lost
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October 13, 2009
By Paul Scott
During the height of their fame in the late 1990s, the five members of pop band Boyzone sat around discussing their various plans for a rare weekend off.
Their respective agendas involved some resolutely testosterone-charged classic rock star behaviour - car racing, several celebrity parties to attend and a spot of mandatory nightclub excess.
Throughout the discussion, Stephen Gately remained unusually quiet. When, finally, his band mates demanded to know how he would be spending his free time, Gately, always the most introverted of his famous cohorts, announced somewhat sheepishly he was planning to stay at home, reading horoscopes and indulging his latest interest in New Age crystals.
Gately never quite fitted the stereotypical image of your average boyband member.
In truth, that was a role that never sat easily with him and threatened for a time to destroy him as he sought to hide his homosexuality from the heartthrob group's millions of adoring girl fans.
And when he did finally come out in a blaze of publicity ten years ago, it coincided with him becoming hooked on drugs to deal with a bout depression so severe he became a virtual recluse who confided to friends his suicidal thoughts.
International fame came to him at an exceptionally young age.
Gately, the fourth of five children brought up in a tough district of Dublin's city centre, was just 17 when he applied for a band being put together by Irish impresario Louis Walsh in 1993.
The group's teen-friendly ballads proved a commercial hit, chalking up six No1 singles and selling in excess of 15million records.
But just as they were hitting the big time, showbusiness was rife with rumours about Gately. The singer went to incredible lengths to keep his homosexuality a secret.
The band's PR handlers put out smokescreen stories claiming he was dating a series of female pop stars, including Emma Bunton of the Spice Girls and Mandy Smith, the ex-wife of Rolling Stone Bill Wyman. But behind the scenes he had begun a relationship with Dutch singer Eloy de Jong who was himself a member of Europop boyband Caught in the Act.
De Jong regularly travelled with his boyfriend on tour alongside the wives and girlfriends of the other members of Boyzone, but was required to book into hotels under false names, travel on different flights from his partner and in different cars.
The charade was finally exposed in June 1999 when a bodyguard working for the group on their European tour approached a tabloid newspaper with the true story of Gately's sexuality.
Knowing he was about to be outed, the singer agreed to come clean in an interview in which he announced he was gay and that De Jong was his lover.
The feared backlash from the group's girl fans did not materialise, but Gately later admitted he was subjected to homophobic abuse in his native Ireland and pulled out of plans to buy a home in Canterbury, Kent, because of anti-gay chants by local teenagers.
His admission is also said by friends to have been the trigger for a rift between Gately and his Catholic parents Margaret and Martin. It was also to coincide with a series of fall-outs with the group and less than a year later Boyzone split amid barely-concealed fallouts and jealousies, with Gately blaming Ronan Keating for orchestrating the split in order to launch his own solo career.
Gately launched his own solo career too and scored a couple of minor hits. But although his first single got to number three in charts, subsequent releases flopped.
He became addicted to antidepressants, and later admitted: "I was a zombie. On these pills you can't even laugh or cry."
It was Elton John whom Gately credited with bringing him back from the brink after the pop star heard of his plight and invited him to stay at his South of France villa.
After regaining his confidence, Gately returned to the lakeside home near Amsterdam which he shared with De Jong and began immersing himself in the Eastern mystical art of Chakra. But the relationship was already unravelling and the couple split in 2002.
He set out to reinvent himself as an actor and musical theatre star and was chosen by Andrew Lloyd Webber to take on the West End lead role in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat in 2003.
That same year Gately was introduced to Internet entrepreneur Andrew Cowles by Elton John's partner David Furnish. Three years ago, the couple had a civil partnership ceremony in London.
Sadly, Gately's parents, who still live in a Dublin council house, were not there as his mother admitted she had not known about the wedding until the day of the ceremony.
Nor was his relationship with Cowles without its share of storminess. Just two months after tying the knot, Cowles was photographed allegedly beating Gately after they had a row while dining at The Ivy restaurant. Gately subsequently laughed off the incident saying: "Boys will be boys. We were both tipsy and tired."
Gately had pinned his hopes on a Boyzone reunion to help reclaim the success of his youth, but when Keating eventually relented last year, it was not an unbridled success with a tour this summer often playing to half-empty arenas.
Cowles found his partner's slumped body on the couch of their Marjocan holiday home on Saturday. The group had been still working on a "comeback" album.
"Stephen had so much to live for," says friend Kevin Fennel. "The boys had 60 songs written and were whittling them down for an album."
As they mourn their "friend and brother", the question for the rest of Boyzone is whether they can carry on without him. - Daily Mail
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