McFly on drugs, therapy, fame and their surprise comeback: ‘Without McFly, who are we?’

“It’s 9.43am and we’re already talking about drugs,” says McFly’s bassist Dougie Poynter, at 32, the youngest member of the London-born pop-punk band, having joined at just 15-years-old back in 2003. “This is just like therapy!”

Drugs, rehab and how group therapy brought them back together as a band after a four-year hiatus are certainly not the conversation points I imagined I’d be navigating with McFly when I first met them as a bunch of teenage boys 16 years ago. But, to be honest, I wasn’t expecting that I would still be speaking to them in their 30s, such is the fickle world of pop music.

In 2016, the band had announced an indefinite hiatus, but today they are back with a lyrically mature new album that stays true to their style, Young Dumb Thrills, out today, and a one-off ITV documentary, All About Us, airing tomorrow night: an unflinchingly honest dive into their fade out and burst back into pop culture.

Tom Fletcher, lead vocalist, formed the band (named after Marty McFly from Back to the Future) while already signed to fellow Noughties boy band Busted’s management as a song-writer. When Busted invited McFly on tour with them in 2004, they shot to fame, dethroning The Beatles as the youngest band to have their first album, Room on the Third Floor, debut at number one. A headline tour followed suit, as did a starring role in Hollywood film Just My Luck opposite Lindsay Lohan. Almost every teenage girl had a poster of them on their bedroom wall.

They were young then. Not only Dougie, but the rest of the boys too, Tom (now 35), Danny Jones (34) and Harry Judd (34), were all just 18 years old, and living together in a house their record company had rented for them in North London. “It was beautiful, the biggest house I’d ever seen at the time,” says Tom over Zoom. “But you put four guys between 15 and 18 in a house with no one else living there and they will trash it. We had maggots in the bins…”

“No one did any washing up, no one cooked, you’d just wait for the cleaner to arrive and clear up all the pizza boxes,” adds Harry. “We also didn’t know what to do with furniture, so there would be a random sofa facing the wall,” laughs Danny.

“I jumped straight from school to living in that house,” says Dougie, who won I'm a Celebrity in 2011. “Everything was new. It was like a dream, where you’d be in a maths lesson thinking imagine if I was in a band and it took off, I wouldn’t have to come back into this classroom.”

It was certainly a world away from their life now, grown up and mostly married with kids, Tom is married to author and I’m a Celebrity 2020 star Giovanna, with whom he has three boys, Buzz, Max and Buddy, Harry to violinist Izzy, with two kids Lola and Kit, and Danny to model, Georgia Horsley, with whom he has two-year-old, Cooper. Dougie is seemingly single, having dated pop stars Ellie Goulding, and The Saturday’s Frankie Bridge in the past.

We’re speaking on Zoom, and while it’s still early morning, Harry and Danny are already at work in the studio together, while Tom and Dougie are speaking from their respective homes in London. They’re full of beans, in spite of the very un rock n roll hour, taking the mickey out of each other and messing about within answers. But they are respectful, too, excusing themselves if they interrupt another’s response, offering the floor to one another if they felt they have perhaps spoken on their behalf.

I remember the process of interviewing them back then being like herding particularly badly behaved sheep into a pen of questions, most of which they would answer with something sarcastic, or nonsensical, or an in-joke that would fly over your head. It wasn’t that they were rude, they were just kids, riding on the back of their hugely successful management and label stable-mates, Busted, and already adored by hundreds of thousands of screaming girls, who had bought their first single, 5 Colours in Her Hair, shooting it straight to number one.

They pitched themselves the anti-boyband, choreographed dance moves and six packs replaced with guitars and drum kits, references of heroes like Blink 182, gave teenagers something ‘cool’ to cling on to that had been missing from the pop landscape for so long.

“We fell into that gap where people who were into [guitar] bands might secretly like our music,” says Danny. “You’d go to signings and guys would come along who were into McFly, a guy in a Metallica T-shirt who likes metal and had studied our guitar solos. I’m not saying all Metallica fans are going to like our band, but that sort of thing is cool, man.”

“There was more of an investment for fans in us as a band,” Harry adds, of the fact they have always played and written their own music. “I think we’ve managed to hold on to so many hardcore fans, because they know all the creative and the songs are coming straight from the band.”

Fame wasn’t the same back then. There was no social media to document their every move and every thought, but there were endless parties in the days when record companies still had a modicum of money to throw at launches and celebrations. That, Tom adamantly says, was never what really interested them, though.

“We would be in these bizarre situations, on TV and in interviews, and we just wanted to hang out and be teenagers,” he says. “I think that was the thing that took me most by surprise looking back. You’re getting everything you’ve ever dreamed of, but the thing you’re enjoying the most is just hanging out with your mates.”

“McFly came at a great time for me personally,” says Dougie. “My parents had just split up so my reality had broken down, then I joined this band and everything got 200 times better. Did it come too young? Maybe, but I don’t really think about it because I don’t know any different.”

“The band was a bubble that allowed us to escape,” says Danny. “It was the happy safe place that protected you from the world.”

