For the summer of 2006, when
Don't Stop Me Now/Please Please - McFly
was Number 1 for a week, I will be comparing McFly to the Beatles, and not entirely as a joke.
McFly were seen as Busted Mark 2, a new and improved Busted, reasonably enough, since Tom Fletcher was almost in Busted, wrote songs for them, and they were under the same management.
Busted annoyed me, and rock people, on several levels. It was weird visually - three guitars, where's the drummer? Their songs were catchy but annoying, puerile, with extra transatlantic accents and gurning.
McFly worked better for the casual observer. They were a classic four-piece, they didn't mug quite so much, their songs, though also coming from a pop-punk direction, allowed for more of a 60s feel
Tom Fletcher met Danny Jones when the latter was auditioning for a boyband which he thought played its own instruments but didn't. In some ways, they were as organic as plenty of other acts. They went their own way from there. Harry Judd and Dougie Poynter saw ads in Melody Maker. Jones, in particular, had/has a non-boyband voice - it made their songs sound more grown up than a lot of other stuff, though they still dealt in teen melodrama. But they were neat songs - I always liked Obviously and All About You.
They had seven UK Number 1s pretty quickly, and something like 15 consecutive top 10s (though they never broke the USA). They are one of the most successful chart-orientated, teen-orientated conventional UK rock bands that I can think of since ... well, the Beatles.
Could McFly have been the Beatles? Were McFly at all like the Beatles? The thing about the Beadles was (said in Macca voice ...) they were just a crackin' liddle blues band, ya know? No, that's not it. The thing about the Beatles was the incredible luck of it - the combination of two then three heroic songwriters, four great players, great singers, and then, to top it all, four personalities people truly fell in love with and are still in love with.
And what of McFly - perhaps after several Number 1s and winning the hearts of the teenagers all over the nation and earning the respect of some of the snobbier fans, they could have had a Rubber Soul and a Revolver - really made people go, holy shit, they're good ... but, no that didn't happen. Their musical star gently faded .... but ... one can still see McFly as a pretty remarkable happenstance of , for want of a better term, polymathic affability. Seriously, over the last decade +, the four McFlys have just been constantly on our screens being good at stuff. Do the dancing, win the dancing, do the jnugle, win the jungle, do the children's books, sell in droves, celebrity football - great at that, celebrity cricket - great at that. McFly will probably be remembered as the ultimate reality TV good guys.
For what it's worth, this single's not good - Please Please is overly brattish but unmemorable punk-pop, more like Busted than anything else, and Don't Stop Me Now, is, well, a cover of the Queen, which was probably fun to do but not great to listen to. But, you know, that Queen song is a bit special. Even when I went off Queen in a big way, I was still impressed and thrilled by the welly Freddie gives this one. So McFly sound like children by comparison.
There was some pretty good Number 1s in the latter half of 2006. These years are, to me, a slightly surprising golden age. Here we have Maneater, Hip Don't Lie, Deja Vu,, SexyBack, I Don't Feel Like Dancing, America by Razorlight, Black Parade, Smile by Lily Allen, Patience, Take Thar's greatest song, in my opinion - also Crazy by Gnarls Barkley earlier in the year, which i suppose is a classic, though I wouldn't listen to it now if you paid me.
I was going to say I remember nothing about the summer of 2006, but actually I've pieced it together, and it's quite an interesting little slither of time.
I'd started this here job I still have early in the year, shortly after moving into a flat in Clapham South where I'd be for four years (probably my favourite London flat). I was running a lot of quizzes, travelling a lot, doing a couple per week, about 150 over my first couple of years. I was getting to grips with the job, was really keen to do well. Didn't have time for that much else, but was able to relax a little over the summer.
I was still not on facebook. Not many were. It took off in the UK in 2007, I think. I had bought my first iPod in around April 2006. Revolutionary. In fact, that's when I first got broadband, really when I first got online in a significant way.
It was the summer of the Football World Cup in Germany, and I ran World Cup quizzes, but also watched lots of games. It was a hot summer. Still so much fun and wonder in a World Cup summer back then. Especially as we didn't have Sky Sports. It still felt special.
Then Benicassim, around the time of my birthday, for the second time - I recall I massively enjoyed it, a) cos I was getting the hang of festivals b) solid fun mid-2000s headliners - Strokes, Franz Ferdinand, Pixies, Madness, Morrissey, Walkmen etc c) i did a lot of dancing, and I think that's the first time I realised that dancing all the time was really really fun. Only took till I was 28 ...
That was the summer before my first DVT, but, you know what, I remember on the flight back looking at my ankle after the days of alcoholic disrepair, and thinking it looked weirdly swollen. Jesus, only just remembered rhat. How funny. So, here I am 28, just about to get a bit older.
Oh, and, I've just spotted, the key fact from the week of my birthday in 2006 - it was the last ever weekly Top of the Pops.
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