BUSTED – "You Said No"

I can’t remember whether it was with What I Go to School For or Year 3000 that Busted came into my life – it was definitely in the first few months of my first year of school, and I think it was my best friend from a few doors down that inspired the interest – but I have the vivid memory of going out with my dad to Asda to see which Busted CD I wanted, where the band had their own display with the album and singles (or presumably just the various versions of the latest single), and I picked the one with the coolest cover, the band having their height recorded, it seemed to me. Good decision, my dad said, because that’s the one with all of their songs on.

So a milestone number one for me. It was the first No. 1 I knew before it was a single (on the album it was called Crash & Burn, and for some reason the memory of my mum telling me they changed the name has stuck), it was also the first No. 1 where I remember hearing about the video before I saw it (my aforesaid best friend said it saw the boys on bikes, which I assumed meant motorbikes, not BMXs; the fall through the floor at the end was a playground laugh), and, as I later realised, the first No. 1 I knew with an uncensored swear word. But it was the first No. 1 by a favourite band of mine, since becoming my favourite band. I have little but wonderful memories of this time for numerous reasons which won’t be indulged in detail here, but it seemed obvious to me in later years that not only was this me having for once my own favourite band, one that was not my parents’ music, but a band I loved in real time with all my friends, when I still had friends on my street and my estate and my school. There’s but one example of this yet to come, although that feels different, but Busted were the epitome. Right time, right age – even if their music would perhaps not interest me much if they had come at the other end of the decade, I bear the giddiest smile whenever I hear virtually anything from their first two albums.

You Said No, admittedly, is not their finest hour, not least in hindsight for the reasons Tom outlines. But the things about the band that generally stick out to me now are all in place – the weak vocals getting by anyhow on sheer eager-to-pleaseness, and the Matrix-ish electronic flourishes all over the production. Even more enjoyable to me now are some of the little touches, like the exclamation mark harmonies on certain lines in the lyrics or the ‘na na na na’ droning on into the final choruses. Even so, and unlike McBunny, Busted for me try to resist any sort of nostalgia-disregarding, revisionist analysis. Because its May 2003, there’s a wonderful summer on its way, and life is the best.

7

self-correction: that should be “in the verses”, not ” in the lyrics” (guhhh)

My muso friends and/or classmates at the time (we were in Year 11 for reference) all either had genuine disdain for Busted, or considered them an easy source of cheap point-scoring laughs. I would half-heartedly defend them because I thought they were missing the tongue in cheek nature of the whole thing, although given how seriously Charlie Simpson has taken himself in the years since I may have been giving them some benefit of the doubt. I never really rated their songs, although, as is much more the case with McFly, may have enjoyed them if performed by singers who were more to my taste, and I did like them more than a lot that came from the acts they had supposedly watered down.

“Year 3,000” was a cracker of a pop song: almost like an updated Undertones teenage tale. Albeit more polished, both musically and socially. And it captured the weaknesses of Busted as well as showing them at their greatest strength.

This pales in comparison with that. It fails to be “My Perfect Cousin” to that “Teenage Kicks”

#4 “It is curious Busted and their successors took off so strongly…”

How strongly? They combined for as many 00s bunnies as Westlife! (And, as mentioned, Busted shared early-Westlife’s tendency to fire out singles at a one-per-quarter rate; this seems to be a feature of this era generally. As Tom pointed out with Take That at one point, visibility meant product in the 90s, and we’re still in the era where the singles chart is purely physical here even if the rise of ADSL, and hence the Internet as we know it, is firmly under way. So the management strategy was the same: singles, and another one, and another one… and another one.)

And here they are, Manics-esque, their first chart-topper a pale imitation of the breakout hit. Actually, the Manics were less like that than Busted even – the breakout hit was the most plain-spoken their lyrics ever got, “If You Tolerate This…” was oblique lyricism from the title on down. Busted broke out with boyish school-hall rock with an oddly effective production sheen, and they got to number one with boyish school-hall rock with an oddly effective production sheen.

The period Busted soundtracked was the sixth-form years where I drearily embraced “real music with real instruments” to an unnerving extent. It was a weird period of contrasts, in retrospect. I’d throw myself into rock, yet have constant painful sensory overload from its playing in the sixth-form common room, which I’d sometimes fight against by playing Sarah McLachlan CDs. That I purchased with some of the money I won from an essay-writing contest run by the IEA – saving the rest – while my own political and economic beliefs were swinging hard against everything the IEA stood for. (More on that one in a later 2003 bunny, but suffice to say I did buy “American Idiot.”)

One thing never changed, though; I was a sucker for a walloping high-impact bit of pop, whatever trappings it was coated in. Throughout my secondary-school years, the trappings tended to be the synthesiser wash of pop-trance and adjacent genres; at sixth form, it was more likely to be the guitar wash of pop-punk and adjacent genres. And so while I was probably exactly the right age to be just too old for Busted, and had a snobbishness that simultaneously drew me towards and away from them at once, those high-impact choruses were something I could never take away from them.

(The lyrics I could, but even then I don’t think I quite knew why they were such Unrelatable Content, I certainly hadn’t put my finger on exactly how to describe my queerness yet. It was actually like how #6 pointed out pop-punk was forming through fragments years in advance before being an established genre, actually. I had individual moments – one from this era springs to mind, where I got roped into a truth-or-dare game in the common room and essentially got asked if I’d ever have sex with one particularly conventionally-attractive woman in the group, reacting with utter confusion – that pretty clearly pointed towards me being queer. But they were only fragments, and didn’t say much about how, or what it would mean.)

I have nothing much else to add about the single – like seemingly everyone else, I agree it’s a lesser execution of the band’s obviously appealing formula and would give it 5. I think it’s telling that it’s a single off an already-available parent album – that’d already had a name change from events in the interim, even! – that hit the top first, it suggests they really were a singles act and that makes sense with their instant-impact style. Heck, the change of title probably helped it in a singles context – the new title is the words in the hook, and even if it wasn’t now the actual title I bet people would’ve thought it was.

My main memory of Busted is how hilariously inept their attempts at miming playing guitar seemed.

Imagine my surprise when it turned out that they actually did know how to play their instruments. And in the case of Charlie, play rather well (Look, I’m still a rock snob. OK?)

Don’t forget 21st Century Girls! Simon Fuller’s attempt at the format released one self-titled single that ‘flopped’ at No 16 and, hilariously, had split up by the time the millennium actually came around.

this sounds well produced even if the song itself is a bit ho-hum – they could have leaned more into the bad attitude in the same way that the Stones did with ‘Under My Thumb’ etc but perhaps that would not have gone down so well. I can vaguely remember my pupils being into the band but it seems significant that they have tied the song to BMX in the video which seemed to have more cutting edge cultural clout than mere pop music at the time

Ultra! I had forgotten how much I liked Say It Once, which was fixed perpetually in my memory by an interview with the band who talked about how naff the video for it was (it’s terrible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohuEUjvxg9w)

Looks like they charted in NZ, which is how I heard of them; Busted never seemed to trouble the Antipodean airwaves.

Fine enough and doesn’t outstay its welcome. In truth I would be around the 4 or 5/10 mark for all of their singles that I remember.