Bust Up
Nursing a bad case of the flu whilst fellow band members were nursing sore heads after celebrating their recent successes, we caught up with Busted's gorgeous Charlie Simpson. Looking back at a crazy year and forward to another, we hooked up with competition winner Olivia Cleal to put the big lad through his paces..
How does it feel to be the biggest British band around at the moment?
It's pretty crazy! We've sold over a million albums now and when I think about only starting just over a year ago it's like 'Whoa!' And to come out and do well, but then the album nearly dropped out of the charts before anyone knew who we were until Year 3000 came out and then it turned round and started climbing the other way then stayed there.
You've now got new album A Present For Everyone. What were the differences between making that and 'Busted'?
I had a lot more fun making this one, because I much prefer the sound of it. We worked with a lot of new people like Steve Power who produces Robbie Williams' stuff. He is brilliant, he brought out the best sound and the sound of this album is the way Busted is going to stay. It's more guitar-heavy in the vein of Good Charlotte rather than BBMak. We've all done our own tracks on the album, Matt's done one with Guy Chambers and we went to LA for two weeks - the most amazing place. I wanna move there!
Your upcoming 2004 tour has grown into a monster..
Oh mate! That tour is going to be so awesome. An arena tour! The last tour was the best time I've had in Busted so this will just be amazing. We'll be playing to over 250,000 people including six nights at Wembley Arena! It's totally crazy, I don't want to think about it! Haha.
What's the best and worst thing about being on tour?
Best thing: everything! There's no bad things about being on tour, even the catering's pretty good, it's got a lot better!
Christmas is coming up before that, what are you going to be doing?
I'm going skiing with my family in France for Christmas and New Year. We've got three weeks off which is brilliant.
What do you want Santa to bring you?
From Santa this year.. I want.. my mum's roast dinner! It's damn good.