Boyzone to Release an Album in Tribute to Stephen Gately

Over the weekend, the surviving members of Boyzone announced they plan to record and release a new album in trubute to the recently deceased Stephen Gately who died unexpectedly last month while on vacation in Majorca, Spain with his civil partner Andew Coles.

Ronan Keating told Sky News that:

We have decided that what we do now is we're going to make the next album for Stephen, we want to stick together because we find comfort in being together at the moment. We have a couple of songs with Stephen's vocal on it so that's a saving grace. Thank God we have that, that's very important to all of us and we know the fans would really appreciate that too.

Keating also added the band will try to "...keep his memory alive when the four of us perform, if we can do that. We don't know that we can but we'll try." 

For those of us in the U.S., it's harder to know exactly how close the members of Boyzone were, but they did seem to genuinely like each other and the new album seems like a heartfelt gesture. It's sad how often previous musical groups have lost gay members and this makes me think of Queen losing Freddie Mercury. 

I've also heard Boyzone is to record an anti-tribute album for Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir who wrote all those nasty things about Gately after his death. The album is tentatively titled Bat Out of Hell and will be a cover album of songs fitting for Moir.

Included will be "Devil Woman," "Purple People Eater" (with the lyrics "A one-eyed one-horned, flyin' puple people eater"), "Who Let the Dogs Out?", Mariah Carey's "Cold Hearted," Ozzy Osbourne's "Bark at the Moon," and of course "Ding Dong The Witch is Dead." I'm sure you folks might have other suggestions.