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

  Then came Manchester. The boy stood out because he had a guitar, blatantly ignoring the instructions in the ad. He also had shaggy dark hair, a thick Northern accent – and heaps of star quality.

  ‘All right,’ he said, as he stood across from Fletch and Rashman in the crowded audition room, with Tom peering out at him from behind his camcorder in the corner. ‘My name’s Danny Jones.’

  Danny Jones was from Bolton and proud of it. On the cusp of his seventeenth birthday, he was a huge fan of Oasis and his absolute idol Bruce Springsteen, of Ocean Colour Scene and Pink Floyd. The Backstreet Boys certainly weren’t a part of his musical vocabulary.

  He’d first picked up a guitar as a very, very small toddler; he’d had a plastic toy model that he’d cherished as most other kids would a cuddly bear. Aged six, he got his first ‘proper’ guitar from Argos and started formal lessons – he would eventually go on to pass his Grade 6 with honours – before upgrading to an Encore guitar when he was twelve. It was two years later, when he was fourteen, that he gave a performance that changed his life. There was a talent contest happening at a local working men’s club, and his mum, Kath, encouraged him to enter, even though he wasn’t sure he could sing. Aside from a one-off performance in a school production of Bugsy Malone, albeit as the lead, he’d tended to concentrate on his instrumental skills, playing lead guitar in other school shows such as Grease and Jesus Christ Superstar.

  With his mum’s encouragement ringing in his ears, he found himself taking to the stage. He belted out the Gallagher brothers’ ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’, just as Matt Willis had done before him in another pub down South, a year or so earlier. Danny won second place. It wasn’t his greatest performance, but it gave him a bit of self-belief; and that was worth its weight in gold. He went on to form his own band, Jinx, and they were winning talent contests before too long.

  It was good to have something going right, because Danny’s home life wouldn’t be taking first prize in any kind of contest. For as long as he could remember, his mum and dad hadn’t seen eye to eye. They were different people, with different interests, and his dad did a tough job: he was a prison warder, which made him a tough man. That could sometimes come in useful on the rough streets of Bolton, especially when Danny was being chased by kids from a rival postcode area, but it didn’t make him an easy man to live with. Some of Danny’s earliest memories were of his parents arguing as he lay awake in bed, listening to them fight. He and his sister Vicky would lose themselves in music as they grew up; she was an accomplished singer and he would often accompany her on his guitar as she sang in the pubs and clubs around Bolton.

  It was Vicky who had spotted the ad for the new band. She’d printed it out for Danny to have a look at, but their printer – unreliable at the best of times – had somehow missed out the word ‘not’ in the advert. So, when Danny rocked up to the audition, guitar firmly in hand and a Stereophonics song lined up as his show-stopping piece, he was fully expecting the management to be looking for rock singers who could play the guitar like Springsteen. As he surveyed the acrobatic warm-ups of his fellow auditionees, he felt that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there was no flying time machine to get him out of this one.

  His mum urged him to go ahead with the audition anyway. It was, after all, a major management company and a major record label pulling the strings of this particular puppet boy band. ‘You don’t know what you might get out of it.’

  So Danny did his thing, performing the Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ in the end – the closest he could come to pop at such short notice. He was talented enough to get through to the next round, but, to be taken seriously at this boy-band audition, he was going to have to sing a straight-up pop song. The only trouble was, he didn’t know any.

  That was where Tom came in: at the panel’s request, he agreed to teach Danny a Backstreet Boys song for his next audition for the new group. He and Tom took their guitars and holed up in the corridor outside the main audition room, laboriously picking out each note of ‘I Want It That Way’ until Danny had it down pat. His sister Vicky helped, and before long Danny had nailed it. As he recalled in Unsaid Things, ‘To my surprise, I really liked it. I’d never heard straight, clean pop chords like that, and I found them so satisfying to play.’

  As for the panel, they were finding Danny himself mighty satisfying, too. He was down to the last fifteen for V, but Rashman, Fletch and Tom were all wondering if he might be better suited to Tom’s vision for his band. Yet that would mean asking Danny to give up a place in a record-label-backed, management-guaranteed band for a chance on making it with an unsigned teenager who wrote songs in his bedroom. Would he really go for it?

