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

  Matt and Charlie were usually out partying, but one evening Charlie joined the duo and they came up with a tune called ‘That Thing You Do’. It was different from most of Busted’s other songs. While the guitars were still there, and the cheeky lyrics, it had a summery lightness to it that was new. It was more of a sixties-style surf record than a Blink-182-inspired track. And it was a hugely important development, as Tom remembered in Unsaid Things: ‘For the first time, we’d come up with something that was fresh and original that would be more suited to whatever my project was going to be . . . That song was the spark for everything that was to come.’

  With the new direction nailed, Tom and James became more productive than ever. Jotted down in Tom’s black book, ‘5 Colours in Her Hair’ followed ‘Air Hostess’; there followed yet another song – and another. In less than two weeks, they had a raft of tunes that they were proud of – but still no name for the new group.

  Rashman tried to help them out, suggesting Skate Park as a name; perhaps inspired by Busted’s ‘You Said No’ video, which saw stunts on a half-pipe interspersed with footage of the band playing live (and Matt crowd surfing). Tom and Danny weren’t keen, but they weren’t having any luck themselves in coming up with something better.

  On Wednesday, 21 May, the Busted tour bus pulled into Sheffield to rig their gig at City Hall. Tom – yawning from yet another late night writing with James – sat in the empty theatre seats as the band ran through their sound check. Idly, his brain started turning over the problem of the band name. It couldn’t be anything too fake. It couldn’t be anything too cheesy. It had somehow to be authentic, but he was stumped if he had a clue what.

  Onstage, Busted moved seamlessly from one track into the next, Matt’s bass guitar picking out the opening notes of ‘Year 3000’. Tom smiled: he loved this song; and his and James’s shared love of eighties movies and Back to the Future was a big part of their friendship. Only James could get ‘flux capacitor’ into the lyric of a song. James – and maybe Marty McFly . . .

  Though they weren’t yet testing the pyrotechnics onstage, a veritable firework went off in Tom’s head. McFly. McFly! It was perfect. Cool, catchy and totally genuine. He raced backstage – the sound check over – and grabbed James to tell him the good news, as he remembered in Unsaid Things:

  James stared at me. His eyes widened. And then he went absolutely nuts. ‘That’s so cool, that’s so cool! Quick, tell Danny . . .’

  I told Danny the good news. ‘McFly!’

  Silence.

  Mr Jones was going to need some convincing.

  FOUR

  Room on the 3rd Floor

  If there was one thing Tom and James were passionate about, it was Back to the Future (music aside). Danny’s unfamiliarity with the classic Robert Zemeckis movie was like a red rag to two very enraged bulls. They had to make Danny see what a totally awesome, supercool idea it was to name the new band McFly. As soon as Busted were back from the tour, Danny was in for a night to remember.

  The Busted tour finished on 3 June 2003. Not long after, Danny found himself knocking on the door of James’s swish London flat at Princess Park Manor and being escorted into the sitting room like a guest of honour. The black-leather, bachelor-pad La-Z-Boys were already set up in front of the enormous TV, with Danny getting the prime position with a perfect view of the set. Tom and James presented him with multilayered sandwiches and the best milkshakes known to man (they were true experts after their excessive consumption via hotel room service on the Busted tour). Danny, milkshake in one hand and a good dose of scepticism about the proposed band name in the other, lay back in the chair and prepared to be impressed.

  Tom and James kept casting sly looks at him as he watched the film, exchanging meaningful glances with each other if he laughed at the funny bits or exclaimed at the cool ones. A car chase! Skateboarding to ‘The Power of Love’! The flux capacitor! A soaring theme tune that totally kicked ass! It was the best film ever.

