McFly were Busted friends and affiliates, and refreshed the earlier band’s ailing formula with sixties pixie dust – chanted do-do-doo harmonies and a sunshine disposition conjuring a spirit of Monkee business. But their retro aesthetic isn’t just designed to evoke teenage good times – there’s a hint of classicism in there too. McFly were boys, and they were a band, but they worked to give the impression that those two words’ proximity was just a happy coincidence and instead we were in the presence of Songwriting Talent.
That promise was occasionally kept. McFly’s hits lack the likable crassness of Busted, and mostly lack the energy too. But there’s a crispness to their power-pop borrowings, an easy, confident tunefulness most British bands struggle to access. The gap between McFly and, say, Kaiser Chiefs is social more than it is musical: different fans, different lyrical priorities, but a similar commitment to bouncy guitar pop like the stuff your mum danced to.
Bratty pop-punk moves and sounds made Busted an unusual British proposition; McFly don’t entirely ditch them. The band made “Five Colours In Her Hair” as a bubblegum introduction, but they also made it a second time for the US market, a noisier, snottier version that’s still the one they play live. In the ‘US’ recording they can uncensor themselves, swap out “phone her” for “bone her” and make the song’s sound fit the callous indifference of the lyrics.
“Five Colours” isn’t spiteful in the way “Who’s David?” was, but it’s far from kind to its subject, quickly sketching her journey from – in the singer’s eyes – fuckable eccentric to nameless cast-off, broken by the attention she got for the things that made her unique (and maybe for getting involved with the narrator). Unlike pop-punk and emo’s more gleeful treatment of scorned women, there’s an itch of regret here, something more thoughtful lurking under the scruffy bonhomie, a vague nod towards personhood beyond freaky hair and naked cooking. Maybe even a sense that yes, this girl’s breakdown is a Bad Thing. But that’s not what the record’s about, and we play out with another round of do-do-dos, like a musical “oh well”, and the moment passes.
Score: 5
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Surf guitar continues to be the sound of the early noughties, or something. I like the massed vocals on “shaved five colours OFF AND NOW”, unashamedly Beatlesy as they may be (maybe? I’m bad at telling this kind of thing), especially as they emphasise possibly the three consecutive words in the entire lyric that it makes the least sense to emphasise. “Remember, lads, what the audience are really here for: prepositions, conjunctions, and adverbs.”
In my memory of it I’d thought it was reasonably sympathetic towards the girl in question, but on a closer relisten you’re right that the song doesn’t really dwell on the tragedy of her situation, not when it could focus on how hot the singer finds her. That could be considered timely, given that the year afterwards a review of the film Elizabethtown will coin the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”.
Evening all. McFly’s debut single and the first of their many visits to the UK’s top spot on the singles chart. In all honesty I can’t claim to be the world’s biggest authority/fan on these guys (or Busted for that matter), so it gets a generous 4/10 from me. I look forward to other commenters giving their perspective on the boys.
Not mad keen vocally, but there is an energy, brevity and enthusiasm here that I respect. Nothing too off-putting imho, so I will go just below half marks.
I remember at the time they were heavily pushed by Busted in magazines, opening for them on tour and televison shows, seemingly long and frequently before this release. They were on the same record label, same management, producers, video directors etc etc.
Was it the first time such a high profile act had been used to promote another so long before their first release?
This annoyed me when I was younger as it felt like a huge impressionable fan base were being told who to like and support. An easy, calculated ride to the top, with no bumps. While I appreciate PR directed to a youthful audience has been around for decades beforehand.
It still questioned the ability of their audience to fairly judge without the hyberbole from the biggest pop act at the time, Busted.
I had enjoyed the genuine dislike between label”mates” of prior boybands. That intense energy and rivalry of one-upmanship of having to share buisness space; ultimately driving both to higher sales (especially in the US between the first two groups mentioned below) and subjectively speaking, better music, and artistry.
It is well documented Backstreet Boys and NSYNC hated one another, as did Westlife and Five, purely for sharing a label and all that comes to one and not the other.
Favourite child syndrome, jealously, trash talking and mimicking in interviews, and resentment coming into play. Creating a much needed spark in pop music, exaggerated or otherwise.
Busted were the real deal and idiosyncratic; McFly were flat and calculated.
