Mark Bio

Baby Mark and his family 

Born on 28th May '81,Markus Michael Patrick Feehily, alias Mark from the well-known band Westlife, grew up with his two brothers, Barry and Colin (both younger than him) in Sligo, a little town in Ireland... It was a great place to grow up because there was always plenty of space to play football. Barry's shier than Mark and is really into horses and cars. "You give him a name of a car and he'll tell you about it- the speed it goes, the size of the engine, how much it costs, he knows the whole lot." says Mark. Colm (5 years younger than Barry) is soccer mental and crazy Manchester United fan. He goes to every game for the local team, Sligo Rovers, and always drags Mark's dad grandfather along. Anything to do with football and Colin loves it. Mark's mum, Marie, is a civil servant and works in the department of agriculture. She's originally from Sligo and has lived there for most of her life, and her family owned a pub in the town. His dad, Oliver, was brought up on a farm in an area just outside Sligo, and that's where Mark was brought up and still live. Now, Mr Feehily owns a window company and is very good at working with his hands. Mark's Mum used to put the radio on when she used to leave him in the cot in her bedroom when Mark was a baby. The noises relaxed him & helped him get to sleep. Even nowadays, Mark still switches on the TV or the radio to get asleep! That's probably why Mark has a room on his own at the hotels, while the others share. "None of us want to share with him anyway, I shared with Mark the first night, we had just got into bed and he turned the TV on full blast and turned over to go to sleep!" says Kian. So since then he's never shared as he has to have the telly on really loud. "It's easier for me to have the single room, and now I've bought a portable cd player, so I play music to get me to sleep." His first school was a small local infants, and then he went to St Patrick's National, which was also quite a small school with about 300 kids. It was about four miles out of town, so it was very quiet and friendly. "I enjoyed it there, although I was totally off the point in class. I was a total daydreamer and I made one teacher's life hell because my mind was never on studying." reckons Mark. "I was always talking, or distracting other kids, or looking out the window and singing to myself. I didn't mean to be badly behaved, and I wasn't a troublemaker, but it's just that my mind was elsewhere." He also used to play a lot of tennis at school. "I was dead serious about my tennis, I would play every single day and travel round Ireland playing for Connaught province. There are four provinces in Ireland, at the end of the year there was a big round tennis competition. I played twice for Connaught at Under 12s & Under 14s and did pretty well, but never won the whole thing." He loved tennis so much that for a while he wanted to be professional player, but realised it wasn't really going to be possible. They just didn't have the facilities or the coaching in his area to take him to a higher level. Unless he was willing to pay a lot of money and travel to Dublin every week end for a proper coaching, he didn't stand a change. But tennis is great fun, so he just enjoyed playing and stopped taking it so seriously. He also got into playing squash and badminton a lot as well. Mark's home is in a small area just outside Sligo. It's only two and a half miles from the centre of town, but it's like being in the country. The house is surrounded by beautiful fields and is quite secluded. In recent years there has been so much buildings that the town is growing out to it. Mark will end up being part of Sligo eventually. Because he lived in the countryside, the biggest change for him was when he was twelve and left his local school to go to Summerhill College in Sligo, a boys school. He had to travel into town every day and there were like a thousand boys in that school. Up until then Mark would only have gone to town with his mum on Saturdays, or very occasionally with friends. So he wasn't as mature as 'with it' as the other lads. The kids from the town were used to hanging around the shops in gangs or going to lively places on a daily basis, but Mark had never done all that before. He was used to staying at home, going to watch television at a friend's house over the road, or going to his gran's in the evenings. His social life was just staying at home playing with his cousins, which was very boring to the Sligo guys. "It was quite a shock for me to go to Summerhill, and I was very wary of everything at first. I was reserved and shy during my first two years because I was worried the other boys would see me as a farmer's kid, so I stuck with the friends I knew from my last school. "And because of his shyness, it took him a while to settle into Summerhill... Summerhill, where Kian Egan & Shane Filan, two of the 5 westlife members, were studying too. At that time, Shane was one year ahead of them in school, and Kian into rock stuff.. At twelve, Shane did his first proper stage. It was Grease at the Hawkswell Theatre in Sligo. Kian and Mark were there, watching him on stage and performing. Who would have guessed that it was the begining of a brilliant and successful career for the three of them? Who'd have imagined they were going to be one of the best Irish bands ever and break records? No-one knew what the future held... 

