Westlife once turned down the opportunity to have lunch with Claudia Schiffer.
Claudia invited the band to lunch after she appeared in the music video for their 2000 cover of Billy Joel’s ‘Uptown Girl’, but band member Mark Feehily has now claimed they were forced to turn down her offer by their record label.
Speaking on Monday’s (18.11.19) episode of ‘This Morning’, Mark, 39, said: ‘"When we shot Uptown Girl, Claudia Schiffer was in the video. She invited us for lunch and we turned her down. We were doing the shoot with Claudia Schiffer and she was going for lunch halfway through the shoot but the label told us we had to do finish the shoot."
Westlife released their new album ‘Spectrum’ last week – which came as their first major album in eight years – and Kian Egan, 39, revealed that the band wanted to produce something "fresh" rather than recreating the music from their 1990s and 2000s heyday.
He said: "Because we were a band of the 90s and 00s, the big thing for us was doing something fresh. Something that felt new rather than what we used to do. With this album, we wanted to find a sound that was good for us. We kept some ballads in there for the old school audience but also freshened ourselves up."
Whilst Nicky Byrne, 41, added: "I think we enjoy the nostalgia. We just did a big tour around the UK and Ireland and Asia. But if we want to be in the charts again, we needed to do something fresh, that’s when we got the call to say Ed Sheeran was a Westlife fan as a little boy. He had already written some songs for us."
The video for the Irish band’s new single, ‘My Blood’, features the kids of every band member, and Shane Filan, 40, admits that having children has changed the band’s approach.
He said: "The children were too young to experience Westlife the first time around. They are beginning to understand how big Westlife is. You forget how much of an impact you have on children."