Matt Willis, meanwhile, had been productive in rather a different way. On 20 June 2009, he and Emma welcomed into the world their daughter, Isabelle Catherine Willis. Matt tweeted two days later, ‘Isabelle Catherine Willis was born at 9.05 p.m. on Saturday the 20th! She is AMAZING and doing really well! Taking her home today.’
And Matt wasn’t the only one settling into domestic bliss. It seemed that McFly’s loved-up bandmates had finally rubbed off on Danny. In November it was announced that he’d started dating Miss England 2007, Georgia Horsley, a beautiful blonde from North Yorkshire.
However, their union wasn’t without its controversy. Danny’s previous girlfriend was Miss England 2008, a fact with which the tabloids had a field day. Danny had once been stung in a tabloid kiss-and-tell at the very start of the band’s career, and swapping one Miss England for another seemed straight out of tabloid heaven, too.
Yet this match was clearly meant to be. Danny and Georgia met at the Miss London competition, which was being hosted by the two former Miss Englands, and a friend told the Sunday Mirror, ‘You could see that Danny and Georgia were going to get together. All the chemistry was there.’ Danny himself was clearly smitten, saying on All Star Mr & Mrs, ‘She’s basically my life. She makes me smile every day. And she just makes everything . . . great.’ And he confessed in Unsaid Things, ‘The old Danny, the kid in a sweetie shop every time pretty girls were around, is gone. I don’t want anybody else but her.’
Just as Danny was settling down, his bandmate Harry’s relationship with Izzy – which had been going strong ever since the Wonderland tour – suddenly hit a roadblock. Commitment issues were at the heart of it.
But Harry told the Daily Record that, after they’d agreed to split, Izzy turned up on his doorstep one night. It was a night that changed everything. ‘She was standing there in tears, with make-up running down her face. I knew then that I couldn’t ever be without her.’ And Izzy later mused to Hello!, ‘If you survive difficult times, it just affirms that you want to be together.’
While Harry and Izzy took time to focus on their relationship, the rest of the band headed to Atlanta to work on their new album, which would become Above the Noise. Record labels had been so keen to work with them after the success of Radio:ACTIVE that the band found themselves ‘signing on’ again. And, as they flew off to start work, they heard some good news. In the spring of 2010, Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles decided to start a new feature on his super-popular breakfast show. Every Friday, he would play the upbeat ‘Star Girl’ to kick off people’s weekends – dubbing the weekly feature ‘McFly Day’. For the 8 million listeners, McFly soon became synonymous with good times, freedom and the start of the weekend. So let the good times roll
And in Atlanta they certainly did. With a big label behind them, the band found themselves in a position to work with the legendary producer Dallas Austin. His clients included Madonna, Pink and Lady Gaga – and Tom and James’s old favourite Michael Jackson. It was an opportunity they couldn’t pass up.
Yet the making of Above the Noise proved to be an experience that differed completely from any album they’d ever done before. As the writing and recording began, staged in the end in both Atlanta and London, across the course of 2010, the band lived a lifestyle that Tom described in Unsaid Things as ‘totally nocturnal and constantly drunk’. The time in the studio was interspersed with visits to bars and strip joints. Dougie threw himself into the new lifestyle with his usual abandon, until even Tom started noticing something was up. As he said in the band’s autobiography: ‘I couldn’t help noticing that Dougie was acting weird. He would disappear for a while, then come back bouncing off the walls, talking nineteen to the dozen.’
And Dougie had more reason than ever to want to drown his sorrows in booze and narcotics. He and Frankie – who had been dating solidly since 2008 – split up in the spring of 2010. A ‘friend’ told the Metro that, soon after the split, Frankie ‘came back in tears and said she made a mistake’. They were back on – for now.
