What he was doing at the moment was getting ready to rock the Manchester Apollo. The band were psyched about this tour. They were playing all their greatest hits, and it was the perfect full stop before they started recording their sixth album. They were planning to head to Texas – with producer Jason Perry back onboard – to record it after the tour was over.
They’d been writing new songs for the album for a while now, and James was over from the States in part to see if any on-tour magic might happen, just like in the old days. Manchester had been the scene of some top writing in the past – ‘Air Hostess’, ‘Who’s David?’ and ‘Unsaid Things’ had all been written in the city – so it seemed only right that it was at this particular venue that he’d happened to hook up with them.
Also hanging backstage that night were an up-and-coming band called the Vamps, who would be releasing their debut single in the coming September. James, Tom, Dougie and Danny would all write with the band for their debut album, but its release was many months away yet. This day, Friday, 3 May 2013, the Vamps were here to warm up the crowd for McFly as their support act – just as McFly had done for Busted many moons ago.
The Manchester Apollo holds 3,500 people. James, Tom, Danny, Dougie and Harry could hear them all coming into the old cinema on that Friday night, raucously up for a good time and energised about the evening’s entertainment. With Bolton’s Danny Jones in the band, playing Manchester was like playing a home crowd: the atmosphere would be electric.
The fans’ chatter and excitement vibrated through the Art Deco walls, through to where the band were kicking back in their dressing room. As usual, they were having a laugh. This was the band who had donned fake moustaches to play a cheesy restaurant trio in the ‘Sorry’s Not Good Enough’ video; who had recorded a bespoke ‘Star Boy’ track for Chris Moyles on his departure from Radio 1, complete with comedy scene of them in bed together; whose latest video, for ‘Love Is Easy’, had given a starring role to a pink ukulele and restaged their respective reality-show wins in am-dram fashion. Having a laugh was in their DNA.
‘Hey, James.’
An idea was brewing.
‘What?’
‘Mate, wouldn’t it be funny if you went out there and played a few songs?’
It had been a long time since he’d heard screams like these. James slowly walked out onto the stage, a lonely silhouette against the backlight. He stood before a microphone in front of the Vamps’ drum kit. They hadn’t performed yet. It was just him. He had his black guitar strap across his shoulder, and his acoustic guitar in his arms.
He stood still for a second, thinking, letting the moment wash over him, and then he started strumming his guitar. There was only one light on the stage, picking out the drum kit and the black curtains behind him that concealed McFly’s set. He played into the darkness.
As it always did, the music shot into his veins. He found himself swaying gently in time as the song built. He was James from Busted, but he was also James the singer-songwriter from New York, James from Southend-on-Sea, James who wrote songs in his bedroom, and wanted people to hear them any way they could.
His vocal started. And the lights came up. He was dressed in a simple T-shirt and khaki trousers, with a blue checked shirt over the top. He wasn’t in full leathers or boy-band garb, but the screams that greeted him suggested otherwise. He sang on. ‘Beautiful Girls Are the Loneliest’ was a relatively new track. But this was an artist who had played arenas when he was just twenty years old. He’d sold out Wembley eleven times. And he had a list of songwriting credits for top-ten hits as long as his arm. By the end of the song, every one of those 3,500 people was singing along. He played the crowd just as well as he played guitar. They were chorusing his music back at him, just as they used to do. Though he kept it together for the song, James couldn’t resist the smile that tugged playfully at his lips. This felt good.
Tom, Dougie, Danny and Harry were watching him from the side of the stage. Tom remembered on McBusted: The Birth, ‘It was really exciting for us because it was the first time we’d really seen James and seen him play anything for a while.’ Harry remembered that they were ‘really apprehensive to see what it was like’.
What it was like was, well, something else. Having got the crowd on side with a new song, James took a step back in time. He took things more uptempo by quickly segueing into ‘Everything I Knew’, a song he and Matt had written together for Busted’s first album. To the rapid rhythm of his own accompaniment, he ran through the track. The crowd’s support was visceral. At the end of the first chorus, James couldn’t help himself. When his enthusiastic ‘Woo!’ was met with 3,500 screams, he jumped up and down onstage with sheer excitement. The shiny whites of his teeth, glistening through his wide smile, could have been seen from the balcony. As the song came to an end, he shouted, ‘Yeah!’ exultantly and the audience screamed their heads off.
