CD:UK often dominated my Saturday mornings when I was little. By the time I was a little boy into pop, the cultural weight that once defined Top of the Pops had systematically subsided into bad scheduling and terrible format shake-ups. For me, CD:UK – on days when I wasn’t watching The Saturday Show on the other side – was much more exciting, one of the natural homes for many of my favourite artists, including my favourite band of all, Busted. When you’re a 5-6 year old in 2002-04 (indeed, their first single was released in the ten days between my first day of school and my fifth birthday), the slightly – but never considerably – decaff pop punk offered up by Busted is the greatest thing in the world. I’d happily have lapped anything up by them, or in some way linked to them.
So in early 2004, after Busted performed “Who’s David” – that most misguided number one from their second album, A Present to Everyone, the first disc I ever owned on release date – on CD:UK, it was exciting to see James Bourne very unsubtly announce to camera, “You might not be ready for this yet, but your kids are gonna love it”, before it turned on their mates, a newly-formed bunch naming themselves McFly, performing what in would in a month’s time become their first single, “5 Colours in Her Hair”. At this point, the only McFly record in existence was their guest spot on Busted’s slapdash go at “Mrs Robinson”, found on the “Wedding” single. But Bourne was right, the kids – this kid – did love it.
In hindsight, it feels like a premature changing of the guard. A year later, Busted would be preparing to implode and McFly would only be in the chrysalis of a lengthy career. But what stood out then and now is how McFly were a very different proposition to their mentors. Busted looked to Blink-182 and The Offspring and brought scrappy, awkward teenage boyhood to Smash Hits gossip pages. McFly, at this point, had nothing remotely, vestigially ‘punk’ about them. Rather, what “5 Colours in Her Hair” offered us pop that was at once cleaner (because younger) but somehow more inclusive, looking to the flexible templates of bubblegum surf for inspiration.
And “5 Colours In Her Hair” was to six-year-old me what “(Theme from) The Monkees” may have been to my parents’ generation, a starting pistol as absolute and undeniable as anything. The start of pop, as it might well have been for many impressionable youngsters. Riding a guitar riff clearly indebted to what these upstarts might have recognised as ‘surf’ in origin, namely Electric Six’s “Gay Bar” (both songs also feature similar breakdown-and-startups), it possesses a real ungainly beauty, because in just three minutes it is immaculately structured for maximum effect. Ask anyone to name its most memorable part and you’ll get an array of different answers – the riff, ‘do do dodo do DO’, ‘nayayayaame’, the tick-off of the chorus, the stop-start verses – all indisputable and unforgettable. And sealing the deal is Tom Fletcher and Danny Jones’ voices. Put bluntly, they couldn’t sing, but they get by on their everyboy eagerness and sincerity. At a time when even Sam & Mark were considered a bankable pop pursuit, the instant success of “5 Colours” drew a clear line in the sand, as far as I was concerned. I had a new favourite band.
The enusing album, Room on the 3rd Floor, is perhaps predictably never quite as inspired, but it did everything that was required of it, thirteen further songs that cradled humid 1960s pop in a chirpy, C86/La’s scaffold. “Hypnotised” is Postman Pat skiffle via the Coral’s “Pass It On” (itself a variation on the Beatles’ “You Like Me Too Much”), while second number one “Obviously” is a spotless scutter of fallen teen pop leaves. “Saturday Nite” is the album’s out-and-out, unreconstructed rock and roll pastiche – a spotty, warty Shakin’ Stevens – limply tracing the adventures of an underage house party. An adult would have no use for it, but a six-year old like me did, despite a passing, passive mention of searching for drunk girls landing on the wrong side of the charm/charmless divide. Better yet is “Met This Girl”, a ba-ba-ba rockabilly number with all the requisite hiccups in the important places. The much-maligned Charlie Simpson vision of what Busted should have been makes a mawkish but strangely prescient appearance on “Not Alone”, a tinny, downcast AOR slowie with – of all things – Chris Rea guitar twitches.
