MCFLY - "All About You"/"You've Got A Friend"

(#1008, 19th March 2005)

McFly’s biggest hit, crossing the 500k sales barrier partly because it was the official Comic Relief single. The Carole King cover is doing most of the hard work on that front, with a video involving the lads helping out in Uganda, and the song stopping for a chorus sung by the kids they meet. It’s a clear-cut example of the kind of thing Comic Relief liked to do with its borrowed stars, and which eventually became the focus for criticism of the charity’s ‘white saviour syndrome’, with David Lammy calling out the “unhelpful stereotypes” videos like McFly’s perpetuated of helpless Africans dependent on Western aid and grateful for the biennial attention of boy bands, comedians and other light entertainment notables. 

It’s not a charge the McFly video does anything to evade, though it’s no worse than most charity showreels. Meanwhile, “You’ve Got A Friend” is a song which needs a very delicate touch to feel intimate and healing rather than mawkish - part of King’s power as a performer is knowing just how to thread that needle. There’s a holy spontaneity to the best parts of Tapestry which makes them sound, despite the arrangements, like they’re coming into being as you listen, on some perpetual stolen afternoon that just happened to be recorded. McFly’s version has no such magic, even before you’re ambushed by its choir. It’s what you’d imagine an X-Factor winners’ version would be like - sincere, reverent, featureless.

Tom Fletcher’s earnest vocals are the only thing which gives “You’ve Got A Friend” any character, and “All About You” is a Fletcher stab at writing something with that same connective power. It’s obviously a touchstone song for them as well as a top seller - Fletcher wrote it for his girlfriend (now wife) and the band named their TV show after it. It certainly sounds like a band and songwriter trying hard to show they’re a serious proposition - not in the rock sense of maturity of lyric, or harshness or difficulty of sound, but in a more Gary Barlow-esque fashion. “All About You” is a band making great efforts to demonstrate their respectability.

Certainly McFly have developed quickly from the snotty social observation of “Five Colours In Her Hair”. “All About You” is a mid-tempo ballad in their “Obviously” style, and its heartfelt tenderness would land better if they hadn’t recruited an entire orchestra to labour the point. So would the jaunty, buskerish qualities of the song for that matter.  British pop is never shy of plastering on the strings, but as a first single from a second album “All About You” seems to me a good example of a band using full orchestration as a positioning tactic. McFly aren’t just heirs to Busted’s scruffbag legacy, they’re in a longer, worthier tradition of British pop craft: check the single sleeve, with its obvious A Hard Day’s Night homage. Fletcher is putting down a marker that he intends to be around a while, even if in this case it means drowning his song with a bucketful of gloop.

4 Out Of 10