A new star is born 

For as long as he can remember he have loved singing. He used to jump up and down on his bed with a hairbrush in his hand pretending it was a microphone, thinking he was a pop star. The first song he remembers really liking was 'Uptown Girl' by Billy Joel. He used to sing it during playtime at his first school when he was about four. On Sunday evening, his family'd go to his grandparents' house & the main event was when everyone had to get up and do a party piece. "I knew I could sing OK, so I usually did a song. I enjoyed it so much, even though I was shy, and that's when I realised I liked performing. I'd normally be all shy in front of a load of people, but I didn't have nerves or anything when I was singing. "Mark remembers. Those party pieces were a big influence on him, but the only problem he had was remembering the words. He was really bad at that & would end up humming a lot of the time! He started entering talent competitions when he was about 7. They were only small things in his local area, but he loved them and won a plaque one year for singing. When he was in the second year at his junior school, he came first in a talent competition and won a trophy, which was amazing to him. He also used to singing in the school choir, but the biggest influence on him was going to see musicals at the local theatre. It used to send shivers up his spine and make the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He would sit there wishing he could be on stage like the other kids, but he's always thought he had to be someone special and really talented to get a chance. "I didn't have any idea on how you went about getting into musicals, but then 1 year, when I was about nine, my cousin Gail, who is a couple of years younger than me, was in a pantomime. She sang 'Yellow Bird' on stage and I remember watching her, thinking, Maybe I can get up and do that too." When he was about 10, he did his 1st show, which was Scrooged. Then he got a part in WestSide Story, which was the first show he did at the Hawkswell Theatre. It was a production for adults, but there were four parts for kids and he played an American boy. He was only on stage for 5 minutes, but he was really nervous on the first night. The show ran for 3 weeks and was so popular it was booked out for the whole time. "We won an amateur theatre award and it was just about the most exciting thing that ever happened to me. I remember my parents being really proud of me. They've always supported me, no matter what I wanted to do." The other big influence on his life was seeing the movie "Grease" when his dad got him his first video recorder. His mum's cousin lent them about twenty or thirty tapes & Mark came across Grease in that collection. When he first watched it, he couldn't believe such a brilliant film existed. It had a big effect on him and he watched it again and again. He is not joking, he watched it every single minute of the day when he was off school. He used to put on his father's old leather jacket & pretend he was Danny. The jacket was nothing like a biker's jacket, but he wasn't bothered. He used to stand in front of a mirror singing the songs- he knew all the words. 'There is something about Grease - it's weird how it kept coming back and playing a part in my life. I know it has had a big impact on Shane and Kian too. The first time I saw it as a stage show was at the Hawkswell Theatre when I was about ten or eleven. Shane was in it and he came on and sang 'We Go Together' with a girl from Sligo. I didn't know Shane at all back then. I was in the audience with my mum thinking he was good and had a great voice. Watching him really hit me and made me even more determined to get into musicals. I loved the whole vibe about the theatre and was desperate to be involved. It's amazing that watching Shane had such an influence on me, especially when you think how everything has turned out with the band.' Summerhill College put on a big show every year and the first did was Annie Get Your Gun and then "Oliver!", but Mark was only singing in the chorus in these. Shane played the Artful Dodger in Oliver!. When he was in the 3rd year the school put on Grease : that was the first time Mark really got to sing properly in a show. Shane was Kenickie and Kian was Sonny in that production and he got to know them pretty well while they were rehearsing together after school. He admired Shane for being a deadly singer & he liked the other lads. "I remember just before a show one night, Shane and Kian and some guys were trying to push people in the showers at the gym & finally they got me. It was just for a laugh, but I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was fully clothed and had to go home a change, which was a disaster, but I got back in time and the show still went brilliantly. I was Johnny Casino and Teen Angel and had three solos. That was the first time I actually let myself go and sang on stage with a mike and an audience in front of me. Singing the Hand Jive with the whole cast- but with me as the main singer - was a major moment for me. The only bad thing was the top I was wearing, which had a glittery US flag on it and looked tragic. But I felt amazing and that's when I really got into being a singer. "All of a sudden he was doing what he wanted to do - it was just a brilliant feeling. For the first two years of school, he had so much wanted to be involved in the main line-up and now he was there and it felt incredible. That show changed everything for him and was a big turning point in his life. He had always had the feeling deep inside that he wanted to be a singer, but this really reinforced it in his mind and he loved it. It made him realise that he wanted to be a professional actor or singer. Mark also studied French! He went in France on a school exchange. "That was a brilliant time" remembers Mark. "I was only just starting to learn French then, so I didn't have a clue what anyone was saying half the time! I was constantly asking the teachers what things meant-I think they got a bit sick of me by the end of the holiday! I was such a pain!" Even if Mark doesn't know much in French, the few words he can say, he says them in the cutest accent ever! The ladz often say Mark's the shyest, but don't think Mark was 'that' quiet as a child! He was pretty naughty when he was a kid... He used to go around knocking on people's doors and when they opened them, he'd throw eggs at them. He never got caught luckily! He used to steal peeny sweets from the supermarket. As his mum was wheeling the trolley around he'd stick his hand in the pick 'n' mix, grab a loads of sweets! At 13, he was desperate to learn to drive and persuaded his dad to teach him in his mum's old car, in the fields out the back of his parents' house. He'd pinch the car keys from the house and drive from the field to his house on his own (around half a mile). "My parents used to go mad at me, saying 'The cops'll catch you! You'll get us all into trouble! Stop doing it!' " says Mark. But he didn't. When Mark became older, he delivered pizzas, worked in his auntie's photoshop in Dublin for a while and in a restaurant where they always played "Words" by Boyzone. That's his least favourite Boyzone song: it reminds him of cleaning the toilets! 

