26 Years Ago, Simon Cowell Passed on This Boy Band's Biggest Hit

If you spent the early aughts rushing home from school to see where your favorite pop song landed on MTV’sTotal Request Live, odds are O-Town’s iconic 2001 power ballad, “All or Nothing,” is still in heavy rotation on your playlist!

O-Town, who famously formed on television via the 2000 reality competition series Making the Band, scored their absolute biggest career hit with the track. Peaking at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and hitting No. 1 on the Mainstream Top 40 chart, “All or Nothing” helped define an entire generation of frosted tips and pure pop euphoria.

But according to former O-Town heartthrob Ashley Parker Angel, the anthem that changed their lives forever almost belonged to an entirely different group of global icons.

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As it turns out, “All or Nothing” was originally intended for the massively successful UK boy band Westlife—a group created by none other than Simon Cowell. While Westlife only secured one major crossover hit in the United States (1999’s “Swear It Again”), they were certified international superstars, boasting 11 No. 1 albums and 16 No. 1 singles overseas.

“I recently did a podcast with one of the members of Westlife and we were celebrating the fact that O-Town got ‘All or Nothing.’ Simon passed on it, Clive Davis grabbed it for us, and the rest is history,” Angel explains in an exclusive interview to Parade. “It’s wild to think about the reach of a song that almost wasn’t ours.”

Related: O-Town’s Ashley Parker Angel Is Having His Biggest ‘Full Circle’ Moment Yet (Exclusive)

Angel shares that the legacy of “All or Nothing” has quite literally followed him across the globe. “I was in a grocery store in Tokyo and it came on over the speakers as I was shopping. I took a moment to think about the reach of the song, which almost wasn’t our song!” he says. “People still come up and say, ‘I slow danced to ‘All or Nothing’ at my prom,’ or that their kids are singing it with them ‘carpool karaoke style.’ It lived on and became a timeless classic in the world of boy band power ballads. That’s an incredible thing to be a part of.”

Would Ashley Parker Angel return to O-Town?

So, with “All or Nothing” still tugging at those nostalgic heartstrings, the burning question remains: Is there a world where Angel would finally rejoin O-Town? The original group disbanded in 2003, but later reunited as a four-piece without Angel in 2013. While he is currently fully focused on his role as a businessman and co-founder of his wellness company, High Level Science, he refuses to close the door on his musical past completely.

“I never say never because life is long,” Angel notes. “There are no active plans right now, but to think about a moment in time where we would all step on stage and sing ‘All or Nothing’ again as the five of us? You never know where you’re going to be in different chapters of life.”

To read the full interview with Ashley Parker Angel—where he reveals the truth about leaving the pop world behind, what his 20-year-old son really thinks of his pop-star past, and what he wishes was handled differently in his O-Town days—head over to my Substack, The Teen Mag Time Machine.

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