Mika Effs Up The Boyzone Reunion

Have you heard the news? Boyzone are reforming because they've put aside their differences and not because Take That and the Spice Girls have got rich doing it and nobody cares about Ronan Keating's solo career any more.

Yes, Boyzone - the most famous elderly Irish boyband after Westlife and Murtagh Fitzpatrick And The Clodpoopers - are reforming, but there's a hitch. Boyzone wanted their comeback single to be I Gave It All Away, a song written by inexplicably popular annoyance Mika - but Mika's not having it. That's a good thing, because when a band interprets a songwriter's work, the result is often a brand-new, unique piece of music spliced equally from each party's DNA like a baby - and we can all agree that a part-Mika/ part-Boyzone baby would probably end up looking and sounding a lot like the disfigured genetically-deformed mutant puppy from The Fly II.

Although the reunions of Take That and the Spice Girls have shown that there's definitely a market for cacky old past-it pop groups transparently trying to make a quick buck for as long as they can bear looking at each other for, the failure of the All Saints comeback and the East 17 comeback proved that it's just as easy for these comebacks to fail.

So right now it could go either way for Boyzone, the Westlife-inventing Irish boyband responsible for Ronan Keating, that bloke who used to be on Coronation Street, him out of Love Island, the one who looks like he's spent the last decade sobbing, The Other One and - to a lesser extent - Louis Walsh. This week Boyzone reported that they were reforming after what seems to be a painfully short amount of time. We would have reported it, but we were too busy crying.

But the Boyzone reunion isn't without its obstacles. And not the obvious obstacle, either - the obstacle of Ronan Keating being so completely punch-worthy that the other Boyzone members would be so busy thinking about slapping him in his stupid smug face that they'd never get any work done - but another obstacle. It's been reported that Boyzone wanted to use I Gave It All Away, a song written by infuriating one-hit wonder Mika, as their lead comeback single with a performance on Children In Need to promote it. However, Mika has refused to let Boyzone release it because he apparently thinks that Boyzone are 'too cheesy' - a little like Dr Harold Shipman chiding Fred West for being 'too murdery.'

The Sun quotes an 'industry insider' as saying:

"Mika wrote the song and made it available for other artists. Boyzone loved it. They thought it was perfect to launch their comeback so they recorded it and it sounded great - a certain No 1. Just like the track, Mika gave it all away. But then he took it back again."

While in the short-term this is an obvious win-win for all involved - because the end result of a Boyzone/ Mika hybrid would invariably sound like a gang of dullards trying to mimic a twelfth-rate Freddie Mercury impersonator with a keychange in the middle where everyone stands up, and almost certainly the very worst thing your ears would have ever heard - it might be worth taking all this with a pinch of salt.

Because, after all, Boyzone's manager used to be Louis Walsh - a man who'd happily feed any old bullshit to the press so long as he got a speck of publicity out of it - so the truth is probably that Mikey Graham from Boyzone just saw Mika from his cardboard box outside Woolworths and asked for some change, to which Mika replied "I gave it all away. Plus I need the money I do have for when people work out I'm rubbish and stop buying my records in a few months' time."

Or something.