Stranger worlds are glimpsed elsewhere. With the the title track, they even find themselves abandoned in the anonymous shelter of a cheap hotel, contemplating their prematurely catatonic lives as if this was This Is Hardcore all of a sudden. An “Everybody Hurts” waltz underpins the basic doo-wop of “She Left Me” (a version of doo-wop, that is, which has arrived reformed through Boyz II Men’s clingy, likeable-if-not-trustworthy take on lamppost croon). Where the song momentarily catches you offguard is when Jones turns into an answer-phone message (“Then I left messages after the tone”), to be matily responded to by his friends (“really?”), to which he cornier-yet returns “Yeah, man, loads”; a supremely dopey moment that nonetheless provides an unanticipated sprinkling of Dexys’ Don’t Stand Me Down, minus the Pinter pauses. The typically good-natured surf racket of “Down by the Lake” is at one point even slit in two by seconds of a fumbling dub vortex, as if this most earthly of albums was happening in hyperspace. But these subtle diversions were not yet expanded on. With Room on the 3rd Floor a major success, and first of two number one albums (Busted had never even managed one), McFly spent 2004 having a riot as could only be expected, and encouraged, of 18 year olds. Dirtier fingernails would wait for now.
With the successful promotional cycle for Room on the 3rd Floor complete, McFly entered 2005 with open goals in sight, and come March, with the arrival of their first new material – the double A-side of “All About You” and Carly Simon’s “You’ve Got a Friend” – they themselves were an open goal for Comic Relief, who for that year’s Red Nose Day marathon decided to split the accompanying ‘proper’ song and the ‘comedy’ song after Gareth Gates’ career-ending “Spirit in the Sky” on their previous attempt. So while Peter Kay disinterred “Is This the Way to Amarillo?” for school discos and Radio 2 alike, cheeky chappies McFly got to celebrate the first anniversary of their debut single with a song that today matches it for popularity – the two of them their joint signature tracks.
And already their impatience to branch out and take their audience with them was readily apparent; “All About You” is, compositionally, the sort of potentially schmaltzy folk-pop song someone might write on their first attempt. What elevates it, however, is the easy combination of their boy-next-door vocals and dynamic orchestral arrangement – not to mention the numerous surprises to be clocked along the way, such as the Angela Morley-esque prologue, the Spanish guitar and woodwind passage that is woven in when you’re expecting it to press on with its loudest bridge, and finally Fletcher and Jones singing past each other in classy rounds. If you’re not immune to its charms, this is like 1960s toytown pop meets 1970s chamber pop meets 1980s twee pop, a confluence between The Cortinas, Peter Skellern and The Field Mice. And with this, it doesn’t even matter that the uninspired tread through “You’ve Got a Friend” isn’t any good, since its absence from any of their subsequent albums, bar as its bonus track placement to the otherwise chronologically-ordered All the Greatest Hits, shows McFly to not consider it as up to much either.
“All About You” was the obvious preface to McFly’s ‘serious’ period – that is, when these young men decided that they should put any songs about being dumped by and large on the back burner, get out their moody With the Beatles facial expressions and compress their inevitable “from Please Please Me to Rubber Soul” expansion in a matter of two albums. So it was that, with their second album, released that August as Wonderland, they stocked up on both My Generation and Who’s Next as musical touchstones, wrote songs with more noise and disturbance on their radars and brought in Steve Hale’s huge orchestra where they felt it necessary to embolden their music. Their lives not being quite as carefree as they were only a year ago, this autumnal phase – comparable in the worlds of teen pop to the fantastic but prematurely world-weary David Cassidy of 1972-74 – was about taking their fanbase somewhere new. But this reach for ‘approval’ (from who? or should that be Who? I cannot say – but Zeppelin/Oasis film director Dick Carrauthers was hired to state their case in the Wonderland live DVD liner notes) fortunately did not mean shedding everything that was ever likeable or fun about them in the first place, these sort of moves being cognitively right for pop as ever (cf. The Monkees’ Headquarters or the Osmonds’ “Crazy Horses”), as it’s about enjoying ambitious young upstarts running wild like scallies in a sweet shop.
