McFLY - "I'll Be OK"

(#1015, 27th August 2005)

I still find McFly hard to appreciate, but in the comments for their previous No.1 I linked a piece which made the strongest case I’d seen for them as songwriters and musicians. One of the questions this piece asked was why critics had so little time for them, giving the impression of McFly as a 21st Century Monkees, a more-than-solid pop group tarnished by unfair perception. To this day you’ll find a few American rock fans of a particular vintage who simply can’t get their head around the idea that the Monkees are a worthwhile proposition. The same may well be true of Brits and McFly (it may well be true of me and McFly). The essay points out that if a band with this talent and these reference points had turned up during Britpop, the music press would have relished them.

Counterfactuals like this - if Nirvana had recorded that Nickelback song, you’d all love it! - aren’t always helpful. I absolutely agree McFly were more talented than, say, Dodgy, but that’s partly why they were a lot more successful, too. The thing McFly did - 60s sunshine pop with pop-punk vocals, to simplify it - was the right thing for the moment (right enough, at any rate, that it could grab a young audience and work out what it wanted to be on the back of that). But it might not have been the right thing in 1995. And while I think it’s right to say that a perceived pop identity cost them critical respect in their lifetime, that would have been true at almost any point since the mid-60s.

The interesting thing about a McFly/Britpop comparison, though, is that McFly’s unveiling and instant popularity coincides with British guitar pop coming back onto the critical agenda. The publicity peak of Britpop - the Blur/Oasis chart battle - was a decade in the past, but sometimes history does repeat. Not only did Summer 2005 see Gallagher and Albarn as chart-toppers again, it happened against the context of increasing success for a motley of British guitar bands, from the Kaiser Chiefs to The Libertines to Franz Ferdinand. Before the year was over, this wave of indie acts would assert its popularity in dramatic fashion.

So the question of why McFly didn’t get more respect as a guitar pop band isn’t an anachronistic one - they also weren’t spoken of in the same breath as bands who were their actual peers. It’s one of those points where the musical arbitrariness of what gets called “pop” and “indie” and “rock” becomes most obvious: whatever real differences might exist, they overlap with, and often bow to, social differences. McFly are a pop band because of who their fans are, because of the magazines that cover them, because they shine in things like ITV’s Record Of The Year show and because they have heaps of Number 1 records - despite the fact that they sound like no other pop act of the time.

They don’t, I’ll be honest, sound much like their indie contemporaries either - but there’s more shared DNA between McFly and the Kaiser Chiefs than between McFly and, say, Blue. One of the many odd things about this band is that, despite them being extremely successful, it’s several years before Simon Cowell (or another pop blueprinter) uses them as a model.

Actually listening to “I’ll Be OK” does clarify some of this philosophisin’ around the nature of McFly. In previous songs their balance of vaguely snotty vocal attitude and breezy songwriting instincts has tipped a little too much one way or the other - the brattiness in “Five Colours” or the sappiness in “All About You”. For me, the blend on “I’ll Be OK” feels more successful, more relaxed, a band happy to be their silly selves. And this is another big gap between them and their more credible peers - McFly are very much not scared to get happy: “I’ll Be OK” is a galumphing gormless grin of a record, replete with a goofy Who-inspired synth intro and a pick’n’mix approach to hooks.

Somewhere in there is a snatch of melody which reminds me irresistibly of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” - a song McFly would cover themselves soon enough. And while they don’t have Queen’s range, or their hard rock roots, that’s closer to the territory McFly wanted to occupy: a genuinely populist pop band, skilful enough to try different things, straightforward enough to sell, but usually a step aside from critical credibility. Queen were an awkward fit into any scene, which is why the British public loved them. As role models, you could do much worse.