TOM: ONE OF the first things I remember is the aliens that have haunted me all my life.

It was my dad who first introduced us. He used to tell me stories about them. I loved those stories, and would beg him to tell me more. One story in particular sticks in my mind, about travellers camping in a log cabin overnight, only realizing that an alien had been watching them for hours once its face had disappeared from the moonlit window. That story put an alien in my head that would never leave. Even when I was fully grown and touring the world, I’d always go back to my hotel room, or my bedroom, or wherever I was sleeping, and lie there terrified of the alien at the window. Even after playing in front of hundreds of thousands of fans I’d have to sleep with the TV on, the sound down and the bathroom door open. I’ve never been scared of burglars. I’ve never been scared of ghosts. I’m just scared of aliens, and often I’ve been so scared of them I couldn’t move. I know exactly what the phrase ‘paralysed with fear’ means, because I’ve experienced it nearly every single night. And even though these night terrors have been with me most of my life, I absolutely adore science fiction, especially alien and UFO stories. Does that make me a total mentalist? I guess it must do.

But Dad introduced me to something else, too. Something far more important and which would have a far greater effect on my life. He introduced me to music. Our house was full of it. I’ve been lucky, and one of the luckiest things about my childhood was that music was everywhere. And when I stop to think about it, I realize that my good luck started long before I can even remember. Before the music. Before the aliens. It started with my parents.

My mum and dad – Debbie and Bob – weren’t rich. Far from it. Money was always tight, not that I’d ever have known it when I was a kid because my sister Carrie and I had an amazing childhood. It’s only now I look back that I realize how much my mum and dad sacrificed for us. We weren’t spoiled – at least I don’t think we were – but they did everything they could to make sure we had chances in life.

When I was very young my mum worked at a local video shop. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world because it meant free movies. I’ll never forget the day she brought home a copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles long before anybody else had got their hands on it. That was when you had to wait ages for films to be released on video, so to have a copy before everybody else was awesome.

At the age of four, I started at my first school, Roxeth Manor. Not long after that, Mum did some voluntary work there, looking after the kids at break time and handing out their little packed lunches. She started working there full time a bit later, working her way up to where she is now – a senior teaching assistant. That’s still her job: helping kids with learning difficulties bring out the best in themselves. Dad worked for Kodak. He was in the business of ‘silver recovery’, which is a lot less glamorous than it sounds. Back in the day, camera film contained traces of silver, and it was Dad’s job to recover that silver from used rolls of film. It was properly hard work – twelve-hour shifts, which meant working several nights in a row in a massive, noisy, grinding factory in north-west London, near to where we were brought up. He worked there for twenty years but then, just after I left school, he was made redundant. I wasn’t aware of it then, but looking back I can see how incredibly tough and stressful that time must have been for my parents.

But silver recovery wasn’t his passion. Music was. Ever since I can remember, Dad played guitar and sang in a covers band, playing at the British Legion and local pubs and bars. Even when I was very small, before my sister was born, I’d go with Mum to hear him play, and Dad would get me up on stage to sing a song with him every time he played. Years later, I was able to return the favour and get him to play with me, only this time the stage in question was Wembley Arena – a very special moment for both of us.

Our house was always full of people playing guitar and singing. I was practically weaned on the Rolling Stones, The Eagles and Eric Clapton, maybe a bit of The Beatles and some country music – all the stuff he used to play in his band. My mum was the world’s biggest Bryan Adams fan. She was in love with him, I think. (Sorry, Dad.) No matter what happens in my life, I think that in her eyes the coolest thing I’ve ever done is exchange a few emails with Bryan, and speak to him on the phone a couple of times. In my mum’s eyes, that’s how you know you’ve made it. I’d love to arrange for her to meet him one of these days, although on second thoughts I’m not sure she could cope with the excitement …

For me, though, it was all about Michael Jackson. I absolutely loved Michael Jackson. Mum and Dad saw how keen I was on him and saved up so they could afford to take me to see him live in concert a couple of times, once on the Dangerous tour and once on the HIStory tour (where he flew off the stage and out of the stadium at the end of the show with a jet pack – maybe we should try that one day). I was even one of those kids who waited outside his hotel, hoping to get a glimpse of him or even meet him. I got so close. He came out of the hotel one day to talk to some of his fans and was only about a metre away from me when a girl jumped over the barrier to get at him. His security bundled him into a car, drove him away, and that was that. Now, whenever I walk off the tour bus to be greeted by lines of screaming fans, I try to remember that I was a fan back then. I still am.

