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

by Parker, Jennifer

  As the calendar pages were ripped off the wall, one by one, the first date of the tour grew ever closer. The band were rehearsing hard, sorting out new musical arrangements for the tracks, figuring out how to make five guitars playing all at once sound good and – most importantly – dividing up Charlie’s lines in the Busted songs.

  In a press conference, Harry had said, ‘We felt four McFlys made up for one Charlie.’

  But Danny was quick to interrupt him: ‘Woah, woah, woah – I’m Charlie!’

  Matt was even quicker on the uptake: ‘And you’re twice the man he was!’

  In truth, Danny’s rock voice would fit in perfectly with the numbers. And Tom was looking forward to singing, too. He said to Magic FM, ‘[I’ll be singing] songs that I’ve written for Busted that I’ve never been able to perform before . . . really good fun.’

  And fun was, in the end, what it was all about. The band had loads of bright ideas as to how they could make these the most awesome shows ever; they mostly seemed to involve high volume and high explosives. James said to McBusted: The Birth, ‘We’ve been given an opportunity to put on a special show and that’s what we’re going to do.’ And Tom concluded, ‘I know it’s going to be really special – and a hell of a lot of fun.’

  By the time Danny spoke to the Somerset News, some of the plans were a bit clearer. He said, ‘We know we want to blow stuff up and do some crazy stuff. Our philosophy is, no matter what it costs, we put on the best show ever, and we want to put on an amazing show.’

  And their fans had enabled them to put on the most amazing show of their entire career. The band were completely gobsmacked at the huge numbers of ticket sales, and the passion with which the idea of the supergroup had been received. Danny shook his head disbelievingly as he said on The Vault, ‘It’s mental, absolutely mental.’

  The tour was bigger than anything either band had ever achieved before, despite all their success and the Guinness world records they’d received for their sell-out tours. Even though both McFly and Busted had enjoyed individual spells as Britain’s most popular band, McBusted put them on a whole new level. It was mind-boggling – and somewhat humbling. James put it beautifully on McBusted’s YouTube channel: ‘They’re going to be the biggest shows of our career. For that to happen to all of us, ten years since we started, it’s been an unbelievable journey.’

  He said simply to Fearne Cotton, ‘It meant so much to all of us.’

  And Tom explained to Fearne exactly what the fans’ support had enabled the band to do. ‘Normally on a tour,’ he said, ‘we’ll have loads of ideas and be able to do one of them. But because this tour’s so big . . . we literally had a wishlist of stuff we wanted to do and when we sat down for our first meeting we were like, “Great, let’s just do all of them.”’ No wonder he said of his bandmates to Chronicle Live, ‘James and Matt are going to be like animals uncaged for the first time in ten years.’

  But, before the wildness of the former Busted boys could be unleashed on the world, there was one rather significant event in McBusted Land: the birth of Tom and Giovanna’s baby. At 7 p.m. on 13 March 2014, the McBusted clan welcomed its newest member. Giovanna tweeted about the happy occasion: ‘So in love with our gorgeous little boy Buzz Michelangelo Fletcher.’

  And what better way to mark the occasion than with a new YouTube video? No, not the one Harry had suggested. Instead, the Fletchers revealed that, for the past nine months, they’d been working on a time-lapse video of Giovanna’s pregnancy, showing every day of her changing body, which played on the screen while Tom sang along with his guitar. They called it ‘From Bump to Buzz’ and it soon hit nearly 10 million views.

  Buzz had timed his arrival well.

  Thirty-five days later, his dad and his new ‘uncles’ prepared to open the biggest tour of their lives.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Heart Never Lies

  They could hear the screams from backstage – and they hadn’t even started yet. McBusted gathered in a circle in their dressing room. One dressing room for the six of them. It was a tight squeeze for the sextet, but, as Matt said to Good Morning Britain, ‘I wouldn’t want it any other way.’

  James led the group together in a unified, single clap, all twelve hands pressed together simultaneously, not a whisper of a second apart, to ensure that the band were all on the same wavelength for the show ahead. Then the circle broke up. The band members bumped fists as they made their way towards the stage, wishing each other the best broken legs on the planet.