Indeed, some may have been slightly deceived by the de facto lead single, “I’ll Be OK”, which made plain their new Who influence in a relatively straightforward way – Edge-aping guitar arpeggios throbbing like the “Won’t Get Fooled Again” VCS 3 organ. As a song it lends an encouraging hand to depressed teenagers, something which should not be sneered at, just as many of you didn’t sneer when R.E.M. went down a similar route in 1992, but getting past that and the unlikely Graham Gouldman collaboration “I Got You”, about as bolt-solid as unambiguous power pop gets, Wonderland is ceaseless in its adventure. The subsequent single “I Wanna Hold You” reimagines Bo Diddley with Harry Robinson-style exclamation mark strings and cheery, Muse-worthy melodramatic lyrics about unrequited desire as a “neutron bomb explosion” – it’s as if they’ve condensed Jim Steinman’s IMAX proposals for rock down to just three minutes, allowing it to incinerate as instantly as it screams to you it will. It compares very favourably with its spiritual brethren “Love Machine” (Girls Aloud) and “Switch It On” (Will Young). “Nothing”, meanwhile, negotiates conference between skiffle and “Substitute”, and “Memory Lane” – the irresistible premise of teenagers looking back to their own formative years, lest you forget how quickly live moves on in such a short space of time – makes the most of the evocative album name with a floral “Isn’t It a Pity” coda that could potentially last forever if it didn’t fade out.
The fantasy 1967 double A-side of “Ultraviolet” and “The Ballad of Paul K” saw yet more unexpected diversions. The former song’s effortless meld of power pop and sitar drones (with further raga-like qualities underpinning the second verse) is too forceful to come off as playdough psych-pop – indeed, its made particularly strong, yet curiously open-ended by the non-sequitur abstractness of the lyrics and the typical eagerness with which Fletcher and Jones go at them. “Paul K”, on the other hand, is querying baroque pop (in its single mix) about a father and husband turned defeatist exhibitor of mid-life crisis, with not only lyrics that are funnier (if only because less conclusively bleak) than some of Damon Albarn’s character studies circa The Great Escape, but inspired chordal turns and a verse melody filled with engaging trapdoors. While it would be too easy to locate Ray Davies in its wings, really “Paul K” adheres to the grey pantheon of psych-era songs about ageing men frustrated with the rather self-inflicted outcome of their joyless lives – “Excerpt from a Teenage Opera”, the Who’s “Silas Stingy”, the Hinge’s “The Village Postman”, Rupert People’s “Reflections of Charles Brown”, Kaleidoscope’s “Mr Small, the Watch Repairer”, Manfredd Mann’s “Harry the One-Man Band” and many others. What’s disarming about McFly’s effort, though, is that they’re teenagers observing, and being unable to understand, these damning attributes in people close to their hearts. Hence, the song’s swooning harmonic implements really make you wish the song would end happily and resolved for everyone, even if it never could.
But the album’s twin peaks come courtesy of the two singers really trying to individually break through to somewhere completely new as songwriters, not caring whether they end up with overreaching results (and they don’t). With “She Falls Asleep”, Fletcher delivers a fully orchestrated, six-minute song – essentially an art song… just piano, strings and voice – in two parts that, from pen to paper to arrangement, one could even imagine in the hands of a younger McCartney, but even saying that feels like a distraction from what is really going on here. Fletcher nails his panoramic mini-drama about a loved one reaching a point in their life that hangs at the end of its tether (perhaps almost fatally, if you choose to see it this way) with cautious yet natural care. Getting past the fully voiceless first segment (no McFly for two whole minutes of a McFly album – but Fletcher could evidently score a great adventure film should he ever choose to), the song neither reels in on, nor tiptoes around its flaring centre too much by instead observing snapshots in time, with transitions between them revealing the underlying urgency – indeed, the song works naturally through intense passages and graceful horizons, and this is the fashion in which it wisely ends too, a perfect cadence to softly cushion the precariousness (“please SAVE ME, I’ve been WAITING”) that directly precedes it. Just as “The Rain Came Down on Everything” and “When Two Worlds Drift Apart” were to their performers, it’s quite an astonishing achievement.
Whereas, on the succeeding “Don’t Know Why”, with its cryptic drone intro divulging trepidation about what he’s about to sing, Jones shamelessly opens up about his father’s recklessness with regards to their family (potentially providing further clarity to “The Ballad of Paul K”) via what at first comes across like a valiant variant on the Doves’ “Caught by the River”. The catharsis becomes even stronger, however, once faced with a distinctly haunted middle-eight that confronts how childhood dreams are no longer “the same”, an epiphanic realisation that leads to an ecstatic solo and a photo finish unimaginable minutes earlier. That is, however, until the between-the-lines symbolism in its dying moments, when Jones spins a few spontaneous, acoustic webs in the manner of Kelly Joe Phelps. Just as his earlier solo was indebted to Isaac Guillory, these were the guitarists he was raised on, presumably by his father – the poignant subtext, as I see it, being he found the way out of his childhood tribulation via music. And now here he is, newly adult, on the grand stage with his guitar.