With music being so big in my house, I guess it was hardly a surprise that I wanted to play guitar from the age of five. Dad sold one of his guitars so that I could have my own, and he and Mum paid for me to have classical guitar lessons. That was my mum and dad through and through. If Carrie or I really showed an interest in something, they did what they could to give us the opportunity to do it. I’m sure they went without a lot as a result. I learned all the basics about playing guitar in those lessons, but the real stuff – the stuff I use now – I learned from my dad and all the other musicians who were constantly round our house. Whenever there was a birthday, or a barbecue, or it was Christmas, the house was littered with guitars and full of people playing music. It’s still like that now. And as Dad was also a singer, I was always singing around the house with him from a very young age.

Carrie and I were a bit different to most of the kids in our neighbourhood. Nobody else we knew wanted to play guitar, or sing, or dance. It wasn’t cool. The other children didn’t take it seriously. The only thing they took was the piss. We were the outsiders. In our own, peculiar way, we were the aliens at the window. I had a couple of close friends when I was much younger, but nobody I’ve really kept in touch with, and I’m sure that’s partly because I always had different interests to kids my age, at least until the local high school started hosting Stagecoach classes on a Saturday morning. Stagecoach is a part-time performing arts school for kids, and my parents, always eager to give me every opportunity, let me go. I loved it – three hours a week of singing, dancing and acting in a place where nobody thinks you’re weird for doing it.

One of the Stagecoach teachers also taught at Ravenscourt Theatre School in Hammersmith. She saw how into drama I was, and suggested I go to one of their summer workshops. It was a two-week course, at the end of which we put on a little show. The headmaster of the school came along to watch the show, and offered me a scholarship. I was nine years old.

That was that. I never went back to my normal school.

Ravenscourt wasn’t just a theatre school. It was also an agency. All of a sudden I found myself constantly going out for auditions and even getting a bit of work. Sounds great, right? Well, truth to tell, and for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, I wasn’t that happy at Ravenscourt. It might have been a world apart from my previous school, but I still didn’t quite fit in.

During my first few weeks at Ravenscourt, I’d always be bumping into pupils from another theatre school, Sylvia Young, when I was out working. I remember thinking how well behaved they all were compared to the kids from Ravenscourt, who were always a bit rowdier. They also seemed a bit more professional, and took their performing rather more seriously than my fellow Ravenscourt pupils. I don’t know who first made the suggestion that I should apply, but halfway through my first term at Ravenscourt, I found myself with my mum and dad, sitting in the office of Sylvia Young herself. She asked me to sing for her – I think I sang something from Oliver! – and the next thing I knew, she’d offered me a place. I started there the following Monday.

The Sylvia Young Theatre School was in Marylebone. Dad was still working shifts at Kodak. Mum was at school. My nan and granddad took me in every day – without them, I’d never have been able to go. It was impossible for my mum and dad to get me there and back each day while they were working full time. Nan and Granddad would drive me into London, and later on take me to Sylvia’s by train. I owe them such a lot, and I hope I made the most of the opportunity they and my parents gave me. Certainly I’d finally found somewhere I felt like I belonged. Sylvia’s was full-on. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were dedicated to academic work – they taught us all the maths and English and science that everybody else had to learn, and I was good enough when it came to my regular studies. I’d always been fascinated by science, space and aviation, and I loved art and creative writing. Thursday and Friday were purely vocational. We were immersed in the disciplines of singing, dancing and acting, and these were my passion – especially singing. I was also lucky enough to be one of the pupils who found themselves working a lot. It was all the standard stuff that kids get put up for – extras work on EastEnders and Grange Hill, adverts, voice-overs … I found I had a knack for dubbing my voice in time to foreign adverts that needed to be translated into English, so once or twice a week I’d be out working on little jobs like that.

