5SOS’ ‘EVERYONE’S A STAR!’ tour leans into the absurdity of fame.
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5 Seconds of Summer are fifteen minutes late on stage. They’ve been a little late every show of this tour so far, and maybe that’s deliberate, to feed into the rock star bit in some meta way, but it’s probably just a coincidence. They’re squashed into the back seat of a car, pouring tea from a Union Jack-printed teapot as they launch into the first verse of ‘NOT OK’, but before the track starts, a skit plays, claiming this would be their last show ever, here at The O2, happening at the band’s absolute peak.
Neither of those things is true; this is only the first leg of another lengthy world tour, and, depending on your definition of peaking culturally, this likely isn’t it for 5SOS. But it doesn’t matter. Because the ‘EVERYONE’S A STAR!’ tour is, as frontman Luke Hemmings says during the show, their biggest and best tour yet.
It’s also about living your own fantasy. Throughout the night, they reminisce on being the biggest boyband in the world, win an award for Best Boyband in the World, and document their peak, fall, breakup, rise and return via a series of on-and-off-stage skits. It all plays out like the This Is Spinal Tap of boybands, anchored by the band’s impressively deadpan Australian humour, with the setlist functioning like that of a jukebox musical.
Tracks from their latest album are particularly explosive (literally, in ‘NOT OK’s case, with the confetti canons opening the show), ‘No. 1 Obsession’ and ‘Boyband’ feel integral to the show’s story, but so do earlier tracks like ‘No Shame’ from 2020’s ‘CALM’, with its themes of desperation for fame (or rather, infamy).
On this album cycle, 5SOS haven’t been shy about reaching for nostalgia, reclaiming their boyband image and reimagining themselves as characters calling back to who they were when they debuted. As such, a lot of this set is made up of older material, with a cheeky nod in one of the skits to how the fans tend to go crazier for their old songs. The final act is dedicated to tracks from their 2014 debut and follow-up ‘Sounds Good, Feels Good’; as a band catapulted into arenas early on, they were born writing songs for shows this size. In the show’s first half, they take a moment to do a PowerPoint presentation (yes, really) featuring ‘lore drops’ and a timeline of their London takeover.
In the second half, they play on the idea that the group ‘broke up’ while they each made a solo record, with the members rotating around the massive extended stage to perform a solo track each (it’s very K-Pop concert-coded). It’s a fun change of pace, but they’re strongest united.
It’s funny to see 5SOS mythologise their story in such a way, because it’s such an odd one anyway. They launched to mass hysteria and hatred equally (an era they’ve undoubtedly reclaimed), had their biggest hits while playing their smallest venues (tonight’s closer ‘Youngblood’ comes from an album toured in academies versus arenas), and they never really had a flop era to come back from. Still, ‘EVERYONE’S A STAR!’ The Tour feels like an insight into how the pop machine feels when you’ve spent your life as a cog in it.
“We get a little bored of the same old rock show, same old play of our songs, and do a fake encore and see you later,” said drummer Ashton Irwin in our last interview with the boys. “We wanted more of a narrative, more of an explosive, creative, identifiable way of putting on shows.” It’s a statement true of both their last visit to this venue for The 5 Seconds of Summer Show as it is this tour; it’s a show as unique as their story. As the band return for the encore, walking from the back of the standing crowd to the stage, hands grabbing at their clothes and cameras flashing in their faces, it’s the sort of on-the-nose life-imitates-art moment that makes their opening skit feel, actually, a bit true.