  Rashman got to know him a little better to find out. Following that first V audition, he invited Danny to London. They met in the business lounge of the InterContinental and Danny sipped a Diet Coke as Rashman grilled him on his hopes and ambitions for the future, and chatted more to him about his songwriting; Danny had showcased a couple of original tracks in Manchester, and Rashman had been impressed. Like most sixteen-year-olds, Danny didn’t really have much of an idea as to what he really wanted to do, but one thing was certain: he wanted to play guitar. The one thing V probably wouldn’t allow him to do.

  On 27 October 2002, not long after the first V auditions, Tom and Rashman were in Manchester again, this time to support Busted, who were performing their slot on the Smash Hits tour at the Manchester Arena. Casually, Tom invited Danny to come along. The gig pretty much blew Danny’s mind: great songs, great stagecraft, great guitar riffs, great girls hollering their heads off in the audience . . . This was what he wanted to be doing. When Tom told him he was mates with Busted, he was seriously awestruck.

  But before too long he was mixing with them, too. A few weeks later, the final-stage auditions for V took place in London, with Tom filming them as usual, and James was hanging out with his new writing pal. Tom and Danny ended up sharing a hotel room, and, when James kipped over too, the writing duo topped and tailed in the same bed. Not that there was much sleeping going on. How could there be, when there was so much music to be played?

  Tom and James were bowled over by Danny’s guitar-playing abilities. His Grade 6 technique, backed up by a natural showmanship and a lifelong love of rock, had resulted in some seriously jaw-dropping skills. And the respect went both ways, as Danny recalled in Unsaid Things:

  We would stay up all night in that hotel, listening to music, messing around, playing guitar . . . As we played together, there was an instant connection. Tom and I both seemed to know what the other person was going to do. And then, out of the blue, he’d start singing harmonies to my vocal lines. Harmonies? I was amazed – I didn’t know how he did it, but I knew we had something special.

  They could all sense it: Tom, Danny – and James. The connection wasn’t just musical: the three of them enjoyed a laugh together, too. It was so obvious that, when the time came for Danny to make a call about his future, he didn’t hesitate. He turned down the opportunity to be in V, and returned to Bolton with a plan to somehow work with Tom. He headed back up North without a record deal and without any firm plans in place – but, this time, as he later wrote in a song, he was ‘not alone’. He’d found his musical mates.

  From that moment on, they would often send tapes back and forth of songs they were writing and ideas they’d had, and Danny would come and stay with Tom at his parents’ house as often as he could. It was like Matt and James all over again, jamming in James’s parents’ house in Southend – except that, on this occasion, one member of the triumvirate just happened to be in what was fast becoming Britain’s biggest band.

  Just as the record label had said, the Busted album had been a slow burner, and, as Christmas passed and 2002 turned into 2003, it caught fire in a raging golden blaze. Indeed, a gold record, marking a staggering 100,000 copies sold, was presented to James, Matt and Charlie on Top of the Pops Saturday on 20 January 2003, the same day they rel
eased their second single: James’s much-loved ‘Year 3000’.

  The choice for the follow-up hadn’t been as straightforward as selecting ‘What I Go to School For’. Charlie’s vote was for something like ‘Without You’, a moody, dark ballad that showcased their more serious side, while James was always keen on the time-travel track – not least because he wanted to see whether the video might be able to emulate the classic Back to the Future. He recalled writing the track in Busted; it was one of the songs from their Southend days:

  We’d just been messing around with lyrics – singing a line, then singing another line, and somehow we got on to time travel. Some songwriters I really admire will be writing songs to a really strict brief from their record labels, or their management, but we were just trying everything out. All of our really good songs have come really quickly – almost out of nowhere.

  ‘Year 3000’ definitely wasn’t a record-company-brief kind of song. So authentically James Bourne it could be his personal theme tune, the imaginative track not only name-checks his idol Michael Jackson and elements from his favourite film, Back to the Future, but also references naked three-breasted women (another classic-cinema nod, this time to 1990’s Mars-based movie Total Recall). Nude triple-breasted ladies were really not what a commercially minded management targeting the teen market would have put on the wishlist!