I was ten years old when I went up for a general audition for Oliver! in the West End. It had been running for about a year, and my parents had already taken me to see it. I’d fallen in love with the show. Did I mention that I was lucky? It’s true. The things I really want in life normally seem to come my way. I remember watching Oliver! and somehow knowing that one day I would be in it. I don’t think I was being arrogant. It was just something I’d set my heart on, like kids sometimes do. I was going to be in Oliver! So when word got out around Sylvia’s that they were auditioning for the show, I was the first in line.

I was used to the auditioning process by now, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t brutal. At least on the audition stages of The X Factor they let you perform before they send you packing. On the first round of one of these auditions they might well take one look at you and tell you to go home before you’d even opened your mouth. If you’d got brown hair and they were looking for somebody blond, there was no point wasting your time or theirs. If you weren’t properly prepared, being rejected like that might mess you up, but we were taught early on at Sylvia’s how to be professional about auditions, and to remember that if you didn’t fit the bill it was never personal. I suppose a lot of people found the whole process daunting. It never really bothered me. I loved performing, and I’d been doing it from a young age. And remember: this was something I really wanted to do.

I got the part of Kipper, one of the kids in Fagin’s gang. The child licensing laws meant that children could only work for a certain number of days in the year, so there were two teams on the show. That meant I’d do one week on, one week off during our team’s three-month run, and I lived for those nights I spent on the stage.

I was very professional as a kid. I always knew my lines and, more often than not, I knew everyone else’s too. One night, the kid playing the Artful Dodger completely lost his voice halfway through the show. He wasn’t just a bit hoarse – his voice was completely gone and he could barely speak, let alone sing loud enough to be heard in the gods. There were ten of us kids on stage, and once you’re on in the first half, you’re on till the interval, two thousand pairs of eyes staring at you. Dodger was bricking himself as he passed the word round that there was no way he could sing another note, begging one of us to fill in for him. Of course, I was the only one sad enough to know all the lyrics to all the songs, so I found myself belting out ‘I’d Do Anything’ and ‘Be Back Soon’, while he did all the acting. Come the interval, the director hunted me out to say thanks, and I think that was the first time I’d properly caught his eye. When the three-month run came to an end, I was miserable. I hated the idea of leaving – I’d have quite happily carried on singing in Fagin’s gang, performing in front of packed-out crowds, for ever. So I was made up when the choreographer asked me if I’d come back to audition for the part of Oliver.

I was still just ten years old when I got the part. It was around Christmas time, so come January I was allowed to start working again, this time in the lead role. I still had to go to school in the daytime, so it was full-on, and even though I was allowed to come in at first break, I went through a time during my stint on the show when I didn’t want to go to school at all. I’d invent illnesses, or hide in the toilets and cry. It was a weird little period in my life, something I didn’t understand. Over the years that followed I would have these episodes, but it would be a long time before I realized what was really going on in my head. But even though I was unhappy at school, I loved everything about being in Oliver! The cast were fantastic – Jim Dale was Fagin, and he was absolutely brilliant with kids. They were, all in all, three special months that I didn’t want to end.

They did end, of course, and life went back to normal at Sylvia’s. Or as normal as life can be at a theatre school. Sylvia’s was a tiny, intimate place with never more than about a hundred and twenty pupils, which meant I knew almost everyone by name and everyone knew each other’s business. Amy Winehouse was a few years above me, and I knew her about as well as I knew everybody else there. Even as a young teenager she was pretty much what you’d expect – rebellious, to say the least, but always very friendly. I don’t know if she was asked to leave Sylvia’s before her course came to an end, but I certainly remember that she left early. She released her first album at the same time as we released ours. Amy’s went kind of unnoticed back then, but we found ourselves doing the rounds of the same TV programmes, and she’d always make an effort to say hello. That’s the thing with Sylvia’s kids. You’re part of a group even when you’ve left. Even now, if I see someone wearing a Sylvia’s uniform, I’ll go and chat.

