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

  With James, too, Matt was fond of a bevy or two. In the book Busted, he recalls of that summer, ‘I think to be honest that James and I were pissed almost all the time.’ They were going out to the local student union bars in Southend and enjoying the cheap beer – which made a nice change for Matt, who was used to paying over the odds to opportunists who saw a chance to exploit underage drinkers. He told Digital Spy in 2006 about his experiences as a teenager in Surrey: ‘You’d meet this one person, who’d have his car, and in his boot were loads of bottles of cider, and they’d be like seven pounds each. Seven pounds for a bottle of cider! Cost him three pounds, but he’d be like, “I’m eighteen, you’re twelve, what are you going to do about it?”’ Matt smoked, too – cigarettes and cannabis, which he’d started taking at the age of thirteen – yet this haze of booze and drugs certainly didn’t seem to hinder his creativity. In fact, his and James’s partnership just seemed to get better and better.

  In August 2001, Busted stepped up to their biggest challenge yet: recording a demo at a London studio. The four boys decamped to the capital to take up temporary residence at the InterContinental hotel on Park Lane. As they walked through the grand lobby, with its cool marble floor reflecting the shimmering chandeliers above, they allowed themselves to dream that maybe one day they would belong in this luxury world. All it needed was for the demo to work; all they needed was a break.

  They couldn’t wait to hear the finished tracks.

  They waited . . . and waited. August turned to September, and there was still no sign of the finished demo tapes. The boys had been signed to Prestige since March; they’d been working together since January; and they still felt no further forward than at the start of the year. James in particular – who had broken up with his beloved Kara and was worried that he’d quit college for what seemed to be a floundering band – felt the disappointment sharply. He wrote in Busted that, before his eighteenth birthday in September 2001, ‘It suddenly struck me that I had nothing . . . I was pinning everything on a band that would prob-ably never even get off the ground. I had a terrible, sinking feeling.’ He continued:

  One night, when my anxiety became too much to bear, I sat down with my mum and we tried to find the answers to my problems. It had just gone 11 p.m. and I asked my mum, ‘Am I stupid to dream that this band is going to take off?’ She looked at me, and grasped my hand, and answered, ‘It’ll happen, James. You’ll make it happen.’

  James started to wonder what more he could do to make the band succeed; and he began to think that maybe Richard Rashman wasn’t the man to make it happen for him. They’d had a crisis meeting in June about the lack of progress, which had prompted the demo recordings, but now they were back at square one – and still with nothing to show for all the months of hard work.

  Cracks were beginning to show within the band, though. Matt and James, always a tight unit, longed to explore the rock-oriented route that they loved in bands such as Blink-182 and Green Day, but Owen hankered after a more traditional boy-band format. The situation was untenable. Something had to give.

  On Wednesday, 3 October 2001, the boys faxed Rashman to terminate their management agreement with him. He didn’t feel the sacking was justified and immediately phoned them to discuss the matter. Nothing was resolved that day but, on the Thursday, Rashman caught up with Matt on his mobile, as he was travelling to Southend to see James. Matt told him that he didn’t want to continue working with Owen and Ki any more, but he was still interested in being represented by Rashman. Meanwhile, in Southend, Rashman’s associate, the talented musician and artist manager Matthew ‘Fletch’ Fletcher, called on James to discuss the falling-out too.

  Fletch and James had known each other for a while by this time. The two of them had written music together and James respected Fletch’s opinion. If Fletch thought it was worthwhile giving Rashman another go, it was. Simple as that. Matt and James discussed it together and told Rashman that they were interested in being represented by him as a twosome only. They wanted to try working together to create something new, rather than continuing with the old band. On Monday, 8 October, the old Busted disbanded.

  Yet James and Matt didn’t want to be just a two-piece. How many successful male double acts were there? The Everly Brothers? Wham? PJ and Duncan? None of them were quite as cool as Blink-182. A double act wouldn’t give them the rock edge they were yearning for.