Rise to Superstardom 

Later, Mark joined IOU (I Owe You), a band formed with Michael, Graham, Derrick, Kian Shane and himself. They released an independant single called Together Girl Forever. But Mark didn't stop his studying! He passed his final exams in the following summer, but he reckons if he wasn't here today, he'd be repeating his exams to get better results. After the exams, he decided he had to concentrate in his musical career, so he didn't get any further in college. Meanwhile, Shane's mum contacted Louis Walsh who finally accepted IOU to support Backstreet boys at their gig in Dublin. That day, Ronan Keating was in the audience. Impressed by the performance, he decided to get involved as the co-manager of the band. Three of the lads were told to leave IOU, two Dubliners arrived : Bryan and Nicky. It was time for the band to change their name to WestSide and sign with BMG. Now, if you are a westlife fan, you should know what happened afterward. They discovered WestSide was already used in America and they couldn't use it any more. Luckily, there wasn't any CDs released yet... And Mark and his mates decided to call themselves Westlife. The new band kept supporting Boyzone in their 'By request tour' in summer 1999, and soon, the numbers of fans grew up, most of them already fans of Boyzone. A year ago, Boyzone were their idols and they wanted to become as big as them, and their idols became big-brothers! Then, in March 1999 the first single was released in Ireland, going straightly to number one in the charts. In April, it went straight into number one in the UK. They won the Smash hits Best new tour act award, and a few months later, each of the singles they released went also Number one. Their fifth single, "Fool again" out of the million-selling album, made westlife enter the Guiness book, by breaking the record of being the one and only act who has achieved five straight number ones in the UK with their five first singles. Nowadays, the name of Westlife gets more and more famous. Followed wherever they go by crowds, the number of fans gets bigger, bigger and bigger. The US market has began to play their music and things are looking good for Mark and the lads. Is Mark frightened of being successful? Kinda... Has Mark realized his dream? Yeah. Singing was what he wanted to do, and that's what he's doing now. He isn't a member of the band for the fam, but for the performing and singing. In fact, the other members reckon if one of them had to leave the band, Mark'd definitely be the first one, because he gets more homesick than the others & he likes his privacy. Even after traveling all over the world, Mark's still the same little guy from Sligo?!