There was a guy in the same year as Amy. His name was Matt Willis. I could never have guessed at the time how profoundly the paths of our lives and careers would cross. I’m honoured now to call him a friend, but I doubt I was even on Matt’s radar when we were at school. I must have just been one of the annoying younger kids to him. I was a bit of a teacher’s pet, whereas he had a reputation for being a bad boy – not that it’s difficult to get a reputation like that at a school where all the boys wear unitards and do ballet. Truth is, though, that I wished I was a bit more like him …

A year went by. One afternoon I’d gone back to my nan’s house after school. We were sitting around eating curry – it was buy one, get one free, and Nan always used to joke that I could have the free one – when the phone rang. It was my agent, asking if I could get to the London Palladium by seven o’clock. The boy playing Oliver was ill, and his opposite number (two kids for each part, remember) lived in Wales and couldn’t get there in time. Could I come in and play the part for one night?

I hadn’t done it for a year, and there was an entirely new adult cast on board. But what the hell?

They delayed the show by fifteen minutes while I rushed into town and had half an hour with Robert Lindsay, who was the new Fagin; I didn’t exchange more than a couple of words with the Artful Dodger before going on stage. Standing in the wings, eleven years old, not having sung any of these songs for a year, I was absolutely bricking myself. But the moment I set foot on stage it all came back to me. It went well and I had an amazing night, doing what I loved.

A week later, the same thing happened, only this time it was the Oliver from Wales who got stuck on the train coming in, while his opposite number was still ill. Action replay: I stepped in again.

The following day I was asked if I would do another three-month stint, and I jumped at the chance. Second time round, though, it just wasn’t the same. I didn’t quite gel with the cast the way I had done the year before – Robert Lindsay was replaced by Barry Humphries, and I’m afraid Dame Edna didn’t have the same rapport with the kids that Jim or Robert had done. The show was coming to the end of its run and nobody seemed quite as enthusiastic as they had been first time round. I learned a lot, then, about the importance of surrounding yourself with people you have a bond with, and who are as committed to what you’re doing as you are. Mostly, though, I learned that when you try to recapture a magical period in your life, it’s all too common to find the magic has gone.

I think I still approached it professionally, though. Too professionally, perhaps. When you play Oliver, you’re on stage constantly from the beginning of Act 1 until the interval. I must have been in a rush one night when I forgot to go to the toilet before stepping out on stage. I realized I needed the loo before the first song had even finished, but by that time it was way too late.

I held it in, and held it in. But that first act is long. I considered quickly relieving myself on stage while I was slightly hidden – maybe I could do the necessary while I was shut inside one of Mr Sowerberry’s coffins for a couple of minutes. But I’m incredibly indecisive, and before I knew it the chance had passed me by. It was agony. AGONY! How I managed to sing ‘Where is Love?’ and dance around the stage during ‘Consider Yourself’ is beyond me. We were easily an hour into the show by the time Nancy arrived in Fagin’s den to sing ‘I’d Do Anything’. I’d reached the point where I would do anything. There was a moment in that song where I had to stand on the side of the stage just watching the action, and I simply couldn’t hold it any longer. Everyone’s attention was on Dodger and Nancy, so now was the time to do it …

Reader, I pissed myself. On stage at the London Palladium. With more than two thousand people watching. Fortunately I was wearing my grimy workhouse costume, so I don’t think the audience would have noticed anything, unless they were watching the expression of sheer, joyous relief pass over Oliver’s face. I whispered on stage to Dodger: ‘Dude, I’ve pissed myself!’ I’ll certainly never forget the look on his face. Massively embarrassing, but I still don’t think I had any other option. The show had to go on. Told you I was a professional kid.

