Dougie’s campmate Mark Wright, with whom he reached the final, said of him, ‘I don’t think there was one particular moment when people fell in love with Dougie. I just think you fall in love with Dougie as soon as you see him.’ The two of them shared a last, epic, candlelit meal the night before the result was announced – having won an array of tasty dishes thanks to their final Bushtucker Trial – after three weeks of surviving on limited rations. Dougie declared the spread ‘sprinkled with magic’ and later revealed, ‘That was probably the most romantic meal I’ve ever, ever had.’
On 3 December 2011, Ant and Dec announced the result. Dougie had done it. He was the winner with over 55 per cent of the vote. Mark Wright immediately pulled him into a bear hug and sincerely said, ‘There couldn’t be a better winner than this man here. He deserves it so much. He’s the nicest, kindest person in the whole entire world.’
And while Dougie was ‘lost for words’, and clearly stunned, others said they’d predicted it from the start. TV presenter Caroline Flack commented in I’m a Celebrity Hall of Fame, ‘I knew Dougie was going to win even before he went into the jungle. He’s got the Matt Willis effect.’
So, like Matt before him, Dougie crossed the famous bridge with his wooden sceptre and his twig coronet, the duly crowned King of the Jungle. He had someone special waiting there for him too. Tom raced through the photographers to sweep him up into a hug. They jumped up and down on the wobbling rope bridge and laughed their heads off. Just months after Dougie’s darkest days, he was on top of the world. Tom couldn’t have been prouder – and it showed.
It was an achievement that deserved to be marked in a special way. And Danny had just the idea. He posed naked on Twitter with only a small white cup protecting his modesty. When, just a few weeks later, Harry made it a double win for the McFly boys, Dougie and Tom joined him in his unique celebrations. The three of them stripped off: Dougie with his tongue out and a platinum disc of Room on the 3rd Floor covering himself; Danny with a rock-star wide-mouth gurn and a tiny Union Jack cushion; and Tom looking rather more sheepish, with a larger green cushion in front of his bits. Tom later tweeted, ‘I was forced to do this . . . thanks for voting!’ But the others showed no such regrets. Danny tweeted, ‘We said we would do it!’ and Dougie posted a typically amusing message: ‘As promised . . . you pervs!’
They took to Twitter to champion the double win, too. Dougie, so recently crowned King of the Jungle, said, ‘I have a queen! Thanks so much guys! This is ace!’ And Harry told BBC Radio 5 Live that what they’d done was ‘a McDouble’. He added, ‘What an amazing year, we never ever expected it. We are two happy lads.’
There were two happy lads in the Willis household, too. As Dougie was getting to grips with the Australian tucker and Harry was tackling his tango, Matt and Emma announced the arrival of their second child on 25 November: a son, whom they named Ace Billy Willis. Matt said of the middle name on Twitter, ‘Went for Billy so if he wants to be like a f**king banker or something he can use that instead!’
Matt definitely wasn’t a banker. He was still dazzling the musical-theatre world with his impressive rock voice – and his acting, which was improving with every role he took. Now, after a series of eight or nine intense auditions, he landed the part of Fiyero in one of the West End’s most successful shows, Wicked. Not for the first time in his life, Matt was playing the love interest.
And he had a partner in crime in musical-theatre land too. James, having first tested the water with that early commission for the Youth Music Theatre, was fast becoming a force to be reckoned with. He’d written another musical with Elliot Davis, Out There, and also learned that their original show, Loserville, would have a full professional run at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in the summer of 2012 – starring none other than Gareth Gates, who had used to perform at the same Party in the Park gigs as Busted back in the day.
For Tom, there was only one ‘gig’ that summer that mattered. On Saturday, 12 May, he made his way to One Marylebone, a Grade I-listed former church near Regent’s Park in London, to marry the girl of his dreams. The night before, his stag do had featured his old Busted audition video coming out of the closet as McFly had a good laugh about old times. And now his bandmates – his best mates – played the role of his best men.
