Hey, Let's Make a Band!: The Official 5SOS Book
Page 5
CALUM:
While we were sitting there, shocked, I turned the pages of the tour schedule and it was just endless arenas around the UK and Ireland. All I could see were pages of dates, names of the cities we’d be playing: London, Glasgow, Cardiff, Dublin, Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool . . . I was like, S**t, there are so many cities and so many shows!
We’d never thought of playing arenas before. I don’t think it had even crossed our minds that we could do it, so to get the news that we could be supporting One Direction was a shock. It came out of nowhere. We’d gone from playing in front of 2,000 people in clubs in Australia to performing for 18,000 people a night in cities on the other side of the world. It was an amazing opportunity for us and we couldn’t thank the One Direction lads enough.
CALUM:
As soon as we got the news, we knew we had to get serious. We got a new management team called Modest! and they figured it would be good for us as a band to move to London so we could write with some great songwriters they knew. With a little help we’d be able to put together some new tracks and learn how to play those huge venues.
That was a big step, a massive step. We worked out that we would have to leave our families for nine months, and that wasn’t easy, especially for us. I think we were all around 16 years old except Ashton, who was 17, nearly 18. It was a massive move for us as people, but we were all really excited by it. We all wanted to write some good music, and we knew it was the right move for 5SOS.
MICHAEL:
To tell your parents that you’re leaving to go overseas at the age of 16 was hard enough, but then to say that you didn’t know when you were coming back, and all of it was to be in a band? That was seriously tough. I remember my parents were sad about it, but they were always so supportive of us, and while it was probably hard for them in the first few months we were away, they understood why we had to do it.
It was hard for us, too. We’d been so used to a life of waking up every day and hearing our parents talking downstairs. We lived normal lives; we had a routine where we would go to school all week and then go to band practice. On the weekends we would play guitars as much as we could before starting it all over again on Monday morning.
Suddenly, everything was about to change. We would be living in a random house in a city we had never been to before – or at least not spent a long period of time in. A few months earlier, we had been taken to London to meet Modest!, who were based there, but staying in a city for a few days wasn’t the same as moving there for nearly a whole year.
The good news was that we were all best mates and we would be together. But the thought of having to adjust to a brand new country was scary. We’d have to get the Tube to different places, and get black taxis to drive us around London. That was pretty fun but also intimidating, but it was what we knew we wanted to do if we were to become the best band that we could be.
ASHTON:
I had just finished school forever, and three days afterwards I was moving to London for nearly a year. That was pretty exciting, but upsetting at the same time. I had to break up with my girlfriend and I had to say bye to my mum and my family. Me and the boys were going on an adventure! It was a new beginning.
I remember the flight because it was the first time I had seen Michael cry. He hadn’t really been anywhere in the world outside of Australia. I’d traveled a little bit, the other guys had traveled a little bit, but Michael hadn’t experienced that much life until the band came along. He was leaving everything he was used to, and it must have been tough for him.
I remember giving him a hug and saying, “It’s alright, man. It’s going to be good.” I sat next to him for the journey, trying to cheer him up.
WHAT’S YOUR FUNNIEST OR MOST MEMORABLE MOMENT FROM TOURING?
CALUM:
We were in Melbourne playing with 1D. I’d bought these jeans the day before and as I spread my legs, the denim ripped from the knee to my crotch. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed and quickly pulled my knees together. Then I signaled over to our guitar tech, mouthing the words, “My jeans have ripped.”
He came up to the stage and when we were playing “Teenage Dream,” the lights went down. I snuck off stage and he taped me up while I started playing. He was sticking me together while I was playing the bass lines backstage! But when I came back out, it hadn’t worked. My jeans fell apart again and I had to announce it to the entire arena. It was awful.
LUKE:
One time, we left a venue in Sweden, ran to our car – which was surrounded by fans – and drove for 10 minutes out of town. When we got to the hotel and looked out of our bedroom windows, there were loads of girls arriving. I was like, “How did that even happen? How did they get here so quick?” To be on the other side of the world and have people actually like our music was amazeballs.
ASHTON:
When we were in LA, a French horn band was sent to our house. We had some fans hanging around outside and they were like, “How can we come hang out with you?” I told them, “If you order us a French horn band you can.” It really was just a joke. About an hour later, I was watching The Simpsons on the TV and I thought, Can I hear a brass band? When I looked outside there were four guys with their instruments, playing on the side of the street.
MICHAEL:
Oh god, this is so bad: we were walking down the road with some fans recently and I was trying to take a picture with this girl. As I was holding the phone, I accidentally tripped her up. I don’t know how it happened. She fell and I was like, “Oh my god, what have I done?! I’m so sorry! Are you OK?” She shouted, “I think I broke my foot!” Luckily she was fine, but that was a pretty awful experience.
