The tickets for the McBusted tour had gone on sale that morning. Fletch had promised them all that he would ring with an update as soon as there was news. But all the band’s phones were staying frustratingly silent. They all sat round the table, willing them to ring.
They didn’t.
Was this a bad sign, they wondered, or a good one?
At 9.15 a.m. – just fifteen minutes after the ticket hotlines opened – the call came in.
There was a ripple of excitement around the table. Sharp intakes of breath were taken. Sweaty palms were wiped down trouser legs. The phone was lifted; the screen swiped to answer the call.
‘Hello?’
Danny remembered it all on The Vault. ‘The day that tickets went on sale was such a special day. We were all sat round having breakfast, waiting for our manager to give us the first bit of news. And when it came in . . .
‘I actually got a bit emotional. I couldn’t believe it – how well the tickets were selling. It was amazing.’
For the tickets weren’t just selling well.
They were selling out.
Eleven arenas: just like that. More than 140,000 tickets sold in fifteen minutes. Almost 10,000 seats a minute. The tour was completely sold out in just 900 seconds.
As James said to The Vault, ‘We were just like, “What?”’
Matt spoke about his shock on 5 NewsTalk Live. ‘We can’t really comprehend what’s just happened. We announced eleven dates and we thought we were being quite optimistic. Eleven arenas, that’s quite a big deal. And before we knew it they sold out . . . It’s just incredible.’
Tom agreed wholeheartedly with his bandmate. He said to a fan in a YouTube video, ‘What we think’s been amazing and what we couldn’t predict is the fans’ reaction to it. The demand is so high. The fans really cared passionately about these guys and Busted and us.’
And people were responding passionately to the supergroup. Even Danny’s fiancée Georgia was engaged with the idea. She said on All Star Mr & Mrs, ‘I was definitely more of a Busted fan – but shh, don’t tell Danny.’ People had been waiting for so long for a Busted reunion, and that in itself would have been exciting. But this – this was as if someone had suddenly invented time travel. It was pop with the most ding-a-ling bells and wow-inspiring whistles and pumping pyrotechnics that supergroup stardom could buy.
Tom had his own theory as to why it was working so very, very well. He said to The Vault, ‘What’s awesome about it is it’s not something from the past that’s coming back and re-forming. It’s something new. It’s something that’s completely not been done yet.’
Also new were the formations the band were rocking on red carpets. The night of the press conference, they’d got straight into the swing of a superband’s life by attending the premiere of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire together in London’s Leicester Square. And as the paparazzi snapped away, eager to get a shot of the new band, McBusted debuted a red-carpet stance that others could only look longingly at.
Oh, yes. The human pyramid.
Matt said on Sunday Side Up, ‘That was James Bourne’s idea. The genius that is James Bourne came up with it. We wanted to do something fun and something a bit different and so we decided to do a human pyramid . . . [which was] something fun, but slightly rubbish.’
It was like something out of Transformers. One moment there were six McBusted-ites standing side by side on the red carpet, the next – pow! – pyramid formation. Miley Cyrus could only twerk: this was a specialist move that put all other pop stars in the shade – of their enormous triangular shadow. It was on another level, on three levels, to be precise.
Forming the base were Danny, Matt and Harry. Next up: the original writing partnership of James and Tom. And crowning the creation, like the decorative prow of a supergroup ship, was Dougie, arm held high in the air.
The band couldn’t help enthusing about it on The Vault.
‘I’ve never seen a band do a human pyramid,’ commented Danny.
‘You need six members in a band to do a human pyramid. Are there any other bands in the UK that can do a human pyramid?’ Tom asked his assorted bandmates.
There was a contemplative pause.
Then Matt spoke, ‘I don’t know of any that have . . . not any that thought it was a good idea.’
Tom then stated the obvious. ‘It took people by surprise. They weren’t expecting it.’
