Hey, Let's Make a Band!: The Official 5SOS Book

by 5 Seconds of Summer

  As the band started to take off, my time spent at school became pretty nonexistent and I think I always tried to skip my way out of classes until I left. As I got older I thought, OK, I have to go a bit more so I don’t fail. But I failed anyway. The day that I was allowed to legally leave, I did. I’d just turned 16 but I was having too much fun with 5SOS to care about my grades. I couldn’t wait to get out.

  The weirdest thing that happened to us was before a show in Melbourne. The day of the gig, our manager got a phone call saying, “The venue fell into a sink hole – the gig’s off!” We were like, “What?! Wait, all these people have been waiting for so long to see us play and the venue falls into a sink hole?!”

  We didn’t know what to do. We thought, Do we sit outside and play an acoustic show, or just not do it? In the end, we had to do a last-minute venue change to a high school down the road. We didn’t have any of the equipment and it was the smallest stage in the world, set up on a tennis court, but we didn’t care – we were just so happy to be playing.

  CALUM:

  We were best friends traveling Australia, playing music to people who wanted to hear us. I think the most exciting shows for us were the ones with the smallest audiences. There was so much energy in those rooms.

  At first, we were all nervous about traveling. Michael was especially nervous because it was his first time getting on a plane. We were like, “Don’t worry, Michael, it might do a few loop-the-loops in the air but you’ll be fine.” He was completely terrified.

  I guess it took a while for our parents to become completely supportive. In the beginning, we weren’t playing to a lot of people and Mum thought I was just joining a band to get girl attention, but after a while they came around. They came to the gigs and got on the planes with us to make sure we were fine. Once they were used to it they were happy for us to go on our own. They became like, “You know what? This is a good thing!”

  What was amazing to me was the fact that we actually had fans around the country. That was weird. We were riding around in a van to the show, all squished together and seeing people outside the venue, actually lining up to see us. It was the best feeling ever. Without them we wouldn’t have been doing those shows. The fans were so special to us and it was great to meet them every time we played.

  No one at our school knew we were even doing this. We were just living another life. But the worst thing was coming back to classes, because it was like coming back down to Earth. I was like, “This sucks.” In Math I didn’t really wanna be there. Every day I was just thinking of playing music – it’s all I wanted to do. It was the same for all of us. The band was our new life.

  LUKE:

  It hasn’t taken me long to realize that we’d be nothing without our fans – they’ve been behind us all the way, from the very first minute. They’ve watched our videos and told all their friends about us. But most of all, they’ve given us the inspiration to go on. We feel like we’ve got an amazing, loving, passionate 5SOS family out there and they’re so important to us.

  It was strange at first, though; knowing that there were people all over the world who were into our music and knew everything about 5SOS, even though we were just four dudes from the middle of nowhere in Australia.

  I can remember the first time I was asked for an autograph – that was weird. Me and Michael had traveled into the city on the train to do a little acoustic show. This was before our tours of Australia, so it wasn’t like we were playing sold-out shows all the time. We walked across the road to eat in McDonald’s when a couple of people came up to us and asked for autographs. I felt so confused because we hadn’t worked out what our autographs should look like. It still is weird, but it’s something we appreciate so much.

  MICHAEL:

  There’s a loving relationship between us and our fans, and it’s been there from the start. At the beginning they were getting to know us because all we had were our tweets and our random videos online. There was nothing else for them to grab on to at that time, which meant they were always excited to meet us, and that hasn’t let up, though I remember the first time someone cried in front of me. I was so shocked. I was like, “Hey, are you OK? I feel so bad you’re crying.”

  Getting asked for autographs? Now that was a surreal experience for everyone. I didn’t even have a signature when the band first started, and when somebody asked me to scribble my name down on something I had to make a signature up on the spot. It was awful, it looked like the MasterChef symbol and now I’m stuck with it and I hate the way it looks.

  Posing for photos was even weirder, though. I had no idea what to do. Whenever someone asked me for a picture, I’d just stand there and stare at the camera. I must have looked pretty lame. Before, when somebody wanted a photo, like my mum, I didn’t really acknowledge how to look happy for the camera. I’d just think, Oh yeah, I’ll take this photo with my mum – it’s all good. But as soon as our fans wanted photos and they were asking to take pictures with their phones, well, I had to learn how to not look stupid. I don’t think I’ve mastered that one yet . . .

  ASHTON:

  I thought it was strange that we even had fans. There was a time on YouTube when it was all about people doing covers and putting them online. That was when we’d just started and everyone was doing covers. If a new song came out, your band had to be the quickest to cover it and there was a constant battle to do the first version when an exciting new single came along.

  Our problem was that we just weren’t very good at it. We weren’t punctual at all. We were disorganized and when it came to doing it, we’d do it once and think, Yeah, that’ll do. We’ll put the first take up. Still, the number of hits and views our pages were getting started going up and up and up . . .

