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

by Parker, Jennifer

  Dougie, for one, was in seventh heaven. ‘It was genius,’ he remembered in Unsaid Things, ‘like Green Day meets the Beach Boys . . . I had to be in this band.’ Danny got the remaining guys up on their feet and accompanied them on his beloved guitar as they all sang along. And then the hopefuls were dismissed, and Dougie and Harry went home to wait for another word from Rashman.

  Harry heard first. He was down to the last two, and summoned to a last-chance-saloon final audition at the InterContinental hotel in London. Rashman, who thought there was something about this well-to-do, hard-working, confident young man, had sent him McFly’s demo beforehand. Unlike the other candidate, Harry had the upper hand of a week’s practice in Uppingham’s rehearsal room, playing along with the tracks that James, Danny and Tom had written that same summer, and learning the beats inside out and backwards. He was well prepared when he sauntered into the grand lobby of the Park Lane hotel and prepared to give the audition of his life.

  But Martin, his rival, was a superb drummer. For two days they battled it out on the drums, playing about with Tom and Danny in and out of the audition room, and wondering who was going to make it. It was clear that Martin had skills that were far superior to Harry’s; he had, after all, only been playing the drums for a year and a bit. Who were Danny and Tom going to choose? Danny recalled the dilemma in Unsaid Things:

  Confession time: I was Team Martin. I wasn’t really the type to think ahead, and was just looking at it from the point of view of who was the better drummer, whereas Tom, quite rightly, was remembering that we were choosing somebody who we’d hopefully be in a band with for ever . . .

  While they were making up their minds, Dougie was opening his email from Richard Rashman. It was short and to the point. He hadn’t made it. He wasn’t good enough. He wasn’t in the band.

  Little Dougie Poynter – who never fought back against bullies, who kept his head down and his mouth shut and did anything for an easy life – made a decision the following day (after crying his eyes out, of course): he wasn’t going to take this one lying down. He was going to put everything into being a better bass player. He emailed Rashman back and told him that he’d booked himself nightly bass lessons, and weekly singing lessons too. He was determined to do better. Rashman’s reply was quick and typically brief: ‘Keep me updated.’

  And Rashman had an update for Harry. It was Fletch who made the call – with the good news. He’d made it. He was in McFly. Harry was over the moon; he couldn’t wait to tell his parents. The Judds, who had given their son the absolute best in life, and paid the very expensive fees of Uppingham for the past four years, were somewhat dubious about his plan to leave school at the tender age of seventeen to join a rock band. They sat him down that night to talk about it. What about university? What about his future career?

  But Harry was adamant. He had to follow his heart.

  Which was what Charlie Simpson was longing to do too. He’d said earlier in the year that if he was ever feeling ‘self-indulgent’ about his music, wanting to write his kind of tracks – the ones that didn’t necessarily fit Busted’s character as a highly commercial pop-punk band, which owed more to Charlie’s harder rock and indie roots – then he would just keep the songs to himself. But as the months passed, and Busted chalked up yet another top-three hit in August with ‘Sleeping with the Light On’ – the first song James and Matt ever co-wrote – he was beginning to realise that keeping his songs to himself was kind of lonely.

  But he didn’t know what to do about it.

  Little Dougie Poynter was a boy on a very big mission. He’d been wowed by Danny’s awesome guitar skills during his failed McFly audition. Inspired by Danny’s talent, he knuckled down to his lessons and started challenging himself to get really good at the bass.

  It wasn’t easy. So much for the simple option. Most days he felt like Luke Skywalker trying to learn how to use the Force in his beloved Star Wars (Dougie was another one for classic sci-fi films). Still, he persevered, playing along to the Beatles and the Beach Boys – especially the latter, given the surf vibe of the demo he’d heard at the audition.

  After a few weeks of intense hard work, Rashman suggested he meet with Dougie again. Why didn’t he come to the InterContinental next weekend and they could have a chat? Dougie was thrilled. He’d felt like a boy at the last audition; he was determined that, this time, he would prove himself a man.

  Dougie didn’t know it then, but he was about to have to grow up faster than even he had planned.