  Tom, Dougie and Danny took their places beneath the stage, their guitars ready in their hands. Harry sat behind his drum kit, poised and in position. The four McFly boys had done this so many times before. But this time everything felt different. Six was the magic number.

  For James, it was an incredible moment. He had said to Fearne Cotton on Fearne and McBusted, about that final Busted Wembley gig so many years before, ‘I didn’t know that the last show we played at Wembley . . . I didn’t know that was our last show. In my mind there was never a last gig. One day, it was over.’

  In the next thirty seconds, it would be beginning all over again.

  He and Matt looked at each other. This was it. What a journey they’d had, from that first jamming session in Southend-on-Sea to this moment. They’d ridden the wave of Busted’s success the first time, and had crashed and burned. Now, like phoenixes, they were rising again, once more preparing to play for thousands upon thousands of people. Matt swallowed hard. It was different without the drink inside him. But, somehow, it was so much more exciting second time around.

  Out in the arena, the lights faded to black. The audience shrieked in anticipation.

  And the arena screens flickered into life.

  A single date in white on black. January 14th, 2005.

  Roll VT.

  Amid a cacophony of calls from the waiting journalists and a blizzard of camera flashes, the three men hurriedly made their way from the room, having just delivered the worst news of two of their young lives.

  The door closed behind them. For the first time in three years, there was only silence. How to find the words to say goodbye?

  They didn’t even try. Matt and James made their way, glumly, to the car park. It was grey concrete all around, as gloomy and as hard and unforgiving as the choices now before them. They faced each other, the end of everything written in the slope of their downturned necks, in their downcast eyes.

  They shook hands, formally, but almost immediately Matt flicked his long dark fringe – styled just on the one side in the emo fashion – out of his eyeliner-ringed eyes and pulled James into a massive hug. This wasn’t the time for being cool.

  This was the end.

  James hugged him back, hard. He’d never thought it would finish like this. He pulled his baseball cap down firmly over his eyes, and slipped silently into the waiting car. The door slammed, echoing around the cavernous car park, and the car drove off. Matt couldn’t even bear to watch the tail-lights fade away.

  Which was why he was so surprised when he heard James call his name at the top of his voice.

  ‘Matt!’

  His bandmate ran up to him, the car in which he was supposed to be sitting somehow still in sight in the distance, travelling at speed – and yet James was very much here, now, panting and desperate, and clutching a tour programme in his hand. Matt struggled to compute what he was seeing, his forehead furrowed with the effort. James grabbed him and held his arms tight.

  ‘We’ve got to go back!’ he declared vehemently.

  ‘Back?’ echoed Matt. ‘Back where?’

  James paused for a moment – and then delivered the line to end all lines.

  ‘Back . . . to the future!’

  Cue screams in the Glasgow SSE Arena on Thursday, 17 April 2014. And cue action. As the video reached its conclusion, Matt and James strapped themselves into the car onscreen, ready for the ride of their lives. James floored the accelerator. The screens flashed to white – and
, with that, suddenly, the stage came blazingly to life, with bursts of flame that practically singed the screaming fans in the front row, and with blitzes of blinding lights, dry ice and classic sci-fi lightning strikes. To the awesome sound of the theme tune from Back to the Future, the ungodly sight of a flying DeLorean took centre stage.

  The fans knew what was coming. They screamed and screamed and screamed for the Second Coming of Matt Willis and James Bourne. The iconic winged doors of the DeLorean lifted, and, simultaneously, Matt and James stepped out of the car. The arena erupted in a volcanic hail of helpless shrieks. As James and Matt strapped on their guitars, the stage was lit once more by a brilliant shower of sparks – and Tom, Danny and Dougie were launched at stratospheric speed from beneath the stage to land, perfectly in time, ready for the start of ‘Air Hostess’. As entrances go, it was – without a doubt – spectacular in every sense of the word.