In hindsight, its quite understandable that I was somewhat taken back by Wonderland – an album that understands Teenage Fanclub and K Records better than most actual “indie” fare given a mainstream push at the time – at first, before replaying it incessantly saw it land deep in my affections almost immediately after. Such an album deserved plaudits, but other than becoming the second (and ultimately final) number one album for the group – keeping off Late Registration in the process – those kudos never quite came, at least not in the same way that the rise of poptimism afforded, say, Girls Aloud and Sugababes their (rightful) acclaim. But this perhaps works today in the band’s favour.
After all, battles about ‘pop’ – its purposes, its qualities – are together a very 2000s artefact, and I refer not just to the rise of blogosphere writing, PopJustice and the like. Dan Gillespie Sells has since tried very hard to undercut the easy likability of his band The Feeling’s repositioned 70s prog-pop – trapped from the moment it arrived through critical prisms of irony and taste – by adhering to the somewhat Nick Hornby-engendered view that music enjoyed by the masses is automatically one of melodies to be whistled by milkmen, while anything ‘difficult’ is inherently the reserve, and tastes, of the privileged. While at the other end of the spectrum were the charmless likes of Razorlight or, say, The Enemy pretending to be something above “mere” pop music with their cockeyed ‘social’ ‘comment’. There was Sean Rowley’s influential but misguided Guilty Pleasures mind set taking for granted that everyone shared his crisis of character around 70s pop, while The Guardian‘s music editor Alexis Petridis took a path as the middle-man, here to tell the punter how good, or not, this new pop record is, away from the bloggers.
McFly, being mostly critically ignored, never overstretching themselves or floating cautiously above their barely-defined station, largely sat away from this axis. And after their covert bypassing of the sophomore slump, they found they had made their point with the teenage po-facedness and decided to reconcile their increased spirit of adventure with, unambiguously, no-expenses fun. What happened was, during their downtime that Christmas, Tom Fletcher followed through on a recommendation from Busted’s Matt Willis and discovered Jellyfish. Here was a band who made culty, twisted, inventive prog-pop whilst dressing like almost overbearingly wacky, Machiavellian cartoon characters. In other words, if McFly fancied themselves the first thing, it needn’t come at the expense of the second (or at least, it meant they didn’t need to act all “cool and moody”, as bassist Dougie Poynter later put it). Combined with Poynter’s newfound admiration for artist Drew Brophy, whose surfboard artworks look like Jellyfish sound, Fletcher’s love for the memoralised San Fransico band filled McFly with renewed enthusiasm for themselves as they began work on album three, Motion in the Ocean.
As with Wonderland, the new record had something of a false start with a chart-topping charity double A-side – one track spotlighting a new direction, the other a formulaic cover – that far preceded the album. The group’s rote run through “Don’t Stop Me Now” is agreeable enough trebly karaoke, but “Please, Please” was the real break with the past, a scrunched out horndog pop punk number in the best Busted tradition. Four months later, in October 2006, the album campaign began proper with “Star Girl”, an unabashed pop song with winsome, if slightly melancholic ooh-woo-ooos that advanced the end-of-the-world young love of “I Wanna Hold You” into a new existence in outer space (indeed, the song has since been played to astronauts orbiting Earth thanks to their ever-precious fanbase hustling a NASA campaign). Motion followed weeks later with a hearteningly stupid album sleeve snapped underwater, the four members circling their new, flowing logo in a manner reminiscent of the hippos in the concurrently-launched BBC One ‘circles’ ident package. It only reached number six in the charts amidst tough competition and stayed in the top 40 for just four weeks, yet still sold enough for a Platinum certification.