They all wore tailored suits with fresh green ties. Giovanna, meanwhile, looked stunning. The Italian good looks that had caught Tom’s eye in assembly all those years ago had blossomed. She was a simply beautiful bride. Gi wore her dark hair down, tumbling around her shoulders in gentle waves. Her strapless gown was by Phillipa Lepley, with a beaded belt and an overlay of the most exquisite vintage lace. She carried a bouquet of blowsy pink blooms, with classic cascading ivy. Harry’s Izzy played ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ on her violin as Gi walked down the aisle to meet her groom.
Afterwards, but before McFly played as the wedding band, there was the small matter of Tom’s speech. He wasn’t good at public speaking. The thought of giving a speech in front of all the wedding guests, who included Matt and Emma, and Kara Tointon, who was a bridesmaid, was too nerve-racking for words. He preferred to sing.
So he’d asked Danny, in top secret, to arrange some backing music for him: a medley of McFly’s greatest hits. He stood up, introduced himself and what he was about to do, and then performed what can only be described as one of the greatest groom wedding-day speeches of all time. For fourteen minutes, he held his audience captivated as he acknowledged the help of his family and friends in musical form. He almost broke down as he thanked Dougie, Danny and Harry to the tune of ‘Room on the 3rd Floor’ – the song that he’d written so long ago with Danny at the InterContinental. But, in the end, it was all about Gi, set to the music of ‘All About You’. Current students from Sylvia Young filed into the room behind him to sing as a choir as the song reached its climax. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Tom later said to the Mirror, ‘Danny was really crying. I’ve never seen that; he doesn’t cry a lot. So he set me off.’
And it was perhaps Danny who summed it up best of all in the best-man speech, which he delivered with Harry and Dougie. Quoted in OK!, he said, ‘We’d like to finish off by saying that you two bring out the best in each other . . . You really are the best of mates and that’s why we know that this true love story will last forever.’
As Gi and Tom jetted off to St Lucia for their honeymoon, the true love story of the McFly boys began another chapter. Travelling with the newlyweds were Harry and Izzy. As they landed at the airport on the tropical island, Harry and Tom had a secret rendezvous in the airport loos – so Tom could give Harry back the engagement ring he’d carried for him, just in case customs had asked Harry to open his luggage and had spoiled the surprise.
‘When we got [to our accommodation], I thought he was acting strangely,’ Izzy later remembered to Hello!. ‘We were getting ready and I was like, “Come on, let’s get dinner, I’m hungry.” He said, “No, not yet,” and started dancing around the room with me.’ He then led Izzy along a candlelit path to the beach, where a table was set for them. ‘We hadn’t even had [time for] a drink and Harry was down on one knee,’ Izzy said with a smile, while Harry recalled, ‘I was suddenly nervous. I was shaking a bit and when I opened the box the ring was upside down.’
Somehow that was apt – for this woman had turned his world upside down. They married just seven months later, on Friday, 21 December 2012, in Izzy’s home town of Harpenden in Hertfordshire. The McFly boys were ushers, wearing silver waistcoats and pale pink ties to match the bridesmaids’ gowns; Matt, Emma and Kara were all guests once again.
It was a magical winter wedding. Harry looked as dapper as on his Strictly days in black tails with an ivory silk waistcoat and tie. And Izzy was his picture-perfect partner in a bespoke full-length dress fashioned from Chantilly lace, silk georgette and taffeta, made by Tantrums & Tiaras in Putney, London. She had her chestnut hair pinned half up and half down, with a sparkling headpiece nestling beneath her sno
w-white veil. She and Harry held hands throughout the ceremony – one so moving it prompted both Tom and Danny to cry. It included a special performance from Dougie, Tom and Danny on acoustic guitars, as they performed the Beach Boys’ classic ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ for the newlyweds. McFly performed four songs at the wedding reception, too.
The night, though, belonged to Izzy and Harry. As Alan Dedicoat’s voice introduced them, they performed an unforgettable American smooth – complete with lifts – as their first dance, and waltzed into a wonderful future.