People say cheesily, ‘Feel the love in the room.’ James could have reached out and touched it in the Apollo that night. He paused for a moment. ‘I want to thank McFly,’ he said, which set the screaming off again, ‘for having me up here. We’ve been writing songs together again. And they’re coming out quite good.’
There was time for just one more good song of his own. He started playing a little guitar lick. It was familiar and yet not; a bit more staccato, a few more flourishes, much less production. James was completely straight-faced. What was it? Another new track?
Tom, still standing by the side of the stage, happily taking in the scene of his friend just storming it, remembered on McBusted: The Birth, ‘He started playing this riff, and we were like, “What song is this?” It kind of sounded a bit like “Year 3000” . . . Could have been, was it . . .? There were murmurings around the audience. And then he started singing “Year 3000” and it. Just. Went. Nuts.’
The audience’s shrieks hit ear-splitting levels. And as soon as they’d run out of air from that first breathless scream, they started singing with him. He was only fifteen words in and he didn’t need to keep going – the crowd were crooning it for him, word-perfect ten years on from the song’s debut. James let their energy carry him from one side of the stage to the other, as he bounded in huge gallops across the stage, no longer needing to stay near the mic when the audience were the ones making enough noise to lift the rafters.
Looking out into the crowd, he could see a sea of smartphones recording shaky home movies of his moment of glory. Everyone could sense this was musical history in the making, and they wanted a record to keep for ever. When the chorus hit, those who weren’t already dancing leaped to their feet and sang even louder.
James was in his element. He’d feed in the odd line but the crowd didn’t need it. He swung his head in time with the music and kicked the air as the climax rounded the corner. He was up there on his own, without a band – but the 3,500 people stepped into the breach. As they kept the chorus going, James freestyled over the top of them. It was a masterclass. This wasn’t some has-been, riding a wave of nostalgia: this was a musical maestro at the top of his game, finally getting recognition for writing songs that had lasted much, much longer than anyone had given him credit for back in the day. James recalled on McBusted: The Birth, ‘It didn’t feel like I was playing for someone else’s fans. It felt like the McFly fans were also Busted fans. It felt like a home crowd. It felt like a Busted audience.’
Tom added, ‘It was like Busted had never been gone.’
As the song reached its final stages, people started screaming again. They took it to another level when James freestyled the words ‘crashed the wedding’ – but he was teasing them. Like any good showman, he left them wanting more. With a simple, shouted ‘Thank you!’ he unplugged his guitar and walked off the stage. The lights faded to black.
It was perhaps Dougie who summed it up best. He said on McBusted: The Birth: ‘I’m not ashamed to say it, but it was magical.’
Reflecting in his room at the hotel that night, James couldn’t bel
ieve it. The reaction had been so incredible.
There was only one small fly in the ointment. Years ago, he’d commented to the Birmingham Mail, ‘Being in a band is more fun [than being solo]. When you win stuff and do well, it’s better to say “We did it” rather than “I did it”. It’s better to share the experience. If you’re solo, you’re alone. If you’ve done something good, you’ve got no one to have a beer or relate the experience with afterwards.’
There was a knock on his door. It was Fletch. James remembered on The Jonathan Ross Show, ‘Our manager came up to the hotel room. He showed me a long list of arena dates.’
James was flummoxed. He stared at Fletch, who’d always given him such good advice; who’d been the one to persuade him to stay with Rashman, back when Busted were first starting out; who’d had the commercial and creative vision to build not only Busted but also McFly into a world-class band. Fletch just watched him look through the dates.
Arenas? He’d barely sold out the 800-seater Islington Academy last time he’d gone on tour. He shook his head in disbelief.
Fletch spoke at last. ‘The promoters believe you can do this.’
And he wouldn’t be alone.
FOURTEEN
Ticket Outta Loserville
‘Let’s go!’
