Oh, this is indeed ‘all that we need’…
All That I Need, by Boyzone (their 3rd of six #1s)
1 week, from 26th April – 3rd May 1998
A dull, plodder from the nineties’ dullest, most plodding boyband. Yay! A mid-tempo ballad (shock, horror!) that floats past your ears fairly inoffensively. I’m struggling to remember if I’ve ever heard this before… I’m sure that I must have – I owned every ‘Now’ album between 1996 and 1999 – but I’m also sure that I’ve erased every memory of it in the intervening twenty six years.
Do I sniff the riff from the classic wimp-rock ballad ‘Right Here Waiting’? I think I do, plucked gently on an acoustic guitar. If that’s your inspiration, then you’re going to end up with something pretty insipid. Even groanin’ Ronan sounds bored as he meanders his way through the verses, as opposed to his usual constipated attempts at emoting.
And there’s that late-nineties computer generated drumbeat again. It’s starting to crop up more and more often, presumably preset into every Casio keyboard sold in 1998. In come the rest of the band for the chorus, and a lot of strings for a finish far grander than this song deserves. It’s not awful, nor is it Boyzone’s most offensive effort. But you’ll struggle to hum this five minutes after listening to it.
‘All That I Need’ was the third single from Boyzone’s third album, so we can assume that it took advantage of a quiet sales week to sneak a moment on top. That’s not to suggest they didn’t have fans – I went to school with a lot of them – but when you compare them to Take That, East 17, or the Spice Girls, there’s just something missing. More often than not that something was ‘fun’. In the video, the lads are dressed in some exotic crocodile skin jackets, ready to party. They just weren’t getting the material.
Still, Boyzone filled a niche, aimed at mums and grannies more than the kids. Nice Irish boys. And by 1998, four years and three albums into their career, they were nearing their boyband sell-by-date. Luckily for us all their manager, Louis Walsh, already had his sights on their successors: the T-1000 of granny-pleasing boybands, who will soon take the singles chart in their inhuman grip. Can’t wait!
The UK Number Ones Blog 
People complain about contemporary pop music, and I get it (though I’ll say pop music right now is better than it was 5 years ago), but I’ll gladly take any song in the Top 20 UK Singles Chart right now over this lame song.
I think people’s complaint about modern pop music is not that bands like Boyzone weren’t dull, but that there was more variety in the charts in general. Nowadays streaming has homogenised them so that genres that aren’t fairly generic pop/dance/hip hop struggle to make the higher reaches. But I will agree that current pop music is better, catchier, more inventive, than the tropical house, Drake-#1-for-half-the-year nadir of 2016-2019.
Totally Right Here Waiting riff, but if you’re going to nick a bit at least it’s a good song to nick from. This is a bit limp though, they had better records as a band and solo. Re: current top 20, well, most of the UK top 10 is better than this, but stuff lower down, some stinkers in amongst the tracks hanging around forever and a day. The rapid 90’s turnover meant a lot of stuff didnt register on the long-term memory like previous decades had, but the opposite now is turnover is torturously slow. You get massive hits, those that arent suitable to get radio play, and few new entries despite tons of great records getting released every week.
I blame company playlists on streaming stations….they shouldnt be relevant to chart positions “sales” anymore than radio is…
Yes that’s also a big factor. This Boyzone bland ballad was probably in the Top 10 for 3 – 4 weeks, whereas a bland ballad by… oooh let’s just say Ed Sheeran… can linger around the top end of the charts for half the year with streaming.
I like their voices a lot…they had that down.