What Happened to BBMak? Reunited and Back on the Road in 2026

If you came of age in 2000, there’s a good chance BBMak’s “Back Here” is permanently lodged somewhere in your memory — that plaintive falsetto hook, the harmonies, the earnest close-up shots in the music video. The British trio of Mark Barry, Christian Burns, and Stephen McNally rode that single all the way to No. 5 in the UK and No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, then quietly disappeared when the band split in 2003. So what happened to them? As it turns out, quite a lot — including a reunion nobody saw coming, a new album, and a 2026 summer tour that’s putting them back in small clubs across North America.

01Profile

Group name

BBMak

Members

Mark Barry, Christian Burns, Stephen McNally

Formed

1996, Liverpool, England

Ages (as of publish)

Barry, 47; Burns, 52; McNally, 48

Biggest hit

"Back Here" (1999/2000) — UK No. 5, US Billboard Hot 100 No. 13

Original run

1996–2003, two studio albums

Reunion year

2018

Current status

Actively touring and releasing music as of 2026

Three guys from Liverpool who happened to have perfect three-part harmony — that was BBMak’s whole pitch, and it worked. Two and a half decades later, the pitch hasn’t really changed, which is part of why the reunion has stuck.

02The Rise: A Liverpool Trio Conquers American Radio

From UK hopefuls to US chart regulars

BBMak formed in Liverpool in 1996, built around Mark Barry, Christian Burns, and Stephen McNally’s tight vocal blend and a decidedly less choreography-heavy image than their American boy-band contemporaries — think acoustic guitars over synchronized dance routines. Their debut single, “Back Here,” came out in the UK in 1999 without much fanfare. It wasn’t until the song crossed the Atlantic in 2000, propelled by adult contemporary and pop radio in the US, that it became the defining hit of their career, eventually climbing to No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and ranking among the biggest singles of that year. The UK re-release that followed in early 2001 sent it to No. 5 at home.

Sooner or Later and a genuine transatlantic following

Their debut album, “Sooner or Later” (2000), rode the momentum of “Back Here” and follow-up singles like “Still on Your Side” and the title track, pushing the band to platinum status in the US. Unlike many of their late-90s/early-2000s peers, BBMak wrote a lot of their own material, which gave them a bit more credibility with critics even as they were marketed alongside acts like Boyzone and Westlife. By the band’s account, they sold more than three million albums worldwide between 1999 and 2003 — a genuinely big run for a trio that never quite became a household name the way *NSYNC or Backstreet Boys did.

A second album, then a fade-out

A second record, “Into Your Head,” followed in 2002, but the commercial momentum had cooled considerably by then. Label pressures, the usual grind of touring, and diverging personal priorities set in, and by 2003 the group had quietly dissolved.

03The Split and the Quiet Years

BBMak didn’t go out with a dramatic implosion — no public feud, no tabloid blowup. According to the band’s own retelling in later interviews, it was more a matter of three guys in their mid-twenties realizing the industry machine around them had moved on and deciding to step away rather than force it.

• 2003BBMak disbands after two albums; members go their separate ways.
• 2000sChristian Burns relocates to Los Angeles and builds a career as a songwriter and dance-music collaborator, working with artists in the trance and house scenes.
• 2000s–2010sMark Barry and Stephen McNally step back from the music industry in the UK and focus on family life, largely out of the public eye.
• March 2018Christian Burns posts a video of the three of them singing together again; it goes viral within days and reignites reunion talk.
• 2018BBMak officially confirms the reunion after 15 years apart.

For McNally and Barry in particular, the years after the split were reportedly about raising families rather than chasing another hit. Burns, meanwhile, kept a foot in the music business, co-writing and featuring on tracks for European dance producers — work that rarely made headlines in the US but kept him professionally connected to the industry that had first found BBMak.