Danny yelled into the mic, as Tom launched into the classic guitar riff that opened ‘Saturday Night’. Almost ten years ago, it had been the first track they’d ever played in front of an audience, when they’d supported Busted on their arena tour. Tonight, it was the first track to open their ten-year-anniversary celebrations, as McFly played four nights at the prestigious Royal Albert Hall in September 2013.
And there was a lot to celebrate. One of the band in particular had had some special news of late. In July, Danny had asked Georgia to marry him while they were on a sun-kissed holiday in Cyprus. He’d arranged a romantic beach setting, with a five-course meal prepared especially for them – and a glittering De Beers engagement ring hidden under the table. Georgia told Hello! that he’d started the proposal by asking her when she wanted to get married. She’d joked in reply, ‘Well, when you bloomin’ propose.’
‘What about if I do it now?’ returned Danny.
Georgia confessed, ‘With that I put my head in my hands and started bawling. When I looked up, he was down on one knee in front of me, tears billowing out of his eyes, and he said, “Will you be my future Mrs Jones?”’
The wedding was set for the following summer in Georgia’s native Yorkshire – as Danny put it to the Bolton News, ‘The wrong side of the Pennines . . . sorry about that.’ He’d already asked his bandmates to be his best men. He said to Hello!, ‘We’re like brothers. Our backgrounds are so different but we all get on so amazingly well. We have a connection on another level to everything else.’
And they were certainly connecting onstage tonight. Their die-hard fans were treated to an explosive array of all their hit songs. Chris Moyles appeared in a VT to introduce ‘Star Girl’, explaining how he’d first met McFly ‘when Busted gave birth to you all those years ago’. The band finally indulged seven years’ worth of requests when they played ‘Little Joanna’, a soaring ice-cream sundae of a song from Motion in the Ocean, which was as musically complex as it was toe-tappingly terrific, and which they’d never had the balls to play live before in case they, well, ballsed it up. It was simply glorious, and the crowd joined in with the rhythmic backing vocals as the lights shimmered. And Dougie – it would be Dougie, of course – got to play the Albert Hall’s world-famous organ for the dramatic introduction to ‘Transylvania’.
It was indeed the perfect venue to mark the occasion, packed full of history as well as heaving bodies. As the strains of ‘Love Is Easy’ – played on Tom’s pink ukulele – faded out, the lights dimmed, too. And so the scene was set, ready and waiting, for a new chapter of music history to be made.
An idea had been born back in May at the Manchester Apollo. Harry summarised it backstage at the Jingle Bell Ball: ‘James came on tour with us to write some songs and hang out, and we said, “Why don’t you go onstage and sing some Busted songs acoustically? It’ll be a laugh, we’ll watch and have a giggle.” And he did it and the reaction was insane and we were like, “This is awesome, how can we make this a reality?”’ He expanded to The Vault, ‘It was so fun to watch and the crowd reaction was so special that we were like, “Why don’t we just be the band, why don’t we just be one band?”’
James took up the story. ‘The theory was, if I can go onstage at a McFly show and play Busted songs and have it go down as well as it went down, surely if Matt came on [too] it would be even better . . . and surely if we all just slayed, it would be even better than that . . . It was an idea that happened between all of us . . . After [I played we were like], “Oh my God, there has to be a way.”’
As the saying goes, where there’s a will, there’s a way. James said to The Vault that, before Manchester, he and Matt had been ‘willing something to happen’ to help them reunite. The perfect opportunity had just landed in their laps.
The McFly anniversary was a focal point and an excuse to do something really special, and the reaction of the crowd at the Apollo was too extraordinary to ignore. Danny said on McBusted: The Birth, ‘We wanted to have guests [at the Royal Albert Hall] and the first people that came to mind were Matt and James and we asked them . . . and they said yes.’ The timing of James’s impromptu gig couldn’t have been better. And so, that summer, it wasn’t just McFly who rehearsed for the high-profile gigs. They had a couple of friends along for the ride too.
