Air Guitar

Seemed appropriate...

There are very few bands I love enough to stay up until midnight to pre-order their new single, despite having to get up at stupid o'clock in the morning for work the next day, but I discovered recently that McBusted are one of them.

Ever since Lydia and I went to see them in Weston-Super-Mare, we've been desperately hoping that they'd release a single - and better still, an album - together.  A couple of nights ago, we got our wish when the first ever McBusted single - Air Guitar - was premiered via a lyric video on YouTube.  

You know that feeling you get when a band you absolutely adore release something new?  That bizarre combination of nerves and excitement ("Please be good, please be good, please be good...")?  Well, I had that in spades, although the "nervous" bit was never all that strong - this is a band made up of bloody brilliant songwriters after all.  It was bound to be great, wasn't it?

Well, of course it was.  And is.

The first few seconds remind me of playing classic arcade computer games (which made the Guitar Hero-esque lyric video all the more impressive) and the first lines "I never was a cool kid and no one ever gave a damn about what I did, I liked to party but I never got invited..." were like a siren call to my nerdy little soul.  I was that kid, in my early teens, singing in my room, writing bad poetry and playing air guitar to songs on the radio.  So immediately, this song felt like my anthem.

It builds and builds until the massive chorus comes as an explosion of guitars and voices that just makes you want to punch the air and jump up and down.  Add a twiddly bit of guitar that's made for playing air guitar to and you've got a smash.

The best bit is that this sounds like a fully-fledged band.  Not McFly with two guys added on.  Not Busted with McFly joining in.  It's a combination of what made both of those bands great and put together, it's ridiculously good.  The way the vocals switch from Matt, to Tom, to James, to Danny just works.  It doesn't feel in the slightest bit forced.  It's as though the most natural and obvious thing in the world is for these six people to be in a band, making music together.  Because when they do, the results are fantastic.

If I had to sum up the song in one word, I'd use "jubilant."  Because that's what it feels, to me.  Utterly joyous - the sound of six mates going: "can you believe we do this for a living?!"  The essence of fun and excitement that made their tour such an incredible success is somehow woven musically into every second of Air Guitar, making it a song that simply couldn't have been written by anyone else.  And it's joyous not only because it's the sound of a band genuinely loving what they're doing, but because the subtext of the song screams "SOD what anyone else thinks."  So you're maybe a bit of a geeky kid, not part of the cool elite at school?  Who cares - just keep doing your thing.  

And as long as these six guys keep doing their thing, they're making this nerdy girl very happy indeed.