Mcbusted : The Story of the World's Biggest Super Band (9781471140679)

by Parker, Jennifer

  James revealed some of their songwriting secrets to Peter Robinson. It turned out that Matt and Danny weren’t the only Oasis fans on the tour. While they may have launched their respective careers with their performances of ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ in their local pubs, for James it was all about ‘Wonderwall’. He said, ‘One of the first songs I learned was “Wonderwall” by Oasis. And, if you listen to them, you’ll notice that a lot of our songs use the same technique as “Wonderwall”. Noel Gallagher will probably hate that – but it’s his music that inspired us.’

  Just being on tour was pretty inspirational too. Harry, Dougie, Danny, Tom, Matt and James were having the time of their lives. Every night, they would eat together in catering, put on the show of their lives and then party till the small hours – whenever McFly were allowed to stay up late (Fletch was still keeping them on a super-short leash). Harry would later say to Attitude magazine, ‘We weren’t even allowed to hang out with Matt; he was such a live wire.’

  They were also recording together. McFly’s debut single was due for release just after the tour finished, on 29 March, and Busted and McFly planned another B-side to die for – this time a cover of the Kinks’ ‘Lola’, first released in 1970.

  As you might expect for a cover on a McFly rather than a Busted single, the track begins in a slightly less punk and more gentle way than their previous collaboration on ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’: just an acoustic guitar and Tom’s pleasant vocals. But then that infectious bass line and Harry’s drums kick in, along with the other boys’ drawling, more rocky voices and those all-important guitars, and the pace picks up. It’s a track that builds and builds. By the time the bridge is reached around two minutes in, it’s a veritable singalong of a song. You can almost imagine the campfire the band might be gathered around, with Danny, Tom and James strumming their guitars casually by the light of the dying embers; Matt and Dougie smouldering in the background as they pick out the notes on the bass. It was a more laid-back track overall – more a recording of a jamming session than a stand-out single – yet it still had that unique energy that irrepressibly came through whenever the two bands joined forces.

  The B-side had an unexpected downside, however. Already closely linked with Busted, due to their shared management and their obvious friendship, McFly found themselves lumbered with the label ‘Busted Juniors’. For the four boys, especially Tom and Danny who had pioneered the McFly sound – albeit with James – it was a tough tag. They were their own band. Even some of Harry’s old Uppingham school friends jumped on the bandwagon, ribbing him that McFly were just the same as Busted. They came up with what they thought of as a hilarious nickname for his new band, with which they used to take the mick out of him mercilessly. The name? McBusted.

  James was quick to defend McFly, and the new friends he’d made in every member of the band, in Busted on Tour:

  As similar as some people might think the two bands are, we’re not that similar at all. McFly is completely inspired by sixties and sometimes fifties music. There are chords you’d use in a McFly song, which you’d never use in a Busted song. It’s only because we introduced McFly that people think we’re similar . . . I think McFly is a good thing for Busted. Forget my involvement with their songs – McFly are simply very good.

  And the public were with him all the way. ‘5 Colours in Her Hair’ went straight to number one. Busted may have made Guinness World Records with their slow but steady delivery of 3-2-1 hits, but McFly were showing them how it was really done by heading to the top of the charts on their very first try.

  And they were even gaining critical acclaim too. The Observer described the song as ‘undeniably infectious’ while the BBC called it a ‘striking chart-topper’. And it was a toe-tapping gift of a tune. Inspired by the Beach Boys’ surf vibe, it had a cool, refreshing sound in an era when Victoria Beckham was making the charts as a solo artist and Michelle McManus and ‘Sam and Mark’ from Pop Idol were hitting the top ten. And when the boys had recorded the single, they’d left the tape running at the end of the take. The authenticity of Danny’s post-song exclamation, his Bolton accent coming out thickly as he said, ‘Did you hear my voice?’ about the high notes, just made them sound even more credible. It felt as if he were just jamming with his mates, with Tom and Harry and Dougie in the studio; listeners could actually hear the laughter of the four friends, who were quite simply having fun while making music.

