Hey, Let's Make a Band!: The Official 5SOS Book
Page 1
DEDICATION
THANK YOU!
This book wouldn’t have been possible without our amazing fans, who have got us where we are today. The ones who stand for hours on end to watch us play, the ones who would support us four dudes through thick and thin. You are our everything.
Thanks also to Matt Allen.
CONTENTS
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
PART 1:
HEY, LET’S MAKE A BAND!
PART 2:
BRAND NEW WORLD
PART 3:
OUT OF OUR LIMIT
PART 4:
ANOTHER DAY AND I’M SOMEWHERE NEW
PART 5:
THE FANS
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
INTRODUCTION
What you’re about to read is pretty much our story so far. It really does seem like only last week we played our first gig at the Annandale Hotel in Sydney. Since then we’ve been given the opportunity to turn into the people and musicians we wanted to be. The people who gave us the opportunity were the fans. The ones who stand for hours on end to watch us play, the ones who would support us four dudes through thick and thin. Everything goes back to the fans. You guys are our everything.
So this book is like a thank-you. We want everyone to know the story of how four Western Sydney teenagers picked up their instruments and dreamed of being one of the biggest bands in the world. There’s also some embarrassing photos of us derping around and some facts that we didn’t even know. So we hope you enjoy it!
Love cal, luke, ash, and mike x
Sent from my iPhone
TORN IN TWO
How 5SOS came to be is a pretty crazy story . . .
When we started the band, the dream was to get guitars back on the radio because that’s the music we grew up with. The love of rock and punk music brought Michael, Luke, Ashton, and me together when we were at school, but when I was younger my life could have gone one of two ways. I really loved football and I wanted to become professional. My favorite team was Liverpool and I dreamed of walking alongside their captain, Steven Gerrard. But as soon as I discovered music I knew it was the only thing I wanted to do.
I was always the “sporty” one in my family. When we were at school, my older sister, Mali, was the musical one. I used to listen to her sing at school and at home and wonder why I was never as talented or as good as her at music. I definitely gained a lot of my love of music from her; she would blast R&B out of her bedroom.
We were a middle-class family. Mum worked in superannuation and Dad had a job with Coca-Cola, so it wasn’t the most glamorous life. Mum and Dad weren’t very musical but they could both sing. I remember my dad singing along to The Proclaimers out the back and not being able to get to sleep because of it. But I was extremely grateful – my parents gave me everything I needed with what little we had.
I was a shy kid at school. I never really spoke to anyone I didn’t know or make too much eye contact. It took me a while to come out of my shell, sort of – joining the band helped a lot. Despite my shyness back then, though, I made friends at school, but there were only a few close ones that knew a lot about me.
The only real classes I liked were PE and Music. I loved anything to do with sport. PE was always great and I’d like to think that I was good at English, but Music was kind of an escape. That was the class I looked forward to the most. In music I really felt myself. I always found time to play terribly on different instruments.
As a pupil, I think I was quite well behaved – but that changed a bit when I moved up into high school at Norwest and every single teacher’s comment on every report card read: “Calum has potential, but he gets distracted too easily.” That was my life summed up in a sentence. As I grew older my grades got worse and worse. No matter how hard I studied I just didn’t excel. Later, there was a certain point when the band started where my grades went down the drain and my parents weren’t happy at all. It’s not cool to suck at school, but by then I didn’t really care about anything other than the band.
HANGING WITH THE BAND
I first met Michael when I was in Year 3 at Norwest Primary. He had the best fringe I’d ever seen. But the one thing I remember about him as we got older was that he was really tall. He must have gone through puberty when he was 12. The beard kinda gave it away.
We really became friends a bit later, when we started at Norwest Christian College. We did music classes together and started playing guitar. I always used to love watching him play. He was so talented for his age.
When I was about 15 I saw a classical guitar lying around in my house. I had no idea whose it was but I picked it up. Although I really struggled at first, it didn’t feel like a task to learn to play it. For months on end I’d come home from school and look up videos on YouTube on how to play; I used to always play in front of my parents and they used to love it – they kind of had to, they were my parents. When I was 16 they bought me my first steel string for my birthday and I used to take it to school all the time, but back then I never would’ve thought I’d pick up the bass.
I was 13 when I first met Luke. He joined our school in Year 7 and because he had an older brother, he’d made some older friends. I always wished I had that. I can still see him now, wearing a green jumper with one of those snapback hats with a peak at the front. I didn’t look so great either. I wore really short shorts and my legs were so skinny. My head was shaved, too. I was in a bad place.
Because of my sister, I really liked R&B acts like Chris Brown, but I soon fell in love with the American pop–punk and punk–rock bands like Green Day, Blink-182, and The All-American Rejects. I instantly fell in love with the sound.
