Notorious Celebrity Interviews: 5 Seconds of Summer for Rolling Stone, 2015

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Welcome to another Notorious Celebrity Interviews. This week, let's revisit 5 Seconds of Summer's ~scandalous~ interview with Rolling Stone from 2015.

The pop-punk quartet was trying to prove that it was an edgy punk band, yet it was also still catering to its audience of tween girls. So when the bad boyz started talking about sex and alcohol, it was a pearl-clutching scandal.

Let's set the scene:

There are red-wine stains on the floorboards by the pool on the canyon-side deck…A fireplace is surrounded by empty beer bottles.

Luke Hemmings, the Australian pop band’s heartthrob frontman, wanders downstairs to the kitchen, unshaven, wearing only a T-shirt and tight black boxer briefs…He spreads some avocado on toast. “Sorry I’m in my underwear,” he mumbles. “I’m really hungover.” He shuffles back to his room.


5 Seconds of Summer: Inside the Wild Life of the World’s Hottest Band
By Patrick Doyle
Rolling Stone, December 2015

First, an introduction: Clockwise from top right, guitarist Michael Clifford, drummer Ashton Irwin, bassist Calum Hood, and lead vocalist Luke Hemmings.


They are some party boyz:

Bassist Calum Hood: “Let me put some bourbon in this,” he says, returning to the kitchen. Guitarist Michael Clifford is roaming around inside, but Hood is giving him a wide berth. “He’s still feeling it,” says the bassist, lighting up a Camel. But eventually Clifford materializes, wearing a fully unbuttoned shirt, pale, but fresher than expected. “I’m fuckin’ alive!” he says. “Sorry. I was literally dying today.”

Did you know that young straight men sometimes enjoy SEX?:

Clifford proudly displays one of his favorite presents, given to him by Josh Dun, the drummer of the band Twenty One Pilots: a Fleshlight, a flashlight-shape device with a plastic vagina on one end. “You’ve never used one of these?” Clifford asks with a grin.

They boast about having sex with multiple girls in one night:

“When you put four young dudes on a tour bus, playing theaters, then arenas, you’re going to have sex with a lot of girls, I guess,” says Hemmings. “We had a good time.” Multiple girls in one night? “I feel like I shouldn’t say,” he says with a smirk. “You could say the possibility of that is high.” Multiple girls at the same time? “The possibility is high,” he says again. He cracks a devilish grin. “The possibilities are endless.”

On their dick pic scandals and future sex tapes:

In 2014, a video that Hood had Snapchatted to a girl - in which he filmed himself looking in the mirror with his penis out - surfaced online. It had actually happened a while beforehand - he could tell from his lack of tattoos. “It was kind of a blessing, in a way, because nothing that bad could actually happen to me again,” he says, smoking on the porch at the band’s house. “If another photo of my dick came out, it will just be, like, ‘Oh! It’s his dick again.'”

Plus, the video earned the band a lot of publicity. “Now, I’m just working on the sex tape,” Hood says. “I’ll call Pamela up, like, ‘Hey, it’s been a while. We really need to hype this band up!'”

But don't call 'em fake! Like good punks, they hate ~fake~ industry people:

Last night, the band performed at the American Music Awards. “A lot of fake people, which sucks,” Clifford says. Hemmings complains, “It’s just, like, Viners and Internet personalities, those kind of people. Fucking pisses me off! Why are you here?”

After the show, Clifford and Hemmings hit their friend Nick Jonas’ party, then crashed one thrown by Justin Bieber… They didn’t talk to Bieber - “I think he hates us,” says Clifford… “I probably shouldn’t say this, but he had his own album on loop for, like, two or three hours.”



Some cute casual sexism toward the teenage girls who launched them to fame:

Irwin: “We don’t want to just be, like, for girls... 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.”

Two of their big influences are Creed and Nickelback. Yes, for real. Chad Kroeger was like a creepy dad to them:

The band loves talking about [Nickelback frontman Chad] Kroeger. “He ordered 12 chicken strips and a Caesar salad,” says Irwin. “It was so funny, man.” Hood drops his voice an octave to imitate Kroeger: “He was like, ‘Fuck. I’m so unhealthy. I order this every day.'”

“At the end of the day, he was like, ‘Shit, I feel stressed,'” says Irwin. “He’s like, ‘You guys ever look up shit on the Internet?’ We’re like, ‘What type of shit?’ He’s like, ‘Girl stuff, like, hot girls dancing.’ So he goes on YouTube and writes ‘hot chicks dancing’ in the search. And we sat there watching hot chicks dancing. It was such a creepy dad-on-the-Internet move.”
“Like a dad trying to find porn,” says Clifford, mock-typing, “ ’Porn.com!'”
“You guys ever Google-Image ‘boobs’?” says Clifford. “When I was 11, I used to take off ‘safe search’ in Google Images. Oh, man, this isn’t helping the article at all, is it?”

They’re in a mini feud with James Corden after Corden spoofed them:

Clifford got upset when a skit with late-night host James Corden went south. In the sketch, Corden played the fictional fifth member of 5SOS, who comically lashed out after he was kicked out of the group. But at the taping, the band kept stepping on Corden’s lines, and the host got annoyed. His jokes at the band’s expense seemed to get harsher, and he singled out Clifford: “I can find a dickhead with red hair seven days a week! You think you’re the first guy to dye your hair and be in a band? You’re like a cliché of every shit musician.”

The notorious skit:

Click to view

One of these himbos walked into a literal fireball onstage:

Clifford walked into a pyrotechnic blast at Wembley Arena in June; his hair and shirt caught on fire, sending him writhing across the stage.

Also, they do not appreciate your weird fanfics:

They are the subject of fan fiction, some of which features bondage sex and cross-dressing. “I don’t read that shit,” says Hood. “It scares me.”

Poll

UPDATE: Here is the original ONTD post on it!

Read more notorious interviews with Jessica Alba, Angelina Jolie, M.I.A., Chris Evans, Jennifer Lopez, Kate Winslet, Beyoncé, Channing Tatum, Cara Delevingne, Johnny Depp, Miles Teller

Mods, this is just a fraction of the full-length interview.

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