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A dozen buzzing 5 Seconds of Summer fans are congregating outside the Nomad hotel in Covent Garden. Inside, somewhere, is the boyband I’m on my way to interview. Twenty-somethings Amy, Kate and Max flew in from Ireland this morning, all because a matter of hours ago, the group’s Calum Hood (The Chill One) posted a TikTok of himself diving onto a bed in what they managed to identify as a Nomad hotel room. “We got ready in a Wetherspoons bathroom and came straight here,” laughs 26-year-old Dubliner Amy, pride in her voice. “We’ve been fans since they supported One Direction. Every time they put out a new album, they’ve grown with us…”
But before she can finish that thought, she screams. Everyone screams. It’s Calum – the member who created the security risk – wandering out of the hotel for some fresh air. He looks around, scratches his head, and laughs. “How did you find us here?” he asks. “You!!” they reply.
Inside, the rest of 5SOS – Ashton Irwin, Luke Hemmings and Michael Clifford – are dressed with full commitment in their new look: it’s acidic and bright, involving colourful make-up and chains. It’s part of their ironic pop rock album, Everyone’s a Star!, about the problems involved with being everyone’s favourite boyband (see: their satirical marketing material); their idea was to blow up all their personalities and make themselves larger than life, sellable boyband characters. By now they’re used to being in London, having first moved here from the suburbs of Sydney as teenagers, when they were offered a supporting slot on One Direction’s 2013 Up All Night Tour. 1D’s management wanted to help build 5SOS up in a country where bubblegum pop already made sense with guitars, imagining them as more famous than Busted or McFly.
“We were very hesitant, very scared of coming over to the UK and being associated with One Direction because we wanted to be a hardcore pop-punk act and we were really terrified of pop,” remembers the natural leader of the group, Ashton (The Smart One). “We didn’t really understand the music industry. We just were very beginner-level amateur rock’n’roll guys. We were trying to build a career for ourselves, but we weren’t sure that this was going to be the right avenue.”
That initial introduction to an enormous new fanbase was followed up by the cheeky and infectious “She Looks So Perfect” in 2014 – a musical sibling to 1D’s “What Makes You Beautiful”, both tween pop classics that reassure insecure girls that they are gorgeous. It went straight to UK No 1 and gave them another push into stardom.
Did they have a perspective as kids on how famous they became so quickly? “No, not at all. All I remember was it just started to get hard to leave buildings,” says Ashton matter-of-factly. In some countries, they’d be in a hotel and there’d be thousands of girls waiting outside. Other times it’d be “tumbleweed”, which was a disorientating experience in another way altogether. “I just think we handled it the best we could for kids from a rural area in Sydney,” Ashton continues. “That’s why I’m grateful for One Direction, because we were looking at them dealing with it times a thousand. They were our mentors in the sense that they were graceful, well-spoken and good at dealing with being extremely famous, and leaders of their teams at a young age.” He looks to his bandmates and adds, “It’s probably one of the reasons we’re still together, because of those early lessons in how to walk the walk in this music world, and with having such an intense audience.”
A pink-haired Michael (The Mischievous, Quirky One) jumps in. “It was so inspiring to watch one of the biggest acts of all time from the inside when we were at a very impressionable age,” he says of the 1D-fuelled “pandemonium”. “We were like, ‘Let’s work our asses off forever until we can get as close to what that was.’” I’m told before our interview that out of respect to Liam Payne’s family, 5SOS won’t be answering any questions about the late 1D member’s death, particularly given that they spent a period being so close to the band.
The pay-off for joining boyband world was inevitably being considered as a boyband, something that, in the early days of their careers, 5SOS railed against. That label, Ashton thinks, was a bit of “psychological prodding” from the press and public, and so they responded in a “reactive” manner. “All we ever thought about was songwriting and these noble, pure pursuits of creativity,” he says. “We fought back against it because we were kids with a dream of being in a group that has a substantial impact on pop culture, but not a cheesy one.”
It’s the curse of Peter Pan. It’s like, ‘I hope one day someone takes me seriously.’ What an awful burden to put on a kid
Michael jumps in again: “The connotation around a ‘boyband’ was that it was manufactured and fake.” Ashton continues that thought, suddenly more serious: “And it also felt emasculating. It felt like, how are we ever going to grow up? It’s the curse of Peter Pan. It’s like, ‘I hope one day someone takes me seriously.’ What an awful burden to put on a kid.”