I remember the day when music took over my life: I was on the bus on the way to school and my sister’s friend’s brother handed me a burned CD with “Green Day – American Idiot” written on it in permanent marker. I put it in my CD player and literally could not stop listening to it. I loved everything about it: the angst, the rawness, the distorted guitars; it almost took me out of reality. I loved the energy and the emotion in all the parts; there was power in the songs. Every time I heard the opening chords of the album American Idiot, it always made me wonder how they wrote the album. I learned how to play their song “Good Riddance” and when I strummed it to some cousins on my new guitar they said, “Hey, you should play more often. . . .”
Michael and I always liked the same kind of music – bands like Blink-182, All Time Low, and Green Day are the reason why we each picked up an instrument. That was unusual in our school because there weren’t a lot of kids like us around. If you were really into music like we were it was thought of as being a bit weird, and a lot of the other students looked at us like we were outsiders.
Then Michael and I started sitting together in music classes and playing songs. There was an event every year called Live At Norwest where all the kids that could perform something would get up and play in front of the whole school. Because we got on and liked the same bands, the pair of us decided we would play “Beauty in the Breakdown” by a band called The Scene Aesthetic. I would love to say that it sounded good, but it didn’t. Luke played that night as well – he played Jason Mraz. He also had a broken wrist! He was crazy at guitar. I knew how much he practiced. He used to put up covers on YouTube. I thought he was amazing.
At first I thought Luke didn’t hang out with me because he hung around with an older crowd, but I went up to him and said how much I loved his stuff on YouTube. We became friends after that and the next time Live At Norwest came around, me and Luke did a song togeth
er. At first Michael, Luke, and I never played together – it was always Luke and me, or Michael and me – but once Michael asked Luke to play I also wedged my way in.
Luke, Michael, and I then started to hang around in the music room, jamming and playing riffs. We were there for as long as we were allowed, which was good for me because by the time I’d got to being 14 or 15, I’d found that school was tough. I’d got into Norwest on a sports scholarship, which meant I had to play sports all the time. At first I loved it, but once I discovered music, I realized that’s all I wanted to do. Football fell away – I wanted to spend all my time playing with the guys.
Then, one afternoon in December 2011, Michael said those words: “Wanna start a band?”
LUKE
IN MY OWN LITTLE WORLD
It’s funny, I can’t remember what I did yesterday most of the time, so I struggle to remember my childhood, but my mum always tells a story from when I was really little. Apparently, she came into the kitchen and caught me with my hand in a tub of margarine. I was eating the stuff off my fingers, which must have tasted awful, not that I seemed to care at the time.
I was a happy kid. We lived in a small town called Freeman’s Reach and I came from a small family – just me, Mum, Dad, and my two older brothers, Ben and Jack. Mum was an accountant, then she became a math teacher. In fact, she taught Ashton for a year or two. She always said he wasn’t the best student, but that he was a really nice person.
Although we weren’t a massively musical family, my dad liked all the older Australian bands like INXS and AC/DC, so there was always music being played when I was little. Mum had played the piano, though there was never one around the house, but it was Ben and Jack who started me on playing the guitar. Ben had tried to learn when he was younger, and there was an electric lying about that I would pick up and play. Jack had a drum kit in his room, so sometimes we would make a noise together.
The first song Ben taught me was Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” when I was 10, and I would play it on the top string with one finger. I did it so much that there was a massive crease in the skin and I think I must have driven everyone crazy, playing that same song all the time. Later, I learned the lyrics to Green Day’s “Holiday,” and for some reason, I would sit in my room singing it over and over until my dad would come in and shout at me to stop.
I wasn’t a bad kid, but I was always getting into trouble for stupid things. At primary school I was in a world of my own and often I would get told off for being too loud. Then when I was around six, I wouldn’t go to class. I would be in school, but running around the playground having a great time while everyone else was in lessons. The teacher would look around at the students’ faces and, having realized that I wasn’t where I was supposed to be, she would race into the playground shouting, “Come here, Luke! You’re going into detention!” When you were really naughty you’d have to sit on a chair outside the principal’s office. It was terrifying.
I think I was quite smart in primary school. My grades weren’t too bad, but most of the report cards would be like, “Luke would benefit from not sitting with his friends.” That was my own fault, and I guess I liked talking too much. When it came to subjects, I wasn’t so good at English, and I was terrible at drawing and art. Math was my subject, though. Well, Mum was an accountant and a math teacher, so I felt I had to be good at that.
I was sporty, too. I played football when I was a kid and my team was Manchester United, so I loved watching Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo play. I was also a pretty good swimmer. I’d win all the races at my school and I would compete against other schools in regional competitions. But it wasn’t long before music was taking over my life.
CURTAIN OPENED, HEARD THE CROWD ROAR
By the time I’d got to Norwest Christian College, my high school, I had really long hair and a fringe that went over my face. I joined in Year 7 but didn’t know anyone else because a lot of the kids had gone to Norwest’s primary school together, so I was really nervous at first. It’s always tough when you turn up somewhere and you don’t recognize a friendly face. I guess to everyone else I was the weird guy with the long hair, so it was a pretty lonely time. I didn’t have that many friends until Year 9, and I spent a lot of lunchtimes on my own in the music room.