And finally we get to them. Although thanks to Busted’s three number ones to this point, we’ve been discussing Tom Fletcher, who co-wrote “Crashed The Wedding” and “Who’s David” with James Bourne, as well as the non bunnied “Air Hostess” and several other tracks on the A Present For Everyone album, a lot longer than we realise.
He and Matt Willis were both at Sylvia Young Theatre School (Tom had been in Oliver in the West End and, like Matt and a lot of other Sylvia’s alumni we’ve covered on Popular, done child acting work, and he also met someone who I’ll wait to discuss properly on the next couple of McBunnies) and Tom was actually in Busted for 24 hours before they decided to go ahead with them as a trio instead.
But Prestige Management, who put Busted together, kept him on for other projects, and where McFly began was actually at auditions for another band altogether, called V, a short lived and un-Googleable more “conventional” boyband who were also a support act on the same Busted arena tour they were. (Of their three top 10 singles, the second, “Hip To Hip”, which was a top 5 in August that year as a double-A-side with a cover of The Jacksons’ “Can You Feel It?”, was a tantalising glimpse into what Xenomania would have done with a boyband – like a slightly less aggressive Five. When I was writing for a short lived pop magazine about 10 years ago, I happened to encounter one of their members, Aaron, at Universal Music’s offices in Kensington, as I was there interviewing the non-bunnied Lawson for a cover feature, who he managed).
Danny Jones turned up to those auditions, singing an Oasis song with a guitar whilst everyone else was pirouetting and giving it Backstreet Boys. They promptly bonded and started writing and playing the songs that would eventually end up being those that were on their debut album, Room On The 3rd Floor, so called because of the third floor of the hotel, London’s InterContinental in Hyde Park, where they were installed to write songs together.
Harry Judd – who was at Uppingham Public School with Charlie from Busted – was then found as drummer from later auditions held through NME and The Stage, as was Dougie Poynter for their bassist (although in a very Nadine Coyle-esque manner, he’d lied about his age to get in, as he had just turned 15 at the time, and the minimum age was 16 or 17. Fortunately, it didn’t end with him being driven away sobbing in the back of a Renault Espace on camera, but his addition to the band did mean that by default, they were thus the youngest band to have a number one album, a record they still hold to this day).
I’ll be honest here when I say that I think why we will end up discussing McFly a lot more than we do Busted is simply because they had more heart to them. It all came from the heart – Matt Helders of Bunctic Bunnies actually memorably said as such in an interview one time. That their success and number ones came during a time of low sales pre-download era and that they were percieved by certain chart purists (including one who frequents the comments here) as hopeless is doing them a disservice, because the quality of their music and live show spoke loudly above all that. In many ways, in much the same way Westlife was a finessing of what Louis Walsh got right with Boyzone, so were McFly a fine tuning of everything that made Busted work but even better, some of their best stuff actually comes long after they stopped having number ones.
Because Charlie was in Busted, you did have a situation where only two thirds of them – Matt and James – actually had a genuine interest and love for the music they were making. That wasn’t the case with McFly – they all genuinely loved what they were doing (although that said, Harry did show brief signs of Charlie like behaviour and tendencies which, if you’ve read their book “Unsaid Things”, and/or watched their documentary they did for ITV in 2020, “All About Us”, is not that wide of the mark. Suffice to say it involved smuggled weed in a wash bag). And I’d say it’s only in the last 10 years that they’ve finally been recognised as they deserved to be; they played the Avalon stage at Glastonbury just last year and, as with Sugababes who were also on that same weekend, the tent had to be closed off as it was packed. I doubt anyone had that on their bingo card back in March 2004.
As for “Five Colours In Her Hair”, it’s definitely a song that could only ever have been their first single, all Beach Boys / Monkees hand claps, “Do do do do dos” and surf guitar riffs, and video aping The Brady Bunch Show. It’s actually written about Sooz, the multicoloured be-dreadlocked hippie played by Emily Corrie in Channel 4 teen drama As If, which is at once mildly hilarious and yet so quintessentially mid 00s British in energy. No other Channel 4 shows have, to my knowledge, directly influenced a single, let alone one that got to number one (although I am happy to be corrected).
