Walsh slams Williams

Pop band manager Louis Walsh is a very affable man. He's gossipy and camp and refreshingly outspoken for someone at the top of his career. He's small, neat and looks very Irish with his twinkly smile.

He is currently famous for being the apparently mild-mannered manager of Girls Aloud, the girl band created by ITV's talent show Popstars: The Rivals.

I meet him the morning after the night before, when the girls had beaten the boy band from Rivals, One True Voice, to the Christmas No 1 spot. The boys are managed by the far more mouthy and opinionated Pete Waterman.

Over the past few weeks, Waterman has become more and more aggressive towards the 47-year-old Walsh, which is odd, since they regularly work together and have obviously known each other a long time. "Well, yes, it's a small world, the pop business," says Walsh. During the head-to-head race the week before, Waterman alleged that the girls had not sung on their single. He claimed Walsh had got backing singers in to spice it up. Walsh dismissed this as rubbish. In truth, I don't suppose anyone really cares.

I'm not sure if Louis Walsh cares either. He spends a lot of time during the interview taking calls on his mobile while grimacing at me as if to say, "I'm terribly sorry." But he's charming to the assorted callers. "I'll be back in Dublin by five," he says. "I'll do the interview/arranging/business plan then." He's a busy man.

Apart from Girls Aloud he also manages Westlife, Samantha Mumba, Ronan Keating and Lulu. No wonder he says he's tired. "I was up till 4am at the party thrown by the record company and then had to do Radio 5 Live at 7am. I've hardly slept."

He says he's very happy that the girls beat the boys, and that he does care. During the live broadcast of the chart rundown, the perennially enthusiastic Davina McCall gasped that "this is a record breaker. Girls Aloud are the first girl band to have their first single go straight to Christmas number one!" The truth is a tad more dismal. The record didn't sell very well - just over 200,000 copies - and has been overshadowed by the death on Christmas Day of the band's tour manager, John McMahon, in a car crash. "He was a lovely man," says Walsh, "the girls are all in shock."

The boys' single fared even worse, but Walsh remains buoyant: "We've got the Christmas number one and two and that's great." He says he is not as competitive as Waterman, but that, yes, it's great the girls won.

"At the beginning the rivalry was a joke, but it did turn serious. I mean, Pete thinks he rules the world. He thinks he's up there with Van Morrison and Burt Bacharach and Stevie Wonder. He thinks he writes his own songs - classics! Honestly.

Is I Should Be So Lucky a classic? He cannot bear to be beaten. Do you know what he did? He had all the footage of him crowing about the fact he thought the boys had won taken out of the final show. And I was told not to

Well, this tirade could go on all morning, and Walsh does return to it intermittently. He'll be talking about something completely different, like why he thinks Robbie Williams is a phoney: "He's talentless!" he says. "Liam Gallagher's right about him. He's a jumped-up nothing and he can't sing. You lot went out and bought that dreadful pretend Frank Sinatra record. Just buy Sinatra!" - and then he'll suddenly say: "Pete's the kind of man who'd release that record. He's such a liar, you know."

In fact, there are very few people who don't get lambasted by Walsh. Victoria Beckham: "Who'd sign her? No one wanted her to succeed. And she's not posh anyway. All that fake tan."

Bob Geldof: "You lot think he's a saint. He's a Sir, isn't he? They're all bloody Sirs - him and Cliff Richard and Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney. I remember seeing the Boomtown Rats when they first started out and they were crap. Geldof can't sing. He never washes his hair."

The members of his own band, Boyzone: "Ronan Keating and Stephen Gately could sing. The other three were just there to make up the numbers."

The Spice Girls: "Great product, but individually they're a talentless lot. They can't really sing or dance, but they've made their money, so there you go."

Oh, and us lot: "You English! Honestly. You buy terrible music and you fall for all this appalling hype. You think Coldplay and Blur are cool. It doesn't matter what a band like Westlife do, they'll never be cool. Neither will Ronan Keating. You swallow all the press rubbish. And London is obsessed with being cool."

But he's staying in the Sanderson Hotel, which is, I point out, the icon of London coolness. Walsh raises his eyebrows. "Well, I'm not going to stay at the Lanesborough, am I? I always stay here. I love Philippe Starck."

Yet, despite his love of Van Morrison and Stevie Wonder, Gene Pitney, Sinatra, Elton John and Roy Orbison, he seems quite happy to be pushing Girls Aloud on to an unsuspecting world.

"What's wrong with that?" he asks. They can't sing, I say. "They can!" he says hotly. Well, maybe one, the Irish one, Nadine. The ginger-haired one is dreadful. "People tell me she's very popular," he says. "She's like Patsy Palmer, apparently." He thinks the girls could be very successful - "like the Spice Girls" - or they could only have a couple of years at the top. But in Walsh-land that's fine.