With high school it was the same story as primary school. I kept getting into trouble for small-time stuff – being stupid in class, spending too long on my phone, getting distracted. Sometimes I’d even get told off for not wearing the right uniform. At Norwest you would get demerit points whenever you broke the rules, and if you scored five points you had to go to an after-school detention. I think I was in one of those every few weeks.
Having learned some guitar riffs from Jack, I later took some proper lessons and I would even sit in my room watching tutorials on YouTube. I was becoming completely obsessed with learning how to play. I also loved noisy guitar bands like Foo Fighters and Good Charlotte, so it was natural that I would get to talking to Calum and Michael in school because they were the other outsiders at Norwest and loved those bands as well. The energy and loud guitars of punk made sense to me and the three of us became pretty close once we started going to the same music lessons.
It’s funny, Michael and I didn’t like one another when we first met a couple of years earlier in Year 7, when I first joined the school. I don’t know what it was – I didn’t really talk to him. It was probably because he was taller than me and he looked more like a man. I’d hang out with Calum a little bit, but I don’t think Michael liked that either, because they were friends. Then, in Year 9, Calum and I covered a song by the band Secondhand Serenade at the school talent show, Live At Norwest. Maybe there was a bit of rivalry with me and Michael because previously he had performed with Calum, I don’t know.
That show was so nerve-racking because we had to play in front of the whole school and our voices hadn’t even broken then. That was an awful experience. I’d much rather play in front of 20,000 people than perform in front of the school – all the people that you know and have to live with every day. Still, we got plenty of applause, which felt great, but it was probably only because everyone had to clap. I don’t think the girls went mad, though. We weren’t too popular where we grew up when it came to girls. I was learning that at our school it was much better to be good at sport than be into music. The jocks were the popular kids; punks like us seemed a little odd to everyone.
Just before Live At Norwest, I had taken the step of recording videos of myself as I covered songs by artists like Bruno Mars and Jason Mraz in my room at home. I’d posted them on YouTube because that was the thing at the time – loads of new songwriters were doing it, so I figured I’d give it a go too. I was 14 and had no idea what I was doing, but suddenly I was getting a few thousand views for each one and people at school were saying nice things about them. I would chat to people who had been listening to my music, but despite the attention, I was oblivious to what it all meant.
It was shortly afterwards that Michael came up to me. I think he’d seen the songs online and had realized that I liked the same sort of music as him. After the ice was broken, we would hang out in music class, jamming, talking about all the bands we loved until one day he came up with the idea that the three of us should start our own band – something like All Time Low or Blink-182. He figured it would be interesting if we put some songs onto YouTube. I liked the sound of that. Being in a band, hanging out with friends, and writing songs sounded so exciting. But I had no idea of what was coming next.
THE 5 FACTS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT 5SOS
#1
We nearly called ourselves Bromance (that was Luke and Cal’s idea) until we all decided it was lame.
#2
On one of our early tours, a sinkhole swallowed the club where we were due to be playing. We didn’t want to disappoint the fans who’d bought tickets, so we shifted our gear to a nearby school and rocked out on the tennis court.
#3
W
hen we were recording our debut album in LA, a group of fans sent a gang of male strippers to our front door! We thought we were getting burgled!
#4
When we were writing “She Looks So Perfect,” Michael wasn’t keen. It took him a while to get into the song.
#5
We wanna be a band for many years to come and grow with our fans!
MICHAEL
SITTING HERE AT HOME
Wow, looking back I was such a nerd when I was a kid. Most of the time I was stuck in front of a computer screen; because Mum and Dad owned a computer business, they had all the gear, and some of my earliest memories are of playing games at home. I loved it, but luckily for me it was my gateway into 5SOS.
When I was little, my dad played drums, which is where I must have got all my rhythm from. But when I was around eight or nine, my parents bought me the video game Guitar Hero. Once I started playing I got ridiculously good at it. So good that I thought, Hey! Maybe I should try playing guitar for real . . .
Until that point, I hadn’t really shown any musical talent. We grew up in a place called Quaker’s Hill, which was a pretty OK town – it had a Domino’s Pizza place and a McDonald’s, which was great as I got older, but as a kid it was pretty dull. I was mainly sat in front of a computer screen and there’s even a picture of me, aged about two, playing on a keyboard. I became quite an intense nerd. It’s a miracle I didn’t end up turning into some kind of mad scientist.
I think that became a problem, because I hated school. I never wanted to go to lessons and often I refused to leave the house. I remember my parents being really angry at me because I wouldn’t go in, even when I was at primary school. I don’t know what it was, but there was something I absolutely hated about the lessons. They sucked. Now we’re in the band and getting up and working hard, I’m fine. Back then, school was like torture to me.