The year ahead, 2013, looked bright. And it started with new music. In February, James Bourne joined McFly for a writing trip in Wales. His musical Loserville had transferred to the West End in the winter – Danny, Dougie, Harry and Matt’s wife Emma had all attended the premiere – and he was spending a bit more time in the UK of late, performing a solo acoustic tour, overseeing the West End transfer, and writing with Tom, Danny, Dougie and Harry. They all uploaded a new song, ‘My TVR’, to YouTube in the spring. Tom and Danny strummed their acoustic guitars as McFly debuted the summery track, which was full of the soaring harmonies and catchy vocals people had come to expect from the band. Their musical experiment was over. They were back at their best.
James was embracing Twitter, too. Some time ago, he’d tweeted, ‘My DeLorean will fly one day! Mark my words.’ This from a man who’d once said in Busted on Tour, ‘When I promise myself something, it happens.’
James’s promise to himself was about to come true – and far, far sooner than he might have thought.
THIRTEEN
Don’t Let It Go to Waste
The Manchester Apollo, a Grade II-listed, Art Deco theatre, first opened as a cinema in August 1938. It was the sort of film fact that might have appealed to James Bourne, but he was too stoked about seeing his good friends McFly to worry too much about the provenance of the building they were in. He hurried backstage.
It had been a busy few days. He’d jetted over from New York, where he was still living – currently hard at work on a brand-new musical, Murder at the Gates, which he was writing with the Tony Award winner Steven Sater – in order to attend the Olivier Awards, the West End’s most prestigious awards ceremony. Loserville, against all odds, had been nominated as Best New Musical.
It was an accolade that blew James’s mind. Simply having a show on in the West End was mad enough in itself. As James said to The Vault, ‘Three years ago [the show] was nothing, just an idea. To get here [to the West End] is crazier than anything. The chances are so slim.’ To make it happen, he’d had to channel everything into it. He later revealed to heatworld.com, ‘I could have written songs for One Direction’ – which was something Tom, Dougie and Danny were doing – ‘or I could have done Loserville.’ And for James, there was no contest. He said to The Vault, ‘[Writing for other people is] not as fulfilling as being on the inside of a project, as I was [when I was writing] with McFly – we shared a vision – or with my own band.’ He summed it up to heatworld.com, ‘[With Loserville] I get to be more creative.’
And that investment in his own creativity had now paid off. He’d been invited to perform at the Olivier Awards, so the previous evening he’d been singing ‘Holly . . . I’m the One’ to the crème de la crème of British theatre, dressed in an unusually debonair outfit, for James, of a black tie, smart white shirt, grey waistcoat and trousers. Despite the elegant look, he delivered a performance that bore all the hallmarks of his usual high-energy routines. He even rocked out an old-school Busted jump with his legs splayed dramatically. His former Son of Dork bandmate, Danny Hall, had joined him on drums. They were the only two left from the original SOD line-up now.
James had started a new band recently. He and his brother Chris – who had also become a musician: a bassist in the band Hollywood Ending – had teamed up to form the Bourne Insanity. So far, though, they’d released only one track: ‘Mohawk’.
So James was also doing his own thing: playing a small solo acoustic tour and, as ever, writing new music. He reflected on the stark difference of performing his music these days to The Vault. ‘You don’t appreciate at the time [of Busted] how incredible it is that that many people are coming to see your band every night [in arenas]. It’s such a surreal thing.
‘Now if I play a gig I’m lucky if I pack out the Islington Academy.’
Still, he was slowly finding some peace about the Busted split. He and Matt had even built some bridges with Charlie. James told The Vault, ‘We went round to Charlie’s house [in September 2012] . . . It was strange . . . The three of us had not hung out since we split up. It was the first time.’
Some things hadn’t changed, though. James continued, ‘He said to us there and then [that] there was no sign of him showing any interest [in a reunion] . . . no sign that he was remotely interested.’
But the Busted reunion rumours kept on coming. Even Louis Tomlinson from One Direction had joined in, tweeting plaintively: ‘I have to say back in the day Busted f**king smashed it. Come on @mattjwillis @charliesimo @jamesbourne just do one more gig!’