  Yet, for the innovative and wild-child Busted, it was the perfect second single – and the fans clearly agreed. Boosted by a cartoon-tastic video, which featured James’s little brother Chris as the infamous neighbour Peter, the record sold in its thousands. It went straight in at number two and was still in the top ten three months later.

  If you hadn’t heard of them before, you would now: ‘Year 3000’ was undoubtedly the song that put Busted on the map. And, with their album being described by Q as ‘inspired’ and by the NME as ‘the best album about being a teenager in recent memory’, they were on top of the world. The album’s artwork – the three lads standing in front of an iconic height chart, as if they were in a police line-up; the entire image stamped with the red Busted logo – was dominating the shelves of record shops across the globe. For James, who had recently been reunited with his school sweetheart Kara, life couldn’t get much better.

  Those around them were keen to counsel the young stars on the hurricane of fame that was about to sweep them away. In Busted, Matt recalled that Uri Geller – Michael Jackson’s good friend, much to James’s excitement – had taken them aside when they’d appeared on The Saturday Show to impart some pearls of wisdom. Matt said, ‘Uri’s advice was basically, “Have a brilliant time, make the very most of everything, but don’t get into drugs. You get into the industry and it’s paved with drugs. Stay your own man.”’

  It was good advice, but for Matt, who was by now merrily enjoying a daily spliff in the way most people have a morning coffee, it came a little too late. Cannabis aside, however, he wasn’t a druggie in the traditional sense. Alcohol was his drug of choice, and, with so much to celebrate, every night was party night in Mattie Jay’s world.

  It was a world that James didn’t live in, as Tom recalled in Unsaid Things,

  James was a lot like me: a bit geeky, he didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke. His bandmates Charlie and Matt weren’t quite so clean-living. With a Busted theatre tour coming up, James knew his bandmates would be partying harder than him, so he asked me if I’d like to come on tour with them so that he and I could start writing Busted’s second album together.

  The tour wasn’t due to start until May, but Tom said yes straightaway. Even before the tour began, he and James were coming up with new songs. As a private joke between the two of them, they compared the art of hit-making to fishing, and they soon found that the tunes were flowing with the boys reeling in hit after hit. On Tuesday, 4 March 2003, Tom headed round to James’s flat as usual. The apartment was quiet: Charlie had moved out the month before, seeking a bit more independence.

  It was Shrove Tuesday, so at first James and Tom joked that they should pen a ditty in honour of Pancake Day; as Tom later recalled on Fearne and McBusted. But that idea didn’t get much further than a song title at the top of the page in Tom’s notebook, which was filled with doodles as well as lyrics. They turned their attention to another track instead, and that proved to be much more productive. By the end of the night, they’d completed a crazy little tune that they called ‘Crashed the Wedding’. It featured, as was beginning to be a theme, a reference to a movie: 1993’s Wayne’s World 2, as the hapless hero of the song crashes a wedding being held on the film’s Gordon Street.

  Matt loved the track as soon as he heard it, especially the line that riffed on a vicar’s opening speech to a wedding congregation: ‘We are gathered here today . . .’; he dubbed it ‘genius’ to Culturewatch. The song also linked perfectly to a track on Busted’s debut album, with the hero dubbing himself a ‘Loser Kid’, the name of the closing song on Busted. The budding songwriting team of Bourne–Fletcher thought they had a hit on their hands, but only time would tell.

  Hits were what Busted were racking up at an astonishing rate. Just under a month before the theatre tour kicked off, on 21 April, they released their third single from their debut album, which was the song they’d written about Charlie’s knockback from Daisy Bell, ‘Crash and Burn’. Due to the Columbia space shuttle disaster, which had occurred on 1 February, the track was renamed ‘You Said No’ in sensitivity to the families of the seven deceased astronauts.

  Matt, James and Charlie were a little apprehensive about where the song might place, because by this point, with the album having gone gold, lots of fans already had the song in their collections. Would it sell?

