About A Boy
He was the cheeky chappy in Boyzone, the cheery one with the boy next door personality. Then the band broke up and he didn’t know what to do with his life. So Keith Duffy did what nobody expected: he became a well-regarded actor and soap star. As he prepares to make his debut with the acclaimed Druid Theatre company, he speaks frankly about his quest for meaning in life, the controversial break-up of Boyzone in 2000, their successful reunion and Stephen Gately’s tragic death.
Olaf Tyaransen, 16 Nov 2011
the tears come down because people genuinely did care and they were all so nice, shaking our hands
and stuff.
The flight was at 6.30am. We went up to that new area where Burger King and the coffee shop is. And Shane said, “Look, I’d better get some food in,” and Mikey said, “Fuck it, I’m getting a beer,” so I said, “Alright, get me a beer.” So he went up and ordered six bottles of Corona, and Shane got two full Irish breakfasts. The two of them came back to the table bawling their eyes out and I said to them, “What’s wrong with yis?” and they went – “They wouldn’t charge us, man… they just gave it all for nothing”. It was amazing! We were going through security at Heathrow and people weren’t even frisking us: we were setting off alarms, and they just gave us our bags and told us to go. It was unbelievable. We hooked up with Ronan then and fucked off to Mallorca. The rest was highly exercised on the TV…
Do you feel you’ve been well treated by the media over the years?
The Irish media has never been as bad as the British media. The journalists over there were vultures for years. We had an understanding with the [Irish] journalists, we knew them all. The likes of Eddie Rowley and Ken Sweeney. But ah, look, it goes both ways, man. There’s no point in slagging off the media or the press because when you go for promotion you’re gonna use them to your own advantage. Then when you’re pissed out of your head and falling off a kerb at four o’clock in the morning coming out of China White’s in London, and you’re photographed on the front page of the paper, well – you put yourself up there for a fall and if you’re going to fall in front of them, you can’t give out about that. Sometimes the intrusion into your private life can be too much. Everybody is human, and God made us not to be perfect, so people are going to fuck up. Nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors, and it’s nobody else’s business what goes on behind closed doors. The whole kind of shit in the papers of ‘this footballer is sleeping with this girl’ and infidelity or whatever going on… I don’t think it’s anybody else’s business. If it’s somebody like Cheryl Cole and her fella, and they’ve no kids or whatever, and both of them are media-hungry, well fine, write what you want, but when there’s kids involved and they go to an ordinary school with 30 other kids in the classroom, and their mammy and their daddy are on the front page of the papers and their private life is splashed everywhere, I think it’s not fair on the kids. So there has to be a line drawn between media-hungry people that are fucking up in the public eye, and parents of children that have made a mistake and fucked up. There has to be some sort of protection for the kids. In general, look, the media are there, they do their job. You need them, you want them, you use them, and don’t be expecting that they’re not going to use you back when you fuck up.
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Olaf Tyaransen
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