They certainly weren’t. And, with that in mind, the group seemed determined to come up with a surprising camera-ready formation every time they appeared in public as a group. The Cosmo Awards saw them striking a pose with three of the band holding the other three upside down, showing off a fair amount of bare torso as their shirts flipped down, as well as a half-cart-wheel dismount that would impress any PE teacher. This wasn’t red-carpet posturing: it was a gymnastics display.
The human pyramids and half-cartwheels were indicative of just how much fun they were having together – and they hadn’t even started rehearsing yet. As Tom said to the press conference on 11 November, ‘What makes [McBusted] different [to cynical reunions or mash-ups] is that there’s a genuine relationship between us. There were always blurred lines between McFly and Busted back in the day. Behind the scenes, they were even more blurred. I was nearly in Busted – which I am now! It’s taken me ten years, the longest audition process ever.’
James chipped in with, ‘And if Busted hadn’t happened or I wasn’t in Busted, I might have been in McFly.’
To which all of McFly immediately murmured, ‘Not sure’ and ‘Don’t know about that’ – to James’s amusement. In the end, he simply settled for the blanket, ‘Our musical histories are intertwined.’ With which everyone agreed.
The friendships between the boys – and the good-natured ribbing that came with those close relationships – were part of their appeal. No wonder so many people wanted to buy tickets for the tour. McBusted looked as if they were having the best fun ever being a band together: who wouldn’t want to join that party?
Asked for his favourite McFly song at the press conference, Matt commanded himself to ‘Remember a McFly song, remember a McFly song . . .’ to tease the gang – before opting for ‘Transylvania’, because that’s the one his good friend and fellow bassist Dougie sings most on. ‘I like that one,’ he said to Dougie, giving him an affectionate squeeze. ‘I like it ’cause you sing.’
Backstage at the Jingle Bell Ball in Belfast, when asked about the potential tour set list and the bands’ respective numbers of hit records, Matt pointed out that Busted had had only two albums, so they had fewer hits, and then joked to McFly, ‘Seven number ones over ten years ain’t really that good . . .’
And when Matt realised on The Vault that, on The Big Reunion, if band members were missing, they were usually just replaced with other people, he joked with Tom and James that, ‘We could have maybe got Tom in [to join a Busted-only reunion].’ And Tom replied in kind, ‘That would have been way better than McBusted – we should have just done that!’
So even the interviews were full of fun. But, as always, what Tom, James, Dougie, Danny, Matt and Harry were really all about was the music. The performance. The live gig.
And their debut TV performance as a unified band would be one to remember, taking place on the night the tickets went on sale, Friday, 15 November 2013. Having filled up on breakfast and the good news of the sell-out tour – to which more dates were being added, as soon as the promoters could confirm them – the gang headed to the BBC studios to perform for Children in Need. Ten million viewers wasn’t too much pressure for their first live TV gig, was it?
Matt would later recall on Sunday Side Up, ‘I’ve not been so nervous about a performance ever in my life.’
For Danny, meanwhile, ‘It reminded me of when we played our show at the Albert Hall – the excitement we had. We were like little excited kids at Christmas.’
That was plain for all to see. The performance started with just McFly onstage – though th
ere was a small hint of things to come, as Harry had the McBusted logo stamped in red on his white bass drum. McFly were singing ‘All About You’ – but only for about thirty seconds. As Tom went into the final refrain, the one the band would always pause on before singing the final ‘you . . .’, he deliberately hesitated as usual – but then the ‘Year 3000’ intro kicked in, where normally there’d be pursed lips and oohing. The audience knew what was coming. The screams and the raised hands and the crazy jumps started with them even before Matt and James ran on energetically from the side of the stage.
Danny took great pleasure in making the introductions. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Children in Need, please welcome, for the first time ever, McBusted!’
And then they were off. It was a shortened medley of their Albert Hall set list: ‘Year 3000’, ‘Air Hostess’ and ‘Shine a Light’ boiled down to four minutes of magic. The unity within the gang was even more apparent this time. Tom and James, and Dougie and Matt on the other side of the stage, would share one mic for each duo, clearly loving every moment. Matt’s freestyled shouts to the crowd had got even more confident and enthused. And the audience responded in kind. Rarely have the BBC studios seen such a reaction. It was more like the mosh pit at the Electric Ballroom in Camden than a charity fundraising programme on straitlaced BBC1. Hands aloft, jumping up and down to match the musicians onstage, everyone was having the time of their lives.