  Matt and Dougie started the bass line, Harry pounded his drums – and they were off. All six of them were like rockets packed with plutonium fuel, as the five guitarists zoomed round the stage, high-kicking to the moon, and singing their hearts out. Fans didn’t know where to look first, there was so much glorious action happening onstage. Tom and James jamming in the corner. Matt creeping up behind Danny so they could Busted-jump in unison. Dougie locking eyes with Harry as they kept the rhythm pounding through the heart of the song. The energy was nuclear. Danny, centre stage, holding court like Springsteen, simply couldn’t wipe the smile from his face. The genuine friendship between the group was as transparent to the audience as if they’d had the superpower of X-ray vision. The crowd just wanted to eat them up with a very big spoon, one tasty musician at a time.

  As the song reached its triumphant conclusion, Matt raised his bass like a shotgun, playing it above his head. The gang shot straight into the next number: ‘You Said No’. It. Sounded. So. Cool. Fans, who hadn’t heard these songs played live for a decade, went absolutely nuts. These were the songs they had grown up with; songs that, for the past ten years, had accompanied them in their bedrooms on their stereos, or walking down the street on an iPod. Even with the best speakers in the world, the sound would be small, tinny, tiny and low. Now, the songs’ own creators were playing them live, at visceral high volume, on five guitars and a top-of-the-range drum kit. This was more than exciting. This was memory come to life and standing solidly in front of you, taking you by the hand and twirling you around the dance floor at 500 million miles an hour.

  Hit after hit, song after song. The secret set list was exposed track by track – and it didn’t disappoint. ‘Britney’, ‘Who’s David?’, ‘5 Colours in Her Hair’, ‘Obviously’ . . . No wonder James had said to Chronicle Live, ‘I’m going to frame this set list after the tour. It’s just going to be so good.’

  The band made full use of their very expensive set. There were about a hundred lighting changes per song, with big round lights set up on the speakers at the back of the stage, which throbbed in time with the music. The main stage had a circular walkway attached to it – the fans caught in the middle of the circle were ticket holders for the exclusive ‘OMFG!’ zone – and Tom, Dougie, Danny, Matt and James loved running round it and playing to fans further out in the crowd.

  After ‘Obviously’ came a very special moment. While the others ran off to get a quick drink of water or to towel off the sweat, the lights dimmed, and James was left on his own at the front of the circular walkway, as close as he could get to the very heart of the arena. He had his acoustic guitar in his arms. He started strumming, slowly, the ballad pace of ‘Sleeping with the Light On’ – the first song he and Matt ever co-wrote. It was just him, his guitar – and 13, 000 fans. It was a moment that echoed his life-changing performance at the Manchester Apollo. The thousands of fans sang along with him, word perfect. And James was lit not only by the single spotlight, but by the soft blue lights of the smartphones surrounding him, twinkling like fireflies on the best summer night of your life. As the chorus built, his bandmates returned, harmonising to gorgeous effect.

  The next rabbit out of their very big McBusted hat was a UFO. Yes, an all-lights-flashing, jeepers-creepers 3D flying saucer was unleashed on the people of Glasgow. The ‘second stage’ descended from the ceiling of the arena to showcase Harry in the middle of the ‘saucer’ on his drums and his five bandmates surrounding him, each with a light-up guitar in neon colours. What else could they play on a UFO but ‘Star Girl’?

  Busted’s track ‘Nerdy’ followed, then McFly’s ‘Room on the 3rd Floor’ – a song they could all connect with, with their shared history of the InterContinental. And then it was back to the main stage, for ‘Thunderbirds Are Go’ and a very, very special cover.

  There hadn’t been much discussion as to which icon they might choose to honour with a cover song. For James, there could be only one answer: Michael Jackson. The artist who had started it all for him, way back when.

  And this wasn’t just a musical homage – oh no. As the unmistakeable intro of the Jackson 5’s ‘I Want You Back’ resonated around the arena, Danny, James and Matt revealed that it would be a dancing tribute, too. While Dougie and Tom played their guitars like two beautiful bookends, the centre stage was dominated by a dance routine by the other three guitarists – to the delight of fans. McBusted weren’t a boy band, but they proved they could groove it with the best of them. James took the lead vocal of his icon; it must have been one of the greatest moments of his life.