  And while those four friends may not have loved their first video – which saw them playing a gig on a Top of the Pops-style set circa 1964, messing about with surf boards, walking along the Abbey Road crossing à la the Beatles, and encouraging a girl in a black-and-white world to join their über-colourful TV set – it actually encapsulated their sixties-inspired song pretty well. They could at least count themselves lucky in one regard. The video introduced them to the world with their names onscreen next to their faces. When Universal had done something similar with Busted on the ‘You Said No’ video, James Bourne had been transformed into ‘James Harris’ and the video shown on TV before anyone noticed the clanger. This time, all the names were present and correct; in fact, the director made a joke of it by making Dougie and Danny ensure their names were in the right place.

  For McFly, topping the charts was a strange anticlimax. Though Fletch turned up with a video camera to film the momentous occasion when they heard the news, and the boys obligingly cheered enthusiastically, Tom recalled in Unsaid Things, ‘We were a bit oblivious to it all. Nobody else around us made much of a fuss about being number one. Busted had already been there and done that, remember. I guess it wasn’t so exciting to have us coming along and doing it second.’

  Of course, this being the McFly and Busted boys, they still celebrated. James and some other mates came round to the Finchley pad for a good old knees-up. CONGRATULATIONS banners were pinned to the walls, where they cohabited with the strings of fairy lights. There was booze. Tom and James each grabbed a champagne bottle and tried to release the corks simultaneously. A snapshot in McFly’s autobiography shows them, mouths wide open and bottles pointed like pistols, about to set them off. It was a moment to remember. And for James it was a fitting climax to the end of the shared tour. He said in Busted on Tour, ‘I’m not really an “emotional last night” type of person, but I enjoyed soaking up that feeling for one last time. As soon as I get out of bed tomorrow there will still be a million other things going on, and there’ll be a million other things the day after that. But I’m never going to forget this tour.’

  Busy toasting McFly’s number one, the boys didn’t get much sleep that night.

  And Charlie wasn’t getting much sleep, either. He told Peter Robinson that he’d been plagued by dreams throughout the tour. Of getting shot. Of being electrocuted. ‘The blood,’ he confessed, ‘always feels really warm.’

  Charlie probably didn’t set much store by dream dictionaries. He probably never looked up what his dreams might mean. Had he done so, he might have seen this definition on DreamMoods.com:

  To dream that you are shot or being shot at represents a form of self-punishment that you may be subconsciously imposing on yourself. You may have done something that you are ashamed of or are not proud of. If you are shot and come back as a different person, then it indicates that you need to start fresh. You want to wipe the past away and literally become a new person.

  As for being electrocuted?

  ‘To dream of an electrocution indicates that the current course of your actions . . . will lead to disaster.’

  SEVEN

  Party’s Over

  On a corner of Chalk Farm Road, in London’s grungy Camden district, sits the Barfly pub, home to alternative rock gigs, indie music and occasional pop. It was used to playing host to bands such as the Killers, who’d released their debut album Hot Fuss in the June of 2004, and the Strokes. On the evening of Wednesday, 14 July 2004, McFly were on the bill. And the 200 fans who’d got golden tickets to the intimate gig were about to w
itness a moment in music history.

  McFly’s debut album, Room on the 3rd Floor, had been released a week earlier. Onstage that night at the Barfly, Danny, Tom, Dougie and Harry were presented with an award from Guinness World Records. They had overtaken the Beatles to become the youngest band ever to have an album debut at number one. Tom was about to turn nineteen – his birthday was that coming Saturday – Danny and Harry were eighteen, and Dougie was just sixteen.

  They’d shifted more than 60,000 copies of their debut in a single week, and garnered the kind of critical acclaim that they’d dreamed of, back when they were writing songs in James’s flat and in that now-famous room on the third floor at the InterContinental. The Observer wrote, ‘These are immaculately constructed pop songs articulating genuine teenage emotions . . . Room on the 3rd Floor is a delicious blend of fantasy and reality: classic pop storytelling, with some brilliant handclaps.’ And if the critics did insist on referencing Busted in their reviews (‘Their mentors, Busted, have remoulded the fresh putty of American pop-punk into something that still sounds new. McFly’s influences are ancient in comparison, making the end product sound rather retrospective. But that’s not to say it’s a bad record,’ wrote the BBC, rather half-heartedly), well, McFly weren’t above referencing them, either.