As a fan of theirs, I’ll be very keenly speaking in their favour for the duration of their bunnies to come, so I’ll save additional thoughts for those and their wider journey as a band when we get to them. But a solid 8 for me this one.
It’s a UK “Sk8er Boi” (which went to #8). Manic mosh-bunny storytelling, played so fast you hardly notice the downer lyrics.
It’s sharp, punchy, and doesn’t overstay its welcome. You can get quite far just on energy and not making huge mistakes: it worked for Lonny Donegan in 1957, and it works for McFly now.
But it’s clever, too: written to be full of dials and knobs that can be adjusted for various markets. The UK version is pop rock, but the US version has an abrasive guitar tone that pushes it toward punk rock (of the 90s NOFX/Lagwagon variety). Improvise, adapt, overcome.
I’m sure guys like Weird Al and Richard Cheese hate songs like “Five Colors in Her Hair”, because they’re nearly impossible to parody. They’re stylistic chameleons. No matter what you do to them, it would probably sound basically correct.
Surf rock is virtually a pop music Konami cheat code at this point. We’ve heard Dick Dale-isms show up in at least 2 recent hits, “Sound of the Underground” and “Toxic”, and will surely hear them again.
(Come to think of it, even “Cumberland Gap” had that twangy minor pentatonic lead line, and it was BEFORE Dick Dale!)
Other than seeing their name mentioned, McFly are new to me. Even the “snotty pop punk” version escaped my attention. I’m inclined to agree with Gareth. A 4 from me. It’s all a little too obnoxious. Although If it didn’t have the “forget her” jaunt at the end, I might be more receptive.
The debut of McFly was built into the rollout of Busted’s second album. The B-side of “Crashed the Wedding” was a cursory run through “Build Me Up Buttercup” that, the sleeve announced, was a collaboration with this new group, whom were depicted in thumbnail size next to the track listing, their faces barely perceptible – a teaser trailer before the real trailer came along. But that false start aside, it was moments after Busted did “Who’s David?” on CD:UK that things began in earnest. James Bourne towered over one camera to introduce his friends with the inevitable legend: “In the words of Marty McFly, you guys might not be ready for this yet, but your kids are gonna love it.” The action then shifts over to another stage where the band who don’t even have anything in the shops debut “5 Colours in Her Hair”, a starting pistol in pop as absolute as anything to six-year-old me and my friends. So Bourne was right.
In the past I’ve compared it, in effect, to “(Theme from) The Monkees” (though this is necessarily hindered by Busted having already been in our affections), but everything about “5 Colours in Her Hair” is precision-tuned for instant, maximum effect. Except saying ‘precision-tuned’ makes laboured over, and if it was you’d never know from its very genial veneer. Back at “Going Underground”, Tom said you could potentially ask five people on that song’s most memorable moment and get wholly separate answers. I’d say the same applies here; there’s the surf riff, the frequently parallel do-do-dodo-do-DO, the hiccuping stop-start verses, the drawn-out melismas in the chorus (nayayayame) and the way each chorus draws its doors with the title. There’s even a breakdown-and-reboot before the final chorus (possibly inspired, likewise with the riff, by Electric Six’s “Gay Bar”, a hit the previous summer). The track is filled with incident and, like all bubblegum, all of it directs course straight to the pleasure centres.
Almost all of it, ahem. 5 Colours isn’t particularly widely-loved, as I appreciate the sound of teenage boys who, to be honest, can’t sing with the most endearing pitching, about a girl with “sexy attit-tude”, certainly isn’t for everyone. Had I not been six at the time, it might not have been for me. But McFly at this point were younger – ergo cleaner – than Busted. And where Busted’s work got a little uglier as they grew a little, McFly’s best work is still comfortably ahead of them, their attitudes maturer, their subjects obscurer, their music a lot more intriguing – though, crucially, seldom ever less fun. Some of it we even get to see on Popular (and I’ll have to figure out what I’ll say about it, as I’ve written about it three times before). But as sheer, exhilarated pop rushes go, though, this for me is a 9.