But inevitably, this pop rebirth came with lessons learnt from Wonderland, namely the always-present need to push their own walls back further. So for every “We are the Young”, there’s a “Bubblewrap”, a coulda-been-Jellyfish number that pushes five minutes and has chordal passages to die for. “Sorry’s Not Good Enough” and “Little Joanna” slightly evoke such forgotten luminaries as The Mommyheads or the Sugarplastics. “Friday Night” goes the route of “The Show” by battling two choruses against each other, yet teeters on the edge of incineration with its demented “Think i’m gonna lose it lose it lose it” refrain, which becomes increasingly staccato and jerky, like Phil Collins’ humanoid “We-know!-we-know!” from “Whodunnit” has resurfaced in the most unlikely (or maybe not so unlikely) place. “Home Is Where the Heart Is” is pure heartland rock/dumb campfire singalong that effectively deploys every trick in the book.
The Jellyfish template is not only amplified but revitalised, or maybe even improved, on “Transylvania”. Never mind just being this band’s best record, it may just be power pop’s finest ever hour (sez me) and the song McFly, a band so nerdy they named themselves after another nerd, were always destined to make. Falling shamelessly into theatric, 1970s art-rock worship, a de-and-reconstructed, lovingly impenetrable, absurdist splatter of Queen, 10cc, Roy Wood and Sparks, every move it makes is absolutely the right one – its baroque/Shakespearean tragedy panache, Wagnerian Greek chorus bridges, a storming second verse of heart attack melodrama, three-way call-and-response Bismillahs and getting Poynter, the weedy voiced bassist, to sing the chorus. It sounds so full of life, so vital, like it was a total riot to write and record. And of course, stocking it up with so many unmissable, outlandish hooks – many of them working at right-angles or as unexpected correctives to those they succeed – doesn’t half help. It’s the incongruent fusion of its near-total incomprehensibility and the sheer force at which they go at it that makes “Transylvania” the very best type of abstract euphroia in pop. Frankenstein’s beauty.
But one thing McFly’s giddy 1970s jigsaws weren’t in 2006-07 was out of place. The aforesaid Feeling provided Radio 1 and 2 with ubiquitous Electric Supertramp Orchestra models, whilst the reformed Take That richly brought out their hitherto unseen inner Jeff Lynne for their better-than-“Mr Blue Sky” number one “Smile”. Meanwhile, MIKA’s stage school Freddie poses were for a time ubiquitous, while Scissor Sisters – who were quite anachronistically 2004’s biggest-selling band in Britain – re-emerged auspiciously in late 2006 with “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing”, Elton Euro-disco gone right, as if to look at what British pop had become said ‘We’d told you so’. McFly may have mostly become a fanbase concern, as their chart positions made increasingly apparent (the double A-side of “Transylvania” with outright Jellyfish cover “Baby’s Coming Back” breezed into the number one spot in May 2007 and then broke the record for the lowest-ever fall from the top in its second week, plummeting to number 20), but they more than anyone in this era breathed life again into those allegedly uncool old 70s stalwarts, forgoing workmanlike study (as sometimes befell their peers) for twenty-something spontaneity.
The kitschy heartland/arena undertow of “Home Is Where the Heart Is” subsisted into “The Heart Never Lies”, the obligatory but more-than-agreeable new single from 2007’s Greatest Hits. The package was perhaps premature, but in its superior manifestation as All the Greatest Hits, it fills up a CD with 22 tracks, few of which are inarguably losable, so maybe not. It was their epitaph for Island Records, since McFly then inaugurated their own label, Super Records, by issuing their fourth record, Radio:ACTIVE, as a freebie in The Mail on Sunday in July 2008, adding the youth vote to a questionable, short-lived phenomenon that had already infamously befallen Prince’s Planet Earth and the album that helped publicly spell the death of long-time democratic socialist unit UB40, TwentyFourSeven. Those not wishing to indulge McFly’s apolitical ignorance by buying such bogroll could wait until the inevitable deluxe edition was marketed commercially months later with improved artwork and extra songs (plus a behind-the-scenes DVD that inevitably gets watched only once).