  The night before the all-important meeting with Rashman, he arrived home to find a weird atmosphere settled around his family house in Corringham. It had oozed into the corners and was thick with tension and upset. His mum was in tears. The extended family were in the kitchen, trying to comfort her. Dougie entered the room in confusion, looking round at the faces of his relatives and trying to work out what was wrong.

  There was a short note on the side. It was from his dad. Dougie scanned it. But the words didn’t make any sense.

  His dad had left them: Dougie, his mum and his little sister Jasmine. He wasn’t coming back. It was a total shock. Unlike Danny, whose parents were still working things out in Bolton, Dougie had never heard his parents fight. There’d never been a row that he could recall. Yet now his dad was gone – and Dougie was suddenly the man of the house.

  His dad was the one who brought the money into their home. With him no longer around, Dougie would have to grow up fast. They couldn’t afford for him to study the bass any longer. All that was gone. He made a bit of money selling the lizards he bred, and now he would have to channel all his income into paying the bills. But Dougie didn’t mind – anything for his mum. He squared his shoulders. He would give up his dream of being in a band. He would look after her.

  He still had the meeting scheduled the next day with Rashman. His mum, who was distraught, wasn’t going to be able to take him. Dougie bravely said he wouldn’t go. But his uncle, listening in, said he would accompany him. So it was his uncle who travelled with him into town on the Tube, and gave him a good-luck hug as they stood outside the imposing white hotel. Dougie, carrying his guitar and his bass with his skinny little arms, hoisted them onto his back and walked, on his own, up to Rashman’s suite.

  Rashman could see how much he had improved, even in that very short time. But Dougie was perhaps one of the least confident people he’d ever met. Rashman – as well as listening to his songs and giving him musical advice – got him to rehearse saying hello and making eye contact. And he played him Charlie and Tom’s Busted audition tapes to inspire him. Dougie, watching the sixteen-year-old Tom belt out BBMak’s ‘Back Here’, wondered if he would ever be as good as that.

  At the end of the meeting, as Rashman had done for Harry before him, Dougie was given the McFly demo to take away. Perhaps he could have a practice, the American suggested, maybe come in for another audition with the band in a week or so’s time.

  And so Dougie found himself walking into the InterContinental one more time, for one last chance. As with Harry and Martin, it was a sudden-death elimination contest. Two bassists. Two days. One. On. One.

  For Tom, Danny and Harry, it wasn’t an easy choice. Danny and Harry shared a room with the monosyllabic Dougie, who wouldn’t even tell them his horoscope sign when they asked (having lied about his age, Dougie wasn’t sure which star sign linked to his fictitious birthday). Was this silent guy really someone they wanted to tour with, write with and play onstage with?

  For Tom in the adjoining room with Dougie’s rival, said rival was perhaps taking it too much the other way. He was so comfortable with Tom that, in the middle of the night, Tom woke up to find the guy masturbating in the bed next to him. In all the times he and James or he and Danny had shared hotel rooms, that had certainly never happened before.

  But Rashman was firmly Team Dougie. He played the three existing band members a video of Dougie performing his Blink-182-style songs with Ataiz, and they were sold. Dougie was i
n the band.

  His rival, in a case of sour grapes, ‘informed’ on Dougie for being underage. But it didn’t matter; in fact, it made them like Dougie more. They’d made their decision: McFly was born.

  Now the hard work really started.

  Hard work was something Busted could tell them all about. Their feet had barely touched the ground since their debut single had launched almost a year before. Life was an insane combination of gigs, photoshoots, recording sessions, writing sessions, travelling to gigs, meet-and-greets with fans, meet-and-greets with producers and fellow songwriters, interviews, more interviews, and more interviews still. They did the rounds of every magazine and every radio and TV show, from Radio 1 to MTV, and everyone wanted to know everything about them, from their favourite foods to their favourite colour. It wasn’t quite why Charlie had joined a band.

