The biggest beef backstage was about the windiness of the McFly boys, though. While the four of them had, for ten years, been quite comfortably farting in each other’s company, the Busted boys found it quite a culture shock. Danny’s fiancée Georgia did say of her beloved on All Star Mr & Mrs, ‘I mean, he farts more than not. I mean it’s constant’ – so it seemed it was something Matt and James would have to get used to. Matt, who had discovered the charms of various vitamins and health supplements since giving up drink, tried to tackle the issue by supplying ‘digestive enzymes’ to his bandmates. They did stop the farts – but just transferred the gas from one end to the other.
For McFly, the biggest adjustment was to James’s personal hygiene – or lack thereof. Harry said diplomatically to the radio station Fun Kids, ‘James is a very unique character. He’s amazing to be in a band with because he’s very funny and he’s very unique – hence why he’s such a creative person.’ Yet the creativity came with other issues attached. Harry revealed, ‘James Bourne is basically a tramp-slash-pop star. He’s proud to say he’s never bought a can of deodorant in his life. He wears the same outfit for two weeks. Showers every four days.’
Which meant he wasn’t involved when the rest of McBusted had a naked communal shower after the Sheffield show!
Each member of the band had his own favourite moments in the show itself. Tom said sincerely to James on the McBusted vodcast that, for him, his highlight was, ‘Watching you go out [to sing “Sleeping with the Light On”]; I really like that. That whole little moment.’ For Danny, hilariously, it was the end. But he explained, ‘Jumping into the crash mat at the end [is my favourite bit] – because you feel like you’ve done an amazing show and you get to launch yourself on a crash mat. It’s the best way to get offstage ever.’
Matt, typically, was always striving to see how they could improve things. In response to Danny’s comment, he said thoughtfully, ‘It would be better if one of us could do a backflip.’
Matt had noticed there was something different about the fans this time round. He told the Mirror, ‘There was a bra thrown [last night] – it was quite a big bra, though. When we were in Busted, the bras were quite small. She’s grown up! They aren’t sports bras or training bras anymore.’
The show was evolving all the time, too. Dougie introduced a helium-voiced solo for himself. Sometimes it was ‘My Heart Will Go On’ from Titanic; Harry would join him to play Leo to Dougie’s Kate, Dougie’s arms splayed dramatically out to his sides as Harry held him close in a tight embrace. At other times, he’d perform ‘Wonderwall’, in tribute to the Gallagher brothers. He didn’t sound quite like Danny and Matt had done when they were singing Oasis songs in pubs, back before they made it big – but he was just as entertaining.
The band started using the gigs to showcase some of their other skills, too. Danny was known to throw in a burst of opera vocal from his time on Popstar to Operastar. Harry borrowed Danny’s guitar to demonstrate his multi-instrument musicianship. A childlike, staccato version of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ followed.
Matt rocked out some of his old moves from his days of West End glory in Wicked. And – in a classic, true McBusted moment – Tom and James took a trip down memory lane by giving a short performance of ‘Consider Yourself’, complete with dance routine, in a nod to the role they had shared as child stars: that of Master Oliver Twist. The band also, perhaps predictably, took to forming their famed human pyramid each night too.
For James, his opinion of the show was quite simple. He said on the vodcast, ‘It’s the most fun I’ve had onstage – ever.’
And that was all to do with the people he was performing with. Matt revealed to Good Morning Britain, ‘What you see onstage is what it’s like. This isn’t two different groups of people that you’ve just shoved together and said, “Right, do this”: this is six mates who went, “How about we just do something awesome together?”’
James agreed. He said to Chronicle Live, ‘The relationship between our two bands is unique. I was trying to think of any other bands who could do this [supergroup thing] where it would actually work. It’s really rare. We’ve all been friends for so many years.’
Harry added to The Vault, ‘For bands [in themselves] to get on these days is rare. For a band to stay together for ten years is rare. And to have two other new guys come along and for us all to get on equally as well – it’s awesome.’
Dougie summed it up in McBusted: The Birth, ‘We’ve got two more best friends onstage with us.’
