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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Entertainment
Elle Hunt, Fred McConnell and Monica Tan

Justin Bieber island: one man's intimate date with 1,200 screaming Australian fans – as it happened

Justin Bieber performing on Cockatoo Island in Sydney and his Beliebers.
Justin Bieber performing on Cockatoo Island in Sydney and his Beliebers. Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP

Bye, bye Bieber Island

Having been voted off Bieber Island, we’re herded on to a ferry bound for the mainland and with that, our Bieber time – and this blog – comes to a close.

It feels a bit like the end of school camp, with crowds of girls – and a couple of hardknock journalists – sitting cross-legged on the carpet, playing back their footage of Bieber’s performance on tinny cellphone speakers.

“I can’t get that song out of my head,” says one woman who catches herself humming Baby, sitting with her daughter on the ferry as it nears the wharf.

My notifications feed on Twitter is full of Beliebers from around the world retweeting and favouriting even the most banal updates (“Shout-out to the caterers who took my coffee order!” “The queue for the ferry is long!”), desperate for any details of the show.

Only 1,600 people (1,200 of them fans) were ferried to Bieber Island this morning but many more had a window to it via blanket media coverage and social media, with all eyes fixed on the one handsome, talented and obscenely wealthy 21-year-old young man at the centre of it all.

I can’t say I envy Bieber – and though I was always a fan, I’ve got a new appreciation for what he has to put up with, and why he might do so.

I Beliebe.

Updated

All credit to the Beliebers. Somehow we managed to avoid scenes of 1,200 crazed fangirls holding Beebs’s torn limbs and blood-splattered high-top sneakers in the air. Could it be his Snapchat request to fans for some “selfie respect”, posted a couple of days ago, actually worked?

Updated

Baby, baby, baby, ooooh!

The crowd knows every word to Baby, Bieber’s break-out hit from five years ago, back when he was actually a baby.

(Fun fact: Drake makes a cameo in the video, which shows an age-appropriate date at a bowling alley.)

Question is, who’s going to do the Ludacris rap verse?

As it turns out, no one.

“I’m all gone, gone, gone,” he sings, before deadpanning: “Now I’m actually gone.”

He thanks us for being “an amazing crowd” – then does a hundred-plus sprint for the dock to catch the first ferry off this island.

Updated

I shouldn’t be surprised, given that 1,200 fans have been brought by boat to an island solely to watch Bieber play a third of a normal-length set and answer banal questions about his skateboarding, but you can feel the wheels of his publicity machine turning.

Every interview is an opportunity for Bieber to make up for past sins and set in popular imagination his new brand: Bieber the skateboarding Christian, Bieber who spends every Christmas with his family, Bieber who lives to serve his fans, be it through the power of music or the Make a Wish foundation.

Of course he must acquiesce to media demands he discuss, if only obliquely, his (barely) chequered past, but the crowd cheers at every reassurance of him having turned over a new leaf. This is a transaction that benefits everyone, and Bieber, having so publicly “atoned” will be free to sell truckloads of albums and talk about something other than the monkey he left at an airport that one time.

In an interview with Complex – accompanied by photos of Bieber underwater, struggling to break free from chains (oh, the symbolism!) – he said he was baffled by the negative press after he urinated into a mop bucket at a restaurant:

Honestly, I think the pissing in the bucket wasn’t as big as people made it seem. Just because, dude, think about it. Imagine, you hear that fucking Ozzy Osbourne pisses backstage. Immediately, “Oh, he’s a freaking rock star!” As soon as I do it, “He’s being a brat.” Dude, what is bratty about pissing in a bucket? I had to go piss – we all have to pee.

The bathroom was like on the other side, and the dude in the club was like, “Just pee here.” He told me I could and it wasn’t like I was being disrespectful. I feel like that was pretty ostracising — bigger than it should’ve been.

Which doesn’t really explain why he yelled “Fuck Bill Clinton” while doing so, but it’s a reminder of a time when the world wanted Bieber to fail and that he would rather we forget.

Honestly, can you blame him?

Updated

Fact: Pope Francis has 7.46 million twitter followers. Beebs? 67.9 million.

