McBusted

I’ve spent the last couple of days with McBusted, engineering material for their record. People tend to assume, not unfairly sometimes, that bands whose product is not solely a musical one are not great musicians. The mind fills with images of production teams, massed around a huge computer, digitally massaging the horror into a flat, banal facsimile of music, and frantically grabbing for the session musician rolodex to save their bacon. Well, nothing could be further from the truth in this case. Yes ok, they’re a fine-looking bunch, clearly experienced in the pantomime of the pop music industry, but in the studio they’re not fucking around! I found myself working with a drummer who could hit the kick and snare, in time, at exactly the same intensity on every hit (rare), a bassist and guitar players who came up with and nailed their parts in minutes, not hours, and five guys singing lead vocal parts, none of whom I wished were another when the red light came on. And they genuinely do write the good bits. I come away from this session feeling that quite a lot of bands who consider themselves musically ‘above’ McBusted, would fall far short of this level of talent, never mind professionalism. Like.