My own enthusiasm for Oliver! had run its course, but not my enthusiasm for the stage. I carried on working alongside my studies. One of my coolest ever jobs was singing in the choir for the reissue of Return of the Jedi. If you were to come round to my house and see all the Star Wars memorabilia, you’d get an idea of how much I dug doing that. I even went along to some open auditions for various boy bands that were advertised in the Stage magazine, and generally got quite a long way through the audition process, but I was always too young – the minimum age for these bands was invariably sixteen, and I’d only have been fourteen or fifteen at the time and would never have had the guts to lie about my age. (Here’s looking at you, Dougie Poynter.) In retrospect, that was a good thing. Those auditions were for very typical boy bands, and I really don’t think I’d have been happy in them even if they’d gone on to have any success, which they didn’t.

I left Sylvia’s at the age of sixteen, and I still look back on those years as some of the best of my life, and some of the most significant, not least because it was there that I met the girl who would later become my wife. Giovanna and I met when we were thirteen – I’d been at Sylvia’s for a few years and she had just started halfway up the school. I remember sitting in our tiny assembly room with my friend Jason, checking out all the new kids and wondering if we’d get any of them in our class. This gorgeous girl walked in – I immediately turned to Jason and commented on how fit she was – and one of the teachers told her to come and sit next to me as her surname was alphabetically next to mine. She smiled at me. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Giovanna, but you can call me G.’

‘Hi.’ I smiled back. ‘I’m Tom, but you can call me T.’

Hmm … very smooth (not).

Despite my cringeworthy chat-up lines, by the end of that day, Giovanna was my girlfriend. It didn’t last long. Two days later I dumped her for a girl called Gemma Gould. Harsh but true. I instantly regretted it, and spent the next two years of my life completely obsessed with her. All I thought about was Gi, and I drove my classmates absolutely insane going on about her. I’d totally messed things up by being the bastard who dumped her in the first week of her new school, and she quite rightly did her very best to make life as difficult for me as possible. I spent two years trying to persuade her to go out with me again. In the end I wore her down. She finally caved in and we started seeing each other properly in our final year at Sylvia’s.

When school finished, we broke up again. Gi was from Essex, I was from Harrow, and they seemed a million miles apart. Splitting up felt like the sensible, adult thing to do … right up until the moment that we actually did it. Yet again, I spent the next two years trying to win her back, and although I had a few other relationships in that time, I always knew it was Gi that I wanted.

I loved being at Sylvia’s, but when I finished there I felt like it was time for a change. I’d devoted nearly half of my childhood to acting and singing, had been working almost constantly, and felt a bit like I’d missed out on being a kid. I wanted something different, more normal. I had a good friend outside of school – my only friend, really, outside my little group at Sylvia’s – called Neil. Neil’s brother was in the Air Cadets and had encouraged us to go along with him. I was desperate to do so. My love of aviation was another thing passed down to me by my parents, who used to take me to air shows as a kid. We’d even drive down to Heathrow and park near the runway to watch Concorde land – sounds geeky, but it was an amazing experience. I signed up to 1454 Squadron in Northolt and thought it was awesome. We had uniforms and used to learn drill practice, and once a month you could go gliding or flying. I became obsessed with planes, and as a result I gave serious thought to joining the RAF (I later fulfilled that lifelong dream by getting my pilot’s licence), but in the end I decided on something more humdrum. In September 2001 I enrolled at Stanmore College to study art, English literature, media studies and drama. It was one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made.