Justin Bieber performing at Cockatoo Island, Sydney
Can the Pope do this? Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP

Updated

Bieber performs Boyfriend

After a short break, Bieber is back on stage along with the opening bars of his 2012 hit Boyfriend. Attempts to update the song with a new, heavy bass line don’t entirely pay off, and the rap verse – half sung, half whispered – doesn’t translate well live.

In person Bieber fails to sell “swaggy” as an exclamation as well as he does on the record. But fans love the dance breakdown and, one presumes, entertaining Bieber’s entreaties of “if I was your boyfriend”.

Updated

The man can dance.
The man can dance. Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP

Some banter from the crowd:

If you’re too cocky they hate you. They already hate him because he’s young and he’s got too much money. – Security guard

I don’t want to have to go back to normal life. – Fangirl

Bieber performs Where Are Ü Now

It’s not the first time I’ve listened to it before 9am, but Bieber’s performance of Where Are Ü Now sounds so good. Credit to the sound desk out here on Bieber Island – the bass is loud and the mix is rich, and Bieber is nailing that breathy, confessional verse.

The song was a collaboration with Diplo and Skrillex under the moniker Jack Ü and is quite possibly my song of the year. It was pivotal in Bieber’s comeback, appealing to both his original fans, the Beliebers, and the poptimist music media.

A beautifully produced video about the making of the song on the New York Times helped to cement Bieber as back on the scene, and taking his music career seriously.

Updated

The sound of 1,000 teenage girls swooning.

Bieber reveals his relationship status

Bieber is talking to Kiis FM breakfast hosts, Kyle and Jackie O, with their attempts at jocular banter falling a little flat. A breathless fan calls in to ask if Bieber would ever consider putting the model Kendall Jenner in one of his music videos.

He seems confused. “She’s not really a music video girl?”

On to the most important question of all. No, Bieber is not seeing anyone at the moment. He’s been put off by all the media scrutiny during his last relationship (referring to his former girlfriend Selena Gomez). Kyle and Jackie ask about his friendships with other famous people. Bieber name checks his early patron Usher and Niall Horan from One Direction. The latter is received very, very well by the crowd.

Every Christmas, Bieber and his family play a “dice game”. I don’t find out nearly as much about this as I would like to. Is it Yahtzee? Or one of the Bieber clan’s own devising? I can’t decide which outcome would delight me more. Presents are also capped at the value of $20.

A fan screams at Bieber to take his shirt off. He doesn’t oblige but Kyle does.

Disappointing.

Updated

Bieber performs What Do You Mean?

Bieber is performing his new hit What Do You Mean?, with six backing dancers. Not every pop act can carry off a live performance in as unforgiving a setting as this one – outdoors, early morning, small stage – but objectively he has a great voice, even scatting a bit in the outro.

This morning I’m reminded of his star power – he can dance, he can sing, he has an elusive quality in interviews that is charming. But that alone is not enough to necessarily make a celebrity, as the career trajectory of Chris Brown – once hotly tipped to inherit Michael Jackson’s throne – illustrates.

Kochie and Sam are back onstage and point out a fangirl in the front row who Bieber made cry with his very touch. “What does it feel like to have that effect on people?” Armytage asks. “It feels amazing,” he replies. “Making people smile is my favourite thing to do.”

Updated

#DemiGod

The Bieber has landed

The hosts of Sunrise take the stage for their live broadcast and the fans start screaming.

Oh. My God. Bieber is on stage.

David Koch opens with a remark about how Australia has “stuck by” him for so many years, and aren’t his Australian fans so very different to his others around the globe? Bieber dutifully says something nice about Australia.

Kochie’s co-host, Samantha Armytage, says she’s surprised Bieber skates out and about with his fans. “I just like that intimate connection with them,” he says. “I want to break that barrier of fan-artist with them”. The crowd shrieks at “intimate connection” and again when Bieber speaks of “knowing yourself” and “seeing the world in a different way now”.

Armytage: Were you hanging around with the wrong crowd?

Bieber: I think there were definitely people who were taking advantage of me and taking advantage of the situation.

He surrounds himself with “supportive” people now.

Armytage confesses she is not in Bieber’s target demographic. “Say what you want, but you’re blushing right now,” he says winningly.

I think I love him!