04The Reunion: How BBMak Found Its Way Back

The reunion story is almost disarmingly casual. By the band’s own account, the three of them got together just to see if the old harmonies still worked — no label meeting, no manager pushing a comeback. They started singing “Back Here” together for old times’ sake, someone filmed it, and Burns posted the clip online. It spread fast, racking up views far beyond what any of them expected for a trio that had been out of the spotlight for a decade and a half.

That groundswell of nostalgia turned into something real. The band signed on for shows, started writing together despite living an ocean apart — Burns in Los Angeles, Barry and McNally in the UK — and in October 2019 released “Powerstation,” their first new album in 17 years. The record leaned into a more electronic, dance-adjacent sound than the acoustic pop of their early 2000s work, something Burns has attributed to the different musical world each of them had been living in during the gap years. The lead single, “Bullet Train,” arrived that May as the first new BBMak music fans had heard since 2002.

Reviewers generally treated “Powerstation” as a credible, mature reinvention rather than a nostalgia cash-grab, and the accompanying tour proved there was still a real audience willing to buy tickets for a band most people assumed had quietly retired.

05What They’re Doing Now

BBMak in 2026 looks less like a reunion victory lap and more like a band that simply decided to keep going. They’ve become fixtures of the 2000s nostalgia touring circuit, joining Chris Kirkpatrick’s Pop 2000 Tour alongside acts like O-Town, LFO, and Ryan Cabrera in both 2023 and 2024 — a package tour built specifically around the audience that grew up on this exact era of pop radio.

A tuna commercial went viral — and they leaned into it

In one of the stranger and more good-humored chapters of the reunion, Bumble Bee Seafoods recruited BBMak in May 2024 to rework “Back Here” into “Snack Meal, Baby,” a Y2K-nostalgia ad campaign built around the band’s original melody with new lyrics about tuna snack products. All three members appeared in the accompanying music-video-style ad, shot in deliberately retro ’90s soft-lighting style. It was a marketing stunt, sure, but it also showed a band comfortable enough with its own legacy to poke fun at it — and it introduced “Back Here” to an entirely new round of algorithm-fed listeners who had no idea the original song was 25 years old.

Back on the road under the song’s own name

By 2026, the band is headlining its own dates again rather than just riding a package tour. Billed as the “Back Here Tour,” BBMak’s summer 2026 North American run includes club and theater dates stretching from May through November, with stops that include New York’s Cutting Room, venues in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, Cleveland, and Columbus, among others. Fans attending these shows have reportedly noted how little the core appeal has changed — three guys, tight harmonies, and a catalog deep enough now to mix old hits with “Powerstation”-era material.

“It’s a pinch-me moment, honestly. We never thought we’d be doing this again, let alone touring off the back of it.” — BBMak, Geo.tv interview, 2023

Christian Burns’ parallel solo career

Outside the group, Christian Burns has kept busy as a songwriter and featured vocalist in the electronic dance scene, including a 2024 collaboration with trance duo Cosmic Gate on the single “Brave,” and further work with producer Yero on “Wonderful Life” the same year. He’s also continued to release solo material, including tracks reflecting on his move to the US and his life since. It’s a reminder that even during BBMak’s long hiatus, at least one member never fully left the music industry — which may help explain why the reunion’s songwriting and touring machinery came together so smoothly once Barry and McNally were ready to jump back in.

06Summary

BBMak’s story doesn’t follow the usual boy-band arc of flame-out and bitter reunion tour cash-grab. Instead, it’s a fairly rare case of a band stepping away cleanly, staying friends, and coming back on their own terms once the timing — and the itch to sing together again — felt right. Nearly a decade into the reunion, they’re not chasing radio hits anymore; they’re playing to an audience that already knows every word.

For a band that many assumed had simply faded into one-hit-wonder trivia, BBMak’s second act has been unexpectedly durable. Whether you catch them at a small club this year or just hear “Back Here” pop up in a commercial, the trio’s harmonies have proven to have real staying power — proof that not every 2000s pop act needs a dramatic comeback narrative to keep going. Sometimes it’s just three friends who decided the song still sounded good.