I’m very shy, not keen on socializing. Even now, when we have parties at home, I’ll lock myself in the toilet for ten minutes, just so I can have a bit of time out where I don’t have to talk to anybody. It’s not that I don’t like other people, it’s just that I don’t crave company. I’m fine being on my own. I like it, and I always have, ever since I was a young kid. So, I was the sort of person for whom the first day at school is a complete nightmare. I turned up at college on that first day of term as nervous as hell, and it was totally, completely, one hundred per cent as bad as I expected. Almost all the other kids already knew each other from their previous local schools, and none of them paid any attention to the shy new boy. I hated every moment I spent there. I had no real friends. I’d gone from studying at one of the best theatre schools in the world to something really amateur at the local college. I felt like I’d properly messed up.

A depressing month passed, the prospect of two years of unwanted time at Stanmore hanging over me like a shadow. I arrived home from college one day and my mum pointed out an advert in the Stage for an audition the following day at 10.30 a.m. It was for a boy band, but it wasn’t just asking for guys who could look good, sing a bit and dance a lot. They wanted musicians, instrumentalists. This was an audition for a boy band with a difference. A boy band that could actually play. ‘Why don’t you go along?’ my mum suggested.

I shook my head. Even though I hated being at college, I was still trying to persuade myself that I wanted to do normal stuff, to give it a proper go at Stanmore. I was being my usual incredibly indecisive self, though. I woke up the next morning thinking perhaps I should audition, before just as quickly rejecting the idea again. Mum and Dad left to take the dog out for a walk. The moment I heard the door shut, my decision flipped again. I did want to go and do it. I called them back from their walk, grabbed my dad’s guitar and worked out a song to play – ‘The Dance’ by Garth Brooks – and we rushed into town.

The audition was at Pineapple Dance Studios in Covent Garden, a place I knew well because loads of auditions were held there. It was full of maybe two hundred kids with guitars, obviously all there for the audition, but as I walked up the stairs to the place where we were supposed to congregate, I saw a face I knew. It was Matt Willis, and to be honest my heart sank a little.

We said hi. ‘You here for the audition?’ I asked him.

Matt shook his head. ‘No,’ he told me. ‘I’m already in the band.’

Great. I might as well go straight home. Matt was much cooler than me, and I was certain he wouldn’t want me in his band. I should have just gone to college. I said all this to my mum, but she persuaded me to stick around and do the audition anyway. Thank God she did.

We were divided into groups and the time came for mine to step into the audition room. There was a long table, with four people sitting behind it. Matthew ‘Fletch’ Fletcher – young, enthusiastic, always talking – and Richard Rashman – older, American and with a slower, lazier drawl – were the management. It was they who were putting the band together, the brains behind the operation. I didn’t know it then, but they would become two of the most important people in my career. The third person was a kid called James Bourne – already in the band. Matt was the fourth. There were about ten people in my group. One of them was called Charlie Simpson.

It was one of those rare auditions that goes brilliantly. As each of the others got up to sing and play, I knew I had the edge on them, and when, at the end, the panel announced which three of us they wanted to see again later on that afternoon, Charlie and I were among their number.

The afternoon audition was more in-depth. I was properly introduced to Matt and James, and asked to sing some songs with them. Fletch and Richard put me on the spot, but it still went well. By the end of the day, the couple of hundred hopefuls had been whittled down to me, Charlie and two other guys.

I was called back to a second audition a couple of days later. This time we rocked up at the InterContinental Hotel in Hyde Park. This, I later found out, was where Richard Rashman stayed when he was in London, and I had no idea how important that place would later become in my life. It wasn’t until I arrived at the InterContinental that I found out what the band I was auditioning for was going to be called. Busted.