  They’d been watching for a little over an hour. On the screen, Marty McFly had got himself in deep trouble by standing up to bully Biff Tannen at the diner. He’d legged it, nicked a kid’s toy to make a makeshift skateboard, and was currently being chased by Biff and his gang in Biff’s very smart black Ford motor car. Marty was winning, sending sparks flying from the tail of his board, when Biff’s convertible suddenly had him cornered and was ramming him straight towards a manure truck. McFly, spotting the danger, courageously leaped on to the bonnet of the car, clambered over the cronies and jumped back onto his skateboard, just in time to see Biff and the convertible crash into the truck and get covered in horse manure.

  It was an exciting scene by anyone’s standards – but that wasn’t what had snagged Danny’s attention. Sitting up straight in his La-Z-Boy, his mind whirling, barely able to believe his eyes, he ordered Tom and James to rewind the movie.

  They did. They paused it on his direction. Writ large on the screen, in big white capital letters painted onto the side of the wooden manure truck, was a name.

  D. Jones.

  There could be only two reactions to a coincidence like that. The first was to exclaim ‘Great Scott!’ like Doc Emmett Brown. The second was to agree 100 per cent that the new band’s name had to be McFly.

  From there, they were on a roll. Amid great excitement, James and Tom got out their guitars and enthusiastically played Danny ‘That Thing You Do’. Like them, he completely dug the vibe of the track, and the three of them were soon tinkering about with a new song; the first they’d all written together from scratch as a threesome.

  As always, they cast about for their theme by chatting about their own lives. For Tom, his inspiration, as it so often was, was fixated on Giovanna, his ex-girlfriend from school. Unlike James and his childhood sweetheart Kara Tointon, who were back together despite their earlier split, Tom and Giovanna were still separated – and Gi was even dating someone new: an older guy who worked in the police force. Needless to say, Tom hated his guts.

  As only good friends can, James and Danny immediately saw the humour of Tom’s predicament, and teased him mercilessly if good-naturedly. But the scenario wasn’t just the source of a good joke at a friend’s expense: it was also the source of a new song. ‘Obviously’ was the result, and it sparked a summer of stunning songs.

  Tom and Danny would split their time between Tom’s parents’ house, Room 363 at the InterContinental (inspiration for their tune ‘Room on the Third Floor’), and James’s place at Princess Park Manor. While the three of them were writing at the Busted house one week, they came up with a plethora of songs that they thought could do something: ‘Surfer Babe’, ‘She Left Me’, ‘Broccoli’, ‘That Girl’ and ‘Down by the Lake’. McFly’s debut album was coming together at super-speed.

  Yet James was also concentrating on the other album in his life: Busted’s second, which would be called A Present for Everyone. He and Tom had produced several songs for the record written just by the two of them – ‘Crashed the Wedding’, ‘Who’s David?’, ‘Over Now’ and ‘Loner in Love’ – but Busted’s other members were also accomplished songwriters and they had a lot of creativity to contribute too, both with and without Tom. Charlie and Matt both wrote their own songs for the album, Matt collaborating with Robbie Williams’s famous co-writer Guy Chambers and producer Steve Power to produce the rocky tracks ‘Fake’ and ‘Better Than This’.

  A trip to LA to record with the hit producers the Matrix, who had just produced Avril Lavigne’s album Let Go – the biggest pop/rock debut of 2002 – was also on the cards. It resulted in some dramatic tracks co-written by the band and the producers, including ‘3am’ and ‘She Wants to Be Me’. The latter was a clever song riffing on the boys’ assessment of the attentions of some of their ‘fans’. Much as Matt might have been enjoying their – ahem – affection, even he could see that, sometimes, the fame was what the girls were after more than the man.

  For Matt, he knew what he wanted in a woman, but as yet
he hadn’t found it. Writing in Busted, he said, ‘I like girls who are intelligent, with their head screwed on, who can tell me when I’m letting myself down but do so without nagging me.’ For now, the search continued – and he certainly had plenty of opportunity to try out candidates for the role of girlfriend.

  As for Tom and Danny, they were trying out candidates for a bassist and a drummer to join their crew. That summer writing with James, they laid down some early demos of ‘Obviously’ and ‘Surfer Babe’, and started advertising for bandmates in the Stage and other places. But barely anyone turned up to their low-key auditions – certainly no one suitable. Their hearts sank. But their songs were about to get them a golden ticket to the big time.

