Review: McBusted – Most Excellent Adventure Tour

Much to almost every young adult’s delight, McBusted landed in Belfast’s Odyssey Arena last night on the last date of their Most Excellent Adventure Tour. Everybody knows that being aged 10 – 14 were the best days of your life, and although you’ll never get that carefree, splendiferous youth back, you can always relive it by listening to McBusted blast out hit after hit after hit, reminding you of the good old days where your greatest worry was that your crush wouldn’t reply to you on MSN or that the servers for Bebo would be down for a few minutes.

With this in mind, it’s clear to see that nostalgia is a definite theme running throughout the entire show – before the band even hit the stage, the crowd is warmed up with trailer upon trailer for old movies such as The Karate Kid, Weird Science, Back to the Future, Teen Wolf, and of course, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. As the lights go down, the neon lights go up and the stage is set to look like a massive arcade game. As our character’s are picked on-screen Harry, Dougie, Matt, James, Danny and Tom pop up onto the stage before launching into Air Guitar. Here the giant arcade machine is used to its full potential in a Guitar Hero style where it’s like the band are playing the computer game itself. This is definitely one of the best entrances, not to mention stage sets I’ve ever seen in the Odyssey Arena and the atmosphere was electric.

Having just released their first album as McBusted last year, the band rattle through the lesser known Hate Your Guts, What Happened To Your Band and Get Over It with as much gusto as old favourites like You Said No, Thunderbirds Are Go and 3am. In what has become a true staple of any McBusted concert, the band disappear from sight only to reappear in a Back to the Future style DeLorean descending from the ceiling onto a mini stage in the middle of the crowd where they play Air Hostess, What I Go To School For and Obviously to the willing crowd.

The use of the giant screen is fantastic and innovative throughout, with graphics and lyrics being displayed to help add to the performance, and even a break for the guys to play the largest game of Street Fighter I’ve ever seen. Surprisingly, my favourite track of the night was a new one; the chip tune-esque Riding On My Bike sees James cycling a stationary BMX while the screen scrolls by behind him, making it look like part of a computer game, he then breaks free and cycles his BMX around the stage, firing shirts into the crowd. If there’s one thing you can expect from a McBusted show it’s fun and lots of it, right from the outset there are jokes about ‘boobies’ and ‘front bottoms’, a kiss cam for It’s All About You, wedding dresses for Crashed The Wedding and just tons and tons of energy being expelled.

Before we know it, the three song encore is upon us and the band play Year 3000 for the final time on this tour. As the six of them triumphantly jump into a Mario style pipe complete with flagpole, it’s obvious that as long as the audience keep enjoying their music as much as they enjoy making and playing it, this supergroup is here to stay.