  They were getting near the end now, but you wouldn’t have known it from their unstoppable energy. They bantered with the crowd, fired merchandise at them from massive T-shirt guns, admired the drag air-hostess outfits some male fans had turned up in, and effected so many effervescent, synchronised Busted jumps it was incredible the stage was still standing. Now they were singing ‘Shine a Light’. Now ‘What I Go to School For’. Now it was the end.

  But, like the Busted story itself, it wasn’t. The encore was introduced by another VT. As the video of Tom Fletcher’s famous wedding speech rolled, it was interrupted by some very vocal, ahem, wedding crashers. And as, onscreen, Matt swooped behind the top table to rugby-tackle Tom to the floor, the arena rang with the cacophonous chords of ‘Crashed the Wedding’. The band were back – and Matt was reprising his original video role as the blushing bride, sporting a gorgeous white wedding gown. Dougie leaped on to his bandmate’s back as the bride kept playing ‘her’ guitar, before both tumbled to the floor in fits of giggles.

  Next, they segued into the simple tune of ‘All About You’, which simply soared, with all six of them chiming in on the vocals.

  And there could be only one song to end it all. The song that had set the ball rolling in Manchester. The song that had started their very first set together at the Royal Albert Hall. As three inflatable boobies unfurled above the stage, in tribute to the lyric, McBusted played ‘Year 3000’, and the Glasgow arena partied as if it were 1999.

  To the appreciative roar of the crowd, McBusted left the stage one by one, hurling themselves from a runway of a stage into the air – to land on a crash mat offstage. Each death-defying jump was made to the accompaniment of Harry’s dramatic drum rolls, until the drummer himself made his own leap of faith into the dark. On the screens, three words were lit in the fiery typeface of the Back to the Future logo:

  TO BE CONTINUED . . .

  It was a night neither the band nor the audience would ever forget. Harry said to Fearne Cotton afterwards, ‘The first night was insane.’

  And they still had another thirty-odd gigs to go.

  Almost at once, it seemed, the band settled into life on tour. They were receiving rave reviews from the media. POP CONGLOMERATE MORE THAN THE SUM OF THEIR PARTS, championed the Guardian; RELENTLESS FUN, screamed the Telegraph, pointing out that ‘every song had expertly placed pauses for everyone to jump in the air in unison.’ And the Guardian concluded by saying what everyone was thinking: ‘Tonight’s trip back in time has conjured an unexpectedly
bright future.’

  The band celebrated in a slightly more sedate way than in their former hellraising days. Matt revealed to the Mirror after the first Glasgow gig: ‘Last night I got back to the hotel and we had sandwiches and nachos, and a mint tea. I was like, f**k dude, this is not the way we used to do things.’ But he added, ‘We’re all older and not quite so chaotic as we once were – but it still feels like that vibe; it’s still troublesome.’

  And they took that troublesome vibe with them on the tour bus, as the six got used to life on the road. Matt confessed on Fearne and McBusted, ‘I’ve been out loads on this tour, which I thought we wouldn’t do. Dougie and I have started smoking cigars.’ Harry attributed that to ‘Dougie’s bad influence’ on a McBusted vodcast, but Tom perhaps had it right when he said, ‘I think you’re bad influences on each other.’

  James was quickly singled out for being the sleepiest boy on the bus, later winning the title of ‘Sleepy Sleeperson, Best Sleeper’ in a McBusted vodcast. But he was active on the McBusted Twitter account at least, which was full of pranks and jokes detailing the band’s backstage shenanigans. Here was James posting a Vine of Harry ‘pumping iron’ – as the former Strictly winner lifted the domestic appliance up and down.

  James and Matt found themselves impressed by how McFly had matured since they’d last toured together, all those years ago. With a decade’s experience under their belts, and with the confidence that comes of being a headlining act, Tom, Danny, Dougie and Harry were at the top of their game – and assertive with it. James said on a McBusted vodcast, ‘Back in the olden days, I feel like we were quite polite; I felt like I would never really say much [e.g. to the crew]. If something wasn’t quite right, I wouldn’t say something . . . You [guys] stand up for yourself [now].’ And Matt agreed. Impressed by his bandmates, he dubbed them ‘seasoned pros’.