  There was only one thing for it. They’d have to audition for new members of the band. A tiny ad was taken out in the hallowed pages of the New Musical Express (NME) and the Stage that very same month. Fletch, Rashman, James and Matt were on the hunt for the boys’ perfect match. And there was one young man who was hoping he was just what they were looking for.

  His name was Tom Fletcher, and he was just about as nervous as you could be before an audition, even though he was actually extremely experienced for one of so few years – he’d just turned sixteen that past July. Tom was born in 1985 into a house full of music: his dad Bob played guitar and sang in a covers band, and Tom first picked up a guitar at the age of five. Later, he learned piano, too, and the first track he mastered was a Backstreet Boys song. His mum, Debbie, worked in a video store when Tom was a kid, prompting a lifelong love of movies in her son; she then became a teaching assistant while he was still at school. Both his parents certainly assisted Tom and his younger sister Carrie in anything they wanted to do. And what Tom wanted to do, more than anything, was perform – just like Michael Jackson, who was his absolute idol.

  A stint of sessions at the Saturday-morning performing-arts school Stagecoach saw him spotted by a teacher at a local full-time theatre school, and from there Tom moved on to a place he felt he truly could call home: the Sylvia Young Theatre School. Like the rest of the kids there, he went out regularly to audition for shows, and, when he was ten, a big one came up: Oliver! in the West End. Guess what? He first landed the part of Kipper – and then went on to play the lead role of Oliver. He must have missed James by just a couple of years.

  Sylvia Young certainly gave him the time of his life – and introduced him to a girl he was pretty sure was the love of his life, too. One morning in assembly, when he was thirteen, a pretty new girl with Italian good looks walked into the school hall and lit up his world. Fate was on his side: her surname was Falcone, which meant the teacher directed her to sit next to Mr Fletcher. She walked over and knocked him for six with a megawatt smile.

  ‘Hi, I’m Giovanna, but you can call me Gi.’

  Tom didn’t miss a beat. ‘Hi, I’m Tom, but you can call me T.’

  That was the start of it, but it was nowhere near the end. Going out by the end of that fateful day, they broke up two days later, got back together, and then broke up again when Tom’s time at Sylvia Young’s came to an end in the summer of 2001. Waiting nervously outside the audition room at the Pineapple Dance Studios in Covent Garden that October morning, Tom wondered what Gi would say to him now. She always seemed to be able to inspire him. But, for the moment at least, she wasn’t his to call on. He was going to have to win this one by himself.

  He fidgeted with his audition number, 35, which was pinned to his loose-fitting grey sweatshirt, and tweaked his slickly gelled blond hair. Looking around at the 200-odd musicians who were all clearly there to try their luck, he was somewhat relieved to spot a familiar face from school. It was Matt Willis. He’d been a couple of years ahead of Tom and Tom had always been a bit intimidated by him – Matt was one of the cool kids, a rebel, and cautious Tom was anything but that – but auditions were a great equaliser. They were probably both nervous as hell; it would be good to share the pain.

  ‘Hi, mate, you auditioning?’ Tom asked, in a friendly way.

  Matt shook his head, his hair – gelled into crazy spikes and strobed with one blond streak on the right-hand side – not moving an inch. ‘No, I’m in the band.’

  Tom’s heart sank as the confident Matt strode away, his eyes coolly assessing the auditionees lining the corrid
or, as far away from Tom as he had been in school. Matt wasn’t going to want someone like Tom in his band. I might as well go home, thought Tom. I’m not getting in this.

  It was his mum who persuaded him to stay. And, as the clock hit 10.30 a.m., the tryouts began. Tom walked into the audition room. There were Fletch and Rashman, from the band’s management – they already had management, how cool was that? – and a kid he didn’t know, who introduced himself as James Bourne. Then there was Matt. Tom swallowed hard, and decided to put his insecurities to one side. He slung his black-and-grey guitar strap around his neck and went for it. He’d prepared Garth Brooks’s ‘The Dance’ – a moody, atmospheric country ballad – and also BBMak’s ‘Back Here’. He got the chance to show off his piano skills, too, when another boy needed some accompaniment for his audition: Tom confidently played a Backstreet Boys track as his rival crooned his heart out. By the end of the day, Tom was down to the last four.

