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poisoneitherway · 2 years ago

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5 SECONDS OF SUMMER - THE FEELING OF FALLING UPWARDS: LIVE AT ROYAL ALBERT HALL

(transcription from the deluxe album booklet under the cut)

Like all moments of light, "The Feeling of Falling Upwards" begins in total darkness: an exhale, a single second held to feel like a lifetime, limitless possibility meeting the total anxiety of potential. Then, their screams-your screams-a chorus of thousands of voices fill London's famed Royal Albert Hall, emanating from a crowd dressed in suits and gowns, louder and more resonant than even the venue's iconic golden pipe organ. Tonight, that instrument is covered by the stage-no distractions-this performance is all about the band, their songs, and you.

Synths boom. A 12-piece string ensemble's orchestral maneuvers tease a future crescendo. Pianos twinkle. Soon, stage lights will illuminate from the floorboards, pointing upwards to reveal a choir. Can a rock show be bigger than Broadway? Can a rock show feel like floating? Can a rock show change your life? 5 Seconds of Summer take their positions-Calum's bass leads, D to A minor. Luke clutches a microphone: "Caught up in Heaven, but your Heaven ain't the same / And I've never been a saint, have I?" By the time the chorus of "Complete Mess" hits, it's total ascendance in multi-part harmonies, the kind 5SOS fans have come to adore from a band immeasurably in sync with one another. (Four vocalists, but different this time. It's four, plus 12: the House Gospel Choir, known for their work with Kylie Minogue and Primal Scream, stand on a crescent moon platform above 5SOS's heads mirroring a long desert sunrise, to add magnitude.)

These harmonies are a nostalgic sound-you first heard 'em in 5SOS's suburban Sydney living room, covering "Teenage Dirtbag back in 2011. Or maybe it was 2013, just across the street from this hallowed hall, at the Marble Arch, where a tweenage, fringe-and-skate-shoe-wearing 5SOS could be found performing outside for their nascent audience, a community soon to become unwavering in their dedication. These are the kind of fans a band could only dream of inspiring, and this Royal Albert Hall performance is the kind of full-circle moment a band could only dream of achieving. That's the peculiar magic of setting intentions; thank goodness 5SOS, despite every challenge, has stuck around long enough to enjoy it, to get here. Thank goodness you have.

This is the feeling of falling upwards. And it's like nothing they've ever felt before.

"We've done a bunch of different stuff for fans along the way," Luke laughs. "We've gone down the sides of buildings. We've done crazy stuff all over the world-guerilla marketing, hiding things..." It's true: 5 Seconds of Summer have never been strangers to creative promotional activities dedicated to their unimpeachable fans (remember Derp Con?) but the Royal Albert Hall show was something else entirely. 5SOS5, the band's fifth album, recorded in Joshua Tree, CA-the desert majesty three hours east of Hollywood, an enclave of hippie mysticism, knotty cactus, and trees with spiky arms reaching towards a sunset-y sky-provided. 5SOS with a new sense of autonomy, and creative self-assurance. "It gave us the confidence to know that the four of us are capable of creating something really great-just the four of us," as Michael describes it. And so any event around the release would need to eclipse it: to be bigger than just an interview or fan convention.

It would need to highlight their newfound freedom, their willingness towards collaboration, their celebration of musical diversity. And so the band's manager, Benjamin Evans, had an idea. What if 5 Seconds of Summer created a unique show, a production like never before? One that they could live stream around the world on the eve of the album's launch, so fans all around the world could join in the occasion? Wouldn't that be a great way to showcase the band's greatest asset-their live show-in a way that went beyond the same radio and TV spots? What if the band performed with an orchestra and a choir for the first time, ever, reimagining songs from their extensive discography alongside new album tracks, recording the event to later release as a live album?

Surely it would have to be at a truly iconic venue, a bucket list experience for any musician. The prestigious Royal Albert Hall was the obvious choice, for its legacy and most importantly, its place in the history of the band. "We used to busk outside of it [a decade ago]," as Calum is quick to point out.

What if they ran a series of flyaway competitions with media partners to bring fans from outside the UK to London for the one-night-only special? Wouldn't that make it more than a record release, but an unrepeatable moment in the band's history, forevermore?

And what if, instead of turning it into "5SOS5 Live," they created something timeless-a career-spanning set to anchor the entire existence of this band into something mythological, a release superfans and casual listeners alike could hold on to, and return to across their lives? The Killers, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Dusty Springfield, The Who, Arctic Monkeys, hell, Bring Me the Horizon have all released records Live at Royal Albert Hall-if they could just pull it off, 5 Seconds of Summer would join some impressive company. But ideation is one thing: conception, another.

