It’s difficult to overstate the scale of Busted’s success at the start of the millennium. The effervescent pop-punk trio knocked out two triple-platinum albums in a little over 12 months and sold out 11 nights at Wembley Arena in 2004 before singer Charlie Simpson broke hundreds of thousands of adolescent hearts and split the band, declaring himself bored with the strictures of playing teen pop.
Simpson spent the following decade playing heartfelt but essentially unremarkable post-grunge rock in Fightstar while bandmates James Bourne and Matt Willis pursued solo careers. Willis, in particular, reinvented himself as an actor, TV presenter and reality-show regular, winning the 2006 series of I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!
Even as Bourne and Willis toured the UK’s arenas three years ago with former members of fellow boyband McFly in the hybrid band McBusted, Simpson wasted no opportunity to reconfirm that he had no interest whatsoever in rejoining Busted. There were thus many cynically raised eyebrows last year as the three original members rematerialised with their third album, Night Driver.
If Busted Mk I live resembled a charged musical take on the Inbetweeners, Mk II is a far more measured affair. As before, wall-to-wall screaming greets their arrival, but Simpson, Bourne and Willis now begin the evening not with slashed guitar riffs and scissor jumps but by remaining studiously static behind three sets of keyboards.
Night Driver was a far less successful album commercially than its two predecessors, but that does not deter Busted from playing most of it tonight. It’s heavy going in parts, with the trio’s former guitar-driven angst anthems and infectious exuberance now replaced by cloying, synth-heavy 80s-style soft rock. The mawkish Thinking of You and strained album title track have distinct trace elements of Phil Collins and Hall & Oates respectively.
The crowd – notably more sartorially conventional than first time around, when Busted gigs were a hormonal tsunami of pigtails and ironically accessorised school uniforms – politely tolerates the new stuff, but it’s the oldies that get the place bouncing. Despite being preternaturally photogenic, Busted always wrote their own material and bridled at being dismissed as a mere boyband, and the craftsmanship behind the adrenaline rush of the Green Day-like Crashed the Wedding goes some way towards explaining why Simpson pined for credibility amid the screaming.
The giddy Year 3000 and a hyperventilating encore romp through 2002 debut single What I Go to School For are neat, funny, melodic power-pop gems, but instead the trio choose to close a slick evening with a soporific new ballad, Those Days Are Gone, whose husky faux-sincerity and grisly shifts into white funk summon the grim spectre of Sting. It may be a further valiant attempt to show us their much vaunted maturity, but it only serves to emphasise that Busted were a lot more fun before they grew up.
• At the Cliffs Pavilion, Southend, 6 February. Box office: 01702 351135. Then touring.
