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The First Band That I Fell in Love With
The nineties, an era of Pogs, jelly shoes and a movie trilogy featuring utterly realistic dinosaurs terrifying the public. Meanwhile the music scene seemed a little drab; Backstreet Boys, Westlife , Boyzone and Take That all seemed to sing the same song, but perhaps with a slightly different floppy hairstyle or a crazy new key change. The Millennium slowly crept in, but the radio stations still seemed to repeatedly play tracks by boy bands (and another one, and another one, and another one).
Then in 2002 everything changed with three names: James, Matt and Charlie. You could say they literally Busted onto the music scene! Okay, so the pun might be a bit painful, but who cares – they certainly wouldn’t have! Oh no, to my little 9 year old self this crazy new band was the embodiment of rebellious rock ‘n’ roll.
As you might have guessed the first ever band I truly fell in love with was Busted. Yes, everything about them was truly perfect, from the hilarious spoof-tastic music videos to crazy ‘Punk’ haircuts and prophetic lyrics such as ‘He said ‘I’ve been to the Year 3000 not much has changed but they live underwater’.
Not even something as huge as the whole of human civilization suddenly becoming aquatic could phase Busted, they were way too cool. I still remember every word to the Year 3000 thanks to 5 hours of going over the Lyrics in Top of the Pops magazine. I can tell you it has served me very well in any Singstar or karaoke parties.
Then there were the tons of other fantastic tunes such as the slightly more sophisticated ‘Sleeping with the Light On’ with its mellow guitar background and the cheeky ditty ‘That’s What I go To School For’, about a school boy crush on a teacher. The lyrics to ‘What I Go to School For’ were so risqué St Nick Jonas and his fellow brothers felt the need to change them when they re-released the song in 2006. Also, lucky old Miss McKenzie suddenly lost over ten years and became a senior high-school student.
Many a school break was spent sitting in a circle with my friends reading Smash Hits or Top of the Pops magazine trying to glean every little bit of information about the band from their latest interview. Then I would very carefully extract the posters from the magazine with a pair of scissors, so scared I might accidentally damage a depiction of my idols.
However all of this lovely Busted bliss came to a stark end in 2005 when Charlie Simpson left the band and within two weeks Busted was no more. I was completely devastated – more than heartbroken. I was only later consoled by the music of a certain band called Mcfly, who until then I had just seen as ‘those people trying to be like Busted but they’ll never be like them’.
After leaving the band Charlie went on to play more grown up music in the alt-rock band Fightstar; he recently released his own solo album Young Pilgrim. Matt released several solo tracks and did a spot of reality TV which in turn crowned him King of the Jungle. Currently Matt is doing presenting work for E!. James who is also pursuing his own solo career went on to write songs for the Jonas Brothers and Mcfly.
So even though Busted are no more, the band members are still out there doing their own thing. However I never saw Busted live, so with my fingers crossed they’ll live up to the promise they made in the song Year 3000, that it will indeed go multi-platinum and I will definitely buy their seventh album…
Here’s a Busted classic: