'Everybody wants the image to carry on. The press around you want to carry on because they want the free drinks and the free whores and the fun. Everybody wants to keep on the bandwagon, it's Satyricon."

It was John Lennon, who answered thus, when Yoko asked how The Beatles had kept their "clean image" while touring.

Either way that quote, like the Sword of Damocles, has always hung over my head as a music journalist. It certainly resurfaced as I watched how RTE's Six One news report on Stephen Gately's funeral ended with an image of a girl clasping my 1995 Boyzone biography, Our Story. This made me realise that I was obviously on the Boyzone bandwagon from the start, and wonder if the lies I told about Stephen in that book added to his inner turmoil at the time.

And back when he was just a kid of 18 Stephen was in turmoil because of the conflict between his hidden homosexuality and Boyzone. So, what lies did I tell? Well, Louis Walsh, who was particularly close to Stephen at that point, told me Gately was gay and "terrified anyone in the media will find out," and asked me to "go along with asking him about girls". Therefore I did.

This led to me ask Stephen, as my opening gambit in our first interview, "So, like Bob Geldof, did you get into music to get rich, famous and laid?" I noted mentally how nervous he seemed answering that question. Even though he did laugh and say, "Of course! Why else would anyone get into the music business?"

Stephen also seemed somewhat self-conscious telling me that from the age of 13, he "went out with girls" such as "Siobhan, the first girl I kissed" and later, "Anita, Amanda, Sharon and Melissa". But the clearly less-than-media-savvy Gately probably gave the game away when he acknowledged that he "didn't get sexually involved" with girls, "just got close, as friends, in a cuddly sense". Likewise, he suddenly slipped into a non gender-specific mode, admitting, "I don't think I've met a person I really, really loved", adding, maybe only half-jokingly, "So, if the right person is out there, I wish that person would come and get me."

That said, Stephen also claimed that he was "looking forward to being the idol of thousands of girls" and this was the game, and role, he was playing -- despite being terrified that journalists, Boyzone fans and the public would learn he was gay.

Indeed, even before the guy was forced to "come out" by The Sun in 1999, Louis told me that another newspaper "had a story" about Gately's gay past, which the magnificently media-savvy Walsh tellingly, and cutely, prevented being published -- by giving that newspaper some Boyzone exclusives.

The irony of all this is that there once was a gay magazine called Boy Zone, gays are part of the public at large, and all of Louis' "boyz", including, if not especially, Stephen, were primed to appeal to the gay community. This sometimes led to additional problems for Gately. For instance, before he "came out" Stephen was once asked during an interview for a girl's magazine if he had ever kissed a guy. He replied, "Ugh".

That, naturally enough, did not go down to well with his gay fans. Particularly those at a gay nightclub in London where Boyzone performed after a concert in Wembley. The crowd not only booed when Stephen arrived on stage but threw their Boyzone T-shirts at him. I was with Boyzone that night and Stephen confessed he was "totally shaken by the experience". It also struck me that Louis should have known better than to book Boyzone into a gay club at that point. The relationship between Louis and Boyzone often tends to be depicted as a marriage made in heaven, as it were. Maybe it is. But, just like all marriages, it had its ups and downs.

For example, back when I began writing Our Story, Louis told me Stephen was going to be the group's lead singer. So, I can easily understand why he became "deeply depressed", five years later, when Louis turned his attention to Westlife, the new "boyz" in his life. Boyzone disbanded and Walsh decided to manage only Ronan Keating, thus relegating the rest of the lads to a boy band wilderness where they remained for seven years. This, sadly, meant that for most of the last decade of his life, Stephen was denied the chance to do what he loved best -- singing with Boyzone.

Indeed, when I kicked off my 2001 Keith Duffy interview for this newspaper with the lines, "No one ever tells you when you join a boy band that you could be suicidal after it folds. And decide life may as well be over because your best days are past at the age of only 25", I knew that this coded warning to all would-be pop stars probably also applied, in varying degrees, to Stephen, Mikey and Shane. Keith was definitely speaking for what he described as "the four of us -- apart from Ronan, who Louis now manages" when he said they all "came out looking bad" after Walsh was asked on UTV's Kelly talk show, "What's the comparison between Boyzone and Westlife" and replied, "Westlife can sing."

Sure, it probably was a joke. But to Keith -- who had seriously considered killing himself after the bubble of Boyzone burst leaving him feeling, "open, vulnerable, frightened of everyday life, not sure how to deal with people [or] relate to them" -- it nonetheless seemed that "to promote fu**ing Westlife he's stabbing Boyzone in the back".

I strongly suspect that Stephen felt the same, in every sense. Especially after his solo recording career flopped and Ronan's took flight. Though that, too, in time would finally flop, relatively speaking, and lead to the inevitable and, good for them, lucrative reunion of Boyzone last year. Louis again became manager of a group that "can't sing", and there was no more backstabbing or slagging each other -- at least in public!

Incidentally, during that interview, Keith also revealed that he, Stephen, and "everyone, including Louis, but not Mikey signed a confidentiality clause" meaning they "can't tell what happened on the road with Boyzone".

So we may never know if, behaviour-wise, Boyzone on tour were the Beatles of Irish popular music.

Sunday Independent