There was great interest, meanwhile, in whether there might be a reunion of a different sort in 2010. Matt and James both faced constant questions as to whether Busted might get back together. Matt, who was busy being a stay-at-home dad to little Isabelle, as Emma’s presenting career went from strength to strength, revealed to This Morning in September 2010, ‘Me and James kind of had the chat. A shall-we-get-the-band-back-together? kind of chat – but . . . Charlie wouldn’t do it, so it’d be me and James and there’s questions like, “Do we keep it the two of us? Would we get a brand-new member in?”
‘We’d love to do it, don’t get me wrong. I loved that band. I have such an affinity for everything we did with that band . . .’ Yet with his new family commitments, suddenly life wasn’t as simple as it once had been. The carefree lifestyle Matt had used to enjoy, where he was at liberty to join a pop band on a whim and travel the world, didn’t gel with now being a dad-of-one and a supportive husband. He confessed that, despite his passion for all things Busted, ‘Right now, I couldn’t see myself being away from home eight months of the year. I don’t know if I’m quite ready to give my life back to that.’
Meanwhile, James had been musing on the situation too – not that he would ever have broached the subject with Charlie himself. He told FleckingRecords.co.uk, ‘Matt actually asked Charlie if he would mind us using the name Busted without him. He said no [to use of the name]. We invited him back, knowing he wouldn’t be into it. He doesn’t want to come back, but he doesn’t want me and Matt to do it without him either.’ Years after the band had split, they were still banging their heads against the same brick wall.
Matt confirmed the sad situation to the Daily Record, confiding that, ‘Charlie didn’t want to play ball. We tried to buy the name off him but he wasn’t willing to sell it. It is not worth the fight.’
There was one good thing that came out of the conversations between the former bandmates, though. James and Matt had always enjoyed writing music together, and they were slowly rediscovering that shared passion, and the special connection the two friends had always had when it came to making music. Matt revealed to This Morning, ‘[Our conversations] got me and James in a room with two acoustic guitars writing songs for another Busted record. Which we did. We wrote about six tracks which are the best we’ve ever written. And, whether Busted happens or not, there will definitely be something between me and James happening.’
James was still writing his own material, too. In the summer of 2010, he released his debut album as Future Boy. Volume 1 had a staggered release on James’s website, and appeared in two halves: Side A and Side B. The music was completely different from his usual style: electronic, rather than guitar rock. James said explicitly on his website, ‘This is not a rock album. This is 100 per cent electronic.’
It was unlike anything he’d done before. The music, an album of ten songs, is an unusual mix (for James) of chilled-out tracks and more upbeat dance music, all with an electro-vibe sound effect on James’s voice. Gabriela appeared with him on the song ‘Internet’, sharing vocals in a futuristic-sounding duet between the two lovers.
And Above the Noise, too, turned out to be a very different record for McFly. It was the first to which James contributed no songs. Tom would later tell Digital Spy that it was their ‘least favourite’ album. He continued, ‘We thought we’d try something really drastic and try a completely different producer from a different genre of music.’ And, while they all said it had been a ‘great experience’ of which they had ‘fond memories’, Harry was almost damning of the first single, ‘Party Girl’: ‘It was like a bad version of a Lady Gaga song . . . It really wasn’t us.’
What also wasn’t him, suddenly, was drinking. Harry gave up alcohol around this time. He said to Attitude magazine, ‘You know how people get hangover blues? I just started to not cope with them well, anxiety-wise, to the point where I was being really horrible. Drinking was my vice.’ Other than that short soundbite, and a comment
to the Daily Record that he ‘only ever used to drink to get drunk’, he has never been drawn on exactly what prompted him to become sober, saying only to Fearne Cotton on Fearne and McBusted, ‘Something happened that definitely changed me a lot. It affected me in a way that was very horrible, frightening. And so I was, like, well, I’m never doing that again.
‘I had [a wake-up call] – in a way that no one would want that to happen to them again. It was a blessing in disguise. It meant that I never touched anything ever again.’
But Dougie was about to take his addiction to a whole new level.
