It wasn’t like I couldn’t do the subjects, though. I went to Norwest Primary, the same as Calum, and then on to Norwest Christian College, the high school. When I was really young, maybe in Year 3, I was placed in the gifted and talented class. I was smart. I was good at English, I was awful at math, but I understood everything and I could get what the teacher was saying. Still, I hated it. I kept thinking, Why the hell am I in a class that needs me to be smarter when I don’t even want to be here in the first place? Everyone else was so dedicated to school. They were getting all these amazing grades and I was like, “Forget this.” The next year they put me in the average class.
When I was about 12 or 13, life got a bit tougher for me because the recession happened and it hit Mum and Dad really hard. I was an only child and until then I’d been pretty spoiled, I guess. I hadn’t realized what money was worth because I was so young. I would just ask for things and get them, no problem. Once I’d got into my teenage years and my parents went broke, it made me realize that I couldn’t expect everything to happen for me.
Now I’m in the band, I appreciate absolutely everything we do together. Every time we’re on stage, I’m happy. Every time we’re meeting fans or signing autographs for people, I make sure I enjoy it, because I know from my parents how hard life can be when things aren’t running so smoothly. Even when I’m tired from all the shows and touring, I tell myself how lucky I am. I got all of that from my childhood. That was a pretty important lesson to pick up.
LET’S GET OUT
Getting into Guitar Hero made me fall in love with punk, metal, and old-school rock. I loved playing along to songs by bands like the British metal band DragonForce and also Metallica because on The Black Album they delivered riffs that were so damn heavy they blew my head off.
I’d play that game over and over – I even got a Guitar Hero drum kit. I always thought that shredding it on Guitar Hero – that’s when you play loads of notes, super fast – was more impressive than shredding it on a real guitar.
When it came to playing the real thing, oh dude, it was so hard! At first I tried singing lessons, but I hated them. Then I tried playing the piano. Eventually, when I was 11, Mum and Dad bought me a crappy acoustic guitar from a shop down the road, but when I started taking lessons, I nearly quit straightaway. I was like, “No way, this is so tough.” My guitar teacher, David, kept encouraging me and I eventually got over my frustrations of not being able to play anything. Now I’m in our band I’m so glad I stuck with it. Imagine if I’d given up and never picked up the guitar again?
The first song I learned from start to finish was that awful tune “Ode to Joy” – you probably would have heard it at school. After that I got to play Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” but really badly. Then came the basic rock classics, like Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.” I drove everyone mad playing that, but it soon paid off and after a year of practicing, I got an electric guitar when I was 11 years old. It felt cool to bash out songs really loud on the amp.
I was getting into some great bands back then. Guitar Hero tuned me in to some of the older rock groups like Led Zeppelin, which then directed me to Blink-182 and Green Day.
But it was the American band All Time Low that got me really excited. I loved their songs. They mixed pop and punk so perfectly and they looked like they were having a great time, all the time. Alex Gaskarth, their lead singer, had such a powerful voice, which worked so well with some seriously infectious guitar hooks. I was sold on them straightaway. He was an absolute dude, too. I wanted to be in a band because of them; I guess I started singing because of Alex as well – he was a hero to me at that time.
Up until Year 7 I was an absolute geek. I’d had a few friends, other geeks, but other people at school didn’t really like me that much. Then I manned up a little: I got myself a girlfriend and I met Luke in a Year 7 orientation day at Norwest. I also became friends with Calum. We had known each other since Year 3, but we hadn’t really hung out that much. It wasn’t long before we were all really close.
It was music that brought us together, because, I admit it, when I first met Luke I figured, “He’s too cool. He’s the type of guy I can’t be friends with.” He thought he was great (but he wasn’t!). But Calum was really nice, he was the guy who everyone liked. I guess I was the guy who everyone didn’t. I also looked a little bit different to everyone else. I wanted to dress like Lil Wayne, but at the same time I wanted to look like Alex Gaskarth. I was kinda confused.
There was also a period, just before we’d hit it off, where Luke and I hated one another for a bit. It was over a girl at school. He’d really liked her and I’d liked her, too, but I’d asked the question first. For a while Luke was always being rude to me, but once we started talking music together, we got over it. But Luke was cool. I knew he was really into his music because he had been making cover versions of songs by people like Jason Mraz and posting them on YouTube. They were OK – not great – but there was something interesting about them.
Suddenly, Luke, Calum, and I spent all our time together, hanging out in Music class. When we weren’t in lessons, we were in the music room playing riffs together. All of us had guitars, so we would learn songs and mess around. When it came to the school’s annual show, Live At Norwest, Luke and Calum did a song together. I went on my own and did a medley of songs by the band Panic! At the Disco. I really liked it, but I only got a 7/10 score. Still, in my head it was amazing.
Then one day in school, I turned around to the others and said, “Dude, what if we started a band like All Time Low?” I thought it would be great if we could hang out and make real songs together; playing our guitars as loud as we could and writing records as iconic and vital as American Idiot or All Time Low’s Nothing Personal. They got excited and said, “Yeah, man, why not? It would be awesome.” And the rest is history.
WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE 5SOS LYRIC?
MICHAEL:
We have a song called “Everything I Didn’t Say.” I love the sentiment of a song that’s about the things you could have said to someone. I also really like the line from “Good Girls”: “Good girls are bad girls that haven’t been caught.” I think that’s badass.
LUKE:
“Take me back to the middle of nowhere,” which is from “Long Way Home.” Half of the album was written by Michael, Ashton, or Calum and I like the songs they’ve written. They’re by my band, but I’m further away from those lyrics because I didn’t write them. I think I like those tracks more. And that’s a really cool lyric.
CALUM:
There’s a song on the album called “Never Be” with the lyric, “We’ll never be as young as we are now.” I think it’s really cool. We wrote that as a band with John Feldmann in LA. But the funny thing is, we were all writing it from different perspectives, which means that people can listen to that song and interpret it in different ways. Like the song says, I don’t feel I’m getting older. I still feel really young. It’s like I’m 16, and I’m just waiting for that rugged stage to happen where I get facial hair.
ASHTON:
I’m like Calum, I love the line from “Never Be”: “We’ll never be as young as we are now.” That song’s all about how we’re doing what we do at the moment and that, right now, people want to listen to our music. Me and the boys are between 18 and 20, and we’re living in the moment. It won’t be like this forever. I want to grab it. I hope people see that in us – that we’re growing up.
ASHTON
I’VE GONE FROM PLACE TO PLACE
One of the things I can tell you about growing up in Australia was that I never stayed in one place for too long. My dad left when I was two, and me and Mum moved around a bit, from home to home – sometimes we even lived in caravan parks. At times I had to meet new friends and get used to new homes, which was pretty tough.
Most of the time, we were in a place called Windsor, which was about an hour and a half out of Sydney. When I started at primary school, I was a good kid, but I
used to get into trouble with the teachers loads because I was very loud. Every report card said the same thing: “Ashton gets distracted a lot. He should concentrate more.” I guess I just wanted to be funny and I loved being the center of attention.
Luckily I was pretty smart, otherwise I would have been in some serious trouble with Mum. She was kinda strict when it came to schoolwork and if I played up, or didn’t do well in classes, she wouldn’t stand for it. She could be pretty frightening sometimes, but I knew she was only doing it because she loved me and wanted what’s best for me.
Living with her was great, though; she encouraged me to do so many things away from school – stuff she thought would improve me as a person. I played football, which I loved, and I did acting classes. The one thing I was really good at was swimming, but it was hard work. As I got older and the training became more serious I used to swim seven days a week. I’d finish school in the afternoon and then walk to training. I’d come home really tired and then I’d have to get up early the next day to go swimming again. It was intense. Now the smell of chlorine makes me sick.
I tried to be good at everything I did when I was in primary school – that was my attitude. It’s the same now: whenever I go out and play a show with the band, I want to raise the bar, I want everyone to come away thinking, That’s a great band, or, That dude’s a great drummer. Back then, I wanted to be the best at all the classes. Except for Math – I was absolutely awful when it came to numbers. English was pretty cool because I enjoyed writing stories. Later, when I went to high school, I loved Science. I thought it was fun because I could blow things up, cut cows’ eyeballs open, and do other weird stuff.
At times it was hard for me and Mum because we were on our own. We didn’t have a lot of money and we’d struggle to eat from week to week at times. But that became a normal thing to me. I’d go to a friend’s house and they’d say, “What do you want for dinner?” I’d tell them, “Oh I’m fine, I don’t want to intrude.” I was used to living on a budget but that was my whole childhood. We did what we could to get by.
MIXTAPE ’94
One of my earliest musical memories happened when I was around seven or eight. I used to have a tape recorder and I would sit in my room and wait for my favorite songs to come on the radio. Then as soon as I heard a riff I liked or recognized, I would press “Record” and tape the track, and at the end of the day I’d have a whole album full of stuff. It’s funny, we have a lyric on our single “She Looks So Perfect” that goes, “I made a mixtape straight out of ’94.” That line was inspired by those days.
I guess my musical education really started when Mum met her boyfriend, Warwick. He was a drummer in a local band and he loved music. They were always listening to albums together, and I remember at the time it used to really annoy me because they would play music so late at night. It was always bands like Counting Crows and Smashing Pumpkins, and the guitars would be blaring out of the lounge, but it was nice because they were in love. The sight of them staying up and listening to music together is a really cool memory for me.
Those times also taught me a lot about different bands and developed my taste in music. My musical tastes were a little bit different from a lot of kids’ at school, I guess. I didn’t go to the same place as the other guys, and when I started at Richmond High School I was really into pop–punk bands like Green Day, Blink-182, and The Living End – stuff I’d discovered when I was making my mixtapes. Green Day quickly became my favorite band ever. I loved their energy and the songwriting.