  They needn’t have worried. As the chart rundown began on Sunday, 27 April, the boys kept waiting and waiting to hear their track. Radio 1 presenter Wes Butters kept them hanging on till the bitter end. Just before 7 p.m., ‘You Said No’ was played to the nation as the UK’s number one. Busted were at the top of the charts for the very first time. And they couldn’t be happier.

  ‘Slap my bum, we’re number one!’ Matt cried with typical exuberance, before donning some ‘celebratory eyeliner’ for their performances on CD:UK and Top of the Pops.

  And there was a lot to celebrate: Busted were the first ever band whose first three singles had charted in such a steady yet meteoric rise to chart domination, hitting numbers three, two and one respectively. Their achievement was officially entered into Guinness World Records.

  After just shy of eighteen months together, Busted had made music history. And they were determined that their first headlining tour would be one to remember, too. By now, the lads had put in a lot of time on the road, whether on the Smash Hits UK tour or travelling to meet their international fans in Germany, Sweden and other countries. They’d become accustomed to the long hours – and had found their own ways of filling the time and entertaining themselves. For Matt, that usually involved some kind of trouble, as he revealed in Busted: ‘We’ve actually managed to get ourselves banned from one chain of hotels. We accidentally got really, really pissed one night and ran riot through the entire place, and as a consequence we’re not allowed to stay there again.’ James remembered seeing Matt hanging out of the window of his fifth-floor bedroom, balanced precariously on the window ledge, on one particular night, while Matt’s friend Lee Ryan would sometimes join them for wild nights out both home and abroad. James recalled in Busted, ‘One time we met up with him in Munich and got so hammered on B52s, White Russian cocktails, tequilas, beers . . . We’ve got video footage of one point in the evening and we just look as if we’re about to die.’ That night ended with Charlie vomiting all over his hotel room (including inside Matt’s suitcase); Matt losing his shoes and socks – meaning he had to travel to the airport the next day with bare feet; and all three of them missing their flight home, at a cost of some eight grand to the record label. But, despite their high and somewhat alcoholic spirits, they were all professionals at heart a
nd the partying never got too out of hand; as HR magazine put it, their manager’s role had ‘yet to include explaining to a hotel manager why there’s a television-shaped hole in the hotel room’s window and a Rolls-Royce in the swimming pool’.

  What the band were really psyched about was performing live. All three of them adored that incomparable buzz of standing onstage and singing your heart out; it was why they were in a band in the first place. The sold-out tour ahead of them, which was due to take in sizeable venues such as the Hammersmith Apollo in London, would see whole theatres of fans singing their songs back to them. This was the big time, and for Matt the theatre tour was ‘the best thing that had ever happened in my life’, as he later told The Vault.

  And Tom Fletcher, with Danny just a phone call away, was with them all the way. As May drew to a close, Tom and the three Busted boys packed their bags, zipped their guitars into their carry-cases, and stepped on board the tour bus for the ride of their young lives.

  The tour opened on 17 May in Newport and lasted for the next month, taking in Nottingham, Newcastle, Sheffield, Glasgow, Manchester and other towns and cities. The reaction from fans was indescribable – and not just to Matt’s bleached blond hair. As Tom put it in Unsaid Things, ‘There was mayhem everywhere they went.’

  While Matt enjoyed the party lifestyle, and other attractions (by his own admission to the Mirror, he ‘made the most of being a young man in a band when it came to women’), James and Tom embraced not the girls, but the opportunity to write. They were inspired by the mad world around them and their blossoming partnership. Night after night, they would write song after song. And, with Tom and Danny having decided they were going to form a band, they weren’t just writing for Busted any more. Tom had ambitions to play his own music in his own band. So he and James channelled their creativity not only into tunes for Busted’s much-anticipated second album, which the label wanted to release later that year, but also songs for Tom and Danny’s new, and as yet nameless, group. Each night after the show, Tom and James would retire to James’s hotel room, order nothing more rock ’n’ roll than milkshakes to see them through the night, and then write until the sun came up.