  They knew exactly who they wanted to thank for their success. Writing in the sleeve notes of the album, every single member of the band, in his individual acknowledgements, name-checked James and Matt, and the whole band wrote, ‘Special thanks to our writing mate James Bourne, along with Charley [sic] and Matt of Busted, who not only helped launch our career but have been our friends and advisers.’ And James in particular was singled out. ‘James, you psychedelic love child, thanks so much for everything. Man, it’s been fun so far, huh?’ wrote Harry; ‘James – without you we wouldn’t have so many killer chunes!’ from Dougie; while Danny simply wrote, ‘James Bourne “ya nimpty” you simply are a legend at songwriting. You’re a top mate.’ The unique friendships between the two bands, forged in the fire of that spring arena tour and in songwriting sessions from the previous summer, had blossomed into proper bromance territory.

  For Tom, whose partnership with James had started the whole enterprise, it was an opportunity to celebrate him in print. ‘James Bourne, you dude!’ he began. ‘Thank you so much! You taught me everything I know about fishing, dude, and we caught some big ones last year. It’s a big ocean out there . . .’

  A big ocean – but a small world. The Barfly was also the venue for the first gigs of Charlie Simpson’s new band, Fightstar, who were cranking up their activity, writing songs and playing gigs, as 2004 whizzed by.

  It was incredible that Charlie found the time to do both. Both Busted and McFly were dominating the charts across the world; and Tom and James’s songs were also finding a life outside the two bands. In May, the Prestige-managed boy band V had launched their debut single with a B-side of none other than ‘Chills in the Evening’, the very first song Tom and James had written together. The single got to number six, and it was billed as a ‘V featuring McFly’ B-side. Danny did get to perform with V after all, on CD:UK, delivering a stunning guitar solo while the boy-band members crooned somewhat awkwardly around him. McFly were set on raised stages behind the five-piece – and they really were on another level.

  Throughout that year, McFly totted up top hits at a rate of knots: ‘Obviously’ in June; ‘That Girl’ in September; ‘Room on the 3rd Floor’ in November. And Busted were doing the same: ‘Who’s David?’ went to number one in February; ‘Air Hostess’ to number two in April; and the double A-side of ‘Thunderbirds Are Go’/’3am’ to number one in July, just a couple of weeks after McFly’s Barfly gig.

  And new songs needed new videos. Matt wasn’t always impressed with the treatments, though, as he told Peter Robinson, after he had to film scenes for ‘Who’s David?’ in the same phone box as he’d used for the ‘Sleeping with the Light On’ video. He said, ‘It did rather seem as if someone had decided that, whenever Busted do a song which isn’t about air hostesses getting off with teachers at a wedding in the year 3000, I have to stand looking pensive in a phone box. Not just [any] phone box. The phone box. The Matt from Busted Phone Box of Moodiness.’

  Still, he had his own way of coping. As he later told Fearne Cotton, ‘If I wanted to drink at 10 o’clock at a shoot, I bloody would.’ And he did. It didn’t seem to occur to him to stop, or that it was an extraordinary thing to be boozing before noon. For Matt, it was a way of life. He would drink as soon as he woke up. He would drink a ‘liquid lunch’. He would drink before gigs in the evenings, to take the edge off his nerves. He drank to socialise, to function and to survive. And all that alcohol was garnished by the grass of his daily spliffs. No one said no. No one said stop. And Matt had never been one to live life with any kind of caution anyway: he was an all-or-nothing guy. Busted’s success had given him money to burn – and, in a sense, he did that every time he touched his lighter to his roll-up, or chain-smoked another ciggie in a bar, nursing just one more drink between his nicotine-flavoured fingers, as he sipped greedily and with untethered joy at the glass. He was a happy drunk, and nothing made him happier than swinging into a brand-new bar and ordering yet another drink.