"Look, they want to be famous. That's why they went on the show. They want to date glamorous men and have stylists and great clothes and be whisked around in limos. If they work hard and get on with each other and put some graft in, then maybe they'll get a few good years and make their money and go away. If not, they'll be Hear'Say the second."

He thinks the boy band will split up very soon. "Pete wanted the boys. He said girls are too difficult. He's right. 10 and 11-year-old girls tend to buy records by boy bands. And boys are easier to manage - they're not so emotional." But Waterman chose a crap song for them. "It's his own fault. He wants to be as famous as Simon Cowell and now he's fed up because Simon's big in the States and he isn't."

He concedes that Popstars: The Rivals has enhanced his profile, but that he doesn't want to be famous. "When I was a kid I just wanted to be in the pop industry. You know, I loved music. I spent all my time listening to Radio Luxembourg. But I live in Dublin and it's a small place. Everyone knows everyone else, so I suppose we're all famous."

When he first moved to Dublin at the age of 20 he found it all a bit scary. "I'm a country boy from a small place called Kiltimagh in County Mayo. I'm from farming stock, but I did go to boarding school for a while," he says. He's one of nine, the second eldest. His brothers and sisters are all off doing various things. One brother lays wooden floors for celebrities in New York. "He's done very well for himself," says Walsh.

His siblings, he says, have no idea what he does. They don't seem to question the source of his wealth - he collects art, owns an island off the coast of Galway, has houses in Dublin and the expensive seaside resort of Dalkey, and collects classic cars.

But for all his outspokenness, he is a private man. He has always said he will never marry, but doesn't ever seem to talk about his love life. There are, of course, rumours about his sexuality. He doesn't really want to discuss that but he does say that being gay in the music industry is no longer the impediment it used to be. "Coming out hasn't hurt George Michael's career and it won't hurt Will Young's. Mind you, he won't last. Neither will Darius. Gareth Gates will. He's got The Look. Little girls love Gareth."

He says that he didn't watch the BBC's talent show, Fame Academy. "It was a disaster. No one watched it. It was fake and phoney, all that living in a million-pound house. Please. Life isn't like that. Most musicians have to graft. Do you know where I found Johnny Logan? In a town hall somewhere in the middle of Ireland.

I heard him sing and thought: 'Eurovision'. And that was how I started." Logan, represented by Walsh, went on to win the Eurovision song contest with What's Another Year?

How much control does Walsh have over his artists? "I let them be who they are," he says, although he does admit he tried to hide Stephen Gately's homosexuality for a while. "So does everyone," he says. "I know a male singing star - the one there's rumours about - who paid a model to pose with him for £120,000. Everybody does it."

According to a recent book, Walsh used to snort coke and smoke joints. "I don't do drugs now," he says, "and I rarely drink. Drugs mess up everything and affect everyone around you. I would be very careful to take on anyone with a drug habit." Not even if they were stunningly talented? "No," he says.

Walsh doesn't believe talent will out. "I could name you 10 people in Ireland without record deals who are far more talented than anyone we have around now. But no one wants to take them on. I don't manage the new Elvis Costello - although I imagine the old one's a nightmare to work with - or Shane McGowan. No one wants to touch people like that now because the investment's huge. I'm realistic. The worst thing is when people want to be taken seriously as an artist. There's Robbie in LA pretending to be a tortured soul. He's a twit! I know Ronan will never break America. Ronan once said he wanted respect.

I told him that was a totally stupid and pointless thing to say. He will never get respect. He should go for sales and stick to ballads. He's a good role model and people like him but, at the end of the day, he's a former member of a boy band."

But if everyone's so useless and awful and dreadful, why is he doing it? Why not take one of those 10 unknowns and turn the pop music world on its head? "I wish I could," says Walsh sorrowfully, "but I don't think I'm very good at my job. It's the record companies that do all the work. They find the songs and create the hype. I just find the people. And I do think Westlife and Ronan are very good. I think people will be humming Westlife songs in 25 years. Then again," he says, elliptically, "maybe they won't."

And then he's back on to the gossip. On Ronan Keating: "All the rumours about him being gay are untrue." On fellow Rivals judge Geri Halliwell: "She is a different person off-camera. She works hard. She'll never fade from the public eye." And on his archrival, Pete Waterman: "He doesn't play by the rules. He believes his own hype. Never believe your own hype."

But his final bit of advice is this: "At some point every pop act wants to become credible. John Lennon did it with the Beatles and it was a disaster. Pop acts should not want to be credible. They should want to sell millions." And that's it - the gospel according to the rather rich, rather fantastic Louis Walsh.