LONDON CALLING
MICHAEL:
What a shock. When we landed there, it was right in the middle of winter. This was January 2013, and it was the worst weather they’d had in years and years. The temperature was freezing cold.
I think the first day we got there, it snowed. I was used to the sun and hot weather in Australia, and that was the first time I’d ever seen real snow. When I woke up in the morning I walked downstairs, but before I could even get to the door, Calum, Luke, and Ashton were already running outside in their underwear. It was ridiculous.
The house we had in London was so much fun. I want to go back there one day because there are so many funny memories from those days. We were four dudes, away from our parents, and every day we’d sit down and play Call of Duty and FIFA on the computer for hours. We’d run riot around the house. It was great to be living together.
CALUM:
But then the hard work started. For the whole time that we were in London, we wrote pretty much every day with lots of different songwriters, and it was pretty full on at times, especially as it was all a new experience for us. By the end of a day we were all braindead. We couldn’t really think – not that we cared. Writing songs was so much fun, especially when you love who you’re writing with. Then it’s not like work at all, it’s just hanging out with your mates writing songs.
ASHTON:
We would go out and write songs every day. We had five months until the One Direction tour started at the O2, so we needed more tracks than the ones Calum had written in his bedroom. So, with the help of some great songwriters, we went into an intense period of getting tracks down. We were probably writing 12 a week, so it was kinda full on. I’d go into a studio with Michael to write a song, and then the other two boys would go and write another song the same day somewhere else. So we’d be writing two songs a day. Man, it was tough. They were long days, but we knew it was going to be so worth it.
MICHAEL:
We worked with James from Busted, we worked with the guys from McFly, we worked with Nick from Kaiser Chiefs, Scouting For Girls . . . We worked with so many people, just to see who we could create the best songs with, and also to become better songwriters ourselves. That was always our thing: we wanted to write our own songs just like Billie Joe Armstrong, Kurt Cobain, and the
Madden brothers had done – the artists we grew up with.
Lyrically we were writing about things that we knew about, subjects that were important to us while we were in London, or had been when we’d been growing up in Australia. Me and Luke even wrote a song called “18” – the story behind that was the fact that, at the time, we were really bummed out about not being 18! We couldn’t do this or do that. We wanted to go out so bad, but Ashton was the only one who was 18.
There were some other tracks I love too, like “English Love Affair” and “Voodoo Doll.” The cool thing is, even after all this time we still play those tracks now. We wrote for a long time but eventually we felt ready for the One Direction tour.
ASHTON:
We all wanted to be in the biggest band in the world and we were prepared to work hard for it. I remember when the weather got better, we decided to rock up to Hyde Park, which was in the middle of the city, and do a random little performance. There’s a Hyde Park in Sydney too and we’d once played an acoustic gig there, so we figured, “Why not do the same thing in London?”
The first time we showed up, 30 people came along. Then we did another and 70 people arrived to see us play. It wasn’t a lot, but we were thousands of miles away from home and we were building a little British fan base and making the most of our opportunities, because me and the boys wanted it to work out so bad.
Our only problem then was that we had major confidence issues as a band. That came from the fact that we were brought up with the Australian mentality. At home you didn’t talk about yourself, you didn’t talk yourself up. You weren’t encouraged to be loud about yourself, or to be a character.
But to be in a band that wanted to conquer the world you had to be louder than life, you had to be a character. We didn’t like that. We felt a bit awkward talking to people. We sucked in interviews when people wanted to find out who we were and what we were up to. I remember I was the only one who really talked when people asked us questions. The other boys would be silent. Michael might have said something every now and then, but Calum and Luke would say nothing.
Looking back at that time in London, we were a band on hyperdrive. We were learning how to work on level terms with all these other bands that were huge in the UK. It was a whole new world for us, and we worked so hard to get everything right.
5SOS BIRTHDAYS
JANUARY 25th 1996
Calum’s birthday
JULY 7th 1994
Ashton’s birthday
JULY 16th 1996
Luke’s birthday
NOVEMBER 20th 1995
Michael’s birthday
HIDING OUT IN A DREAM
ASHTON:
When it came to playing those shows with One Direction, the venues were crazy. When we first set out on the tour, we were going to do 10 shows at the 02 Arena in London. Then we started playing it twice a day, every day – in the end we played 10 days there. All in all we played something like 115 shows across the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US, and that’s when we learned to be a band and discovered our sound. Today, if we were to play a smaller venue – to 2,000 people maybe – we would hopefully blow the roof off, but it wouldn’t have happened without those shows. We learned so much.