Matt and James were there, and they played us a song they’d written called ‘What I Go To School For’. I loved it. Everything about that song sounded perfect to me. I liked that it was very pop, but with proper musicianship. What struck me most, though, were the lyrics. It was a cheeky song about wanting to shag your teacher. No clean-cut boy-band clichés. It was what pop music is supposed to be: a laugh. To my ears it was light years ahead of your average boy-band fodder. When I heard it, I felt brave enough to play them one of my own songs that had similarly tongue-in-cheek lyrics. It was called ‘I’m In Love With A Whore’. They all cracked up laughing when they heard it, and although it was a truly terrible song, I think it at least showed that I was in tune with the kind of music they wanted to make. They got us to sing ‘What I Go To School For’ with them, and it was then that I knew that I really – really – wanted to be in the group. With Fletch and Richard’s ‘We’ll let you know’ ringing in my ears, I went home, keeping everything crossed that I’d done enough, and trying to ignore the little voice in my head that kept telling me there was no way Matt would want me to be in his band, given that we were hardly best mates. I focused instead on the fact that James Bourne and I seemed to have a lot in common. He’d also played Kipper in Oliver! before going on to play the title role; and as we’d chatted, we’d realized that we’d worked together on some other projects when we were much younger.

The call came through that night. It was Richard Rashman. ‘Congratulations, Tom,’ he said in his understated American drawl. ‘We really liked you. We’d love you to be in the band.’ He explained that Charlie was to be the fourth member, and asked if I could come down to the studio the following week.

I was on a total high. It wasn’t just that I’d been accepted into a pop band that I was totally into. Getting into Busted was my escape route from college. I’d made such a huge mistake going there, and now I had another option. I could carry on doing media studies at Stanmore, surrounded by people I didn’t really get on with, doing something I didn’t enjoy – or I could go and be a pop star. Tough choice.

Matt, James, Charlie and I arrived at the studio the following week and listened through some more rough cuts of the songs they’d been working on for their first album. I got on brilliantly with James and Charlie; even Matt seemed friendly enough. I loved all the songs and, if anything, I was even more excited at the end of that day than when Richard had offered me the gig. I remember the four of us going to Burger King – the band, together – experiencing the kind of camaraderie you only get with being in a band. It was something I’d never done before, and the feeling was fantastic. I remember walking to the station with Charlie, shaking hands and agreeing with him that this was the start of something awesome.

Which it was. For them.

I was over the moon. I got home and started telling everybody I knew that I was leaving college to be in this brilliant band. It was the best feeling. Elation. Everything seemed to be slotting into place.

A couple of days passed. It was Halloween and my sister, Carrie, was having a party. We had loads of people round the house, including all my family, and kids everywhere. My mum answered the phone and handed it over to me, saying that Richard Rashman wanted to talk. I went upstairs to take it.

‘Hello, Tom.’ Richard’s American drawl was as matter-of-fact as it always was. He’s totally blunt. A guy who says things as they are. ‘So we’ve been talking,’ he said, ‘and we’ve decided to keep the band as a trio. So we’re really sorry, but we’re keeping it as Matt, Charlie and James. You’re not going to be in the band.’

I’d been flying high. Now I felt like I was in the gutter. Total devastation. End of the world. I’d had two days to enjoy the idea that I was going to be a pop star. Two days to gloat about it in front of everyone I knew. (Thank God Twitter and Facebook weren’t around at the time.) Now I would have to admit that it had all been a mistake. And even worse than that, it looked like I was going back to college in the morning.

All these thoughts rebounded in my head. I was vaguely aware that Richard was still speaking. ‘We really like you,’ he tried to assure me. ‘It’s no reflection on what we think of you as a performer … we really like the kind of songs you’ve been writing … we’d love to keep working with you.’

Rubbish, I thought to myself. Richard was obviously just letting me down gently. I listened politely, but deep down I knew everything was slipping away.

‘I go to LA tomorrow,’ he continued, ‘but I’m back in a couple of weeks … you should spend some time working on some songs … maybe come over and talk things through, show us a few when I’m back … we can help you develop them …’

Yeah, yeah. I was totally sure I’d never hear from him again. I mumbled something down the phone and hung up. My dreams were well and truly shattered.