Sadly, the messy promotional plan for the record reflected the music itself. It isn’t a bad album, but is noticeably less imaginative and twitched than its immediate predecessors by largely opting for a streamlined, yet compressed Kerrang! pop punk blanket, as if the ghost of Busted’s foppy side had possessed them with a time-honoured weariness. Lead single “One for the Radio” was a lovingly supercharged run-off which boasted a cartoon fury without real precedent in their back catalogue, but that’s because it goes for the defensive in the manner of N’Sync’s eleventh hour hit “Pop” (a “This Is Pop” for the industry’s sales apex), given its bitter, “Only a Northern Song”/”My Iron Lung” meta sarcasm. After all, this is “just another song for the radio” in the ears of smug dissenters, despite how we’re alleged to “all look the same in the dark” (a clumsy if endearing hook). It’s flattened distortion and crackbrained, spiral-staircase verses convince where its yelps that “we don’t care” don’t. Months later, the ratty magic of “Lies” appeared with a fiery, staccato horn arrangement and oom-pah-pah circus moodiness (aided by the post-apocalyptic freakshow cautiously explored in its video), throwing the fans a rightly-timed, Big Brovaz via Muse curveball. The snag, sadly, is that it was probably their last hit single of such considerable quality.
The rest of the album varied in class; the unlikely Prince inspiration seemed to seep further into the less successful, also horn-clad “Smile”, which pointedly resembles The Supernaturals covering “Kiss”, while “POV” delves unnecessarily into Charlie Simpson’s version of Busted, and “Falling in Love” is syrupy acoustic MOR that could have come from some half-forgotten 1975. More bizarre, if entirely in character with their cheery pomp, was their attempt to rewrite “The Black Parade” as “The Last Song”. But surprisingly, the finest moments besides the hits are its most straightforward; “Do Ya”, “Everybody Knows” and “Going Through the Motions” are squarely dumb rock in the “Louie Louie”/”You Really Got Me” riffola tradition, a return to their first album’s musical if not so much thematic simplicity.
While Radio:ACTIVE initially reeled in more fanbase hits that dropped like stones in week two, not even that prevented the “Do Ya”/”Falling in Love” double A-side widely missing the top 10 completely (despite being a Children in Need tie-in). Fletcher and Jones later admitted to being conscious of their chart positions, and their later frustration in feeling unable to write hits was perhaps already evident with the tabloid covermount campaign; since Motion only reached number six, what if handing over two-and-a-half million copies of the next one for free provided McFly with a safety net so that when releasing it properly months after, the boys could comfort themselves knowing its presumably low chart peak (in the event it reached number eight) wouldn’t take into account how many fans already owned it. If this sounds cynical, factor in how they’d do something like this again with their next album, 2010’s Above the Noise, where fans were encouraged to register with a new interactive website for the group’s activities, Super City, with pre-release copies of the album included in the deal for the privilege. When the official release followed in November, it bottomed out at a still shockingly poor number 20.
And then there’s the matter of the album’s content itself, where McFly’s two years away might as well have been 20 years. Reimagining themselves as a Dallas Austin-assisted brash electropop outfit, ditching much of their gawky birth charm, it seemed something big was up internally, an impression essentially confirmed by the band’s retroactive speak of label pressure and it being “our worst album”. Of the two solitary hits, “Party Girl” was exuberant, in-yer-face EDM whose enjoyability largely relies on its stop-start white noise, even if it inevitably wrongfooted and tested fans’ patience to the point of it now being regarded as “bad Lady Gaga” by its authors, while “Shine a Light”, a blatantly Radio 1-pleasing collaboration with man-of-the-moment Taio Cruz, is chronologically the final McFly song the average punter is likely to know or still hear. But the sheer depths they go to in order to sound unlike the McFly of before reveal a particularly desperate mindset, and often results in lesser material. “iF U C Kate” is pleasant enough until you consider the forced, “if U Seek Amy”-derived pun of its title, threatening the song’s likeable naïveté entirely, while much of the album’s remainder slips by without making much of an impression. This is far from a band in rude health. And yet, Take That’s Progress, released the same day, also saw a successful pop rock band seamlessly sprint the vogue digi-synth-pop route, and ultimately ended up as perhaps the best pop album of the 2010s (or, okay, my favourite). I eagerly bought both on release day and played the latter endlessly while sadly leaving Above the Noise to gather dust.
