BUSTED – "Who's David?"

I don’t think there’s any way this can be the worst Busted single in a world where Air Hostess exists (it’s much better than the next bunny as well). I agree that the lyrics are a bit half-arsed and don’t get as vicious as they might have been allowed to be if they weren’t such a kid-friendly band, but the chorus has plenty of energy which makes up for that. I’d go as high as 6 for this, which probably makes it my second or third favourite Busted single.

Am I right in thinking this set a record at the time for the lowest-selling #1 single of all time? This was obviously in the era before downloads were counted. A quick Google suggests a 2006 bunny “beat” that record.

At #3 below it was the debut of another 00s indie stalwart – Keane with Somewhere Only We Know, which I liked a lot. Like Snow Patrol’s Run from a couple of entries ago, that one also has a bunnied cover which we’ll get to in due course.

So on “Crashed the Wedding” we covered what is for me, Busted’s crowning glory of their number ones, and a shining example of when they were really at the peak of their powers and were as brilliant as they were. Revisiting “Who’s David” under 2023 eyes, I am feeling the same about it as you are Tom; it’s undoubtedly the weak link of singles from the ‘A Present For Everyone’ album, an awkward lyric and I dare say whiny and unlikeable beast 17 years on.

In fact I suspect the lads themselves (Charlie and Matt of whom are married with kids now) also feel the same about it in the present day; I had a quick glance at YouTube just now and tellingly, it hasn’t been performed live by them since their Pigs Can Fly comeback tour seven years ago.

#2 – you are correct that this also had one of the worst first week sales not just of their career but for a number one in the 00s; Music Week suggests it was just over 30,000 (50 of which were a limited cassette run that thus makes this the last chart topper to be released on the format unless I’m mistaken).

The B-side of this was their just about passable cover of ‘Teenage Kicks’ by The Undertones, which they performed at the BRITs the very week this was released and where they picked up Best British Breakthrough and Best Pop Act. They reprised said performance again instead of performing the A-side on Top of the Pops when it was at number one the following week.

But it was a fanbase concern for sure; after topping the chart it spent just two more weeks in the top 20 before descending with alarming haste to the lower end of the top 40, vacating just in time for the support act on their recent arena tour to make their debut – more on whom a couple of bunnies hence, of course. The ‘Baby Jump’ of the 00s, then? Very possibly. 4 from me.

I thought the worst sales for a number one were later to come in 2004.

@5, the Americanisms started all the way back on their first single, where a “trunk” rather than a boot is referenced in What I Go To School For! Seems more of a product of their influences than anything.

This is probably their worst single, and I like A Present For Everyone overall. Can’t agree with Air Hostess being bad though, that’s got proper energy, a massive chorus and was held off no. 1 by an awful bunny.

A complete non-event and forgettable for me. Both back then and especially now. Regarding their Imperial commercial phase, a few tracks still get the seldom play from me.

‘Year 3000’ and ‘Crashed The Wedding’ for their pure silly sugar rush nature. ‘What I Go To School For’ and ‘3AM’ because I genuinely like them.

The first album was by far the better overall of their initial two, even if it was heavily derivative of more credible US pop-punk bands of the time. The second album, including this track, produced diminishing returns of quality. A smash grab.

That said latest album ‘Half Way There’ released in 2019 is the record Busted were always supposed to make, yet couldn’t at the time. Commercially, aside from a strong first week chart placing, it didn’t sell.

I still much prefer them over label mates and successors McFly, who we shall see soon. Busted at least tried to make pop fun and ‘dangerous’ amongst a sterile landscape of Atomic Kitten and Westlife. The problem though was pushing this, combined with their youth and lack of awareness made for casual misogyny. In this particular case.

It is interesting to know that the band themselves have distanced themselves from this track, highlighting issues mentioned above and how it wasn’t really acceptable even in 2004. The last time it was played live was 2017, on radio not since release, and it’s existence is neither promoted by the group nor the management since, despite being a number one record.

In a bizarre way, does this fact make them fleeting punk rock? A self imposed banned single of sorts.

The way the three vocalists take turns at the first-person suggests the subject should have been exclusive to the three of them.

I had found the single version distasteful and just now learned of the album version.

I guess the credited cowriter of this and other Busted No. 1s will get that aspect mentioned when he himself hops his way to the top.

Charlie From Busted is looking to have a bit of a renaissance in 2023 pop culture, in a context where he doesn’t have to worry about being too cool for anyone.

I honestly love Busted. Not their best effort, but they were such a refreshing band in a landscape of manufactured pop groups. Being a big fan — I was in *high school* too — I always wondered why the hell they would go with such a filler track as a second single — I mean, it’s definitely no Year 3000. Had they gone with Air hostess we might have been discussing that instead.
Interesting to see how this became #1 with such low sales, but let’s not forget the record had been out since Christmas, so it’s definitely a fan base based #1. I lived in Dublin at the time this came out — and honestly have no recollection of radio plays or anything else, other than the Where is the love funny cover on one of the singles.

This was the second number one single written by Tom Fletcher — who, in retrospect, has written so many bunnies, many more than anyone would guess.

Don’t really remember this – or them (four number ones, really?) except for ‘Year 3000’ which I see isn’t bunnied, and which I enjoyed only for the lyric:

“I’ve been to the year 3000. Not much has changed, but they live underwater.”

Quite a major change there, I would say. Human beings have developed gills, yeah? Good going, for only 1000 years. Or maybe they were predicting the inevitable melting of the polar ice caps.

#15 – hang on a second, how is “Year 3000” NOT bunnied? It’s by far their most known track, but it did indeed seem to spend only one week at number two (although five weeks in the top ten in total isn’t to be sniffed at, I suppose).