Also, if it isn’t clearly obvious from my comment, I’ve never stopped being a really big McFly fan – like ThePensmith I can’t imagine giving anything other very kind notices from hereon in, with maybe one or two partial exceptions – so I’m very pleased we’re at this point now; the artist I’d most been being waiting for since I came on board 🙂
I love mcfly there was my dream to meet them and their rock on i love them so much love Zoe
#4 – Wow – that’s something I never knew before, and you’ve mentioned a 00s C4 drama I used to find myself occasionally watching for no good reason – and of course, mainly for the awkward, hangdog misadventures of the character Sooz. I was way too old to be tuning in, and indeed I didn’t make a regular habit of it, but everyone who has ever been a teenager from the 80s onwards had a Sooz somewhere in or close to their social circle; all dour toughness, hair dye, piercings and public tears, getting sympathy, friendships and relationships at first and then ultimately alienating those closest to them with their moods. Teen serials have a tendency to overdo the “tragic teen” plots and make them one-dimensional tantrum throwers who are always close to playing with razor blades, whereas Sooz was downbeat and quite sympathetically and realistically written. You felt as if you knew her.
(Sorry, btw, if any aspects of my portrayal of the character above feel inaccurate. I genuinely haven’t watched the show since the early 00s and my memories of that period are starting to get rusty now).
I might have written a song about her myself if I’d been 16 and in a band, but I doubt it would have sounded much like this – the power pop bouyancy here feels very out of kilter. It’s not a terrible single, but its smoothness and chirpiness also make it sound like the power-pop Christian Rock bands who used to turn up at my school for a spot of bopping and preaching in the 80s (“you’ve had your fun, now it’s time to talk about Jesus!”) and for that reason alone I’m never going to be able to warm to it much. If you were there (man) you’ll know exactly what I mean.
Not that McFly really came into my orbit in 2004 – I was living in Australia at the time this was a UK hit, and the Aussies remained pretty immune to the group’s charms, although they did finally end having a big hit there in 2012 with “Love Is Easy”.
As If was a remarkable show, dismissed by some as Hollyoaks for teens (it aired in the weekend’s T4 strand) but ultimately the predecessor to the when-it’s-good-it’s-the-best-thing-on-tv-when-it’s-bad-it’s-unwatchable Skins. (Not over season 7 of Skins and never will be. Fire was an abomination.)
That Skins comparison holds both in the show’s structure (a per-episode focus on each of one of the show’s key characters, although with fewer characters and more episodes As If could revolve through them more), some of the characters (our heroine here, Suzanne “Sooz” Lee, is basically a 50/50 split between the enigmatic but broken Effy Stonem and the acerbic but lovestruck Naomi Campbell), and its recognition of the importance of a good soundtrack (likely the reason the show has never seen a DVD release and Channel 4 now barely acknowledges its existence, the licensing rights being too complicated). Its title tune, Touch And Go’s “Would You…?” was a number 3 hit back in 1998, while the show’s mood was set by a whole stream of trip-hop and obscure album tracks (did I really hear James’ Alaskan Pipeline at the end of one episode? With Alex and one of his boyfriends kissing? On a weekend morning?).
McFly’s “tribute” accidentally captures more of Sooz than one might think. The weirdo who went insane and couldn’t take the fame, had enough and shaved five colours off… Emily Corrie had one more meaningful TV role after As If, supporting in the transatlantic romance NY-LON (I watched most of it but it was largely pish), before becoming disillusioned with acting and joining the Navy. Last I heard she’d been done for drunk driving.
And if they’d recorded it during season 4 of As If (it released during the 3-4 gap), they’d have been disappointed to learn that Sooz’s dreadlocks were now entirely red. There’s a parallel universe where One Colour In Her Hair was a number one.
Despite the pedigree, the song grates. Busted annoyed me enough, and pound shop Busted is definitely not for me. And yet I have to give it a 7, if only for its nominal subject matter; its bounce and jangle may be as far from the complexities of Miss Lee as one can get, but it acknowledges her existence and that’s more than can be said for Channel 4.
Re11: NY-LON is indeed a fascinatingly terrible show, starring a pre-US The Office & pre-Parks and Rec Rashida Jones. I rewatched the first episode and a half a couple of years ago, I think because I was staying somewhere and the only thing I could get to work on the TV was All 4 (that’s my excuse, anyway). That one was also very soundtrack-led, as I recall.
(I have nowt to offer on McFly.)
But post-Rashida Jones appearing in a music video for a UK #1 single!
