Westlife defend covers

Mark Feehily says he's fed up of people criticising Westlife for doing cover songs.

The 29-year-old vocalist said he was annoyed that Westlife - who have had 14 number one hits and more than 43 million records sold worldwide - were "misunderstood."

The 'Flying Without Wings' vocalist said: "Our record company, they don't want to take risks so they would be the ones who would be happier to do more covers. To anyone who criticises what we do, we actually do a lot of original pop songs and a lot of our best songs, a lot of our number one singles are actually original pop songs. "

He added: "We definitely did go too far, we did too many covers. That's something we allowed to happen and shouldn't have."

Despite this, Westlife's new single 'What About Now' is actually a cover from Daughtry, an American rock band, but Mark defended the group's choice of song.

He said: "It's a cover in the way that it's been recorded by another artist but it's not a cover in the way 'Mandy' was in that it's been a massive hit already."

He also said that even though Westlife have had a year off, they won't be splitting up.

He said: "I think we had the break because things were almost coming to the point of going too far with just getting an album out every year. Things were getting a bit stale really."

Westlife's new single 'What About Now' is released today (02.11.09), and their album 'Where We Are' follows later in the month.