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 2nd of four #1s)
1 week, 16th – 23rd 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.
The UK Number Ones Blog 
It’s slightly better than their first one. I’ll give them that. This pop punk sound for me is fine in small doses, but I remember even in the late-2000s people were getting sick of it. It seems to have come back around now people (millennials and older Gen Z) are getting nostalgic for it and younger Gen Z kids who weren’t even born or were babies when this sound was big are rediscovering these pop punk/emo pop bands.
Definitely agree these pop punk/emo pop and Disney pop rock bands for a time replaced the boy bands.
I find it quite interesting that on a pure pop charts level, though pop punk was very popular in the US (maybe even more popular than grunge in terms of singles at least, grunge definitely outsold pop punk album wise), it seems to have been even more popular in the UK. Pretty much all the 2000s US big emo pop/pop punk bands have a Top 40 hit in the UK, and even your homegrown bands are having success.