  Behind the scenes we weren’t focused on covers, though. We were fixed on our live performances and how we were going to get that part of our band right. That was the important thing to us, but it was a bonus that we were getting noticed online and people were listening to our songs – even if they were covers.

  It was pretty crazy to have YouTube. I remember we used to be obsessed with the comments from our fans, especially when it came to what people were thinking about us. A lot of people said we weren’t very good, I guess because the covers weren’t that organized – they didn’t sound great. But the people who did like us were the ones that kept us going.

  It felt good to have those fans because the attitude towards us at home wasn’t always nice. We thought that a lot of people in our area didn’t like us because we were trying to do something different. It was the four of us hoping to make something out of music and that seemed pretty sad to them.

  Our parents didn’t understand what we were doing (though they came around); our friends didn’t understand. We were going away every weekend, touring Australia. We’d come back, go to school for five days and then we’d be hanging out until Friday afternoon when we could pack our bags and go to another state again. The only people who really understood were the four of us and our fans online.

  CALUM:

  It felt weird to us calling fans “fans,” as we were just four dudes who were trying to start a band, but learning that we had these guys out there who liked us was really cool. When we went on tour, I was being approached by people from a city that I’d never been to before and they were wanting to hang out and get photos and stuff.

  I remember, a year after the band had started to take off, me and Ashton spent Christmas in Edinburgh, in Scotland, because I had some family there. We were just walking down the street and this girl came up to me and was like, “Can I have a photo?” We both looked at each other. I knew we were both thinking the same thing: What?! Someone in Edinburgh wants a photo? That’s so strange. But it was brilliant as well, and we knew we were very lucky to have those people supporting us.

  THE FIRST ALBUM I GOT WAS . . .

  CALUM:

  I was on the school bus one day, it was really early in the morning, and my sister’s friend’s b
rother came up to me and gave me a burned CD. I looked down and it had “Green Day – American Idiot” written on it in permanent marker.

  I put it in my s**tty CD player and I was instantly in love with it. Green Day was the reason I picked up an instrument, fell in love with songwriting, and wanted to be someone in music. The second track, “Jesus of Suburbia,” blew me away. It was about 10 minutes long, but it was so amazing to think that someone could actually write all those different parts in one song and make them all equally good.

  LUKE:

  It was Good Charlotte’s The Young and the Hopeless. It was so cool, even the title was amazing. I remember when I was little I made my mum drive me to the shop so I could get an album and I picked this, even though I didn’t really know who they were at the time. Once I played it, I thought it was the best album ever.

  Because none of my friends at school were really into that kind of music, they all thought I was a bit weird – especially as I had the long hair. I also remember the artwork was great – there was a picture of the band on the back and they all looked really punk. That’s still one of my favorite albums today.

  MICHAEL:

  I think it was Eminem’s Encore. I went through weird phases in my life where I wanted to be a rapper, or be an amazing guitarist. I’ve also wanted to be a video-game designer. I’ve probably been through everything!

  Eminem was definitely one of my stages – at the time I loved everything about him. In the beginning when he was first coming up with stuff like this, I could rap every lyric of his songs – as embarrassing as that is to admit now!

  ASHTON:

  Mine was Jet’s Get Born. We play their single “Are You Going to Be My Girl” before we go on stage. They were an Australian band and I got into them because I loved rock. I used to watch TV every day, waiting for live performances to come on because there was something I loved about watching a band live. Jet were always on at the time and they were great.

  WE’VE WORKED TOO HARD FOR THIS JUST TO GIVE IT UP NOW

  LUKE:

  We headlined two different Australian tours during 2012 and around that time we signed a publishing deal with the record label Sony ATV. After that we spent our whole time rehearsing, because we knew things were getting serious. We’d come home from school and rehearse. Sometimes we’d skip school too and just hope our parents didn’t find out. It was fun times.

  In the end we got a rehearsal room, so we could practice properly, as it was becoming a real drag having to share a mic at Michael’s garage. The only problem was, our parents had to pay for it because we didn’t have any money. In the end we got this room, but it was a pretty s**tty place! There were three mics and a PA, and the place was very small and smelled real bad.

  We rehearsed so much that we even played in the dark some nights. I’m not sure where the idea came from, but our thinking was, If you can play without seeing each other or what you’re playing, then that’ll make things harder . . . and it’ll make us a better band! I’d like to think it worked out all right.

  That rehearsal room was very important to our band. We were practicing five times a week because that’s all we wanted to do. We were desperate to be a great live band like the acts we loved growing up – Good Charlotte, Jet, and those guys. I remember us playing the songs over and over and over so we could really tear it up when we got on stage.