Working with Ben Dupont of Moment Factory, who directed all the visuals, stage set, lighting, and production for the show in just under one month, "The Feeling of Falling Upwards" took an army. 5SOS was just coming off of a few years spent inside finding new ways to thank the fans that have always supported them, like "The 5SOS Show: A 10 Year Celebration," a self-referential, playful commemoration of their decade together as a band, that they created a year earlier and made available for free-and their massive. "Take My Hand" arena and amphitheater tour, with its elevated production from past tours. With "The Feeling of Falling Upwards," they wanted something "classier," for Royal Albert Hall as Calum describes it. "Stripped back, but also multiplied, in terms of its organic element."

"They wanted symphonic, acoustic, timeless," says Ben. "When Nirvana performed at the Hall, they put a ton of flowers on the stage, and it stayed as this iconic look. Less is more. "Do one thing, but do it in a bold way." He endeavored to do the same: hiding the organ behind a stage to elevate the choir, hiring a theater lighting designer to enhance the drama-more edgy Broadway than rock show-complete with Svoboda lighting, an old school Tungsten fixture used to create light curtains atop each member. On stage, he instructed his team to build sand dunes-Styrofoam with real sand coating, meant to look wind-swept, leanin organi the band's risers, an "elegantly disruptive" set, as he puts it. The dunes were 5SOS's version of Nirvana's flowers, bringing a bit of Joshua Tree to rainy England.

The lighting's color story enhanced the experience: "Outer Space/ Carry On," a cut from the band's second record (2015's Sounds Good Feels Good) that they hadn't played live in half a decade, was illuminated a rich blue; closer "Bad Omens" was a sunrise gradient of pink and orange. Most surprising was "Youngblood," the song that gave 5SOS its second life in an industry that, 9 times out of 10, will choose to eat up and spit out its young talent was lit "underside of a leaf green," as Ben describes it, despite the fact that most performers stay away from green. It's too witchy. Too Halloween-y. Green, it turned out, was a favorite of at least Ashton, who, despite being asked by Ben to play silver instruments to take the light off the stage, broke out a green drum. "It's a sore thumb!" Ben remembers thinking. "I was disappointed." Then Ash confronted him about it. "He showed me a photo of a tiny baby plant, two little leaves, growing in the middle of a dune in the desert. For him, that's what his drum kit was doing on stage. I thought he only chose it because it sounded great, with no consideration for the visual aesthetics. But his vision was so much deeper."

Their band itself grew from four members to 31: the 12-piece string orchestra, the 12-member House Gospel Choir, legendary keys-man Roger Manning, "If you've heard an alternative rock record in the last 30 years, Roger is probably playing keys on it... Whether it's Blink, or Morrisey, or Air, or Beck." says lan Longwell, one of 5SOS's music directors who also played orchestral percussion for the band when their previous pick dropped out last minute. Ian was joined by his partner, the band's other MD, Drew Chaffee, who played guitar, synth, and samples. Together, Ian and Drew created a set list-career-spanning but not too backwards-facing, meant to highlight and celebrate the launch of 5SOS5 but most crucially meant to stand on its own. This performance needed to endure, to stand out like the brightest sunset in a career full of them.

They worked with a man called Brandon Collins on the orchestral arrangements, to completely transform some of 5SOS's most identifiable songs. "Teeth," with its "pissed off strings" became "a little more Ennio Morricone, more score-sounding," says lan, the perfect moment to use the orchestra in a heavier way, "to at the end, flip it, and take it to the death star," as he describes it. "She Looks So Perfect" was stripped to its barest materials, a reimagining that came from the most surprising source: Ed Sheeran. "The year the song came out, he covered it, and it's beautiful," says Ian. "It's pretty much the same melody but it skips a chord-it's just him and an acoustic guitar." 5 Seconds of Summer did something similar, adding voices, strings, dimension. "It's the opposite of what the actual song is," Calum says of the new arrangement. "Songwriting is the top priority for this band, and [an acoustic performance] allows it to shine for what it is: a beautiful song."

"That and 'Older' were the most fragile moments of the set," lan jumps in. For Luke, that's especially the case: it is the first time he's gotten to perform it with his fiancé, Sierra Deaton, a romantic duet emphasized by their forever partnership. "That was really special," Luke says of the moment, still at a loss at its majesty. "It was cool, to have the stars align, to be able to do that."

On rare occasion did the songs stay more or less the same than their tour counterparts: "Red Desert," lit red, abridged, and used primarily as a drum break for Ashton, made it onto the set list because "we needed to hit that chorus at least once with the choir," says lan. "Lie to Me" was an uphill battle. "The joke at rehearsal was that it was cut but we were insisting on practicing it anyway. But when we heard it with the choir, it sounded like Simon and Garfunkel."

