McFly’s Danny Jones: Streams and likes don’t matter if you can’t play live
McFly singer and guitarist Danny Jones wants his group to sound like a ‘glorified pub band’ on their upcoming album. Casey Cooper-Fiske reports.
Bursting on to the scene in the early 2000s with pop rock number ones 5 Colours In Her Hair and Obviously, McFly had all the catchiness and shimmer of a band which had been created in the offices of a major label.To some degree that was true with some of the group, who nabbed the record for the youngest band to have a UK number one album from The Beatles with their debut album, Room On The 3rd Floor, meeting at auditions for Busted and later V.
But the truth was that the musical education of the band’s members, Tom Fletcher, Danny Jones, Dougie Pointer and Harry Judd, took place in the local boozer.
Jones especially credits the robust criticism he received while performing in the intimate yet volatile spaces for a career with McFly which saw them score seven UK number one singles and two UK number one albums, and for helping to form the band’s energetic live shows.
“The criticism is great, and you should be able to take it,” Jones says of his experiences in pubs. The reason why I play almost a character on stage is like when I’m up there, and excuse my language, I’m a badass, but then when I come off, I’m like, ‘OK, how do we make that better?’. You’ve got to protect yourself, you’ve got to look at yourself and go, ‘how can I make that better?’, and it’s exactly the same in the pub.
“I remember playing and going, ‘how do I stop people from going to the toilet? I don’t want them to, they might need the toilet, but I want them to watch my show, I don’t want to be the toilet break’. So I want everyone looking, and also the big problem was people talking, they could be talking about you, but I used to play really kind of emotional acoustic stuff, and I’d love the pin drop moments, and those in a way are a real-life certificate of how well you’re doing I feel.
“I think they (pubs) gave me that experience to read the crowd, and that was me saying, ‘OK, I think they’re liking this’, they’re giving me some reaction, they’re giving me something back, they’re giving me some respect.
“When I first started, when I first met Tom, we wrote the first album in the hotel, and then we had to go into the offices, these stale offices in record labels, and try and play. And compared to the pub, it was awful because in the pub you’ve got a PA, you’ve got an atmosphere, you’ve got people being merry, and it’s a wonderful atmosphere.”
Jones recalls taking Fletcher to the pubs he used to play in and said his bandmate, who composed Paddington The Musical, “loved it”.
He adds: “I feel like you can stream however many you can get and whatever, however many likes you want to get, however many reposts, however many whatever views, streams, but if you can’t play a gig, to me you’re not an artist. “If you cannot play in front of people, if you can’t grab the attention of two, three people in that place, you haven’t got any artistry, because to me, that’s what it’s all about.”
The band recently revealed they are releasing a new album, which will be their first since 2023’s Power To Play, on which they hope to sound like a “glorified pub band”.
“We’re in the studio at the minute, and it’s funny because we were just talking about capturing the energy of (performing in a pub), we called ourselves the other day a glorified pub band, that’s what we want to sound like,” Jones explains. “We want to sound like a glorified pub band, but that hopefully can play arenas.”
Jones says upcoming artists should look to the pub rather than social media as a launch pad for their careers. “I often hear them saying like you’ve got to go viral on TikTok, what does that mean? Does that mean you can sell out a show? I don’t know what it means any more. Does it mean you can sell out a show? Does it mean you can sell merchandise? I don’t know what that means, so it’s a hard one to know.
“But for me, in my world, what I always say to people is, create your fan base… because if you create 500 fans, it’s easy to get to 1,000, if you get to 1,000 fans, you can start seriously thinking about this, it could be your job, you can make money from that. Then you get to 1,000, it seems to get to 2,000, then it seems to get to four, and suddenly you build this fan base, and I think it’s building something that people want to be a part of, and a fan of, and a movement.”
The comments come as Jones backs a campaign from pub chain Greene King called Live At Your Local, which aims to get people to see up and coming artists in the chain’s pubs, something Jones says is “close to my heart”.
He adds: “I started in pubs around Bolton and I was keen to get involved because I think with a lot of venues closing down these days, keeping that alive is big for me, and I gained so much experience, not just playing in front of people, and making mistakes in front of people, experiencing it.
“I think music is so different when you see it in those environments, it’s great going to a big gig, I love that, but when you see somebody in there, in a small room, and you get to discover them and then follow their journey, it’s such an amazing way to do it.
“And also being a community, a shared community experience, you’re looking at each other, going, ‘this is amazing’, and you’ve got a beer in your hand, and you’re at the pub, and I just loved all that atmosphere.”
- Greene King’s Live At Your Local campaign is celebrating grassroots music with 1,000 free gigs and live music events across its venues in August and September, allowing music fans to see emerging talent in their local pubs.