Matt, for one, was certainly conscious of the clock ticking as his and James’s thirtieth birthdays approached. He said to The Vault, ‘Singing “What I Go to School For” when I’m thirty-five is not cool. Maybe we need to do it sooner rather than later. Or maybe I just dismiss it as some crazy thought at the back of my head and it belongs there.’ Going solo wasn’t something he wanted to do again either: ‘I found being onstage [as a solo artist] quite . . . not hard . . . but definitely I felt I was more comfortable as a member of a group rather than as a solo artist.’
Shit-hot TV producers, their fingers firmly on the pop-culture pulse, clocked the uprising of interest in Busted coming back – but Matt and James weren’t keen on the kind of opportunities being suggested to them. James tweeted frankly, ‘Busted and [the TV reality-documentary show] The Big Reunion is like custard and mashed potatoes in the same bowl. A really bad idea.’ He went into more detail on The Vault, saying, ‘There’s a difference behind the way we think about stuff. Even though we were a boy band, and people put us in the boy-band [category] . . . and we were marketed no different from a boy band, the thought behind how we do our music is not the same.’
And, frustratingly, music was something he and Matt really, really wanted to do together. It had been almost three years since they’d recorded those six tracks that Matt had mentioned on This Morning – and not one of them had ever seen the light of day.
At Matt’s house one day that spring, Matt had turned to James and said, ‘Listen. This is stupid. I want to do music with you.’
The feeling was mutual.
It should have been so simple.
But the solution to their problems was not.
Yet it wasn’t something that James was going to worry about today. He was here in Manchester to hang with McFly, who were eight gigs into their Memory Lane tour, promoting the second greatest-hits album of their career. With 2013 being the band’s ten-year anniversary since they’d first formed, they’d finally reached the magic number that Tom had felt was suitable, in that interview all those years ago, to release a compilation of their hits. Memory Lane had come out at the end of last year. Now, they were touring the album.
James bumped fists with them as he joined them backstage. There was Dougie, chilled and looking cool as ever. He’d started two skater-style clothing ranges now, Zukie and Saint Kidd, just as James had done before him with Sic Puppy in his Busted days. Danny and Harry were there, too, getting ready for the gig. And there was Tom, perhaps faffing about with a video camera, preparing one of his vlogs. There was more reason than ever now to make them good, because Tom had unexpectedly become a viral Internet sensation. He had uploaded the video of his unique wedding speech to YouTube at the start of the year, and it had attracted millions upon millions upon millions of hits – almost 14 million and counting.
In a way, it wasn’t surprising: anyone who watched the video couldn’t help but
connect with it emotionally. There is something about music that hits you right in the solar plexus, anyway; and the soul-stirring melodies he’d chosen, plus the heart-rending nature of a wedding speech in itself, combined to provoke a stratospherically emotional effect. Tom, close to tears as he thanked his parents and his best friends, seemed to encapsulate everything we all experience in life but often fail to find the words to express. Somehow, he was doing it for us. And so, as the frog in his throat leaped higher with his tribute to Danny, Harry and Dougie, each of the viewers watching thought of their best friends, and teared up too. It was such an accomplished, yet simultaneously genuine, speech. Tom’s love for Giovanna was as crystal clear as the champagne flutes with which their wedding guests toasted them; and a bit like ‘All About You’ itself – a bespoke track for Gi that had connected with thousands of people and in turn become their special song – Tom’s wedding speech had the gift of universality by being utterly personal.
The first James knew of his friend’s spectacularly risen profile was when he’d been on a writing trip with the gang. He remembered backstage at the Jingle Bell Ball in Belfast, ‘I knew it was quite serious when we were in Wales writing songs and Tom was disappearing to talk to the news [in America] about his wedding tape. We were like, “When are we going to finish this song? Where’s Tom?” And we’re like, “Oh, he’s on the news talking about his YouTube video.”’
Even Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe had seen it, and experienced that connection that every viewer seemed to have. He commented to Magic FM, ‘I sat and watched that [video] and what came to my mind was, “I’ve just met one of the richest men in the world. That man has such a rich internal life . . .” I think he’s incredibly special and I’ll be very interested in whatever else he’s going to do.’
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