  After that, we were asked to open for a band called Hot Chelle Rae in October 2012. They had become a big deal in Australia and were about to appear in much larger venues than we’d been used to. I’m talking shows where 2,000 would pay to get in – and that was a huge step up for us. Luckily, because of all the rehearsals in our crappy little room, we’d started to sound way better live.

  One time, while we were jamming at home, I remember all of us looking at each other and thinking, We’re a proper band now – this is working. The music sounded good and we were playing tight. The thing is, we probably weren’t even that good, but at least we felt good playing as a band together.

  CALUM:

  The big thing for this band was to be one of the best live acts around. The bands that we loved were incredible when they played gigs, we could see that from watching them on TV or playing their live albums at home. We wanted to be as powerful as Foo Fighters or as energetic as Green Day. And we really worked hard at it. We sucked at the start, and at the time we were supporting Hot Chelle Rae, we only had a few songs of our own, like “Gotta Get Out” and the others that I’d written in my bedroom. But me and Luke were writing some new songs. They were coming together in an organic way and we knew we had it in us to make more music, better music.

  LET’S GET OUT

  LUKE:

  We recorded the Unplugged EP in between the two Australian headline tours. I remember we had to get a lift from my mum into central Sydney, which is a couple of hours from where we live. It was a big day for us and a bit of a road trip. We recorded it all that day but I remember feeling pretty sick at the end of it; my voice had gone and I wasn’t able to sing very well, but we still got it all done. We recorded “Gotta Get Out,” “Too Late,” a song by All Time Low called “Jasey Rae,” and a cover of the Blink-182 hit “I Miss You.”

  What was great was that we had made a little bit of money from our tours over Australia, and when we put it together there was enough for us to cover the cost of recording. That felt really special.

  CALUM:

  We’d never properly recorded anything before, especially not in a real studio. We were pretty nervous about it! But it was great laying down our songs in there. There was loads of stuff we could fool around with and we were able to play really loud. We were curious about everything and how it all worked. It was such a proper laugh doing it, too.

  LUKE:

  After that, the single got to Number 3 on the iTunes chart, and to be honest, I didn’t really know what that meant. I’d never been on the iTunes chart before, but I knew it was a big deal, even though I didn’t really appreciate just how big at first.

  Then the single went into the Top 10 in Sweden, but all I could think was, Why? How do we have fans in Sweden? How does that happen? I remember that our manager at the time, Adam, got us together as a group to tell us the news of our small success and we were so confused by it all. We were just four dudes from a school out in the sticks in Australia.

  CALUM:

  By then, we were all very committed to the band. We had to grow up a lot to be able to make the decision to say to our families, “The band is what I want to do from now on.” Our parents were sketchy about it. Naturally, my mum was like, “What future are you gonna have? You could go to university and get a real job.” But I was like, “No, Mum, I’m doing this.”

  AND THEN . . .

  MICHAEL:

  I’ll never forget the moment we were told that we’d be going on tour with One Direction. We were in Adelaide on our third Australian tour, sitting in a diner booth, drinking milkshakes, when someone – our manager at the time, I guess (that’s how blurry it was) – put a piece of paper in front of us. When I looked down it had all the One Direction dates on it. Everyone was scared half to death.

  What?!!

  We were told: “Louis Tomlinson has found you guys . . . One Direction are looking for a support for next year . . . They want you!”

  It was a pretty mental thing to happen out of the blue like that. We were all silent for about five minutes and we didn’t know what to think. When I looked at the number of shows and the size of the arenas we’d be performing in, I knew we’d be playing to around one-and-a-half million people in total. Up to that point we’d only done a few shows and the biggest gig we’d played was to 2,000. Everyone was stunned.

  The band had a big talk about whether it was going to be the right move for us. Of course the numbers were great, but were 5SOS going to be seen as a boy band if we did those shows? That was the thing. After all, supporting One Direction was about the most pop move we could make. Were people going to ju
dge us for that?

  All those questions came up because we knew that One Direction had a different style to us. Don’t get me wrong, we loved them; their songs are ridiculously good and they had managed to revive the whole boy band scene when they first started up. But what we didn’t want was for people to say we were the next One Direction, mainly because our sound was totally different.

  It didn’t take long for us to figure out that being called all that stuff wouldn’t matter in the long run. After all, we’d be getting our music out there to hundreds of thousands – millions – of people. It would be up to us to change people’s perception of 5SOS. We knew it might take a long time for One Direction fans to realize that we weren’t a boy band and that we had punk and rock influences. But we also worked out that it would be so worth it to play that tour and we will always be very grateful to the boys for the opportunity we had.

  I remember a few months down the line when we were writing some new songs with Benji and Joel Madden from Good Charlotte, they were telling us that they’d started when the boy bands *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys were still huge. For some reason everybody thought that Good Charlotte were a pop band, too, even though they were nothing like one, but if you look now, everyone who talks about Good Charlotte sees them as a legendary rock act. We wanted to be leaders like them and bring guitars back to the radio.