It seemed to be everywhere at that point, and indeed the absurdity of the flippant lyric became the punchline to many casual jokes at the time. I think a lot of friends of mine crowbarred the “not much has changed, but they live underwater” line into conversations after coming back from holidays, towns they haven’t visited in years and even pubs.

Busted confused me. I recognised a lot of their schtick from gigs I saw in tiny venues by bands like The Crocketts a few years previously, but to be honest I didn’t get them either – I have memories of going to a punk gig in Aldershot and being surrounded by teens putting their skateboards safely to one side and doing a weird staccato pogoing dance while some up-and-coming group played lots of sub-Green Day stuff. That whole movement seemed to be cultishly huge, mostly off the NME and Melody Maker’s radar and I had no point of reference for it, then Busted came along, diluted it and blew it high into the mainstream.

Everyone has a moment in their lives where they finally realise they’re old and no longer connecting with young people, and it was unquestionably mine.

Although it seems they didn’t play this on their last tour, it looks like they did still play What I Go to School For, an odd prospect in 2019 for several reasons. I guess people would more likely have been disappointed if they skipped that one than this though, and I guess we have to accept all Pop is dress-up and pretend to some degree, especially acts like Busted (and the Americanisms were part of their “persona” I suppose). Someone more versed (i.e. at all) in Busted deep cuts than I once told me that “Miss McKenzie” turned up in other Busted songs, so it seems there was something of a “Busted lore”.

I don’t think I thought anything of the lyrics to “Who’s David?” at the time. I was vaguely aware it was some kind of breakup song, but a lot of the words are rather indecipherable unless you’re listening carefully. Having a lyric about “sleeping around the town” does seem pretty gross for a band that seemed to mainly appeal to pre-teens, although it was hardly alone in that era.

Busted never broke through in America, or necessarily even tried much, but Year 3000 is known there thanks to a cover by the surprisingly enduring Jonas Brothers. The brothers boast that their album outsold Kelly Clarkson rather than Michael Jackson, which isn’t nearly as impressive.

I recall around the time Year 3000 was released there was a profile of them in Q Magazine where Lemmy was brought in to assess how “rock” they and their activities were. The same article had them admitting that they enjoyed watching the latest pop videos, but that their remote finger started getting itchy when The Strokes or whoever came on. Nothing wrong with that but a little amusing to recall considering Charlie’s decade-long frownyfaced plea for rock cred.

#20 I wonder if the Union Jack logo overlay (which makes it significantly less readable) was made with that move in mind?

#2 (but missed this at the time!) Keane were definitely one of my favourite bands at the time – I was generally the right demographic for landfill indie and specifically had just started songwriting at that time, just to push me further into that snobbish “real music by real musicians” trap that I’m glad I didn’t stick in for too long. (I may not have stayed there for at all long if dance music, my first pop love, wasn’t in an 80s-sample-hammering nadir at the time…)

But my fondest memory of Somewhere Only We Know came not from sixth form, but from my final year at university a few years later, where I invited three friends, all members of the light opera group (and one of them my then-current singing teacher!), to a Singstar party on a Saturday evening. We organised the four-person competition in the form of a Champions League group – home-and-home double round-robin, where “home” in this case meant “picks the song” – and I somehow won the tournament, partly because the soprano in the group was constantly throwing off the pitch-detector scoring with her vibrato, partly because of how most pop singing really doesn’t work for a literal coloratura soprano. By halfway through, she decided to essentially embrace the competition as low note practice; for my home match with her I picked “Somewhere Only We Know,” hoping she’d sing it an octave above the recording, except she didn’t. After the competition was over, I suggested she had another go doing just that. She duly did, literally scored higher, and frankly it was by far the most artistically pleasing performance of the night – a precusor of, but more satisfying than, the bunnied cover by an artist who was in her imperial phase at the time…

#22: As an American, I can attest I knew nothing of Busted. And I was a high school kid (in a place where they actually use the word). Don’t even remember that MTV documentary, although by this point I wasn’t watching that channel at all.

This song has the ingredients to be really good but those gross lyrics are always gonna keep the score low. Pop punk was having its moment but this just doesn’t have the necessary amount of energy. I’ll say 4.

Or, in fairness, like the Beatles and the Stones.

That documentary was a disaster. They hated being portrayed as a boyband and that’s exactly how the label decided to portrait them. No radio play whatsoever and it’s quite cringey how they went from radio station to radio station without anyone willing to playlist their single. Too brit for America, that’s all. Anyway, the first to fightstar records Charlie did since he left the band were great records. I also have a soft spot for Matt Willis’ solo debut album — they hoped he’d turn into the new Robbie williams but the songs just weren’t really there.

They were one of the interval acts at the 2003 Junior Eurovision Song Contest, presumably as part of their efforts to crack the European market. As mentioned upthread – never really happened.

As an aside, the Croatian winner of that inaugural edition of Junior Eurovision recently became a member of Whitesnake. Funny old world.

I have to say I really don’t get the complaints of “casual misogyny” when if this was any other, more serious band no one would bat an eyelid at the lyrics. Being honest, the culture of branding anything remotely controversial as “istaphobic” and not fit for modern audiences is exactly why modern pop is so damn boring. The charts are now cluttered with dull songs (usually written by Ed Sheeran) by the likes of Jess Glynne, Little Mix and so on, singing earnestly about inane topics no one gives a damn about, like not wearing make up on Thursday, getting their driver’s licence or just getting paid. Who cares? This created the musical climate where slightly edgy songs like Cardi B’s “WAP” are now being held up as groundbreaking feminist classics, when really it’s just a filthy hip hop banger in the vein of Khia’s “My Neck My Back”, which hit the top 10 not long after this came out.