Once You Pop, You Can't Stop

There’s a reason homegrown dreamboat Siva Kaneswaren appears completely at ease when I meet him, and it’s fair to assume topping the singles charts has something to do with it. Actually, there’s probably 100,000 reasons why the Dublin hunk’s toothpaste-commercial smile is particularly wide today.

The Wanted were virtual unknowns 12 months ago, but already, the groomed fivesome have taken a sizable bite out of the big time. Now signed to Def Jam in the US, where they share a canteen with Kanye West and Rihanna (note: this does not happen exactly as described), they recently hit the top of the singles charts in the UK and Ireland. 40 million YouTube views ain’t nothing to be sniffed at, neither.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Justin Bieber has the monopoly on screaming girls these days, but fans of the British-Irish collective have taken hero worship to (if you’ll allow me to namedrop a boy band of yore) another level. One girl got so excited during a show that she threw a tampon on stage bearing the words “I Love Max” (lucky Max…), another was moved to the point of projectile vomiting when she met the boys in the flesh.

Identifiable by their bizarre cocktail of baby-faced innocence and stratospheric confidence (see “I decided you look well on me”, a line from their Ibiza-friendly hit ‘Glad You Came’), there’s something oddly appealing about these five lads. Maybe it’s because, aside from Kaneswaren, none of them have poster boy good looks.
Of course, Siva has more than his razor-sharp cheekbones to thank for being chosen for the group. The Dubliner comes from a family of pop hopefuls – his brother David was a founding member of boy band Zoo, his other brother Trevor made it to the final stages of X Factor in 2008 and his sister Hazel, an ex-member of Irish R&B group Dove, narrowly missed out on a chance to be in Girls Aloud.
He may not have taken the reality show route to fame, but he did play a beefcake boyband member on ITV talent show drama Rock Rivals. It’s a clear-cut case of life imitating art if you ask me, but Siva doesn’t see it that way.

“It’s actually quite a coincidence,” he laughs, “and it’s something that’s going to haunt me forever! I always wanted to get into acting and that came up. They were looking for actors who could sing, and I was like, ‘Okay, I can do that!’”
Right, this one’s a toughie, what era does Siva consider to be the golden age of pop?

“I’m a big fan of Lionel Richie and Earth, Wind And Fire,” he says. “All the classics. If I was to think of pop music now that really stands out… aaah! Since Michael Jackson, it’s very hard. It’s tough to think of a sound that defined an era. The Spice Girls got really big, back when it was still credible to be pop.”
To be fair, Siva is rarely asked to trawl through the annals of pop music in interviews. I get the feeling that my questions make a big change from the likes of, “Can I touch your stomach?” and “Which member of The Saturdays is your favourite?”

Still, while The Wanted’s rise to fame has been remarkably swift, it didn’t come without a lot of good old-fashioned elbow grease.
“We worked so hard,” Siva stresses. “Harder than any other band. We were doing two school gigs during the day, and nightclubs at night. We’d have all these drunken lads at two in the morning screaming at us to get off stage. But with all the school gigs and nightclub gigs and the buzz on the internet, we kept it strong and we kept them interested.”

Was there ever a time when they felt like packing it in?
“There really was, sometimes we’d get on the stage and literally, we’d clear the floor. It wasn’t that people didn’t like the songs, it was that they saw a boyband coming on stage thinking they could make it. We even had a few little rows with the crowd. But now our music’s all over the country, so it’s amazing that it’s all changed.

“We want to bring the bar a bit higher,” Siva continues, when I probe him on the bigger picture. “So the older age range will appreciate it more, and to show that we’re actually quite serious about our music.”

As the sole Paddy in a band of Brits, I’m hoping he can shed light on why Ireland produces almost as many pop stars as it does bottles of TK lemonade.
“Naturally, we’ve got a good little rhythm,” he smirks, “and the traditional music is quite melodic, too. You put a pop tune to a really melodic song and it can be really catchy. And the Irish always support each other when it comes to music. When you come off stage, an Irish lad will always say, ‘Go on you good thing!’ It’s like saying ‘Go for it, you’re doing great!’ I sometimes think that’s the essence of Irishness.”