McBusted demonstrated some new moves. As ‘Air Hostess’ began, and Dougie and Matt did their thing on their basses, the other three guitarists gathered together at the side of the stage and made a new formation to emulate their red-carpet poses. In staggered height order in a crouched position, they pointed with long straight arms towards the bassists. And when the main thrust of the song kicked in, the five of them joined together to debut a high-kicking, high-energy routine.
As ever, though, it was all about the Busted jumps. Dougie and Tom went off on one as the other three took vocals, and as the set came to a close, and a glittering array of silver tickertape rained down on them, the five guitarists gathered round Harry once more for a final, spirited jump to end it all. Boom.
A stomping live TV performance. A sell-out arena tour. An incredible 200,000 followers on Twitter for the @mcbusted account in a matter of hours. A 622 per cent combined spike in streams of the bands’ music on Spotify.
No wonder Matt said to Children in Need, ‘This is probably up there as one of the greatest days of my life.’
On 24 November, McFly released a new single, ‘Love Is on the Radio’. The supergroup thing had taken on a life of its own – and taken everyone by surprise with its success – but of course McFly were still an existing band with a whole schedule booked in months in advance. The unrelenting machinations behind record releases couldn’t grind to a halt that quickly.
The gang did get together to record a special McBusted mix of the new track though. The song had been written by Tom, Danny and James anyway, so it was kind of a McBusted record already – those blurred lines again. Or, as Matt put it on Sunday Side Up, ‘It’s very incestuous.’
The McBusted mix bore all the hallmarks of their previous collaborations. It was a rockier version than the McFly-only one, with the drums and guitars higher in the mix. Matt’s punchy voice chiming with Danny’s gave it a harder sound than the other – you could hear that Blink-182 inspiration coming through. With five vocalists joining forces, too, the overall impact was a bit more raucous and meaty, and with more layers to the sound.
The McFly single went to number six. They still had it. Another top-ten hit to add to their collection.
‘Love Is on the Radio’ had more of a country-music vibe to it than had previously been heard from either band. A fiddle and a harmonica were high in the mix. The languorous pace suggested hot summer days in the Deep South, and the ‘hey!’ that punctuated the song was like a line-dancing enthusiast dipping his hat at the end of a phrase. It was a new sound that James was clearly into. In December he released new music with another new band, called 88 (no prizes for guessing where the name comes from: that sweet-spot speed the DeLorean has to hit in Back to the Future in order to time-travel), which he’d formed with the sixty-year-old American musician Eric Bazilian. Their first single was ‘Angels Walk Beside You’, which began with a harmonica and also had a country-music slant to it, albeit with an electric guitar solo in the middle. It was slower than ‘Love Is on the Radio’ – a hopeful, yearning, inspirational song, about how there are always friends around you, something James was now appreciating more than ever – but the two songs were stylistically similar.
Eric Bazilian revealed to JamesBourneBrasil.com,
James and I have an amazing connection. Despite the difference in our ages, we are both inspired by the same music, the same sounds, and the same lyrical themes. Things go very quickly when we get together. Usually we write a song in a day. We’ve got a whole album recorded; at some point we will definitely release it. But, first things first . . . he’s got a lot on his plate right now.
The 88 album wasn’t the only record with a question mark hanging over its release. McFly’s sixth album had been recorded in Texas in the summer, just as they’d planned, with Danny co-producing it along with Jason Perry; and when the McBusted press conference was held in November, the idea was still to release it in spring 2014, on the band’s own Super Records label.
Yet, as date after date got added to the McBusted tour, it became clear that the album was going to have to be delayed.
Danny said to Fearne Cotton on Fearne and McBusted, ‘The McFly album got put on pause. So hard. We were like, “Can we not release our album first?” The promoter offered us a tour so early that we were like, “We’ve got to do it.” Some of the McFly fans weren’t really happy with us. It’s an incredible album. The album’s amazing.’