I think the first song of theirs that blew me away was called “Jesus of Suburbia.” I used to love their singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, and I would play a Green Day live album called Bullet in a Bible all the time. I listened to it so much that I knew the words off by heart – even the parts where Billie Joe would talk to the crowd. They were definitely the band I wanted to be in when I was growing up.
When I was around nine, a friend of mine called Lachlan asked me if I wanted to be in a band with him. He was a guitar dude and he had a drum kit at his house. I figured, “Yeah, I want to be in a band, just like Green Day!” The only problem was, I hadn’t learned to play any instruments at that time – but that didn’t stop me! I told Lachlan that I could play the drums and he seemed pretty happy to have me come around to his house to play.
When my mum dropped me off and I got inside, I sat behind the kit and tried to play a song called “The Mexican Hat Dance,” but it was so bad. Lachlan looked at me funny. He was like, “You can’t really play drums, can you?” I tried to laugh it off. “Yeah, I can,” I said. “I’m just not very good today.”
Luckily for me, Warwick was a drummer. I remember seeing him later that day and saying, “Hey, can you teach me something? Next week I’m going back to Lachlan’s and I want him to think I can play.” As soon as he gave me a lesson, I picked it up really quick. I fell in love with the drums after that. I couldn’t get enough – that’s all I did from that moment.
When I got to high school, the swimming started to be too hard for me. I was competing in regional events, and I even reached state level, but by the time I was 14, I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t get to hang out with my friends or play the drums as much as I liked, so I told my mum that I didn’t want to swim anymore. It was devastating for her, but I’d had enough. I hated it.
As I got better on the drums, I got my first step up. Warwick let me play with his band. They would do shows every Saturday and I would come on at the end of their concert and play a song or two, something like Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Dani California,” or “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Most kids would hang out with their friends on the weekend, but to me, hanging out with Warwick’s band and playing to 40 people at a show was the best thing ever. Think about it: a kid playing drums with his mum’s boyfriend’s band in a pub? Seemed pretty punk to me.
LUKE:
I’ll never forget our first ever recording session. It was in 2011 and Michael, Calum, and I came together in the music room at school one lunchtime. We decided to do a cover of a song called “I Miss You” by Blink-182. They were a band we really loved and we’d jammed the song a few times, so we knew how to play it through. Calum and I were on acoustic guitars and we all sang, though what was funny was that we were reading the lyrics off our phones. We’d looked the words up online and downloaded them rather than taking the time to learn the songs off by heart.
We were just winging it at that time, I guess. Back then, the thing to do if you were in a band was to record a cover and put it on YouTube. Loads of artists had started that way, and I already had my channel, so the three of us figured we should put our version of “I Miss You” up there, just to see what happened.
Later on we did a cover of “Teenage Dirtbag” with Ash. We all went to Michael’s house, where he had a garage. We could record and jam in there because his parents were cool with it, so we stuck up a video camera and recorded ourselves playing. It was pretty DIY.
At the time we thought “I Miss You” was pretty cool. Looking back it was kinda lame, but it still feels pretty crazy that once we’d put it online people actually watched it.
CALUM:
We were wondering what the hell was going on. I guess we must have been kinda naive because we kept putting up these really bad covers online – and we knew they were bad, but we were like, “Forget it. Let’s just do it anyway.” In our minds we were having fun, we weren’t taking it very seriously.
We picked the songs we thought people would like. I guess we put these up because where we came from, music wasn’t really the coolest thing to do. You were a lot more popular if you were into sports, playing rugby or Aussie rules. People at home didn’t really care about what we were doing – they thought we were freaks, outsiders – so we were hoping for some recognition elsewhere. We wanted to make something of ourselves.
None of us had any idea of what might happen. It wasn’t like we were thinking of touring the world and playing shows to thou
sands of people. Our idea was, “Yeah, cool, let’s keep putting up covers. You write some songs, I’ll write some songs, and we’ll come together and practice.”
ASHTON:
I used to watch the boys on YouTube, and I knew about them in the local area. I was in a couple of other bands at the time and I was doing weird gigs with jazz bands and African drumming bands at school. Whenever I saw one of their covers, I’d think, “Man, they could be so much better!” They just mucked around a lot – they didn’t seem that serious really.
I wasn’t in the band at the time some of the early covers were recorded, and it’s funny looking back at them, but those videos were definitely what got people interested in the band at the beginning. Cool thing was it spread internationally, not just in Australia. It was getting more views in Sweden than it was at home. I think that’s really where it started to broaden out and the band became a little bit of a thing elsewhere. In the end, 600,000 people looked at that video. Six hundred thousand! That was insane.
BECOMING 5SOS
MICHAEL:
So, here’s how we came to be called 5 Seconds of Summer: it all happened just before we’d started posting stuff online. The three of us were playing together and we were clearly a band, but we didn’t have a name yet.
Hey, Let's Make a Band!: The Official 5SOS Book Page 2