This was one of the tracks where the poor songwriting actually works in a really hilarious meta way, with the song concluding with the band getting back together recording the album you’ve just listened to and rocking out again and how things will be alright if you believe. The alternative movement is alive and kicking and we here at AltCorner deliver your alternative music fix daily.

Ticket’s for the extra dates will go on pre-sale on Wednesday 6 th February at 9am and on general sale on Friday 8 th February at 10am. A sentiment touched upon when Simpson, Bourne and Willis wail “ We’re not old / But we’re not as young as we used to be / Half way to obscurity” in the acoustic love letter, All My Friends, to their fanbase that touches upon the band’s belief that this is where they’re meant to be. Busted seem to take a lot of music that was popular with teenagers ten years ago and kinda lazily mash it together with this track. It’s judgemental, poorly written and hard to pinpoint a moral or overarching topic beyond lines about where friends are in their lives and how they’re fat now and how the reminisce about bar fights and have faith that they’ll (I’m unsure if they is just the band or the band and their friends) be fine despite being old and drifting towards obscurity.Capturing the band’s larger-than-life personalities, the album cover was conceptualised and shot by Rankin, who also directed the video for ‘Nineties’. I first fell in love with this song when it was originally on MySpace under Bourne’s then band ‘Son of Dork’, then came the re-recording for McBusted and finally, as it was always meant to be heard we now have the Busted version.

This isn’t the band to listen to for pioneering sonic experimentation or playful lyricism: they are what they are, or rather what they were. Race to Mars and Reunion tap into the expected Busted hymnbook by offering familiar glimpses alas 2003’s A Present for Everyone, but with a rejuvenated vigour that sits comfortably among the very best of 2019’s pop punk royalty.

If ‘Night Driver’ was their attempt to move on, ‘Half Way There’ is an acknowledgement it didn’t work. It’s why any sort of nuance is pitched right out of the window, something that gives an oddly self-congratulatory air to What Happened To Your Band? With the talk that Charlie's been writing some Fightstar material recently, I'm hoping that next year, Busted will take a break to allow him to focus on that. Not least for a band whom everyone assumed had too wide a chasm creatively and professionally between themselves to warrant reuniting in the first place. They constantly revisited each idea to make the album as strong as it could possibly be, and also had the opportunity to work with their dream producer Gil Norton, the man behind classic albums from Foo Fighters and Pixies.

Two years later we made the move to our present address, 35 The Headrow, where we have remained ever since. A rush of melody and effervescent riffs that see the band blend huge arena-filling choruses with the classic pop-punk sound of Blink-182 and New Found Glory.Even back when the pop-rock and pop-punk they were so mercenarily emulating, it was telling that Busted always remained firmly in the boyband territory; the sound wasn’t that far from the genuine article in the early 2000s, but both musicianship and lyricism that drew from territory spanning from base to outright stupid was always a heavy implication of the pop machinations behind the scenes to make that sound even more marketable. Today Busted release new album Half Way There and it moves away from the cooler, synth-pop feel of Night Driver and revisits the rebellious punk-pop hybrid the band explored on their first two albums.