At the height of their fame, in 2015, they were on the cover of Rolling Stone, which called them “the World’s Hottest Band”. The writer captured them living it large in Los Angeles, partying with their peers, and enjoying the associated sexual attention from young women you might expect. Though not truly crude, it obliterated any possibility of a squeaky-clean image, alienating a portion of their teen fanbase. Unusually, the most controversial element of the profile was Ashton reportedly saying, “We don’t want to just be, like, for girls. We want to be for everyone. That’s the great mission that we have. I’m already seeing a few male fans start to pop up, and that’s cool. If The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and all those guys can do it, we can do it, too.”
It was read by some as an anti-fangirl sentiment, a dismissal of the same people who had raised them up. This was not the intention, Ashton says today. “You just hoped they bring their boyfriends or something – you don’t want the men to have the ick… It’s not to say we don’t appreciate our female fanbase – it’s 80 per cent women,” he explains. “We looked at bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and all these massive bands that had predominantly female fan bases for the first 15, 20 years of their careers and when you’re still playing 25-30 years down the line, it’s amazing to have all the sexes involved in your concerts.”
Calum adds, “I feel like there are parallels between boybands and fangirls used with a negative connotation as well. I think women are the best type of fan.” Michael practically shudders, looking up under furrowed brow: “We’ve played to a room of men, and it’s the worst thing. Please never again.” They all laugh at the memory. “A lot of things were taken out of context,” Michael explains of the interviews they did in their younger years. “For us, we were just like, how do we expand [after having been] written off as a boyband for no reason.”
In the past few years, band members have branched off to work on their own solo projects, which has only focused them further. Luke (The Internal One) says that being able to channel their own influences and thoughts into their solo material (“having an outlet that isn’t the band to write and get all those s***ty ideas out”) has made the band more pure. “I’m like, ‘What does the band need right now?” It’s why their new album is so good, he thinks.
If the public has pinned them as a boyband who want to be edgy, they decided they would caricature themselves as just that on Everyone’s a Star! It’s bold, catchy pop-rock that wears its influences just as loudly (The 1975 and Fontaines DC). Self-aware phrases like “make that monkey dance” and “imaginary boyfriend” land impressively on the addictive, dark-mode Backstreet Boys track “Boyband”. Their line “Love me when I’m skinny and we never, ever age” reminds me of Ashton’s Peter Pan comment. This is probably the only dignified way a boyband can age under those circumstances.
“We want to use this label [boyband] and glorify its power and say: well, yeah, we’re a boyband but we’ve had a 15-year career and we’re still thriving today and actually have enough songwriting skill to write a song called ‘Boyband’ with irony and tell our story in a poetic sense,” says Ashton. This is about their collective story, they say, being able to zoom out as adults and view their early days in the band when they couldn’t comprehend what was happening. Lyrics explore the way they craved attention, the problems they had with being objectified and perceived, and the feeling of the spotlight drifting away. “Take me to heaven, cure your depression, make me your number one obsession,” they sing on “No 1 Obsession”, a lightly hysterical bop with guitars in the vein of mid-career Fall Out Boy.
Going to the places where you’d like your music to be heard is very important when making contemporary music
From the title track (“Someone call the dealer / feeling like a God”) to “Not OK” (“Lucifer in every line / every night”), it’s a pop record that delves into the underbelly of celebrity partying. Balance, Ashton says, is critical to living in LA, the predominant home base for the band, where friends and late nights are easily accessible, if not encouraged. “But the conjuring of songs is found when diving into the depths of free will,” he adds. “For me personally, when writing, I’ll have better, longer nights out: I’ll be looking for vocabulary, sounds, rhythms, whatever. Going to the places where you’d like your music to be heard is very important when making contemporary music.” These songs on Everyone’s a Star!, in particular, are meant to be partied to. “… but yeah, the balance of staying afloat through the various things that happen in your life, which I don’t really want to talk to you about…” Ashton trails off and laughs. “It’s important to observe yourself.”
He is speaking for himself, not the others. He and Calum are single men; Luke and Michael are married with kids, so one half of the band is living a very different life than the other, Ashton says. “We’re single,” echoes Calum, pretending to shed a tear. Ashton continues Calum’s joke: “Yeah, so you’ve got a lot of loneliness, you’ve got a lot of fulfilment, and they’re colliding.” Then he becomes more serious again. “And it’s not a bad thing or a comedic thing or whatever the f***, it’s just really how it’s happening right now. These guys have different relationships to us, so as a writing group, on the record, you’re getting this collision of concepts and ideas and feelings.”
A couple of hours after I leave them, 5SOS will be trapped inside perspex boxes in central London to get stared at by fans. It’ll be an obvious comment on their previous status as box-fresh boyband dolls, a product to purchase and play with. But this campaign is all about having more fun with themselves and their music than they have in years. “If you have repressed emotion or repressed energy and you haven’t had a good time in a long time?” says Ashton with a smile. “You should think about having a good time.”
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