Читать книгу 5 Seconds of Summer: Hey, Let’s Make a Band!: The Official 5SOS Book - Литагент HarperCollins USD, Ю. Д. Земенков, Koostaja: Ajakiri New Scientist - Страница 10

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 burnt 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 practised. 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 together. 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 realised 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?’