  Fletch and Rashman had been overseeing the evolution of the new band and, with the demo now in the bag, thought the time was right to start showcasing Tom and Danny to record labels. The two of them were soon scheduled to meet the biggest record execs in the country to play acoustic sets of their songs. They were both just seventeen, and they’d been writing songs together for perhaps nine months at most. They were scared, to say the least. James and Matt gave them loads of encouragement, remembering how they’d felt when it had been them touring the record companies, eighteen months before.

  The pep talk paid off: when Tom and Danny were offered a record deal with the same label as Busted, Island Records, the four of them became label-mates as well as very good friends. Yet, with a record deal now in place, Tom and Danny really needed to find some fellow musicians to make up the band – and fast.

  Enter Harry Judd. With a record label and Busted’s management now attached to the auditions, they were suddenly a much hotter bet than Tom and Danny’s more amateur attempts to find a crew. And word soon got around about the tryouts, especially at Uppingham, Charlie Simpson’s alma mater and Harry’s current school, where, as the summer term drew to a close, the boys were keen to follow in their former classmate’s footsteps. Harry was a school year younger than Charlie and didn’t know him well, but the school was a small one, with fewer than 800 pupils in the entire student body, and he’d heard gossip on the Uppingham grapevine that other boys were planning to attend. Why not him too?

  It was an ambitious move. He’d been playing the drums for only eighteen months, but Harry was an ambitious boy – and a dedicated and talented one, too. When he put his mind to something, he really put his mind to it, and usually, given a bit of time, he would excel.

  He’d come to music in a roundabout way. Childhood lessons on the guitar and trumpet had left him unfulfilled. It was his natural outgoing friendly nature that led to a change. His mates – like most of the school – were in a band, a three-piece called Boy Genius, and, when their drummer left, Harry had the wizard idea that he could take his place and have fun jamming with his friends. He got a second-hand drum kit and a laid-back teacher to tutor him in the rhythms of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage Against the Machine, and he was away. He used to nick the key to the rehearsal room so he could practise at any given moment, and, from that point on, his drumsticks were never far from his hands.

  He had them tucked into his back pocket as he waited in line outside the Covent Garden studio for his turn to audition. He didn’t necessarily know it, but Tom and Danny knew he was coming. The Uppingham old boys had put a word in via Charlie, so they knew exactly who he was as he strode confidently into the audition room, trying to give the impression that he was clearly the rock god they’d been looking for, while inside feeling just as scared as everyone else . . .

  There was another auditionee there that morning who was definitely scared. Petrified, in fact. He’d already thrown up once with nerves, and the acid at the back of his throat was threatening to make it an encore. His name was Dougie Poynter.

  Dougie was an anxious child. Nervous, jumpy. One of the most unpopular kids in the school. In the small town of Corringham, Essex, where he came from, people weren’t big on seeing beyond first impressions to the lovely person inside. Dougie was a skater boy, into boarding and rock music; he bred lizards as a hobby; he was shy and awkward; and he was diminutive for his age. He was a walking target.

  The one place he felt at home was behind his guitar. Discovering Blink-182, as for James and Matt and Tom before him, had been an epiphany. Like Danny, he’d started to learn guitar on a cheap instrument from Argos, when he was thirteen; he then switched to the bass when a mate, who also played guitar, convinced him that mastering the bass would be simpler because it had only four strings. Plus, they could then form a band. Ataiz was the result, and they’d not been going long when Dougie heard about the McFly audition at Gable Hall Performing Arts School, where he spent most of his time mooching through the corridors, trying not to get spat on or beaten up.

  There was only one problem: the ad said it was looking for musicians over the age of sixteen. Dougie was born in November 1987, so, in that summer of 2003, he was still only fifteen. He decided not to let it bother him and asked his mum to take him along to the audition. He knew he’d need her cheerleading him on to get him through the door – and he was right. Standing there in his skater clothes, staring bug-eyed at the hundreds of other boys, who all seemed so much more confident than he was, he felt like one of his lizards: his blood ran cold.

