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BUSTED - "Who's David" (Patreon)

Published:
2021-09-07 00:40:12
Imported:
2026-06
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(#972, 28th February 2004)

Busted’s success belied an identity crisis. This manifested most obviously in Charlie Busted’s visible discomfort at playing the early funny stuff (let alone the later funny stuff), but it ran deeper than that. Were they a British boy band who happened to play diluted pop-punk rather than diluted R&B? Were they an actual pop-punk band who happened to be hot and fun and appeal to girls? Were they maybe even serious rock songwriters - well, as serious as Ash or Feeder - trapped in a Smash Hits and CD:UK world? “Who’s David?” - comfortably their worst ever single - feels like the product of these conflicting impulses.

“Who’s David?” is a song about a cheating girlfriend. There are great kiss-off songs in pop, but as cathartic payoffs go, “I’m over you / Ooo ooo ooo / I don’t like you” isn’t exactly top tier. There are also plenty of average jealous-guy records, with varying levels of rage and contempt, entitlement and pain. Lines like “I know your pretty face / Gets far with guys / But your make up ain’t enough to hide the lies” read like they could be from some Nuggets-era compilation makeweight or Mod Revival also-ran.

But “Who’s David?” doesn’t even muster that kind of energy. The desire to make an angry, slut-shaming punk-pop record and the desire to make a hooky, singalong Busted record turn out to clash horribly. You can hear it in the chorus - which starts in a typical Busted jaunty, anthemic mode (“Are you sure that you’re mine…”)  and then ends up at - in the uncut version - “You’re just a whore, you sleep around the town / And I got proof cos the word is going round”. Oh, mate.

It’s a moment where the internal contradictions of Busted stop holding together. The band might think they’re making a shit-talking Blink-182 style song but they look like phonies, laundering casual misogyny for a kids’ TV audience. Quoting the lyrics makes the song sound more enraged than it actually does - the reality is “Who’s David?” is just a Busted record, only a particularly petty and unimaginative one.

2 out of 10

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Comments

Lmm

Hmm, I rather enjoyed the dissonance between the Busted energy and lyrics that seemed to be striving for genuine cruelty but never quite getting there. "Well go live in the house of David if you like" felt like a futile effort in the same spirit as "Well, the Jerk Store called, and they're running out of you." Busted have a scrappy earnestness that comes from their willingness to teeter right on the edge of painfully uncool, and that gives them a charm that the likes of Blink-182 (who, being American, can sing about boners with no trace of irony) could never quite match.

ThePensmith

So on "Crashed the Wedding" we covered what is for me, Busted's crowning glory of their number ones, and a shining example of when they were really at the peak of their powers and were as brilliant as they were. Revisiting "Who's David" under 2021 eyes, I am feeling the same about it as you are Tom; it's undoubtedly the weak link of singles from the 'A Present For Everyone' album, an awkward lyric and I dare say whiny and unlikeable beast 17 years on. In fact I suspect the lads themselves (Charlie and Matt of whom are married with kids now) also feel the same about it in the present day; I had a quick glance at YouTube just now and tellingly, it hasn't been performed live by them since their Pigs Can Fly comeback tour five years ago. This also had one of the worst first week sales not just of their career but for a number one in the 00s; Music Week reported that it was just over 30,000 (50 of which were a limited cassette run that thus makes this the last chart topper to be released on the format unless I'm mistaken). The B-side of this was their just about passable cover of 'Teenage Kicks' by The Undertones, which they performed at the BRITs the very week this was released and where they picked up Best British Breakthrough and Best Pop Act. They reprised said performance again instead of performing the A-side on Top of the Pops when it was at number one the following week. But it was a fanbase concern for sure; after topping the chart it spent just two more weeks in the top 20 before descending with alarming haste to the lower end of the top 40, vacating just in time for the support act on their recent arena tour to make their debut - more on whom a couple of bunnies hence, of course. The 'Baby Jump' of the 00s, then? Very possibly. 4 from me.