The two weeks that followed were horrible. I went from one of the biggest highs in my life to one of the deepest lows. Obviously Rashman had been stringing me along, and I don’t think I even picked up a guitar in that time, let alone worked on any songs. So when the phone rang a fortnight later and a drawling American voice said, ‘Hello, Tom, why don’t you come in and see me tomorrow?’ I was surprised and completely unprepared. I was hardly a prolific songwriter. The first songs I’d written were for my GCSE music course when I was fifteen: two songs, both absolutely terrible. All I can remember of them is that one was a total rip-off of a Green Day tune. I don’t think I ripped it off intentionally, but I was just feeling my way around the edges of songwriting, learning how to structure melodies, so I guess it’s not surprising that the stuff I was into at the time unconsciously ended up in my songs.

I desperately needed material for the following day – it wasn’t like I could turn up and play ‘I’m In Love With A Whore’ five times back to back. Once was probably too many. I spent that night cobbling a few songs together. My short experience with Busted had taught me that it was possible to write decent songs about silly, youthful, teenage things, and given me a little bit of confidence that it was something I might be able to do. I can’t honestly say, though, that I achieved it that night. The tunes I came up with were probably even worse than ‘I’m In Love With A Whore’. The best of the bunch was called ‘Hot Chicks Dot Com’, all about the delights of finding photos of your mum on a porn site. Don’t expect ever to hear it – I’ve conveniently blocked the details from my mind.

The following day, armed with a guitar and my handful of songs, I went to meet Richard and Fletch again.

I played through my songs.

Fletch looked at Richard.

Richard looked at Fletch.

Fletch looked at me.

And then he started to tell me, in excruciating and long-winded detail, just how crap they were.

Fletch didn’t pull his punches – I subsequently learned that that’s a trait of his – and I felt like each one was hammering me into the ground. He wasn’t entirely damning, though. Fletch is a brilliant pianist and a great all-round musician, and he identified small sections of certain songs that were potentially good. He told me which bits could be turned into hooks, and talked to me about how songs should be structured. When the time came to leave, he gave me what was almost homework. ‘Go and listen to hit songs,’ he told me. ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t like them, it just matters that they’re hits. Find out what they all have in common. Work out how to do it.’

I went away from that session with the feeling that Richard and Fletch were serious when they said they wanted to work with me. I also realized, however, that they weren’t easy to impress. If I was going to get anywhere with them, I’d have to raise my game.

Back home, I threw myself into Fletch’s homework with a lot more enthusiasm than I’d ever had for the work my teachers set for me at college. I listened to anything and everything – not just the stuff that was big at the time, like Backstreet Boys and Britney, but also the harder American rock music that I really loved, Limp Bizkit and Blink-182 and Green Day. I asked myself: Who are the greatest songwriters of all time? The answer was obvious to me and to everyone else I spoke to: Lennon and McCartney. I went out and bought every Beatles record and became obsessed with them. I was amazed that I knew every single song already, despite never having listened to a Beatles album before. These songs just seemed to be implanted in my subconscious, and now that I was listening to them properly, I decided they were the best thing I’d ever heard. It was Paul’s melodies that did it for me, and through listening to The Beatles I began properly to learn what a hook was, and a middle eight (the section in the middle of a song – usually eight bars long – that brings in new ideas or chords to keep the listener interested). Gradually I tried to incorporate these features into my own songs. Slowly, they improved.

I kept in touch with Fletch and Richard. Every now and then we’d meet up. I’d play them the tunes I’d been working on; they’d give me some words of encouragement and tell me what was happening with Busted – they’d been signed by now and were recording their first album – and play demos of their music. I had mixed feelings listening to these. I was still gutted not to be in the band, but part of me felt pleased that I’d been involved in a small way, even if that involvement had only amounted to being in the band for two days before getting kicked out. As a result I had a creative way of possibly getting out of college. That alone made me hungry to improve, and keen to stay in contact with Fletch and Richard now that I’d seen that they really could make things happen.

I was keen to stay in touch with someone else, too: Giovanna. Even though we weren’t together and she had another boyfriend, I’d cheekily send her the cheesy love songs I was writing. I can’t imagine the bloke she was with at the time was very impressed, but hey: I might not be confident, but I am persistent.