If McFly were supposed to be the emo East 17 to Busted’s Take That then it underlines the sharp decline in standards since the time when it was all fields around pop. Granted, “5 Colours In Her Hair” does show a more decisive and less braggart and whiny lunge towards power pop than Busted’s “You Are Not Worthy” routine – at least in its opening moments (as record, as video; the latter begins with a Monkees opening credits pastiche, but it doesn’t have the courage or imagination to run with that particular yellow rubber ring) when there is evidence of some real dynamism and snap about the music. Sadly, this early promise is rapidly deflated by the predictable, resentful Autotuned vocals and the tired return to that aspirin-necessitating middleground of ill-defined/produced not-quite-a-song, not-quite-rock, not-really-pop – if I were to apply a general covering adjective to 2004’s number ones it would have to be “middling” and McFly sound as though their wings are stuck in quick-dry cement.
#13 – yes, I really can’t find a way of describing that “middleground” 00s sound; sanded down rock music that says “It’s OK, you can think of this as pop if you want”. Music for people who think that if the guitars are too loud, that might be perceived as a little bit too dangerous, but nonetheless they should be in there somwhere for reasons of “authenticity” or cross-family appeal or something.
I usually can’t get on with it. If you try to carefully keep the sound within tight, sensitive lines, you’ll usually end up coming up with something that’s neither great pop nor fantastic rock. There’s been some wonderful records that mesh different styles, obviously, but it rarely sounds good when someone is obviously keeping one eye on the marketing and hedging their bets.
Dougie Poynter and Tom Fletcher went on to write a series of kids’ books called The Dinosaur That Pooped… The Bed/A Planet/The Past/Christmas etc. As you might imagine, at the zenith of each, the titular dinosaur (a T Rex, poptimistically enough) unleashes a luridly illustrated torrent of shod all over the shop. It is truly disgusting. My kids loved it.
Anyway in one of the books, there’s a couplet that goes “it ate the CDs which on reflection were far from the best of record collections” and clearly depicted among the subpar CDs it scoffs are Busted’s s/t and McFly’s Room On The Third Floor. Make of that what you will.
#15 – I bought my eldest nephew, who’s now 10, one of The Dinosaur That Pooped books when he was little – think it might have been “The Dinosaur That Pooped A Planet”. He thought it was hilarious.
I also incidentally met Tom about six years ago. Happy to report he was perfectly amiable. It was at Selfridges in London, when he was launching another of his children’s books, The Christmasaurus, and he signed and dedicated a copy for the same eldest niece and nephew. He did a musical of it about a year later that was on at Hammersmith Apollo for all of that December, Matt Willis and Harry Judd were in it as well I think?
This is where pop begins to lose me. I remember pretty much all of Busted’s singles but far fewer of McFly’s – when these guys emerged there was the clear feeling that they were aimed at a much younger target audience than me (I was 18 at this time) and I never paid them much attention. This track is alright I guess – harmless enough – but it felt like an even less edgy Busted, if that’s possible, so it didn’t hold a lot of interest for me. 5.
Other chart highlights: Atomic Kitten have come in for a lot of abuse on here – mostly justifiably – but one of their final singles, Someone Like Me, made the top 10 during McFly’s first week at the top and it’s a genuinely lovely two-minute piano ballad which is comfortably the best thing they ever did.
In the second week Finland’s The Rasmus had one of the biggest rock hits of the year with In The Shadows, which made #3. Good tune, but their UK success didn’t last – they only mustered up one more top 40 single and were unceremoniously bottled off at Reading later that summer, in the grand tradition.
I may possibly be the “chart purist” thepensmith refers to in #4. I did, in an earlier thread, make the observation that McFly would see some “chart falls that would have appalled Iron Maiden”. That point was more about how fans consume music; there are artists who have a large and hugely enthusiastic fanbase so that, when they release a new single, they’re straight out to the record shop to buy it. This would result in a high chart position the following Sunday (as it was then). However, as most fans then had it, the record would nosedive out of the top twenty (or possibly further) the following week. At one point it was heavy metal bands who were most prone to do this with Iron Maiden the most notorious. By 2004 it was more common for pop acts to do this and McFly would turn second week collapses into an art form.
