17 March 2005
If, like me, you sometimes have trouble telling your McFlys from your Busteds, that’s not necessarily a failing on your part. Tom Fletcher, lead singer of McFly, had auditioned for Busted and was still involved with them behind the scenes when McFly were formed. The two bands remained close personally. Most pertinently, in 2013 they joined forces for a concert tour as a supergroup called McBusted, which really is just trolling us McFly-Busted confusers. Anyway, all you need to remember is that ‘Year 3000’ is Busted; the rest isn’t so important.
‘All About You’ / ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ is the first of two 2005 UK Comic Relief singles, each with a video full of famous faces from British TV, that topped the charts in Ireland but (Graham Norton video cameo aside) without any notable Irish angle, promotion or involvement. This tells us something about the weight of British light entertainment on the Irish pop-cultural marketplace – and on Saint Patrick’s Day 2005 and all! On which point, Fletcher has said he wrote ‘All About You’ all about a certain Giovanna Falcone, who became Giovanna Fletcher and is now a successful British media personality in her own right, including as series winner of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! in the pandemic times of 2020. The song, though, is a fairly ordinary acoustic uptempo pop ballad with the good fortune to be able to afford an orchestra for added polish and feels. Also, to my ears that chorus sounds heavily indebted to ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ by the Beach Boys. Not that I’m saying Giovanna pitched low here, but if your future husband offers you this and you’re still happily married all these years later, then it must be love.
Meanwhile, ‘You’ve Got A Friend’ is indeed a cover of the Carole King classic. McFly’s version follows the folksier James Taylor reading, again keeping this as ordinary as possible, again buying in feels with an orchestra and especially its lead flautist. All in all, this benign, bland single getting to number one in Ireland is proof we Irish are indeed capable of showing our own charity to the less well off, namely British teen-punk boy bands. Let’s see how far our charity extends to the very next Irish number one – another 2005 UK Comic Relief record.