In other words, the decision to play to that particular gallery wasn’t the issue. Rather, it’s that McFly strangely forewent much of their alluring panache (a quality key to virtually the entirety of Progress, with its winking judgement day dramas and klaxon-glam stomps and “oh what a BEAST oh what a MAN” etc.) That’s not to say it evaporated entirely; the aforesaid “Party Girl” is on-brand ridiculous, likewise the histrionic “End of the World” and album highlight “Nowhere Left to Run”. It’s these rococo numbers people were considering when comparing Above the Noise to Muse, then latterly of The Resistance, potentially partly the model for McFly’s new pathway. Then there’s also the laughably tasteless sleeve, a telling if unintentional update of Gary Numan’s Warriors (released at the same maligned point in his own career). Perhaps a charitable reading of the package – from production to packaging to technological ‘innovation’ (the Super City website) – is of a cyberpunk McFly, reminiscent somewhat of the 1993 heyday of garish multimedia pop (Billy Idol’s own Cyberpunk, Todd Rundgren’s interactive CD-i album No World Order, U2’s saturated Zooropa, Jesus Jones’ frequencies-only Perverse, Peter Gabriel’s musical PC game XPLORA1). It’s an odd place and odd context for such a Trojan revival, but to its credit Above the Noise did innovate one thing: as a friend put it, the 2000s power pop band’s regeneration into 2010s electropop, a soon-to-become-cliched passage taken up by Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco and the reunited Busted in their hours of need.
Yet it spotlights the turn-of-the-decade flux that mainstream rock in all forms found itself in. By 2022, “guitar music” (whatever that means, or whatever certain people want it to mean) does not break into the UK top 40 undigested, not without having been swallowed from the outset by electronic, alt-pop aesthetics. “There’s not a guitar anywhere,” complained Matt Willis in 2017 of chart radio, “there’s not even a live fucking drum.” Regardless of how ill-informed this generalised line of thinking may be, McFly’s confused moves make more sense in hindsight than perhaps they did at the start of that decade, just as that nascent, slowly-fading-into-view generation of modern rock music reared on (but missing the point of) Oracular Spectacular and Merriweather Post Pavilion repositioned the guitar in echoing hallways of murmured ambience, drowsy synths and complacent vocal whoops, attuning itself to the increasingly blurred lines between commercial pop, R&B, dance and indie (certainly a conundrum for another day).
That all began happening in the background while McFly’s work became less interesting in the meantime. Another best-of album, Memory Lane, followed in 2012, containing new songs like “Cherry Cola” – the sort of Bo Diddley rave-up they’d done better before – and the needlessly twee, advert-friendly “Love Is Easy”, while the Above the Noise stylings were waved goodbye/pushed off a cliff on the Pendulum-lite “Do Watcha”. Another concession to indifferent advert folk, 2013’s non-album single “Love Is on the Radio”, provided them with a final top 10 hit. None of the quality control issues really bothered me though; it was nice to still have them around, nine years after their debut and long after cynics may have bet on them disappearing down the plughole. McFly then joined old friends Matt Willis and James Bourne to become McBusted, the sort of nostalgia-acknowledging exercise that effortlessly outdid ITV2’s The Big Reunion get-ups by being far less desperate and coming over with natural bonhomie – I saw the supergroup in Cardiff and a girl of about eight was stood next to me singing along to album tracks that came out when I was younger than her, probably before she’d been born. It only strengthened the longevity of the group, even when thereafter they disappeared from public life for years, the group having all but fallen apart in that time but never officially calling it a day.
And quite right they didn’t. 2020’s Young Dumb Thrills – their first proper album in ten years – doesn’t play to many of McFly’s strengths, but crucially it sounds like a band of old friends making a record on their own terms, free of worry about hits, strained inter-band relations or any of the typical riff-raff. It shows them in a less ambitious, contented space, which happily for their wallets now means the back door creation of potential Radio 2 toetappers, one of which – the actually quite wonderful “Happiness” – was enough to ensure the parent album, even if for just one week, a top two placing. With band members regularly turning up on light ent telly (with Harry Judd a part-time One Show presenter), they refuse to fade fully into the background, but this is the most comfortable McFly have ever been with their legacy, assuaged that the torch has passed to kids who never miss a chance to acknowledge them as a central inspiration. What better time to locate their past glories, and purchase Wonderland and Motion in the Ocean next time you visit British Heart Foundation, and turn even passing curiosity into fascination.
Popluck 