It was hard. For the Royal Albert Hall gigs, too, had been so well reviewed that, finally, after ten years of hard work and effort, McFly had at long last been recognised as a genuinely talented and important band on the music scene. Journalist Seamus Duff wrote in the Metro:
They’ve toured stadiums, sold out shows, starred in films and reality shows – and yet they seem unfairly overlooked by a lot of media outlets and brushed off as mere ‘boy-band pop fodder’. This is incredibly unfair and a disservice to what could arguably be one of the best bands this country has ever produced. . . . They are an act who have played their own instruments and written their own material. Notably, they trumped the Beatles when their debut album reached the top of the charts. You could even argue that the two bands are comparable. . . . Despite the best McFly songs being better than some of the Beatles’ work, Tom, Dougie, Danny and Harry are never given the same credit. . . . It’s time McFly were celebrated for what they really are: a talented group of musicians and singers, not a dismissible boy band.
But as Danny put it to The Vault, ‘Suddenly, this happened. It’s all change. Plans are changing all the time.’ And so now they were leaving all their success behind to form McBusted; or, perhaps, standing on its shoulders to make something even better – just like a human pyramid in itself.
It was a decision that the band members were embracing fully. Harry said to The Vault, ‘McFly is there for us always but . . . it’s refreshing [to be doing McBusted].’ Dougie agreed in his usual kooky way, comparing being in McFly to eating spaghetti Bolognese for ten years straight in an interview with the entertainment journalist Enas Refaei. For him, it was nice for the band to be tucking into some carbonara for a change (Matt claimed, ‘I’m the cream’). Tom even said on 5 NewsTalk Live, ‘It is really good. It’s much more fun than just being McFly. That was dull and boring in comparison to being in McBusted.’ And he added to The Vault, ‘It feels like something new. Days when I see in the schedule that it’s a McBusted day and not a McFly day, it feels like, “Ah, it’s a different day.”’
And Tom’s days were about to be very different indeed. Shortly before the McBusted press c
onference, he and Giovanna had announced some very special news via the medium of YouTube. In a charming video, they carved pumpkins to a soundtrack of them singing along to Tom’s pink ukulele – and then revealed the message in the lit pumpkins: WE’RE HAVING A BABY. Back in 2001, Hallowe’en for Tom had meant lost dreams. Twelve years later, the traditional glowing pumpkins of the season burned brightly with a new dream that was definitely coming true.
Their baby was due just weeks before the McBusted tour would begin, which was a big talking point in the band’s interviews – and an opportunity for Dougie to crack some jokes.
‘Where do babies come from?’ he asked faux innocently on The Vault.
‘I’ll show you afterwards,’ said Tom.
‘Don’t show him!’ interjected Harry in alarm.
And Harry had a characteristic McFly idea for how YouTube sensation Tom could commemorate the impending happy occasion. Backstage at the Jingle Bell Ball, Harry said to his bandmate, ‘What we’re requesting now from Tom is a live webcam, and Tom to be there with his ukulele while Giovanna’s giving birth and singing a little song about it. Are you down with that?’
Someone Tom could ask for some ‘dadvice’ about whether or not that was a good idea was of course his new bandmate, Matt, a seasoned father of two. And James for one was certainly full of praise for Matt’s fatherly skills. He said on The Vault, ‘He does it effortlessly. I don’t know how he does it, ’cause it’s a big responsibility, two kids, and he just nails it.’
Perhaps he’d honed his skills by looking after James. Matt said to Andi Peters on Good Morning Britain, ‘Sometimes I do [feel like the daddy of the band]. Literally, every day I have to pick up James. James is the closest to my house. The car comes to get me; then it gets James. Every day I have to get James out of bed. It could be 2.30 in the afternoon, and I still have to get James out of bed. It’s like the old days.’
Mcbusted : The Story of the World's Biggest Super Band (9781471140679) Page 18