The size of the shows freaked me out at first, but we all handled it differently. The thing is, I wanted to be better. On stage I wanted to be Billie Joe Armstrong from Green Day, or Dave Grohl from Foo Fighters. My problem was that I was behind the drums and there aren’t many drummers out there who will talk to the audience and sing. Playing arena shows was new to all four of us, so the others were in the same boat. We had to learn how to be great in big venues and rock amazing shows.
CALUM:
I don’t think you can ever feel prepared before playing in front of 18,000 people for the first time. We had a week or so of rehearsals and we all felt relatively ready until we saw the size of the first arena in London. We all looked at each other and went, “What?! I’m not sure what’s going to happen tonight.”
We went on stage and played our set and everyone seemed to go crazy. We’ll never know who was the most nervous but I reckon it was me. I was definitely trying to hide it, but it probably wasn’t working. People I saw afterwards said I looked pretty nervous, but looking back it’s still mental; it was the O2 Arena and I’d probably c**p my pants if I played it now.
All I can remember is that it was absolutely crazy having 18,000 girls screaming back at us. At that time I was full of adrenaline, I couldn’t really hear anything and I wasn’t really thinking. The show was so big and exciting. It was a bit of a blur – it still is.
MICHAEL:
Funny, I watched the video of our first show the other day and I could see the very first things we were doing when we walked out on stage. I looked at my face in the video and I seemed so scared, I’m pretty sure I was actually shaking. It was that intense.
After a while, I started slowly walking from spot to spot, just standing in front of my mic, not looking happy – in fact, I looked miserable. In my mind I know I was thinking, This is f***ing cool! But back then we didn’t know how to convey our feelings to the crowd.
The part that I’ll always remember from that first night was when we started playing a song called “Over and Over.” Just before the guitars kicked in, we asked everyone to get the lights up on their mobile phones and the whole arena just lit up. I don’t know how we got everyone to do it, but it seemed like every person in the crowd was holding their phone in the air. Just to look out on that sea of beams was amazing because every one represented a different person. And those lights went back as far as I could see.
CALUM:
After a few gigs we stopped being nervous and the shows became more exciting. We were thinking about how we could improve the performance and the tour started to become more and more fun.
It helped that the One Direction guys were really genuine. They were really supportive. I remember coming off stage one night when I was really disappointed with my playing, and Louis was standing there. He could tell I was annoyed.
“You know what, man,” he said. “You will have those days. You’re on and off for a night, but then tomorrow will be better.”
As a kid on an arena tour for the first time, I really looked up to them. They guided us a lot during those early shows, which was so good; I guess we were very lucky to get bits of advice like that. But we also watched how hard they were working. Every night they would try to meet as many fans as they could, and they treated the people around them really well. It was just so nice to see that the biggest band in the world was made up of genuine, caring people.
We started to become friends, too. We could tell that they were very busy, and we were very busy, but whenever we could, we would hang out. I know there was a lot of fruit thrown around in the dressing room some nights. The music would go on backstage and there would be some heavy air guitar as well. It was all good fun.
CALUM:
We all knew that we had a lot more work to do. We also knew that we needed to make a great record if we were to fully take advantage of the opportunity we had had on this tour. It had been a crazy time for our band, something we’ll never forget, but it was still about to get even crazier . . . next stop was America, and that was going to be huge.
MICHAEL:
America was crazier than we’d ever imagined it could be. We were going there as support for One Direction on their tour, but we stayed in Miami to relax for a couple of days. When we landed, we walked into the airport where we thought some fans might be waiting for us, but there was no one there. I was like, “Oh, that’s cool, it’s getting kinda late. Why would we have fans in Miami anyway?” Then we walked downstairs into the arrival lobby and about 150 people were waiting for us.
It was the first time we’d been mobbed. We were being pushed and pulled. We were surrounded. We couldn’t move. It freaked me out a bit, but at the same time it was awesome we had fans waiting to see us.
I guess our arrival must have seemed more exciting for our American fans because it was the first time they’d seen us in the flesh. They’d been waiting a long time for us to play out there, so they were pretty stoked. It was a really intense experience, though. I was so overwhelmed because we couldn’t move in the crowd. It was scary, really scary, but at the same time, we loved it. We couldn’t believe so many people had come out to see us.
ASHTON:
America was the best for us because that’s where most of our musical influences came from – like the towns where Good Charlotte and Green Day started up. To do gigs in the venues where those bands first played was a great thing for us. It was a real learning curve, and I think America liked us. They’re really into guitars over there so it’s a nice environment in which our music can grow.
CALUM:
By that stage on the tour we’d become really good friends with the One Direction lads. The first time I met them was when we were in London. We were all really young back then and when they talked together we were like, “What?!” We couldn’t understand the accents, we didn’t get the jokes. But it was probably the same for them.