In November, he and Frankie split up again. This time it was permanent. She moved out of the north London home they shared, and Dougie was on his own. A friend told the Metro, ‘Dougie is devastated. He didn’t see it coming at all and still doesn’t know why.’ Dougie himself told Sugar, ‘I was gutted about the break-up . . . I really thought things were going well between us.’
He would later say they both had their own issues and were ‘entirely unsuited’. Frankie would indeed reveal that she had been depressed for years, telling Glamour in 2012 that she found herself in a ‘spiral of negative thinking – [thinking] that if I disappeared, it wouldn’t matter to anyone. In fact, it would make everybody’s life easier. I felt that I was worthless, that I was ugly, that I didn’t deserve anything.’
Without Frankie around, Dougie found that he didn’t have to keep up his pretence any more. He said in Unsaid Things, ‘You know that feeling of freedom you get when a relationship ends? It was dangerous for me. Now that I didn’t have to hide anything from anyone, I could abuse my body in whatever way I saw fit.’
It was a time that McFly called the ‘Great Depression’. They were disappointed with Above the Noise, from both creative and commercial perspectives. It peaked at number twenty, their worst-performing album by some way. It may have contained the anthemic ‘Shine a Light’, which reached number four and endured beyond the album, but one song couldn’t lift a record that Dougie dubbed ‘too generic’. It barely contained a guitar riff. The band also launched their Super City website, a subscription service for fans, amid great to-do, only to see it crash on its first day – to McFly’s huge disappointment and embarrassment. Everything seemed to be falling apart.
It was little wonder that Tom, always susceptible to depression, began to feel that black dog barking at his shins once more, then leaping into his lap and settling like a heavy weight around his soul. He and Dougie would share morose late-night drinking sessions in the dark winter nights, glumly marinating in the hopelessness of life.
One night, Dougie said something that crystallised it all.
‘Mate, f**k it,’ Tom recalled him saying, in Unsaid Things. ‘Let’s just do one more album and then call it quits.’
Tom stared at him.
Was McFly over?
Deep in his heart, it felt like it.
ELEVEN
Nowhere Left to Run
The applause was deafening. Three thousand people hollered and whooped as the cast of Footloose: The Dance Musical came onstage for their curtain call at the famous Edinburgh Playhouse on Greenside Place. They were on their feet, singing and dancing along with the toe-tapping music from the classic eighties film.
The footlights nearly blinded Matt Willis as he took his bow, dressed in the black jeans and black T-shirt of his bad-boy character Chuck Cranston. He was part of the spring 2011 UK tour of the stage musical – and he was loving every minute.
He told the Cornish paper the West Briton, ‘I went to drama school and this is what I trained for. I’ve been wanting to do a show like this for a long time. This is pure entertainment.’ He added cheekily, ‘I don’t remember the film but my wife loves it; she’s a bit older than me.’
And all that training at Sylvia Young had paid off. This was Matt’s second musical-theatre role now; he was leaving his presenting days behind him to follow his first love: performing onstage. The previous year, in the autumn, he’d played Nick in Flashdance: The Musical in the West End. Matt described that character to the Liverpool Echo as ‘a really nice guy, almost geeky . . . quite like me’ – but Chuck was a different matter. Matt said to the Daily Record, ‘In Footloose, I’m in at the deep end. Chuck’s a nasty character, he is the trailer-park trash of the town. He hits his girlfriend, although you don’t see that onstage.’ And, like many actors before him, Matt was discovering that being a bad boy had its benefits. He said to the Echo, ‘The more I did it, the more I realised that I quite liked being an arrogant dick. Actually this is quite fun!’
The dancing was a challenge, though. Matt might have been able to pull off Busted’s guitar-thrashing jumps, but a highly choreographed swing routine was a different matter. He said to the Daily Record, ‘I’ve never danced in my life and am really struggling. Obviously, I’m not doing anything like the dancers, but I am learning how to move and sing at the same time. I’m throwing myself on my knees, jumping up, catching a girl – and I have to try to breathe and sing. I hope I don’t look too ridiculous . . . but I’m loving it.’
