Skip to main content

The return of McFly: will the cheeky pop-punkers finally get their due?

Despite being dismissed as teenage girl fodder, the millennial outfit were influential for a generation of bands

The year is 2005, combat trousers inexplicably have tassels and chart music is groaning under the weight of reality TV winners and Crazy Frog. Tweens across the country are crying in front of Newsround because Busted have split, and the last hope of respite from the onslaught of Fame Academies and Pop Idols lies solely at the oversized trainers of a new musical outfit: McFly.

For those who had outgrown S Club 7 or couldn’t relate to Blue, there was a creeping adolescent need for something that felt “real”. The scorn towards “key change, stool rise” boybands was beginning to set in, but fully fledged indie rock bands still felt a way off, impenetrable in their “serious” music press and 16+ gigs. Busted proteges McFly provided a credible halfway house: they wrote their own songs, they played their own instruments, they were funny and youthful and cool. Behind every perky All About You or Star Girl, there was a Too Close for Comfort or Not Alone, hinting at darker emotional places. To my young millennial ears, they were trailblazers, putting a hefty dose of personality back into pop.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2TDHCzq
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Thirty Years of Adonis film review: sexually explicit gay drama mixes porn and pomposity

1/5 stars The line between soft-core porn and pompous art-house cinema grows ever finer in the seventh feature by writer, director and producer Danny Cheng Wan-cheung, also known as Scud. Intended as a philosophical statement about the meaninglessness of life, Thirty Years of Adonis instead comes across as a badly misjudged piece of sensationalist filmmaking. God’s Own Country review: gay love story set in the Yorkshire countryside The film revolves around aspiring gay actor Adonis Yang... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2qgQkop
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more