YMMV / McFly

• Broken Base: "Above The Noise". One half of the fanbase loved their electro-pop sound, the other half just wanted them to return to their old guitar-pop music ASAP. The Lost Songs showed they were going for a mix of their old and new sounds, so the band seemed to only make their 5th album as a one-off experiment.
• Covered Up: Their cover of "Baby's Coming Back" by Jellyfish is more recognised in the UK than the original. In America, neither are that well-known.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: These guys are huge in Brazil.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • "5 Colours in Her Hair" climaxes with the song's subject deciding she can't handle all the attention she's been getting and shaving her hair off. Three years later, Britney Spears shaving her hair off would be the defining moment of her fame-induced mental breakdown.
  • The video for 'That's the Truth', showing Dougie behaving in a depressed manner following a breakup becomes a bit cringeworthy to watch following reports that Dougie has gone into rehab after struggling to cope with his rather public breakup with long-term girlfriend Frankie Sandford, of girlband The Saturdays.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: This video (Probably NSFW) in which Danny, Dougie and Harry mime/sing badly to Il Divo's Opera version of 'Without You' becomes all the more hilarious knowing that Danny would eventually appear as a celebrity contestant on reality show Popstar to Operastar. Danny, among other pop musicians, is trained to be an opera singer, and then has to compete with the other singers every week to be the best opera star. He didn't win.
  • In the video for All About You, the security guard (played by Harry Hill) wears a badge saying "I'm a Busted fan". (Coincidentally the video was filmed on the same day Busted announced their split.) This becomes hysterical in light of the two bands teaming up for a tour.
  • Another McBusted example, around 2004, when both Busted and McFly were hugely popular at the same time, tabloids often called McFly "McBusted" due to their similarity and Spiritual Successor status to the former.
  • Best example. Harry played the drummer in Busted's video for 'Crashed the Wedding.' 10+ years later, he'd be drumming that and many other Busted songs for the McBusted tours.
• Hollywood Pudgy: In the early years, Tom was often mocked for being fat. He may have been slightly bigger than the other members, but certainly not a fatass◊. He's lost weight since then, but Tom openly refers to his early-McFly appearance as "Fat Tom".
• Ho Yay: Dougie and Harry are often quite physically affectionate with each other. They might play this up as Fanservice. Any conceivable pairing between the four of them has its moments, though, due to the Heterosexual Life-Partners nature of their relationships.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!
• Just Here for Godzilla: Arguably the only reason Just My Luck got any success in the UK was because the fangirls were flooding in to see McFly.
  • If you look on online stores like iTunes, a lot of the reviews just say that the only thing they liked in the movie was them as well, one person even saying that, even though they haven't seen the whole movie, they always just watch their scenes because of their music.
• Misattributed Song: Busted's cover of the Beach Boys' song 'Fun Fun Fun' is often miscredited as featuring these guys, even though they didn't have anything to do with it.
• Narm: 'Nowhere Left To Run' (The Movie) is said to be full of this.
  • Of course, many fans find the band's poor acting to be both hilarious and adorable.
• Nightmare Fuel: The video for "The Ballad of Paul K". Even the band themselves have admitted to being scared by it.
• Older Than They Think: The song 'IF U C Kate' was originally written and recorded by JC Chasez for his unreleased 2007 second album, The Story of Kate. Taio Cruz introduced them to the song when working with them on their 5th album, Above the Noise, as he'd co-written it, and the band liked the song so much during production of the album that they recorded a version of it themselves. JC's version can be found in low-quality YouTube uploads, as some songs were leaked on to file sharing sites after the album was shelved.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Songs that they recorded between 2011 and 2013 that were left on the back burner when they formed McBusted got dug out to be released in 2019 on The Lost Songs.
• Signature Song: '5 Colours in her Hair' and 'All About You'.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Their song 'Just My Luck' sounds a bit too close to 'Accidentally in Love' by Counting Crows.
  • 'Home is Where the Heart Is' was also clearly influenced by 'Wanted Dead or Alive' by Bon Jovi.
• Tear Jerker: 'She Falls Asleep', 'The Last Song' and 'The Ballad Of Paul K'. 'She Falls Asleep' is about a girl who is Driven to Suicide, 'The Last Song', wanting to live the final moments of your life to the fullest and 'The Ballad Of Paul K' about a man suffering a mid-life crisis. The latter can be especially heartbreaking to those who have ever witnessed their own fathers going through the same thing.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The majority of the songs from The Lost Songs feature only Danny or Tom on vocals rather than their signature trade-off vocals. More than one person complained as they were coming out about this.
  • Above the Noise had this reaction from the fanbase, due to a radical shift in style from 60s-influenced Pop Punk and Pop Rock to a similar electronic-infused style to Taio Cruz, who'd had a big hit the previous year. Cruz co-produced the album, so this makes sense.
• Unexpected Character: Doubt anyone saw them showing up at a Jonas Brothers concert in 2009 to sing 'Star Girl' with them.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Though they've always been pretty kid-friendly, there are several examples.
  • 'Star Girl' is pretty clearly about having a booty call with an alien.
  • 'Please, Please' is about hooking up with Lindsay Lohan.
  • 'I Wanna Hold You' involves the main protagonist of the song doing anything to please his woman, including destroying the world if she asks him to, flooding the earth through global warming, leading an army through the streets to cause chaos, and burning cities to the ground, which results in a worldwide evacuation. This resulted in a quick rewrite and rerecording the song for its single release to remove some of these references after criticism of them came out at the time, as their second album was supposed to be more "adult" in tone compared to their first album.
  • 'The Ballad of Paul K.' tells the story of a man going through a midlife crisis.
• The Woobie: The protagonist of 'The Ballad Of Paul K'.
  • Dougie, following reports that he went into rehab to get over his difficult break-up.

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