Together with a team of financial and legal experts I have spent months exploring all possible alternatives to bankruptcy but to no avail.

The couple of years before I was declared bankrupt were the roughest. The bank letters, the pressure, the stress was awful. You're in this twilight zone of not knowing where your life is going, and yet you're in Westlife. Everything was great with the band. I was earning money, and it looked good.

I'd like to keep singing - whether that's small or big. To stop singing for a living would break my heart.

After Westlife, I was in a scared place, you know; you've three children, and I worry about providing for them, and I had no guarantees going forward about the future.

I didn't want to be a solo Westlife - covers and ballads - and the reason I signed with Capitol Records was because they wanted me to write songs myself. It was pretty scary, but they put me in a studio in Nashville with some new songwriters, and the results were pretty good.

My whole world changed when Michael Jackson brought out the Bad album when I was about eight or nine. He took over my whole life and from then on I wanted to be Michael Jackson. I watched his videos for hours and learned how to dance like him. I would push back the chairs in the room and learn his dance moves. I even taught myself to moonwalk.

For Westlife, the music will never stop as long as our fans are around inspiring us to keep on making beautiful music together.