And Danny joined the love-in. Speaking to the Somerset News, he said, ‘The friendship between us is second-to-none. It’s a connection on a different level. We never try and “be” anything. It’s six lads who’re all good mates. There’s lots of energy and we all want to not only perform, but hang out together. It’s just a really good vibe.’
There was only one cloud on McBusted’s sunny horizon. During the tour, James and Gabriela called time on their relationship. Gabby tweeted on 5 June 2014, ‘I’m sure some of you already figured it out, but after almost eight years, James and I are no longer together. It was fun while it lasted.’ The long distance between the couple couldn’t have helped, but there were earlier signs that perhaps it wasn’t a relationship that was going to endure. When James was asked by The Vault about his marriage plans in December, he’d replied awkwardly, ‘I’m not quite ready for that yet.’
What he was ready for, though, was the wicked wave of career resurgence that he was currently riding. Just weeks after Gabby’s tweet, McBusted took on a huge gig when they supported the mammoth boy band One Direction at their Paris stadium gig on 21 June. They knew the band themselves well, with Danny, Dougie and Tom having worked with the 1D boys on all three of their albums. And it was a relationship that was still thriving, as Danny told Fearne Cotton: ‘Niall was over the other night writing. They’re really nice guys. We got a really good song.’
Niall Horan and the other 1D lads were over the moon at the idea of McBusted supporting them. For many of them, their first ever gig had been that now-historic joint Busted–McFly arena tour back in 2004 – a whole decade ago, as Tom was keen to point out to a fan on a YouTube video: ‘We couldn’t have planned [McBusted] any better. It’s almost ten years to the day since we went on tour with these guys, and now we’re going on tour again.’
Niall tweeted his excitement: “F**kkkk yeeaaaahhhh! Tomorrow is the day! @mcbusted are playing at our show! Aaaaggghhh! Soo excited!’ He wasn’t the only celebrity fan. Ed Sheeran tweeted simply, ‘McBusted makes me happy.’
And, come 21 June at the Stade de France, McBusted made an entire stadium of fans very happy indeed.
As they were the support act for 1D, they couldn’t bring their fancy set and flying cars with them, though. They did have the Back to the Future soundtrack still. How to make a show-stopping entrance without the car? Only McBusted could come up with this: tag-team leapfrog. Somehow apt for a concert staged in France.
The boys’ union with 1D for the special gig set rumours aflame that perhaps a super-supergroup could be formed, with all three bands joining forces. Danny cheekily coined their potential name: ‘McBust-erection’. And Tom declared to Magic FM, ‘That’s the only reason why we’d do it: for the comedy value of our name.’
But – in all seriousness – McBusted could only ever be McBusted. It could only ever be the six of them. James said of the group to the Mirror, ‘It was like Lego. It just slotted together.’ And Danny added, ‘We’re like a football team. There’s no star player.’
There were just six stars.
Backstage on the tour, the band kicked back, chatting and relaxing as they made a vodcast for their devoted fans. When Dougie and Tom commented that they’d worked out that they must have played ‘5 Colours in Her Hair’ more than 10, 000 times in their career, it got James thinking. He did some quick calculations on his iPhone, then announced to the group that they had only 26 million minutes left to live.
McBusted pla
nned to make every single one of them count.
Matt put it best to Chronicle Live when he said, ‘This is the start of the future, you know. We never thought it would be this big . . . so everything we’re doing now is already part of the future.’
As the McBusted mega-tour drew to a close, there was a knock on the door of their dressing room. In came the band’s management, with a present for each of the musicians. It was a special plaque, commemorating the fact that they’d sold out every single one of their arena dates, and entertained countless thousands of people along the way.
James held his almost reverentially in his hands. He spoke softly, amid the exclamations of his bandmates around him. ‘This is the most special thing I’ve ever been given,’ he said. ‘I never thought I’d get something like this ever again.’
He looked around the room at his bandmates. It was Tom who had once said, on a VT at the Royal Albert Hall, ‘Bandmates is different to just friends and best friends. It’s closer to being brothers.’ A new family had been fashioned from Busted and McFly – and, as Danny put it, ‘When you have that [bond], you believe you can go on for ever.’