  But he had some hot competition in that final four, most notably from six-foot-two guitarist Charlie Simpson. Tom didn’t know it at that stage, but, from the moment Fletch had seen Charlie coming through the door, he was a frontrunner. As James recalled in Busted, ‘Fletch came up to us at the start and said, “I’ve just seen this guy at the door. He’s exactly what we need.”’

  And Charlie certainly fitted the bill. As well as being tall, he had model good looks to die for, with chiselled cheekbones that could cut through glass and a pair of dark bushy eyebrows that framed his beautiful brown eyes perfectly. (He was, in fact, soon to be signed to the top modelling agency Models 1, which represented the supermodels Twiggy and Linda Evangelista, among others.) That day, he was wearing flared blue jeans and a light-blue shirt with a sharp collar, with his audition number, 27, pinned to his chest. He looked hot. And he soon proved he wasn’t just a pretty face. As well as being a talented vocalist, with a rocky drawl of a voice which sounded iconic from the moment he opened his mouth, he could play the guitar like a dream – and the drums as well. As Matt put it in Busted, ‘We thought he’d been sent from heaven.’

  Not quite heaven – but not far off. Charlie was a sixteen-year-old student at the very grand Uppingham School in Rutland, an exclusive boarding school, which was, at that time, for boys only, and which had been founded in 1584. It boasted the kind of plush grounds that would have blown Matt’s mind, had he known about them. The golden stone of the main school house was dotted with historic mullioned windows, and Uppingham also had its own private Victorian-era chapel and 120 acres of land. Fees in 2014 for a single term ran to over £10,000.

  But, blessed though Charlie was with financial security, money didn’t rock his world. Music did. From the age of seven, he’d been a rock-music nut, taking inspiration from his older brothers Will and Edd, who introduced him to bands such as Metallica and Guns N’ Roses. On 7 June 1995 – his tenth birthday – he was given his first electric guitar, and he never looked back. Several bands followed: his first, Natural Disasters, was formed when he was twelve, but he also played in Fubar, Manhole and Spleen. At Uppingham, he met an inspirational music teacher, Alexis French, who urged him to follow his dreams, telling Charlie, ‘You’ve got what it takes. Forget school and go for it.’

  Which was how he found himself down to the last four in the auditions for the final places in Busted; not that he knew at that stage what the band were called. The name was not revealed till a second audition a couple of days later, when Tom, Charlie and the others joined Matt, James and the management at the InterContinental on Park Lane. Matt and James played the boys ‘What I Go to School For’, and the hopefuls took turns singing it with them. Tom felt brave enough to showcase one of his own tracks, ‘I’m in Love with a Whore’. It wasn’t quite McCartney-level brilliance, but it made everyone laugh, and Tom started to think that he might be in with a chance – even more so when he and James got chatting and realised that, as well as sharing a love of Michael Jackson and Back to the Future, and the lead role in Oliver! in the West End, they’d actually worked on some other shows together when they were much, much younger. Surely it must be fate?

  It was. That same night, Tom and Charlie got a phone call from Richard Rashman. They were in the band. Could they come down to the studio the following week?

  As October 2001 drew to a close, the new Busted – James Bourne, Matt Willis, Charlie Simpson and Tom Fletcher – met in a recording studio in London to start work on the rest of their lives.

  Afterwards, the band headed to a fast-food restaurant to celebrate. They were just four teenagers, after all. Tom remembered that day clearly in the ITV documentary Fearne and McBusted: ‘We all went to Burger King afterwards and were like, “This is it, we’re a band, this is the band.” And we swapped phone numbers with each other, and I was like, “These are my bandmates, it’s really cool.” I said goodbye to Charlie on the Tube and I was like, “See you around, bandmate.”’

  Tom headed home and helped his family prepare for a huge Hallowe’en party they were hosting in the next day or so. Tom had told everyone his news, so, when the party started, all the guests were high-fiving him as he excitedly made his way through the crowd. In the midst of all this celebration, the phone rang. It was Richard Rashman.