The McFly rollercoaster was an adventure that lasted for thirteen years, five albums, and numerous tours until 2016, when Dougie announced he needed some time out from the band. Tensions had become a problem, small differences which nobody was willing to discuss, petty arguments and disagreements about every day life which even a short lived spell teaming up with two out of three members of Busted, to form McBusted, had failed to smooth over. Never a fan of drama, the differences affected Dougie most of all, who decided he needed a break, moving to LA.

“It was so awful,” says Harry. “We had been in that bubble for so long and suddenly, when that’s taken away, you’re faced with reality for the first time as an adult and that was pretty shocking. McFly was more than family, it was more than friendship and it was just gone. I found it so exposing.”

“We all felt that loss of identity,” adds Tom “Without McFly, who are we? Trying to find out and pretend you’re happy with that new version of you was really difficult. In the middle of that break, our manager booked a small tour, but that was the worst experience. Being on stage was fun, but we hadn’t confronted any of our issues, so we were suddenly just chucked back with each other, trying to pretend it’s all going to be fine. It was so toxic and unhealthy. When that tour was over, everything fell apart again, worse than before.”

They unwillingly ventured out on their own, Tom continuing with the children’s books he had started creating with Dougie, writing a teen series with his wife, Giovanna, and making a musical, Christmasaurus. Danny embarked as a solo artist, with a presenting gig on The Voice Kids, while Harry released a book called Get Fit, Get Happy. Dougie tried his hand at acting, and launched a rock band, INK, falling into a huge Valium addiction along the way which caused him to forget an entire two years of his life.

Of losing two years, Dougie has said previously: “Honestly, yeah. I mean, you get flashbacks, but it’s a huge blur. It’s strange. That’s something which is really hard to come to terms with, literally losing two years. Two years just went as like a weird dream. Coming out the other end was like, ‘What? Where’s my band?’”

It was his addiction, and subsequent rehab recovery in 2018 (his second time in rehab, the first being in 2011 following a suicide attempt, in his car), that simultaneously broke and mended the band. They had been in touch, vaguely, over their hiatius, had met up briefly at one of Danny’s solo shows in early in 2018, and it was there Harry noticed a difference in Dougie. He decided to stage something of an intervention, taking it upon himself to turn up at Dougie’s apartment unannounced.

“I was aware I had a problem,” says Dougie. “I was taking an uncomfortable amount of Diazepam, which is highly addictive, and had been building it up for two and a half years. Valium is a huge memory blocker. I lost years of my life. There are little things that I remember, but because you’re in a constant state of the same feeling there’s nothing really attached to any of these little tiny memories that I have.

“I’ve been in recovery since I was 22, so I knew what I was doing was wrong, and had been in touch with my old drugs counselor, but taking that leap to rehab took Harry coming round to my apartment and saying, you’re going to do this. It’s one of the most messed up drugholes I’ve ever been in, and when you’re coming off it, there’s nothing you can take to substitute the feelings. You literally have to sit there and go through internal hell. The puking and tingling and then really weird things, like being afraid of Persian rugs because the detail is so intense.”

“I remember Dougie saying to me, I wouldn’t wish this upon my worst enemy,” Harry says, of Dougie’s rehab experience. “When that was going on, everything that had happened in the past few years was immediately forgotten. Then as soon as he was back, I couldn’t wait for Tom and Danny to see him, because he was the Dougie we knew again.”

Dougie came out of rehab in October 2018, and by April 2019, their manager called a meeting. He had booked the O2 for a one-off comeback gig at the end of November, which sold out within minutes and was followed up by a 2020 arena tour announcement (now postponed due to the pandemic). Knowing that glossing over what had happened in the past, the fallouts, the ennui and the artistic differences that had led to such a long stalemate, Tom decided to book him and Dougie into therapy, their relationship appearing to have been the one which had suffered most over the years, and the one that was key to a successful reunion.

“It became clear that one of the bigger hurdles we had to getting all of our relationships back to a healthy place was sorting mine and Doug’s relationship,” continues Tom. “There is no shame in therapy, no shame in seeking help.”

“I’d been in therapy since I was around 22,” says Dougie. “I knew the benefits of having a safe place and a mediator to get years worth of work done in an hour. I love therapy, I am fascinated by the human condition.”

“Literally on that first session, Dougie and I came out and went, we need to get Danny and Harry in here as well,” says Tom. “It was what we all needed, an environment where there is someone giving us the freedom to talk openly about things without it going into an argument or a debate. It was amazing how effective it was.”

“Therapy helps you to understand your own emotions,” adds Danny. “So you might say something you don’t mean, because something else is going on in your life. You’re not angry at that person, you’re angry at the situation outside of it. So going into a session and saying how you actually are, well actually, I’m a bit pissed off at this, then at least you know at least where it’s coming from.”

Therapy, clearly, has been good for them. It has allowed them to get back into the studio, to re-bond as a band without barriers and to continue their journey with a new outlook. There are still parts of the teenage boys I recognize in them today – the tendency to swerve off topic, answer a question with a joke, take the mickey out of each other – but there are huge parts which are completely different. They are wiser and totally aware of their good fortune. “McFly was fate,” says Harry, in summary. Fate, and, I would argue, a bit of therapy. Judging by the McFly I meet today, perhaps that is something a lot more bands could benefit from.

All About Us will air on ITV tomorrow night at 6:40pm