Harry got the last word, speaking to a fan about the supergroup.
When it comes to McBusted, he said simply, ‘I do believe it’s fate.’
Epilogue
McBusted had called a press conference.
It was becoming a bit of a habit.
And they had an enormous announcement to make.
The supergroup had been selected to headline the Barclaycard British Summer Time Festival in Hyde Park. They would be playing to 65, 000 fans – more than three times the size of the O2 in London, the biggest arena on their tour. This was a stage that the Rolling Stones had played, that Bruce Springsteen himself had rocked out on. It was the capital’s biggest summer festival. And they were getting top billing.
As Tom put it on the McBusted YouTube channel, in a video made to announce the gig, ‘This is going to be the biggest show of our lives. It’s going to be the biggest show we’ve ever played. Potentially the biggest show we will ever play.’
Harry and Danny summed up the band’s reaction by restaging the moment they were told.
Harry: ‘You’ve been offered Hyde Park.’
Danny: ‘What? Where’s the [candid] camera?’
James added to Good Morning Britain, ‘[We] know how special this is. [Looking back] over the last ten years, you know what the special moments were. And you compare this to those special moments, and this is up there with those special moments – that maybe you didn’t understand the first time round.’ Danny agreed, with the wisdom of a decade in the business: ‘You learn how to appreciate it.’
At lunchtime one day, the band were chilling out when they received news of who would be supporting them for the huge gig. Harry just managed to get his phone out in time to capture James’s exuberant reaction. And it was James who had the honour of making the ‘big reveal’ of the support act at the press conference.
‘We have a very special guest band at the event who will be playing,’ he began, the excitement plain in his voice – and in his next statement. ‘The idea that they’re going to be playing . . . that is a whole dream come true in itself. It’s the Backstreet Boys. I love the Backstreet Boys!’
And in fact, there couldn’t have been a more apt choice for the supergroup. James, who had always been a fan of the Backstreet Boys’ superbly crafted pop songs, had introduced Matt to their music when the two had first started working together, back in that historic springtime in Southend. The first song Tom had learned to play on piano was a Backstreet Boys song – a skill he later demonstrated in his original audition for Busted. And on that fateful day when Tom and Danny had first met, during Danny’s dance-tastic boy-band audition for V, it was a Backstreet Boys track that Tom had taught him how to sing. James, of course, had also written for the group – but it’s one thing being an anonymous songwriter, and another being the headlining act at a gig where your favourite band are supporting your own.
It was no wonder that, as applause at the news rippled around the press-conference room from the cynical media hacks, James jumped up and down and said, ‘I’m going to clap too ’cause I’m excited!’
It was such an extraordinary turnaround for Matt and James – something Harry was conscious of. He said to James as they announced the news to the media, ‘James, what would you have said if someone had said to you in the Busted press conference when you were splitting up, “Dude, don’t worry, ’cause in eight, nine years, you’re going to be headlining Hyde Park and the Backstreet Boys will be supporting you.”?’
James didn’t miss a beat. ‘I would have said . . . quit playing games with my heart.’
The band threw themselves into rehearsals with gusto. And their minds turned, too, to what might be on the agenda for them after Hyde Park. They’d had interest from international promoters about taking the tour abroad – and the band were keen to explore the idea. James said enthusiastically, ‘I would like to travel, and see places again.’
A journalist asked them if McBusted: The Musical might be on the cards. The band looked up and down their line-up. There was Matt, who had wowed the West End in Wicked and Flashdance; Danny, who had played guitar for his school’s musical productions; Dougie, who’d attended a performing-arts college; James, who had written an Olivier Award-nominated West End musical and two others besides, as well as playing Oliver at the London Palladium. Tom loved musicals so much that, for McFly’s tenth-anniversary gigs, he’d actually penned an original ten-minute composition called McFly: The Musical. It seemed as if Matt was understating it when he replied, ‘We are partial to a jazz hand.’