  In July, the band had published their first ever official book, Busted. (They weren’t as good at coming up with imaginative titles for their output as they were at writing songs.) The book was filled with facts about the band – and lots and lots of glossy photos for their fans. James and Matt threw themselves into the bespoke shoots with insane enthusiasm. Matt’s famous ‘Busted gurn’ appeared on almost every page, and it was also a perfect opportunity to showcase his new hairstyle – all of them: blond with a black streak, black with a blond streak, pale spikes, flat and fair, roots and no roots; he altered his look almost as frequently as he smoked grass.

  On the opening page, next to a foreword from the boys, James joined him in a Busted gurn and crazy hand gestures, pointing at Matt over the top of his head, while Matt, in the middle of the trio, pointed at both Matt and Charlie with his arms in a straitjacket-style stance. Charlie leaned against the wall, his hands in his pockets, pulling a pose that the agency Models 1 would have paid him good money for. Charlie smouldered; he didn’t gurn.

  And he was smouldering about all these songs he had that were no good to Busted. As he later revealed to Kerrang!, ‘I had all of this creativity pent up inside and I just needed to vent it somewhere, and I was writing a lot of songs but I couldn’t play them.

  ‘Because I didn’t have anyone to play them with.’

  FIVE

  We Are the Young

  With a light bump, the plane touched down on the runway at London Heathrow. James, Tom and Danny stretched in their seats after the long-haul flight. They’d been on holiday together to Florida, USA, visiting Walt Disney World – a much-needed break after all the songwriting they’d completed that summer. They shared a cab back to north London – Tom and Danny, together with Harry and Dougie, now lived ten minutes round the corner from James and Matt in a plush five-bedroom house in Finchley.

  And Dougie and Harry certainly had a warm welcome home for them. For Dougie, the incredible accommodation was like a Magic Kingdom all his very own, especially given the tense home life he’d left behind him in Corringham. While Tom and Danny had been away, he and Harry had dipped into McFly’s £500,000 record deal to kit themselves out with top-of-the-range instruments. Harry, who’d only ever had a second-hand drum kit before, was in heaven. Fully kitted out, Harry and Dougie had been practising the tricky demo tracks day in and day out. On their return, Tom and Danny were impressed both by their new bandmates’ commitment and their increasing musical prowess.

  As summer slipped into autumn, McFly concentrated on getting really tight in the rehearsal room, in preparation for recording their debut album in December, while Busted put the finishing touches to their second album. As ever, though, there was still time for partying. And like Matt Willis before them, it turned out that some of the McFly boys had a taste for weed.

  It was Harry who first raised the subject with Danny, who knew Tom well enough to know that they had to keep it from him. Tom was cleaner than clean when it came to drugs and he would not have dug the side project the boys were planning on lighting up.

  As for fifteen-year-old Dougie, fresh from home and the sudden loss of his dad, he’d have followed his bandmates anywhere, as he recalled in Fearne and McBusted: ‘They played a lot of different roles for me. They were best friends, older brothers and dads all at the same time. They taught me how to do a lot of things for the first time – not dodgy things, [but things] like shaving; and they helped me open my first bank account.’ Dougie was totally up for joining Danny and Harry for a cheeky smoke. It was a ‘leading astray’ that worked both ways though. Dougie said of Harry to Fearne, ‘We were quite bad for each other. Harry doesn’t have a stop button.’

  Nevertheless, once he found out what was going on, Tom did try to press it. When he discovered that the others were smoking dope every night in the house, he first burst into tears – shocked and worried that his dream of a successful band was over before it had begun – and then laid down some ground rules. Yet the others, even though they knew Tom was right, couldn’t stop themselves from bending those rules a little.

  It was in this climate that Tom met up with his old friend James. He was expecting him to reassure him, to give him some advice as to how to sort it out. But James had only one message for Tom, as Fletcher recalled in Unsaid Things.

  ‘You four,’ James had said to him, leaning forward to ram his message home, ‘you’ve got to stick together. You’ve got to be a team.’

  Because at that moment, Busted were anything but.

  Not long before, at a party one evening, Charlie had met a guitarist called Alex Westaway and a drummer named Omar Abidi. They’d hit it off and started jamming that same night, playing a Rage Against the Machine track. A few days later, they went to a gig, then back to Charlie’s place to play together again. To Charlie’s delight, as the night wore on and the sun started coming up, they wrote a new song together, something much more in keeping with the style he loved, called ‘Too Much Punch’.