And the audience in the Edinburgh Playhouse were loving it, too. The cast took one final bow and made their way backstage to their dressing rooms, the applause still ringing in their ears. The Playhouse was notoriously haunted, but Matt wasn’t disturbed by spirits of any kind. In fact, he’d laid his old ghosts well and truly to rest.
Emma Willis said to OK! magazine after Matt finished rehab, ‘To start with I was watching him all the time. The nice thing is now when he comes home I’m pleased to see he’s on two feet and can walk in a straight line . . . I think every day he’s getting better.’ She found it hard being apart while Matt was away on tour, though. She said to Closer magazine, ‘In one way it’s nice because you have that time on your own – the house is a lot tidier! But I do miss him terribly. I’m fine for a couple of weeks, then I have a little breakdown, he reassures me and it’s okay again. It’s just working at it really.’
For Matt, it wasn’t just his relationship with Emma that he worked at. He’d been clean for almost three years. But, when he was asked by FleckingRecords.co.uk if he was ‘completely better now’, he replied simply, ‘I try every day.’
As he changed out of his costume in his dressing room, his phone began to ring. He glanced at the screen, and answered swiftly.
It was Dougie Poynter on the end of the line. And he needed Matt’s help very, very badly indeed.
It was a few days earlier. It was 5 a.m. It was a cold February morning, and the sun wouldn’t rise for another two hours. In the dark, Dougie walked out of his house. He had a hosepipe clutched in his hand. Determinedly, he pushed it into the exhaust pipe of his Audi Q7 and then looped the other end through the driver’s window. He closed the window as much as he could, so that only the nose of the hosepipe snuck into the car’s leather interior.
He sat in the driver’s seat. He put the keys in the ignition. He started the engine.
Dougie Poynter wanted to die.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been sober. He wanted the drugs and the drink out of his life, but he’d tried and failed so many times before to kick his habits that he knew it was hopeless.
There was no one he could talk to. Who would understand?
There was only one way to end this.
He sat solemnly in his car, inhaling the exhaust fumes as deeply as he could. Surely, any moment now, he’d fall asleep – just like the girl in the song on the Wonderland album. Any minute now . . .
But twenty minutes later he was still awake. Still alive. He said in Unsaid Things, ‘That was my nadir. My lowest point . . . I couldn’t even kill myself. I’d tried and failed – like I had with everything else in my life.’
Yet he still had a life. And he knew, now, that he couldn’t handle this alone. He went to his doctor, who referred him to a counsellor. He turned up to the appointment lashed on whisky and the counsellor’s verdict was instantaneous. Dougie had to go into rehab.
They found a place for him at the Priory. In two days’ time, he’d start a rehabilitation programme that would hopefully save his life.
Two days. He had two days to tell Tom and Danny and Harry the secret he’d been keeping from them for years. Two days before he couldn’t touch another drop of alcohol ever again. Two dark, dark days.
Danny said on Fearne and McBusted, ‘He was scared about telling me. Thought I’d tell him off. But it’s fine.’ His girlfriend Georgia added, ‘We didn’t have any idea of the scale of it. He masked it so well. It was quite a shock when it all happened.’
The night before he went into rehab was Valentine’s Day. Dougie, after his recent split from Frankie, clearly had no plans – something Harry and Izzy suddenly realised. Izzy told Hello!, ‘We were on our way out to dinner and it felt wrong. We thought, “We can do this another time.”’ They went straight round to Dougie’s instead, with a plan to keep him sober on his last night of freedom.
But, when they got there, Dougie already had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s bourbon out, with not much left inside it. Harry and Izzy stayed as late as they could, then called Tom, who lived next door, to help him make it through the night. ‘I would do it for any friend,’ Harry said of their intervention to Hello!. ‘He was very vulnerable at that time.’
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