  And there were more excuses to raise a glass come the summer. In August, following a final UK gig in Swansea, Busted headed off to try to break America. Matt had just turned twenty-one – the legal age for consuming alcohol in the States – so for him it was perfect timing. And for James, too, it was a good time to get away, as he and Kara had called time on their relationship after almost seven years together. The break-up was amicable enough, but it was still hard to adjust to life without her – particularly because Matt was beginning to share some of his nights out with a girl who was turning out to be pretty special, though it would be a while before they officially got together.

  Life in Busted, and now in McFly, too, involved a chaotic round of interviews. Radio 1, Smash Hits, MTV . . . And it was at MTV that Matt Willis first met a young presenter called Emma Griffiths. She was a twenty-eight-year-old former model from Sutton Coldfield, who had recently moved into TV presenting. Very pretty, with a relaxed vibe in front of the camera and a lovely jokey manner, she and Matt were kindred spirits, bantering back and forth both on- and offscreen.

  For McFly, though they knew the round of interviews was necessary, like Busted before them they found the boy-band tag that accompanied the teen magazines irritating. Alexis Petridis, a Guardian journalist who spent time with them that summer, observed of them at a Smash Hits shoot, ‘On command, they adopt their trademark facial expression: a sort of perplexed, bug-eyed sneer that implies they have merely popped out for a pint of milk, become involved in an inexplicable chain of misunderstandings and now find themselves being photographed for the cover of a teen magazine with an enormous glittery heart by mistake.’

  Yet the serious music press – who had responded rather well to Busted when they first burst onto the music scene, albeit with a few ‘boy band’ digs – were more resistant to the ‘Busted Juniors’, as they perceived them. The NME, in particular, launched a vicious attack on the teenagers, captioning one picture of the foursome, ‘From left to right: C**t, Wanker, Dickhead and Twat.’ Their fans might adore them (a selection of banners recalled by Harry included HARRY, BANG ME LIKE YOU BANG YOUR DRUMS, DO ME DOUGIE-STYLE and DANNY, LET ME UNZIP YOUR MCFLY) but the world at large still had reservations.

  Busted were hoping the American trip would give them a chance to start from scratch. Yet when they heard their US label’s plans for them, which included the usual teen press rather than the music media, their hearts sank. Charlie sounded a word of warning on America or Busted: ‘I hate feeling like we’re being pushed into doing something that we don’t want to do. I’ll end up thinking, I don’t want to f**king be here . . .’

  As the year drew to a close, both bands were touring: Busted with another arena tour, and that incredible number of
sold-out Wembley gigs; McFly on their first headlining theatre tour. Busted found time to record the Band Aid 20 single in November, appearing alongside Bono, Chris Martin and Paul McCartney on the classic ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ It would become the biggest-selling record of 2004 and the Christmas number one. And it also led to an opportunity for McFly: ‘All About You’ was selected as the Comic Relief single for the coming spring. No wonder Dougie was celebrating. As he turned seventeen on 30 November, he started enjoying a nice glass or two of red wine.

  For Matt, there was a lot to look forward to. He said in Busted, ‘I’ve got a lot of things to do in life . . . I want to be able to look back in ten years, having released eight albums, and go, “Look at that. Look what I’ve done.”’ Their backers certainly thought they had it in them. Mishal Varma, vice-president of network programming at MTV Asia, told Peter Robinson: ‘We’re expecting them to be a really big act over here for the next few years.’

  Surveying the thousands upon thousands of fans at Wembley Arena on Saturday, 18 December, on the final night of the 2004 Busted tour, it seemed certain that the band were here to stay. James, Matt and Charlie broke into ‘Year 3000’ at the very end of the encore and it seemed possible that they would still be singing their hearts out in that infamous year itself. James, hearing his own lyrics about his favourite film sung back to him by the fans, was genuinely moved. Performing live was what he lived for. He told Peter Robinson, ‘The funny thing, and the thing that some people don’t realise, is that when we’re onstage we have as good a time, if not a better time, than the fans do. That’s just the way it is. If they want us here, we’ll be here. We’re not ready for a farewell tour.

  ‘We haven’t even really begun yet.’

  As the final thrum of the guitars on ‘Year 3000’ faded into the frantic screaming of the fans, James laid down his guitar and headed offstage.