Busted
LLWhen: 20th September 2023
Location: OVO Hydro
Busted are the Essex trio who scored numerous hits with their trademark energetic pop punk. Coming to Glasgow’s OVO Hydro on 20th September 2023.
Few bands have as radically different first and second chapters as Southend trio Busted. Longtime friends Charlie Simpson, Matt Willis and James Bourne initially set about highlighting the pop in pop punk. Scoring a string of cheeky hits in the early 00s. By the time they’d split and reformed, the band had matured and evolved into a slick 80s-influenced band with more in common with Bruce Hornsby than blink-182.
The trio formed in the Essex coastal town in 2000. Landing chart success with singles ‘What I Go To School For’, ‘The Year 3000’, ‘Sleeping With The Light On’ and ‘You Said No’, all taken from their self-titled debut album. Their 2003 follow-up A Present For Everyone yielded three No.1 hits and cemented the band’s popularity.
However, the band’s meteoric rise was abruptly halted when frontman Charlie Simpson left the band in 2005 to focus on his new harder-edged group Fightstar. Matt Willis and James Bourne put Busted on ice indefinitely and went in search of their own solo projects. Willis entered and won reality show I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here and discovered an aptitude for acting, including an appearance in celebrated West End chiller 2:22 A Ghost Story.
Willis and Bourne were brought back together in 2013 when the band’s successors in cheerfully cheeky pop punk, McFly, proposed a collaboration. They signed up and the two bands toured together as McBusted, discovering that Busted’s audience may have grown up in their absence but had lost none of their love for the band. Simpson was entreated to return and agreed, the reunion cemented in 2016 with the album Night Driver, a synth-driven album with an 80s sheen produced by John Fields (Jimmy Eat World, Jonas Brothers).
Busted’s new direction
Despite the radical departure, Busted’s new direction was well received. That didn’t stop the band from re-embracing their former selves on 2019’s Half Way There, a return to the caffeinated pop punk of their first two records. In 2023, Simpson followed bandmate Willis into reality TV when he won ITV’s mystery singer series The Masked Singer.
Busted are celebrating their 20th anniversary in style in 2023, with plans announced for a major UK arena tour as well as a brand new album of re-worked classic hits.
