Busted’s first chart-topper, ‘You Said No’, burst a nostalgic bubble for me by being fairly lightweight, and pretty irritating.

Crashed the Wedding, by Busted (their 2^nd of four #1s)

1 week, 16^th – 23^rd November 2003

But here’s the lead-single from their second album, and this is a little more like the Busted that I remember. Silly, peppy, catchy. Not as snotty or whiny as their earlier #1, perhaps because here they get the girl in the end. True love lasts forever, And now we’re back together, You might as well forget her, And walk away… She’s glad I crashed the wedding.

It’s still lightweight – I’ll accept that Busted were generally quite lightweight – but it zips along, has a brilliantly jarring final chord, and some funny lines (I like the idea that the girl sacks off the nuptials because she didn’t want a silly second name). It does also have some clunkier lines, and rhymes that are forced together with all the willingness of opposing magnets: He’s always hated me, Because I never got a J.O.B…

But that, presumably intentional, dumbness was part of Busted’s teenage charm. The utter chaos of the video is an even greater glimpse into why Busted were, for a year or so, Britain’s biggest boyband. It’s based on the wedding scene from ‘The Graduate’, and features food-fights, spanking, and plenty of drag. Gone are Westlife’s stools, and Blue’s tight dance routines. Even when more traditional boybands returned in the early 2010s, a lot of what Busted brought to the party remained. You could easily see One Direction starring in a (slightly more kid friendly) version of this video.

Having said that, I’m still not enjoying Busted as much as I did back in 2003. This may well be down to now being miserably middle-aged, but it might also be down to the fact that McFly were on their way to overtake Busted as Britain’s bigger (and musically more accomplished) pop-punkers. Foreshadowing this is the fact that McFly’s Tom Fletcher co-wrote ‘Crashed the Wedding’, and Harry Judd played drums in the video.