5 Seconds Of Summer – Vector Arena June 18, 2015

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It wasn’t until the penultimate song of their main set at Auckland’s Vector Arena that 5 Seconds Of Summer — 5SOS to the really cool kids — actually became the band they really want to be.

5SOS are not an easy band to pigeonhole. It would be easy to dismiss them as an Australian One Direction with guitars — One Conviction, if you will — and at first glance, that’s not an entirely unfair assessment: four pretty boys with great vocals singing power-pop songs for an overwhelmingly teenage, almost entirely female audience. But that would not do the band justice.

Tonight’s show, their second headline concert in New Zealand — the first, frontman Luke Hemmings reminded the audience several times, was three years ago, to an audience of three hundred — was a tight, polished performance from a band that have outgrown their YouTube origins and are becoming an accomplished live act.

The four worked their way through a 19-song set that was as slick a show as I’ve seen in some time, drummer Ashton Irwin in particular flailing and thrashing for all he was worth. The performance was professional; the music was, at times, a touch formulaic, but expertly performed. Heartbreak On The Big Screen was a typical 5SOS song, rolling drums and chuggy guitars giving way to big, big vocals,

Hemmings sharing singing duties with guitarist Michael Clifford and local boy Calum Hood, the band’s bassist. Songs like Don’t Stop and Disconnected, similarly, offered the three boys at the front of the stage each a chance to step up to the microphone, and it should be noted that while Hemmings, with perfect hair and no shortage of charisma and presence, is the natural front for the band, Hood is the stronger singer, and on Beside You and Amnesia he had the chance to shine.

Tonight’s show, the first in the final leg of the Rock Out With Your Socks Out Tour, was an impressively staged affair. Aside from Irwin’s drum riser and a backline of Marshall amp stacks, the stage was empty, but the half-dozen video screens behind the band offered a pleasingly cinematic video presentation of the show, Hemming’s disturbingly undisturbed hair displayed in closeup, Irwin’s sweat as he Animaled his way through his drum parts distressingly visible.

The four presented themselves with an engaging degree of charisma, Clifford reminding the audience that he was, quite recently, burnt quite badly on stage. Hemmings worked the audience with easy charm, every shouted mention of Auckland eliciting a huge cheer from, well, Auckland. He had, to be fair, an audience that were verging on Beatlemanic in their excitement, but inviting Hood’s young nephew onto the stage to attempt to play bass was a crowd-pleasing highpoint.

But while the show was, for the first dozen or so songs, a trifle undifferentiated, one song broke the mould quite profoundly. Green Day’s American Idiot revealed the band that 5 Seconds Of Summer really quite desperately want to be, an old-school American pop-punk band. It’s not a coincidence that while part of their success is down to touring with One Direction, they’ve more recently written songs with the Madden brothers from Good Charlotte, a band who, quite clearly, are a huge influence. Much of tonight’s show, while tightly and sharply performed, lacked a little spark and energy at times, but American Idiot, an hour in, saw the band almost transformed: the song was kicked out with energy, almost aggression, by a band who gave, quite clearly, the impression that this is the music they really want to be playing.

Their own songs showed the same spark, just occasionally — Permanent Vacation (not, sadly, the Aerosmith song) bounces along with more life and vitality than most of 5SOS’s set, and Kiss Me Kiss Me, their strongest original song of the night, could, just possibly, have been a song that Good Charlotte themselves would have been happy to have played. Guitarist Clifford, with his shock of very black hair and his Slayer t-shirt, would, you can’t help but think, love to have been in Green Day, but since that opportunity isn’t likely to present itself, it’s clear that he, and his bandmates, would like to embrace the old-school songwriting of tracks like Kiss Me Kiss Me, and place the emphasis more on the power and less on the pop.

The show ended with a joyous reading of The Romantics’ That’s What I Like About You, a song from fifteen, maybe twenty, years before most of the audience were born. 5 Seconds Of Summer are a talented band, but they haven’t quite figured out exactly where they’re headed. On the strength of tonight’s show, American pop-punk from the 1990s is where they’d like to find themselves; it’s what they want to do, and it’s what they do best.

– Steve McCabe

Click on any image to view a photo gallery by Steve McCabe:

5 Seconds Of Summer set list:
End Up Here
Out Of My Limit
Heartbreak Girl
Voodoo Girl
Permanent Vacation
Don’t Stop
Disconnected
Long Way Home
Rejects
Heartache On The Big Screen
Wrapped Around Your Finger
Amnesia
Beside You
Everything I Didn’t Say
American Idiot
Kiss Me Kiss Me
She Looks So Perfect
(Encore)
Good Girls
What I Like About You

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