But that is simply a matter of chart statistics (an industry in itself) and has nothing to do with the music. Iron Maiden had (and still have) an enthusiastic fanbase because they were a great band. McFly had (and still have) an enthusiastic fanbase because they were and remain a great band. I’ve seen them five times (albeit twice as McBusted) which with the exception of Manic Street Preachers is more than any act we’ll meet here.
But that lies in the future. 5 Colours In Her Hair was a two weeker, the only time McFly would ever achieve this (U2 and Oasis never would). It has to be said it’s far from my favourite McFly song but has all the hallmarks that would make them great. Put simply the influences are fairly obvious but there is a twist on them that make the overall sound McFly’s own.
#18 And of course the MSPs were another highly engaged fanbase whose singles had similarly frontloaded paths. And the band knew it, which is how we met “The Masses Against The Classes.” The tendency just had a particularly bad name now because Louis Walsh had weaponised it so magnificently with Westlife, who were sneered at in plenty of pop circles with varying levels of unfairness.
#1 Didn’t realise this song predated the naming of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope! Being reminded of that lens certainly makes me feel a bit less kindly disposed to it, but maybe that’s also being reminded of the Busted link specifically via the shared writing credit with “Who’s David?” in all its misogynistic ickery. This has a lot more energy than that, and as a carefully staged introduction to what McFly were all about, you can’t argue with it.
#4 “No other Channel 4 shows have, to my knowledge, directly influenced a single, let alone one that got to number one (although I am happy to be corrected.)”
Not the same thing as this, but we do meet a producer whose career foundation was the money he won on Deal or No Deal, so there is another bunny to come that exists in some way because of a mid-00s Channel 4 show!
The “Bad News” episodes/films from the C4 years of Comic Strip Presents certainly lead to a few singles, although none of them troubled the top spot of the charts. There must have been a dance hit that sampled dialogue from an Absolutely sketch or something, surely?
Despite theoretically being the right age for it (looks like it ran from when I was 14 until I when 17) I believe this is the first time I’ve ever heard of As If. But then I wasn’t one for teen dramas or sitcoms.
I can imagine myself liking McFly, even loving McFly, and honestly I expected this place to be more enthusiastic about them, but I was never quite convinced myself. Probably not an original comment, but it’s the voices that spoil the package for me, especially Dougie’s. At least I think it was his. The Duckula-esque transatlantic twang made a certain sense with the “concept” of Busted, but here they were even more jarring as an accompaniment to McFly’s vaguely British Invasion-style pop. I guess they all just learned to sing from the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game soundtracks. But I think my objections to their sound didn’t start to formulate until their next hit. This is probably my favourite of theirs, honestly. Surprisingly seeing it was only #32 for the year (especially when you see some of the stuff that came above it), it feels like it was bigger than that, or perhaps I have heard it more frequently over the years than some of the year’s other Number 1s.
McFly had a more high profile attempt at a US launch than Busted, with a co-starring role in the film Just My Luck with a peak of fame (at least at the time they were filming…) Lindsay Lohan and an on his way up Chris Pine. McFly played themselves and play their hits and some other songs, but in the film they’re reimagined as a struggling band managed by Pine and playing above an American bowling alley, or something like that. Unfortunately for them it wasn’t a hit at the Box Office (the start of poor Lindsay being more of a tabloid fixture than film star) and the Soundtrack didn’t seem to go anywhere. It’s where the naughtier version of 5 Colo(u)rs comes from I believe.
PAPAT, a worthy mention would be DJ Dee Kline’s ‘I Don’t Smoke’, #11 in 2000, which sampled Marcus Brigstocke on a sketch from the Ch.4 comedy ‘Barking’
(Re: 12 – Actually, I caught the end of this while channel hopping the other day [v. retro, I know] and my half-memory is that I didn’t mind this at all. A 6 from me, I reckon.)
#19 – that is very true! And by definition that also means Deal Or No Deal was, in a roundabout way, responsible for the career of another bunny holder who won money on the show (albeit not as much as the bunny holder you’re referring to did) and then did rather well on another show.
And my previous comment also overlooked the fact that we had Paul Oakenfold’s theme from “Big Brother” (#4 in September 2000) and then, on a lesser note, Xenomania backed girl group with guitars Frank, off another T4 show, Totally Frank (“I’m Not Shy”, #40 in August 2006).