At the tail end of September, just before the curtains were raised on "The Feeling of Falling Upwards," there was a three day, big production rehearsal in Redditch, near Birmingham, two hours out of London-the only space the team could hire to fit their entire production. Day one was Ian, Drew, Ashton, Michael, and the 12-piece choir huddled in a 500 square foot office room of the production venue while the stage was being built downstairs. They sang through the entire performance and did a lot of simplifying. After all, no collaboration is ever exactly how you imagine it, until you do it; that's the beauty of communal artmaking. The second day was strings/orchestra only. Day three was a full production dress rehearsal with choir and strings together for the first time-they ran through the production in its entirety-immediately moved by what they had created. "This is the first time we've played with other musicians on stage. That's a scary thing," says Calum. "You need to let them have free will as artists as well, which gave it so much life. That's the reason it's so different from anything we've ever done." Luke jumps in. "We wanted to make a core memory for the band- a benchmark-something we could always be proud of. This isn't a flash-in-the-pan thing."

"You only get one shot," Michael agrees. "That was the most nerve-wracking part... It was an incredible learning experience and helped mend some of my trust issues." He pauses. "Every time I played, every time I strummed a guitar chord at Royal Albert Hall, I was like, 'This is the only opportunity I get to play this chord. You know what I mean? But with that came this beautiful moment of seeing the songs for what they were." Therein lies the metamorphosis: there was no existential clarity, only connection: with the other musicians on stage, with the well-dressed audience, with the viewers at home, with you.

"I do remember at the very, very end, just taking a look around for a second, at this stage we built, the incredible people who pull it together, everyone in the band," Michael continues. "I had this moment of 'Once I leave this stage, that's it. That's the last time I'll play a show exactly like this. Two years ago, we had gone out in the middle of nowhere and decided, 'What happens, happens...." He trails off, feeling the weight of making 5SOS5, and the Hall performance, all over again. "All of that all that I felt happened in the space of about two-and-a-half-seconds on stage." He jokes that it was the opposite of a near-death experience. "A full life experience!"

"There is no other record that we've made that could be the core of what we've just done," Calum says, starry-eyed. "And that's very telling of the soul of the record." Without 5SOS5, the band would've never gotten to this point, and they certainly would've never learned to live inside of the songs of their past. "As I get older, I learn you can shift your perception on things," he continues, "Stop taking things so seriously for myself. That's been a big learning curve for us." It's the reason he can deliver a classic Calum song like "Amnesia" as sincerely as he did when he was 18, now at 26 years old. "I feel a lot closer to that song, as I did before, when I was younger," he says. "I respect what it's done for this band and what it's done for a lot of people."

5SOS fans go beyond the regular rock music listenership; they participate in each stage of this band. "They've followed 5 Seconds of Summer to London when they were so young and everywhere else the band has gone in the time since. ("I'd never left the country before we moved to London," says Luke, "We figured out, early on, that we needed to leave Australia to come back stronger.") On stage at Royal Albert Hall, 5SOS was able to connect to that idea: their past selves, but also the fans that joined them along this journey. "I felt like a more elevated version of myself on that stage," says Luke. "Songs I put in the back of my mind, that I didn't really think held much emotional weight, got to me." For him, that meant a lot of songs from Sounds Goods Feels Good, specifically. "The second album had a lot of ambition, tons of strings, but we were still wearing skinny jeans and Converse on stage; we hadn't swayed too much from our pop-punk roots," he laughs. "I don't know if subconsciously there was any desire to perform them live at Royal Albert Hall one day, but we did have a big orchestra in London play on the recorded version of 'Outer Space/Carry On. We never thought we'd have the capacity to play them live." Until they did. Listen to your former selves, there's a real prescience there. This was always possible. "I'm trying to fill in the gaps, emotionally, to understand who I am," he adds. "We all are."

Near the end of the set at Royal Albert Hall, Ashton, the band's heart-poet, gives a definition for the crowd to hold close. "The Feeling of Falling Upwards' is simply supposed to describe to you the feeling that we have experienced together, the feeling of taking a leap of faith on such a fickle thing like music," he smiles, "And sharing this experience together year after year, season after season of our lives."

It is far too easy for musicians to grow up to become parodies of themselves. If they find a formula that works, they can repeat it ad nauseum, leaning into superficial, outward readings of who they are and what they do. But 5SOS, on stage and in the current era, are five-dimensional; their pop-punk selves, their .... operatic selves, and everything in between. "We worked really hard to make this happen," Calum says. "You speak positivity and manifest great outcomes for yourself."

Luke agrees. "There's a light at the end of the tunnel," he says "There's a brightness worth fighting for."

#5sos #tfofu #5 seconds of summer #not that anyone asked for this but I made it anyway cause I know not everyone bought the deluxe cd :)#And I haven't seen anyone post this on tumblr #Can someone also tell me if I can get in trouble for posting this??? I hope not lmao #Anyways I didnt actually write all of this I took pictures and extracted the words -> but hopefully I managed to correct any mistakes #i ran grammarly through this so the only mistakes left are missing dots and stuff like these hopefully :)#5sos ono #e*

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