  Charlie was in his element. This was what he’d been longing for: an outlet for his other songs, collaborators who were into the kind of music he really wanted to play. Soon, he was getting another band together, bringing in a bassist called Dan Haigh to join the original trio. They called their new band Fightstar.

  It wasn’t long before James and Matt realised what was going on; though, as James later revealed on Fearne and McBusted, ‘He never really told me he was doing it.’ Charlie acknowledged their difficulties in Busted on Tour: The Official Book. ‘It’s a sensitive issue which is a bit like stepping on glass.’

  It was Fletch and Rashman who now stepped into the fragile arena to try to sort out the problems that were becoming more and more apparent. Charlie recalled, ‘I had two long chats with Richard and Fletch. What frustrated me wasn’t that I didn’t like Busted, or that I didn’t want to be in Busted. It was the fact that I didn’t feel like what I wanted to do with Fightstar was being taken seriously. I was like, “This is really important for me, and I need to be happy about it to make it work.”’

  With James’s words ringing in his ears that night, Tom made his way back to the McFly house. He didn’t want his band to break up over this. He didn’t want to be the odd one out. He wanted to get them through this so that they could enjoy success just like Busted – albeit without the personal fallings-out. So he called his bandmates together when he got back home and, for the sake of harmony, he joined them for a joint.

  The long chats with Fletch and Rashman had put Charlie’s mind at rest. He would continue with Fightstar – and with Busted, too. And as Hallowe’en passed, marking two years since Tom had been kicked out of Busted, the band geared up to their biggest single release yet, the first from their hotly anticipated second album: ‘Crashed the Wedding’.

  The video was one of the most fun they’d ever done. All three of them dressed up as different people at a wedding, playing all the different characters. James took the opportunity to dress up as a Michael Jackson tribute artist, complete with single sparkly glove, as part of the wedding band that opened the video. Matt, meanwhile, had a ball as the blushing bride, donning a snow-white bridal
gown and veil with his usual energetic enthusiasm. He even ended up kissing himself – as ‘Busted Matt’ – midway through the shoot. And when he skateboarded across the top table on a silver platter, demonstrating some ace boarding skills that he might just have picked up from Dougie, it was certainly a video to remember.

  Not least because of a special guest star that James and Matt had roped into proceedings. Although Charlie was an accomplished drummer, he was in full-on rock guitar (and pretty waitress) mode here. Who on earth could they get to play the drummer in the wedding band? There was only one possible answer. Step forward Mr Harry Judd.

  Yet that wasn’t the only Busted–McFly collaboration for the ‘Crashed the Wedding’ release. The B-side of the single was pretty special, too. It was a ‘Busted featuring McFly’ version of the Foundations’ 1968 hit ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ – the perfect way to introduce McFly’s new sixties-style sound, albeit with a very Busted twist. It was also the very first official recording of Tom, Harry, Danny, Dougie, Matt and James all playing together.

  The energy zings off the record from the very first syncopated bass line played by Matt and Dougie, all the way through to the very last thrum of the guitars at the end. It showcased all the thrashing chords that fans had come to expect of Busted, but complete with the soaring harmonies that McFly would soon be wowing the world with. Most of all, it was fun. High-energy. Fast-paced. Cheeky and enjoyable from start to finish, whether the boys were pursing their lips to sing – in near-comedy high-pitched voices – the ‘yooooou’ of the backing vocals, ‘hey-hey-hey’-ing in unison, or relishing the classic ‘call-and-return’ chorus, belting it out to each other across the studio. It’s a song you can’t help but shake your shoulders to; and the fans clearly agreed. The single of ‘Crashed the Wedding’, complete with historic B-side, shot straight to the top of the charts, giving the Bourne–Fletcher writing partnership their very first number one. For Tom, who hadn’t released a single of his own at that stage, it was an incredible landmark, made all the sweeter by the fact that he and Giovanna reunited around that time – and this time, he hoped it would be for good.