Interests:My interests include: Jesus, talking online and offline,ANIMALS,I guess guys, school,and family, oh and we cant forget the Jonas Brothers. Expertise:TALKING!!! or ANIMALS!!! Occupation:Student Industry:school
McFly are the pop ambassadors you can be proud of. With an astonishing run of Number Ones, awards and sold-out arena dates under their low-riding belts they’re one of the few pop success stories of the last few years. It’s not hard to hear why on their new album ‘Wonderland’, which stakes out new ground with the band’s evolving sound. Formed three years ago by founding members Tom Fletcher (guitar/vocals) and Danny Jones (guitar/vocals) and later joined by Harry Judd (drums) and Dougie Poynter (bass) following an ad in the NME, McFly are set to compound their reputation as one of the UK’s brightest and most successful new bands.
New single ‘I’ll Be Okay’ will please fans old, new and soon-to-be. From its opening bars (reminiscent of Coldplay or early U2), through the upbeat verse, irresistibly raucous chorus, organ-fuelled middle eight and triumphant final furlong the song demands your attention.
McFly are back, then, and the ‘Wonderland’ album looks set to make this second chapter of the McFly story even more exciting than the first. Kicking off their career like a rocket last March, ‘Five Colours In Her Hair’ topped the charts for two weeks, and was followed by ‘Obviously’, which also shot straight to Number One. By July the band had played for 70,000 people at Buckingham Palace, and become the youngest ever group to score a Number One with their debut album (‘Room On The Third Floor’). In October the band headed out on their first headline tour of the UK, which found them bringing sold out audiences to their knees all around the UK; McFly ended 2004 by releasing another Top 5 single (‘Room On The Third Floor’) and scooping no less than 5 gongs at the Smash Hits awards.
2005 started off with a bang as the lads won Best Pop Act at the Brits, less than a year after the release of their first single. By March McFly had already scored another Number One single in the shape of ‘All About You’, which was 2005’s official Comic Relief single. “We hadn’t intended to release a new single until the second album was ready,” Harry explains, “but when we got the call from Richard Curtis we were round the Comic Relief offices like a shot.” In January, a trip to Uganda brought home to the band the extreme poverty affecting millions around the world, but it also showed the lads how Comic Relief money had changed thousands of lives for the better, and led to the band’s support for the Make Poverty History campaign and a headlining slot at the Live 8 concert in Japan, after which the lads jetted back to the UK for another slot at the show at the pre-G8 summit gig in Edinburgh.
‘All About You’ gives a clear hint of how the band’s second album sounds – delving into a more mature sound without ever losing sight of the pop sensibility that informed the group’s signature sound. ‘Wonderland’ was written in its entirety by various combinations of Tom, Dougie, Harry and Danny, with the exception of the upbeat ‘I’ve Got You’, for which veteran songwriter Graham Gouldman (10CC, ask your dad) came on board, and the wistful ‘Memory Lane’, which was written a few years ago with James Bourne and quite rightly deemed too good to stay shut in a cupboard until the end of time. ‘Wonderland’ is buzzing with the band’s new influences. “Since the first album, The Who have shot to the top of my iPod’s most played playlist,” Tom says, “and then there’s Green Day, who I think are one of the most perfect modern rock groups around. There’s even a hint of Elton John, whose music I got into while we were writing the album.”
Though this album follows hot on the heels of ‘Room On The Third Floor’, the band have also been keen to ensure that it didn’t simply become a rush job. “We all felt it was important to challenge ourselves as a band, musically and creatively,” Danny explains. “What we’ve ended up with is something quite original, with our own vibe going on.” It’s not always the vibe you might expect. ‘The Ballad Of Paul K’ is a surprisingly moving meditation on growing old and hitting a mid-life crisis, inspired in part by the experiences of some of the lads’ own fathers. “It’s about the best years of your life being over,” Tom explains, “and not being able to tell your kids that your life’s falling apart.” Lines like “grey hairs left in the shower, tattoos fade by the hour” showcase an increasing subtlety in McFly’s lyric-writing and reflect the band’s own awareness that sometimes there’s more to life than boys fancying girls and girls not fancying boys. (Paul K, in case you’re wondering, is a boy Dougie went to school with. “He doesn’t know we’ve written a song about him,” Dougie shrugs. “I suppose he’s about to find out.”) Another song, the tragic tale ‘She Falls Asleep’, finds Tom backed by piano and orchestra and sounds like a cross between ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and John Williams’ classic ET theme. “It’s about a girl calling her best friend on the phone, not able to cope with the troubles she’s going through at home,” Tom explains. “He races round to her house, but by the time he gets there she’s dead.”
Without going all beardy or turning into Pink Floyd, ‘Wonderland’ finds McFly finding a new maturity in their songwriting. Explains Tom: “It would be easy to rely on gimmicks all the time. There were loads of leftover songs from the first album we could have just stuck onto the second one for an easy life – but we weren’t interested in ‘Five Colours…’ part two.” By way of illustration Dougie another new song – ‘Too Close For Comfort’ – which he describes as “the darkest song we’ve ever done”. The recent addition of a new piano in the McFly house and a home studio in Danny’s room have thrown these sessions into a whole new perspective for the band, as did the early studio sessions in New Orleans, where the band were shooting their scenes for next Spring’s big teen flick Just My Luck.
The Lindsay Lohan movie – which will feature several more new McFly songs – required a huge amount of acting ability from the lads, given that they play four guys called Dougie (Dougie), Danny (Danny), Harry (Harry) and Tom (Tom), collectively known as McFly. “Making a film was never in the McFly gameplan,” Tom admits, “but you’d be mad to turn down the chance to hang out with Lindsay Lohan and get paid for it.” It’s good to see that some things never change…
With excitement building around that film, ‘I’ll Be Ok’ and ‘Wonderland’ dropping in August and September, and the lads’ first headline arena tour kicking off before Christmas, 2005 is set to be McFly’s year. Just wait until you see what they’ve got planned for 2006…