The audience in the Albert Hall that night first got an inkling of what was to come when the screens flickered to life and a VT rolled, just over fifty minutes into the gig. There were Matt and James onscreen, talking about McFly. Huge cheers went up for the Busted boys – just as they had for James at the Apollo. Matt mused to the camera, ‘I remember meeting Danny for the first time and knowing that those two [he and Tom] had a real connection,’ while James reminisced, ‘It was amazing to have both bands on the road together [for the arena tour]. That was a really good time.’
As the screens faded to black, it was black too inside the Albert Hall. The girls’ screams punctured the dark. Almost ten seconds passed. Silence from the stage. Then, through the darkness, the unmistakeable bass line of ‘Year 3000’ kicked in. The lights throbbed once, like a new dawn, and then resumed their shadowy swirls, obscuring exactly who was onstage.
As the lead guitar ripped into the main riff, pixelated lights at the back of the stage spelled out one word, very briefly, against the back wall, before it was blasted away by a shower of sparkling pyrotechnics.
McBusted.
As the lights came up fully, there were six very talented, very excited, very animated musicians onstage – and they were determined to have F.U.N. Already they were bouncing dementedly up and down onstage as if they were at a pogo-stick convention (all except Harry, who was having the time of his life bashing his drum kit to Busted’s rocky music). In a sign of things to come, Danny, James and Matt split the six-line first verse into three parts, with each of them taking lead vocals; there were no divas in this band, and Danny took the first line to showcase that this really was a supergroup and not just Busted on their own, back for one last gig.
As the bridge to the chorus came in, James and Tom, old friends that they were, did the honours, harmonising on adjacent mics, while Matt went insane, leaping and spinning and doing Busted jumps next to Dougie in a seemingly school-uniform-inspired outfit: school striped tie, short-sleeved white shirt and a sleeveless denim jacket with patches. James was in shorts and his trusty checked shirt, this time in red and black, mirroring Tom who was in a bluey-grey checked shirt. Danny was in rock-star black, Dougie in purple-bandana heaven and a patterned shirt, and Harry in a grey New Order T-shirt. A marketing exec would have thrown his hands up in horror at the lack of coordination – but it absolutely worked. These were six friends up there having a bla
st, being true to themselves, and showing harmony in more than just the music.
As the chorus of ‘Year 3000’ kicked in, all five guitarists were on their mics, singing away as the crowd went wild, with Tom throwing in some new harmonies. The atmosphere in the Albert Hall was extraordinary. Harry later said emphatically on McBusted: The Birth, ‘I’ve tried to take nothing for granted over the past ten years. One thing I definitely don’t take for granted is the crowds that we play to. They’re always incredible, the fans are insane, they’re so loud; there’s always an amazing atmosphere at our [McFly] gigs.
‘But when we went out for the Royal Albert Hall shows for our ten-year anniversary, when Matt and James came out and “Year 3000” started, I think it’s arguably the biggest screams and feeling of electricity in a venue that I’ve ever felt before. It was such a special moment.’
And magic moments were happening onstage at a rate of knots. When you have five vocalists on a Busted song rather than just three, the musical arrangements know no bounds. Dougie chipped in every now and again on his favourite bits – especially when James raced over to his mic and they tag-teamed lines.
McFly were clearly enjoying rocking out to the Busted song. Having five singers also meant there was more chance for Danny to get into his guitar riffs as he played along with James’s vocals, or for Tom to jump crazily up and down while someone else sang. Matt Willis was just beaming as the crowd chanted the chorus at him (‘Say what?’ he yelled at them), and you could hear the laughter in his voice as he sang, bubbling up from inside of him and helplessly out into the lyrics.
The McBusted name was up in lights at the back of the Albert Hall as the band performed in front of it, each letter picked out in golden pixelated dots. And the audience went absolutely dotty as the iconic aeroplane roar that signalled the start of ‘Air Hostess’ zoomed around the Albert Hall’s speakers. The lighting design switched to bright backlighting as the two bassists – Matt and Dougie – faced each other down to duet on the iconic bass line. James and Danny shared the spoken intro, and then James took lead vocals for the first verse. His foot beat in time as he held his arm aloft, while Tom, crouched next to him, had his head bowed and low, concentrating intently on his guitar licks.
Mcbusted : The Story of the World's Biggest Super Band (9781471140679) Page 16