Westlife’s eleventh number one in three and a half years. How are we all holding up…?
Unbreakable, by Westlife (their 11th of fourteen #1s)
1 week, 10th – 17th November 2002
My patience, for one, is well and truly shot. With each successive ballad, Westlife get more and more turgid. Is this any worse than their early hits? I think it is, but who can tell. When you get to number eleven then the law of diminishing returns has well and truly set in. The worst thing is, their last chart-topper, ‘World of Our Own’, was an upbeat bop. We’ve had hints, glimpses that it could have been so different.
‘Unbreakable’ starts off slowly, with a beat and tempo bastardised from ‘Hero’ and ‘Unchained Melody’. Yes, two of 2002’s previous big ballad hits. Call me cynical… To compound the lack of originality, the video was filmed on the same beach as ‘If I Let You Go’. By the end we’re soaring, or at least lumbering like a drunken buffalo, to a dramatic finish, complete with sleigh bells because it is almost Christmas after all.
And of course, there’s a gigantic key change. But even that lacks the fun, the charm, of their earlier key changes, because you know it’s coming. It arrives slowly, with a huge drawing of breath, like the tide going out before a gigantic tsunami that nobody is ever going to outrun.
The overriding feeling here is of a group going through the motions. This was the lead single from Westlife’s first greatest hits album, and it draws a line under the boyband part of their career. Their final three number ones will be covers of MOR classics, from the likes Barry Manilow and Bette Midler. Probably wisely, they knew that the twelve-year-olds that had bought their singles in 1999 were now sixteen-year-olds who had moved on. From here on they were shooting squarely for the mum, and grandma, market.
All of which ties into something I wrote a few posts ago, that we’re reaching the end of the golden age of the boyband, an era that has stretched from the late-eighties right through the nineties, past the good (Take That, 5ive), the bad (Boyzone, Westlife) and the ugly (911… oops)
The UK Number Ones Blog 
Not heard this since it left the charts, thankfully, but it got as high as 43 in my charts. It must have been the ending as 2 minutes into listening to this and I’m preferring the endless same-old same-old xmas songs on the radio. Dreary! I’ve prob said this already, but their current non-hit Chariot is better than any of their chart-toppers, it has Celtic influences, a great meody and lyrics, is upbeat and oozes warmth and sincerity. I’m guessing Mr Walsh has had no input….
It does have quite a rousing ending. If this had been Westlife’s debut single then I might have enjoyed the bombast, but eleven number ones in the mood is more just “oh God not again….”
Perhaps the most Westlife Westlife single to ever Westlife? Not much to say here. It sounds like a paint by numbers Westlife single. I’m surprised this was a lead single. This sounds like an album track. Take That wouldn’t release this as even the 5th single from their album. If you asked Suno and Chat GPT to make a Westlife single, this would be it. Despite everything I just said, I don’t hate it though. The chorus is okay. Looks like the group is sporting facial hair rather than the clean-cut image they had presented, a common sign of visual growth and maturity with these boy bands.
I’ve commented this a few times, but it’s interesting hear these charts from past eras and hearing how ballad-heavy the top of the pops has been whereas in the streaming era these type of emotional ballads are virtually non-existent (some do become hits eve now, but far less so compared to even the 2000s). I’d say starting from the late-2000s ballads reaching the Top 10 become a much less common occurrence. Perhaps the public just go sick of these drenched up ballads thanks to American Idol, X Factor and Pop Idol and Gen Z and younger millennials became less tolerant of sentimental mush in favour of bangers and vibes.
Yeah this was definitely the end of Westlife as a boyband. Their last three number ones were targetting the middle aged mum crowd, not a teenage one.
I don’t know if ballads are dead, as the biggest song on the UK charts this year was ‘Ordinary’, a song that sounds to me like Westlife for 2025. Not as bombastic – that won’t work in our ‘authentic’ social media age – but every bit as earnest (and dull)…
“Ordinary” is more of an exception to the new norm. If you compare how ballad-heavy the charts were 20 years ago to now, it’s still quite barren And “Ordinary” and “Stargazing” by Myles Smith I feel are more of a revival of the more earnest stomp clap hey/indie folk that was huge in the early 2010s. “Ordinary” might have opened the floodgates for more ballad-type songs…for better or worse. I actually like the song a lot but I’m scared for the consequences of it’s success. We might be entering a new age of adult contemporary music now that younger millennials and Gen Z are entering their mid-20s to mid-30s. 2025 was not a good year for the pop charts. I dunno if you saw but the Hot 100 year-end for 2025, the Top 20 of the year-end was 3/4th songs from 2024. 2025 had no interest in 2025.
Sounds like bad Christian music. They only had one #1 in NZ, and 0 in the US.