BUSTED OFFICIAL

James`s story

I´ve had a happy life – and really lucky life, growing up in a loving, stable family with parents who wanted

To see me excel in whichever career path I chose. But just before Busted happened, I experienceed my first real-life dilemma.

Perhaps it was my independence that got me into trouble, but when I was 17 it suddenly sttruck me that I had nothing. I`d ditched my girlfriend over a series of petty fights, I`d quit my college course in music technology and I was pinning everything on a band that would probably never even get off the ground. I had a terrible, sinking feeling that within months I`d be going back to college with my tail between my legs, begging to be allowed back in. All my eggs were in one really filmsy basket-

I felt like I`d totally lost control of my life 

And one night, when my anxiety became too much to bear, I sat down with my mum and we tried to find the answers to my problems. It had just gone 11 p.m. and i asked my mum, ´Am I stupid to dream that this band is going to take off?` She looked at me, and grasped my hand, and answered, ´It`ll happen, James. You`ll make it happen.`

My  determination is something I`ve definitely inherited from my dad, Peter. He`s a self-made man, and built up a really successful import and export business from humble beginnings selling knock-off  Ralph Lauren shirts to factory workers out of the back of his car. He`d approach any industry as long as he could see a business opportunity to be had – whether it was manufacturing diving equipment or selling the neon lights they`ve got beaming out over Piccadilly Circus in London. As his business grew, he`d often be away from home for weeks on end, but my mum, Maria, would keepme and my brothers and sister entertained back at home. She`d originally met my dad through matual friends when they were both 15 and, when they decided to start a family, I was their first kid. 3 more followed – Nick, who`s 18 months younger than me, then Melissa, who`s 13 and Chris – he played or neighbour in the ´Year 3000` video and of all my siblinngs he`s the one I`m most similar too.

We travelled a lot when I was young – my favourite ever holiday was to Disneyworld in Florida – but my first ever memories are of a strange house I lived in on Burgess Road in Southend. It was quite a small, terraced house which I`ve been able to describe in some detail to my parents in spite of the fact that we moved out when I was about 10 months old – something they find a little freaky. My mum says that

When I was still in my pushchair I developed an annoying habit of bursting into song for no reason at all,

And that there was no way of shutting me up! We moved again whan I was 11, to the house I spent the rest of my time in – it`s a comfortable house and i wa given the top floor to share with Nick. He`s so different from me (we literally have nothing in common!) that we were the perfect floor-mates and we got on really well. We still do.

Ther wasn`t much in the way of music in my house when I was growing up, so when I first got into music it was almost by accident. As a  6-year old i was totally obsessed with a skating place called Rollercity near my house. I didn`t have in-line skates, just these dreadful, four-wheeled rollerboots, but I loved Rollercity and was down there every Wednesday night and Saturday morning. One day I noticed this guy there in a T-shirt I really liked and he told me that the character on the front was someone called Bart Simpson. I`ve got quite an obsessive, inquisitive nature, si from the point when I noticed that T-shirt it wasn`t long before I`d bought a record Bart Simpson made in the early `90s, called ´Do The Bartman`. One line in that song, about  ´dancing like Michael Jackson` intrigued me, so I started trying to fnd out who this Michael Jackson was. And when I did found out, I was amazed. My discovery of Michael Jackson is a key moment in my life. His albums, like Dangerous and Bad, became the soundtrack of my life and, as a result, the soundtrack of my family`s life too.

The following year, when I was 7, I got to see Michael jackson in concert for the first time. My friend Eliot bought me a ticket and it`s still the best live show I`ve ever, ever seen. I`ll never forget the feeling as we walked into Wembley Stadium that afternoon – it was if I could feel Michael`s presence somehow. I knew he was near. Because we were still small Eliot and I took turns on his dad`s shoulders to watch the show it was impossible not to get caught up in the excitement . a few weeks later at school  (Alleyn Court in Southend – we had horrible, pink-striped uniform), I was in a music lesson and we were all offered the chance to learn an instrument. I chose the guitar with one aim, and one aim only: to play Michael Jackson songs.

I`m the kind of person who throws himself into something obsessively and wants to be the best immediately.

I played tennis a lot when I was young and soon as I started I wanted to bea pro from the word go – I wanted to be able to do the fastest serves and the longest rallies. And in a way that was easier; after all, you can whack a ball across the net and let all your agression out when it`s not going well. But with the guitar it was hard work, and when I became frustrated and hammered away on the acoustic guitar all I`d get were bloody fingers. It was incredibly frustrating and from time to time i considered giving up, and it took a couple of years, but the first time I ever managed to play a Michael Jackson song -  ´Earth song` - on the guitar, I knew it was all worth it.