  Tom took the call upstairs. He recalled the momentous phone conversation in the McFly book Unsaid Things, and how Rashman’s American drawl had hammered home each word: ‘Hello, Tom. So we’ve been talking . . . and we’ve decided to keep the band as a trio. So we’re really sorry, but we’re keeping it as Matt, Charlie and James. You’re not going to be in the band.’

  Later, on the TV music channel The Vault, Matt would try to explain the situation: ‘Tom was never really necessarily in the band; we were trying things out and Tom was around at that period of time. I don’t think he was ever truly . . . I think our management had told him he was in the band but we had never told him he was in the band. It was for like one day, and then he suddenly wasn’t – which is awful.’

  ‘Awful’ didn’t really cover it. Tom sat with the phone cradled against his ear. Rashman was still talking, trying to soften the blow by complimenting Tom’s songwriting and saying how he wanted to stay in touch, but Tom knew it was just lip service. He hung up the phone and sat there in his bedroom, the noise of the Hallowe’en party coming up through the floor.

  This was the worst trick-or-treat ever. Tom sat as still as a statue, as the ghosts of his dreams floated far, far away.

  TWO

  Can’t Break Through

  Click!

  The camera flash fired as the shot was taken, momentarily blinding the three boys, who were crouched in an awkward pose in the bathroom of their hotel room. It was the new Busted’s first ever photoshoot, and it was a DIY job with a disposable camera. They’d figured the lighting was better in the loo, but, when the results came back from Snappy Snaps, even they had to admit that their music was clearly superior to their photography skills.

  Yet the dodgy snaps couldn’t dent their enthusiasm for working together. Matt, in particular, was over the moon about the line-up, saying in Busted, ‘Charlie’s audition was perfect, and I still think to this day [July 2003] that if he hadn’t been at that audition, we wouldn’t have accepted anyone else.’ Eat your heart out, Tom Fletcher.

  The new band were professional from the start, that first photoshoot aside. Their first job was to get a demo together that they could send to record companies, so Matt, Charlie and James visited Steve Robson’s studio to lay down some tracks, recording ‘What I Go to School For’, ‘Psycho Girl’ and another song called ‘She Knows’. Rashman’s plan was to take them round the record companies in January 2002 – but, unexpectedly, they found they had strong interest from a leading A&R man well before then.

  Robson’s manager, Sarah Vaughan, was at that time also an A&R administrator for the record label BMG, headed by Simon Cowell, who was just starting to make headlines of his own as a ‘Mr Nasty’ talent judge on ITV’s Pop Idol, which debuted to the British v
iewing public on 6 October 2001. By the time Sarah put in a request for Cowell to get an early look at the new group – a request Rashman granted – he was entertaining up to 7.5 million viewers every week with his caustic comments and unforgettable feedback. This was a man who was notoriously not easy to impress. The boys had a tough task ahead of them.

  Their fate was out of their hands as Cowell took the unfinished demo to listen to. Their spirits soared when the A&R exec told Rashman to bring the guys in to see him in January. He was seriously interested, and wanted a first look once the band had been together for longer than two weeks.

  The two-week mark since Busted’s formation prompted Rashman to put in another call. He’d been sincere about encouraging Tom Fletcher with his songwriting, and now followed up on his promise to stay in touch. He suggested a meeting, for the very next day, so Tom could play him the songs that Rashman presumed he’d been working on over the past fortnight. Tom, who’d thought Rashman had been kidding when he’d told him during that horrific phone call that it would be good to see him again in a few weeks’ time, utterly panicked.

  How to rustle up two weeks’ worth of songs in twenty-four hours, particularly when the best song you’d written to date was ‘I’m in Love with a Whore’? It wasn’t as if the past two weeks had been filled with song-quality life experiences. Tom had spent most of the time moping around the house feeling sorry for himself, occasionally crying himself to sleep at night. Getting into the band had seen his confidence sky-rocket – only for it all to be taken away. He’d gone from feeling as though he could achieve anything to having absolutely nothing. And nothing was definitely what he had when Rashman called and asked to hear his latest songs. What songs?