  In fact, the skater clothes made him stand out straightaway to Tom and Danny, Fletch and Rashman. Dougie may have been unpopular at school, but the difference that got him noticed there got him noticed here for all the right reasons. With his spiked fair hair and his casual look, he was just what they wanted. They had their eye on him, and on Harry – who had bleached his usually brown hair blond and was wearing a band T-shirt – from the start.

  But looks weren’t everything: the musicianship was key. Dougie was up first. He’d been planning on playing something from his first love, Blink-182, but Fletch floored him by asking for some pop. Dougie’s mind cast about frantically for something he could play, and then he gratefully recalled that he’d just about managed to pick up ‘Billie Jean’ when he was messing about in his bedroom a couple of days earlier. That would have to do. He took a deep breath, and started playing.

  Sitting across from him in the audition room, Tom sat up just that little bit straighter. Michael Jackson? Oh, yes please: this guy rocked! He looked the part, he was playing Tom’s favourite idol. Surely he was in the band?

  The intro to ‘Billie Jean’ is quite a famous one: those first eight notes repeated, and then the thumping bass line that gets dance floors pumping the world over. Dougie played the first eight notes. OK, this is good, this is going well. He played them again. And then he hit a brick wall. It was only once he’d started playing the song that he realised he didn’t know the rest. His attention had wandered that other day in his bedroom, and he’d never, well, finished it. He’d never got to the end, or learned how to play the whole song. And now he was stuck, standing like a lemon in front of a panel of highly important people, playing the same eight notes over and over. And over again.

  One more time.

  And another.

  Once more with feeling.

  And, er, one more time again.

  It was Tom who brought his ordeal to an end. ‘OK, dude, that’s enough.’ Dougie’s heart sank. He tried to win them round by playing them a song he’d written, ‘The Last Girl Story’, but, no matter how good a songwriter he was, the ‘Billie Jean’ audition had been utterly criminal, not at all smooth. Dougie recalled how awful he felt in Unsaid Things: ‘I was in that room for about half an hour with just one thought in my head: I’d totally blown it. When I get nervous my whole body feels uncomfortable. I just want to unzip myself and jump out. I had that feeling then.’

  Harry, meanwhile, was – with his usual panache – impressing the panel, demonstrating his drum solos and even trying to sing a bit. Together with Danny, he sat in front of the camera and warbled his way through Busted’s ‘Year 3000’. When the cull of the first auditions came, Harry and Dougie were asked to remain, much
to Dougie’s surprise. But Tom and Danny had liked him. Perhaps he was just paralysed with nerves, they’d reasoned. He was given the benefit of the doubt – but he was going to have to up his game.

  It was weird for Tom and Danny, being on the other side of the audition. They could feel the hopefuls’ eyes on them whenever they popped their heads out to call the next person in, or even just walked through the corridor to go and get a drink. To the auditionees, these were the guys who were already in the band. They were cool. They had it. ‘They’ hadn’t known exactly how to dress that morning – Danny was in his usual ripped dark jeans and a casual T-shirt, while Tom wore a striped shirt and loose trousers – but they could have worn a spacesuit and the candidates would have thought them the epitome of funk. If Tom had had time to think of it, he might have cast his mind back to his Busted audition, when Matt was already in the band and he’d looked up to him with such wide eyes; but, with their tight schedule, there wasn’t a second to think of anything but the difficult task at hand.

  In the afternoon, Tom and Danny were on display once again, when Fletch asked for their demo to be played to the whittled-down aspirants. The speakers blared with the strains of ‘Surfer Babe’ and ‘Obviously’. Tom and Danny scanned the faces of the contenders as they sat in the audition room. Did they like it? Who was digging it? What did they really think? It was as though their hearts, rather than their songs, were being squeezed out through the amps.