I always loved doing drama and stuff at school, and when I was 10 a local theatre group put on a production of Oliver! The musical had really appealed to me because I loved the music, and  managed to bag a role as a member of Fagin`s gang. Somehow  (and looking back now it seems unbelievable), from that small first step, my next acting role was Oliver! again – but this time in the West End of London, with the actor Jonathan Pryce. I`d been along to the open audition, which is the one all the kids who didn`t go tostage school have to attend, and managed to get through, which was a real confidence boost for me as I`d had no formal training, either vocally or on the stage. I was part of that production for 2 years, though in short bursts bacause, still being quite young, the law said that I couldnt work for no more than 40 days at a time. Before long I`d progressed to the lead role of Oliver.

One really vivid memory of that time is appearing with the cast at the Royal Variety Performance in front of Prince Charles, but most of my friends were more excited by the fact that Robbie Williams´ old band, take That were back-stage I had great fun chatting to teenage Take That fans by the stage door; Take That were at the height of their success, and I was at the height of my cheekiness, so I managed to convince all these sixteen-year olds that I knew the band. Being only 10 at the time, I was in heaven. The role in Oliver! led to a couple of dodgy acting jobs – I crashed a fire engine in London`s Burning, for example – but it was never something I was too passionate about., because before long I decided that I wanted to make music for a living.

As I entered my teens, my musical tastes were beginning to develop. MJ still formed a huge part of my CD collection, but alongside Dangerous, Bad and the rest were CDs from bands like Green Day, as well as Robbie Williams, whose first album, Life Thru A Lens, had just come out. I really liked Robbie`s humor and energy, and in some ways I can see that coming through in Busted today. As I was getting better on the acoustic guitar, my parents bought me an electric guitar as a present and from that point onwards I never loked back. By the time I was 12 I`d formed a band called Sic Puppy with my mate Nick. We wer really determined to make the band as good as possible, and some of the songs we wrote together still sound quite good, if not quite as polished as the material we`ve come up with in Busted.

Sic Puppy used to practice in either Nick`s bedroom or mine. There wasn`t enough room for our drummer, Jeremy, to get his drumkit in, so he used to have to make do on bongos, and for a long time we didn`t even have bassist, which was a ridiculous state of affairs but sounded all right to us at the time. Jeremy, Nick and I used to live quite close to each other, but dragging my guitar and amp rond to Nick`s house used to exhaust me. I remember sometimes I was so tired that I could only carry them ten paces at a time before having to put them down for a rest, and by the time I`d get to rehearsal I was knackered! We eventually found a new rehearsal space – in a ware house – meaning there was room for a proper drumkit – and a bassist called Stewart. Two of my favourite songs from that period were ¦omething On My Mind` (which I now realise was heavily `influenced` by Nirvana!) and a Green day-esque number called ´Once In A While` .

The first gig  we ever played was in the car park at the school féet! We`d stormed round to our headmaster`s house mobhandedand demanded that he let us play there. Suprisingly, he agreed. We hardly had any material – in fact we just played the same three songs, over and over agaon – but it was brilliant. After that we`d play a few gigs around clubs and pubs in Southend but, especially in the early days, I was obviously underage so I`d find myself kicked out straight after the gig. There was one where they wouldn`t even let me back in to get my equipment!

Gradually, Sic Puppy fizzled out. It began when one week, instead of rehearsing on Friday, we each decided to go out into town for a night out. Then the same happened the next week, and the week after, and gradually that old warehouse we`d use to rehearse in was used less and less.

One of my fondest memories of Southend is of party I had at my house on Millennium Eve. That party still stands as the greatest ever – the house was being redecorated a few weeks later so I had permission to totally trash the place, and as a bit of a bonus every single girl there was really, really fit. It was like one of those unbelievable parties you see in films – and everyone was going, ´How on earth did you get so many fit birds at your party?` And I was just, like, Í have no idea.` It was the best night ever – I`d go upstairs and there were, like three girls sat on my bed! They were going;) Oh, James, your party`s just the best...` And there was one girl who`d been blown out who was sitting crying in my room – I was quite drunk by that point. It seems a bit cheesy now.

´Don`t worry, lady – I have music!`

In 200, I did my GCSEs and came out witrh pretty good results – two A˙s, one A, four Bs and three Cs, which wasn`t too bad considering I`d donee absolutely no revision! I decided to go to a local college for a course in music technology, and for the next year or so spent almost all my time cooped up in the college`s recording studio, learning how to produce my own music. I was passing my assignments but I was`t getting distinctions because, by this point, Busted was already beggining to take shape. In mid-2001 I quit my course without really having a definite plan of what I was going to do, because Busted was far from being a dead cert. It was a difficult time and I really felt like I`d messed my life up. As it happens, my life was about to turn a major corner...