mcfly

1008. ‘All About You’ / ‘You’ve Got a Friend’, by McFly

/ UK #1s blog / 8 Comments

And so we arrive at the ultimate love song. The song I will have played at my wedding…

All About You / You’ve Got a Friend, by McFly (their 3rd of seven #1s)

1 week, from 13th – 20th March 2005

Two slight caveats here: you must always allow me room for hyperbole when it comes to McFly, and I have little-to-no plans to ever get married. But still, I do think that ‘All About You’ is a lovely song.

First we have to skip the cheesy harps and strings intro, and imagine they’re being delivered with a knowing wink. Skip straight to the harmonies in the first chorus, and the pretty verses, with their timeless melodies. It is hard to write timeless, hard to write a song that sounds like it might always have existed.

The acoustic guitar solo is more of its time – though that ‘time’ would be a soft-rock song from the eighties – and the second bridge and chorus, when the band finally come in, is pure power-pop. Okay the lyrics are trite – Dancing on the kitchen tiles, Yes you made my life worthwhile, So I told you with a smile… – but eighteen year olds can get away with trite.

McFly songs provide a real chicken vs egg scenario for me. Do I blindly argue their brilliance because I think McFly are a truly underrated band; or are songs like ‘All About You’ truly great and deserve to have me arguing for them? I’ve been a McFly fan for so long now that I can’t judge this clearly.

Actually that’s a lie. The other side of this double-‘A’ will give me a chance to appraise McFly impartially. Since this was the official Red Nose Day single for 2005, the suits presumably needed a song with more of a message (and a music video in which the band could run around with lots of Ugandan orphans…) So they chose Carole King’s classic ‘You’ve Got a Friend’.

It is on the one hand completely unnecessary. It does not improve in any way on King’s original, or on James Taylor’s definitive cover. And I really don’t like all the woodwind. (See, I can write something bad about McFly.) But Tom’s voice sounds nice on the first verse. Plus, I sang this in my primary school choir, and it really does have one of the most heart-string tugging choruses in all of pop history.

The flutes, and the full-blown orchestra in the background of ‘All About You’, bring up one of the reasons why McFly’s second album, ‘Wonderland’, is my least favourite. They threw the kitchen sink at it, production-wise, with string sections and three-part rock operas about teen suicide. I think it was an attempt to prove themselves, to show that they weren’t just a boyband; but it led to bloat, and some boringly worthy music. By their third album, they seemed to have shaken that monkey off their back, and returned to making great pop-rock.

As this was the official Red Nose Day single, it opened with McFly’s highest ever weekly sale. It also meant this record didn’t have the massive second week collapse that they would become synonymous with. And yet, ‘All About You’ was still eclipsed by the unofficial Red Nose Day single, which brought about one of the biggest, and unlikeliest, hits of the entire decade, and which is up next.

Just the audio…

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982. ‘Obviously’, by McFly

/ UK #1s blog / 7 Comments

In my post on ‘5 Colours in Her Hair’, I called it the perfect song for McFly to launch themselves with. Their second single, then, was the perfect song for McFly to announce that they were here to stay.

Obviously, by McFly (their 2nd of seven #1s)

1 week, 27th June – 4th July 2004

‘5 Colours in Her Hair’ was largely Busted under a different name, with a big nod towards the same pop punk sound; though with a much more melodic, classic rock influence. For ‘Obviously’ they keep the melodies strong, but this is much more of an understated record, balanced somewhere between power and jangle pop.

Can a song be instant, yet understated? If so, then this is that song. This made me a McFly fan, and started me on the path of buying every album, seeing them live three times, and buying each copy of Attitude magazine in which they shamelessly gay-baited us on the cover. It’s got a hell of a chorus, especially when Danny and Tom’s voices soar and intertwine towards the climax.

This is also a cut above Busted in terms of the lyrics, in which McFly prove that teenage boys can write songs about not getting the girl without sounding like spoiled toddlers. They’re in love with a girl, but have quickly come to the realisation that they aren’t good enough for her… Cause obviously, She’s out of my league, I’m wasting my time ‘cause she’ll never be mine…

The rest of the lyrics are either quite funny: the girl’s boyfriend is twenty-three, He’s in the Marines, He’d kill me… Or they’re endearingly clunky: I think the only reason they chose to run off to LA in the second verse is because it rhymes with that’s where I’ll stay… Their debut album, ‘Room on the 3rd Floor’ is full of similarly teenage lyrics, and is an LP I’ll always listen to fondly.

The one thing I’d change about this are the strings, which add strangely grand flourishes that a song this simple doesn’t need. Maybe they were worried the song was too subtle after 5CIHH, and wanted some more oomph, but it’s a bit much. In fact, that’s one of my few complaints with early McFly – an over-egging of the pudding in an attempt to prove themselves as a ‘proper’ band. It was worst on their second album, from which they’ll be scoring two more #1s soon enough.

977. ‘5 Colours in Her Hair’, by McFly

/ UK #1s blog / 3 Comments

We knew it all along. Busted were just the warm-up for the decade’s finest pop-punk, not-quite-a-boyband: McFly.

5 Colours in Her Hair, by McFly (their 1st of seven #1s)

2 weeks, 4th – 18th April 2004

I love McFly. I think they produced some of 21st century Britain’s finest pop songs. I have seen them live three times. I’ll admit right now, off the bat, that I will struggle to give an unbiased critique of any of their seven chart-toppers. But, having said that, ‘5 Colours in Her Hair’ is pretty far down my list of best McFly singles, let alone my list of best McFly tracks (unlike most pop groups, McFly’s albums weren’t full of filler).

At the same time, this song was probably the best way to launch the band: a breakneck, surf-rock track with a stupidly catchy doo-doo-doodoo-doo hook, and lyrics about a loner with a sexy attitude (inspired by the dreadlocked Susan Lee from Channel 4 drama ‘As If’). This was the McFly manifesto for most of their first three albums, a period that would produce those seven #1s, as well as an unbroken run of fifteen Top 10 hits.

It’s also got that cheeky chappy energy we saw with Busted’s ‘Crashed the Wedding’ and, to a lesser extent, Sam and Mark. The video is a zany Monkees/Beach Boys/Beatles pastiche, and the I’d like to phone her ‘cause she puts me in the mood… is nicely naughty. The main thing that has never sat well with me is the Everybody wants to know her na-ee-a-ee-a-ee-ame hook, which I always thought was annoying and forced.

Having called them pop-punk in the intro, I’m going to retract that claim. Busted were more Blink-182, pop-punk adjacent. McFly had a far wider ranging sound, paying unapologetic homage to British pop and rock from the ‘60s and ‘70s, while Tom Fletcher and Danny Jones were the more talented songwriters (though Busted’s James Bourne, to give him his due, did co-write this record). The B-side to ‘5 Colours in Her Hair’ was a cover of the Kinks’ ‘Lola’, with Busted, while the first time I saw McFly live they announced that they were going to play a new song they had ‘been working on backstage’, before launching into ‘She Loves You’.

I might go as far as to name ‘5 Colours in Her Hair’ my 6th favourite of McFly’s seven number ones. Though it would rise up the rankings if we include the heavier version that they re-recorded for the US release of their debut album. That’s the version I would choose to revisit these days. It should be noted too, that this song managed two weeks at number one, an impressive feat given how later McFly singles tended to collapse in their second week of release.

964. ‘Crashed the Wedding’, by Busted

/ UK #1s blog / 2 Comments

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.