Updated

This is what anticipation looks like, courtesy of YouTuber and Belieber, HeyImNatalia:

We have pulled up at Bieber Island, which is disappointingly still signed Cockatoo Island. A stage has been set up and a wrangler is coaxing screams out of the crowd, prepping them for the main event. A person dressed as a cow wanders into the stage, prompting a chant of “cash cow” from maybe five people.

The mood of the crowd is one of happy anticipation. The “no bad behaviour” sign on the dock appears to predate the occasion because there’s no hysteria, no jostling, no fangirling – only some strategic positioning (“there are too many tall people over there!” one fan points out, steering her friend through the crowd by her elbow).

Private boats are moored off the island, hoping to catch the sweet strains of Baby, Boyfriend, and – who knows, maybe if we’re lucky – Thought of You on the wind (which, by the way, is criminally underrated. It’s fine if you haven’t heard it).

Updated

The mood on the Bieber boat is festive. I am surprised to learn that I still know all the words to the Big Sean verse in As Long As You Love Me and have a fleeting crisis: am I journalist, or am I ... a Belieber?

Updated

Four ferries are bound for Bieber Island (otherwise known as Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour, although everyone here is admirably committed to the rebrand), each with 400 people on board.

Some Beliebers have been queueing since 5pm Tuesday, the Universal rep tells me, making it a 12-hour wait. “They’ve been so good,” she says. “No screaming or anything.” By 5.55am there was a large crowd, of mostly female fans, mostly in their early teens but some definitely older, lining up quietly along the wharf.

I chat to Maya Harris, 11, on the Bieber boat with her younger sister Addison. She scored tickets (which were apparently being scalped for up to $700) through a familial connection: her mother works for Kiis FM, reps for which are going around marking fans with temporary tattoos that say “Kiis me Justin”.

“You never know,” she says, somewhat optimistically.

Maya has been a Bieber fan since she was about seven or eight. Her favourite songs are his latest hits, What Do You Mean? and Where Are Ü Now, which, she’s right, are both mad bangers. Addison prefers his break-out hit: Baby (feat Ludacris), which – Maya and I marvelled – is now five years old. “He’s a good singer,” Maya says.

We talk about the bad press Bieber has attracted over the past couple of years. She says his public profile has made him a controversial figure, though she herself wasn’t put off, “unless he does something really bad”. He’s lost a lot of fans, she says, but it doesn’t bother her: “It gets me closer to being his number one fan.”

Updated

Not so long ago, the phrase “Bieber Island” could have been symbolic: an elegant descriptor of the distance that the once-adorable Canadian pop star had carved out between himself and the rest of the world, even his fans, during his annus horribilis (the arrest, the breakup).

In recent years we’ve watched (and I mean really watched) Bieber, 21 go from baby-faced Baby singer to bad boy, his off-stage bad behaviour – abandoning pets at airports, spitting on neighbours – overshadowing his radio-friendly pop.

But he’s turned himself around just in time for the release of his new song What Do You Mean?, and his tour of contrition has brought him to Australia.

This morning, as a new day dawns in Sydney and the sun rises over Darling Harbour, Bieber Island is a real island, with a real hashtag, that I am setting sail for.

Updated

Good morning, Beliebers!

Guardian Australia’s deputy culture editor here, kicking off our live coverage of Justin Bieber’s special Sydney performance on Cockatoo Island. (Please direct all this is not news-esque comments to @m_onicatan.) As I write our two Bieber reporters Fred McConnell (@fredmcconnell) and Elle Hunt (@mlle_elle) are not so much on-the-ground as on-the-sea as they take the ferry with more than 1,000 competition winners for their special date with the Canadian heartthrob.

Beebs landed on Australian soil on Sunday and, since then, the media coverage of the Bieber train has been like one long exercise in minutiae collecting:

  • Beebs accidentally tweeted “see u soon. #hitherto” instead of his Melbourne show’s correct hashtag #hittheroof. His autocorrect error was soon trending
  • In Sydney, Beebs skated through crowds of tourists and morning commuters on busy George Street. He cruised right up to the door of his hotel

Compelling stuff.

But today is going to be different. One man stuck on an island with 1,200 rabid fans? This is going to be carnage, like that final scene in Perfume. One whiff of Beebs and they’ll lose it.

Updated

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