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 13

By the time I’d got to Norwest Christian College, my high school, I had really long hair and a fringe that went over my face. I joined in Year 7 but didn’t know anyone else because a lot of the kids had gone to Norwest’s primary school together, so I was really nervous at first. It’s always tough when you turn up somewhere and you don’t recognise a friendly face. I guess to everyone else I was the weird guy with the long hair, so it was a pretty lonely time. I didn’t have that many friends until Year 9, and I spent a lot of lunchtimes on my own in the music room.

With high school it was the same story as primary school. I kept getting into trouble for small-time stuff – being stupid in class, spending too long on my phone, getting distracted. Sometimes I’d even get told off for not wearing the right uniform. At Norwest you would get demerit points whenever you broke the rules, and if you scored five points you had to go to an after-school detention. I think I was in one of those every few weeks.

Having learned some guitar riffs from Jack, I later took some proper lessons and I would even sit in my room watching tutorials on YouTube. I was becoming completely obsessed with learning how to play. I also loved noisy guitar bands like Foo Fighters and Good Charlotte, so it was natural that I would get to talking to Calum and Michael in school because they were the other outsiders at Norwest and loved those bands as well. The energy and loud guitars of punk made sense to me and the three of us became pretty close once we started going to the same music lessons.

It’s funny, Michael and I didn’t like one another when we first met a couple of years earlier in Year 7, when I first joined the school. I don’t know what it was – I didn’t really talk to him. It was probably because he was taller than me and he looked more like a man. I’d hang out with Calum a little bit, but I don’t think Michael liked that either, because they were friends. Then, in Year 9, Calum and I covered a song by the band Secondhand Serenade at the school talent show, Live At Norwest. Maybe there was a bit of rivalry with me and Michael because previously he had performed with Calum, I don’t know.

That show was so nerve-wracking because we had to play in front of the whole school and our voices hadn’t even broken then. That was an awful experience. I’d much rather play in front of 20,000 people than perform in front of the school – all the people that you know and have to live with every day. Still, we got plenty of applause, which felt great, but it was probably only because everyone had to clap. I don’t think the girls went mad, though. We weren’t too popular where we grew up when it came to girls. I was learning that at our school it was much better to be good at sport than be into music. The jocks were the popular kids; punks like us seemed a little odd to everyone.

Just before Live At Norwest, I had taken the step of recording videos of myself as I covered songs by artists like Bruno Mars and Jason Mraz in my room at home. I’d posted them on YouTube because that was the thing at the time – loads of new songwriters were doing it, so I figured I’d give it a go too. I was 14 and had no idea what I was doing, but suddenly I was getting a few thousand views for each one and people at school were saying nice things about them. I would chat to people who had been listening to my music, but despite the attention, I was oblivious to what it all meant.

It was shortly afterwards that Michael came up to me. I think he’d seen the songs online and had realised that I liked the same sort of music as him. After the ice was broken, we would hang out in music class, jamming, talking about all the bands we loved until one day he came up with the idea that the three of us should start our own band – something like All Time Low or Blink-182. He figured it would be interesting if we put some songs onto YouTube. I liked the sound of that. Being in a band, hanging out with friends and writing songs sounded so exciting. But I had no idea of what was coming next.