Tom said eagerly that the idea of McBusted: The Musical would be ‘awesome’, but James gave him a reality check from his own experience: ‘I would love to but those things take so much time,’ he said. He added, though, ‘It’s a really great idea . . .’
Perhaps it was something for Tom to jot down in those notebooks of his.
Speaking of books, he and Dougie certainly had a bright literary future ahead of them. Almost unexpectedly, they had become huge stars of the children’s book world, writing a series of books about a diarrhoeic dinosaur. The Dinosaur That Pooped Christmas had been a surprise hit for Random House Children’s Books in winter 2012; they’d followed it up with The Dinosaur That Pooped a Planet; and now they had a multi-book deal for more to come. They said bemusedly to Fearne Cotton, ‘It was a joke that became a reality.’ And Tom’s publishers were in boosted-profile heaven when he won the Marvel Celebrity Dad of the Year Award, just three months after Buzz’s birth.
It was a prize that caused a bit of a kerfuffle within the band, when Andi Peters asked Matt about Tom’s win on Good Morning Britain. Dad-of-two Matt joked, ‘I wasn’t even nominated . . . I’m a terrible father.’
A terrible idea was a McBusted perfume. Yet, as the boys exchanged sweaty trainers backstage on a McBusted vodcast, inhaling the inner sole, it was one James thought had potential. Of the boys’ cheesy footwear scents, he said firmly, ‘If that was a range, it would sell.’
The sky seemed the limit. Matt said to Fearne Cotton, ‘In McBusted, we’ve been in this amazing position where we can just go, “Awesome.” Whenever something comes up, we’re like, “Do you want to do that?” We’re like, “Yeah!”’
As ever, though, what they were really psyched about was making music together. Dougie gave hope to millions of fans when he told the Daily Record in July, ‘There might be a McBusted album for Christmas, if we can get it done in time.’ He explained, ‘McFly had an album ready to go, but . . . then we were like, “Sod it, let’s do McBusted instead.” So we might use some songs from that, and Matt and James have been writing ever since McBusted formed, so there’s lots to choose from.’
And Harry added to the Belfast Telegraph, ‘[Recording] will happen after the tour. We’ll be writing on the road and hopefully soon after the tour we’ll get in the studio.’
The dates had already been booked.
But before all that was the small matter of the biggest gig of their lives. Danny said to Magic FM, ‘It’s still not sunk in really that we’re headlining this, and how big it is.’ Dougie added to Fun Kids, ‘We’re pee-your-pants excited.’
For Danny, too, there was the added thrill that this was a venue Springsteen had played. He said to Enas Refaei, ‘I’m still in my own world that I’m actually going to stand and play on the same stage that Bruce Springsteen played. I might be in the same dressing room – so I might even smell the chairs and things!’
And the proximity of the Backstreet Boys was causing excitement, too. They supported McBusted at another gig a few days before the big one on Sunday, 6 July, and Tom revealed to Magic FM, ‘We all stood side of stage and were fangirls over them. We knew all the words to every song.’
Tom was feeling moved about Hyde Park because of its incredible location in terms of McBusted’s past. He said to Magic, ‘This is an important place for us. We can almost see from the stage where we wrote most of McFly’s first album [at the InterContinental], where we stayed when we were trying to get record deals . . . it’s walking distance from the stage. This is where a lot of McFly and Busted history was born.’
Everyone wanted to know if they were going to be nervous, come Sunday. Danny said simply to London Live, ‘We always play shows like it’s the last show we’ll ever play. We’ve got to look at it as any other show, go into it with as much energy as we do every time – but then remember that it is special. No matter how big it is, all the way to the back, we’re gonna try and make everyone have the best time ever.’
And Tom chipped in with, ‘You will see six very overly excited, hyperactive guys onstage on Sunday.’
Danny’s words struck a chord with his bandmates, though, because the Hyde Park gig was the last show McBusted had in their schedule. Tom said to Magic FM, ‘Hyde Park is the last show we have booked. We don’t have any more McBusted shows planned for the future yet. Who knows what’s going to happen?
Mcbusted : The Story of the World's Biggest Super Band (9781471140679) Page 21