Scott needs Daniel P Carter to decide what is rock
Radio 1 Rocks had taken over the station, but Scott was increasingly worried that he was not personally rock enough for the occasion. He liked plenty of rock music, yet a blue blazer and a lunchtime plan to eat sushi did not exactly fit the image he had in mind. His solution was to repeatedly ring Radio 1’s resident rock expert Daniel P Carter and ask him to adjudicate on almost everything he was about to do.
The first call concerned the sushi. Daniel suggested biting the head off a bat would be considerably more rock. Scott then rang again because he had booked All Time Low and suddenly wondered whether a successful, good-looking band which appeared in pop magazines still counted. Daniel reluctantly confirmed that they did, but realised by this point that Scott was mostly tormenting him. Later calls asked whether Icona Pop’s “I Love It”, Five’s version of “We Will Rock You” and biting the head off a teddy bear qualified. They did not. Throwing a cup of wee over the boss, however, finally received Daniel’s enthusiastic approval.
Scott also found a new insult from Example’s Twitter account. Example had dismissed somebody simply as “you salad”, which delighted Scott because it sounded so mild compared with almost every conventional insult. Within minutes he was trying to make it part of the show’s vocabulary.
All Time Low return to talk nonsense
Jack Barakat and Alex Gaskarth arrived without the other half of All Time Low, who had gone home during a break in their schedule. Jack had recently tweeted Scott asking when they could come back to Radio 1 and “talk more nonsense”, an approach Scott thought more bands should adopt. The two immediately settled into the kind of interview which wandered happily between touring, food, underwear, strange foreign interviews and their own podcast.
They had been supporting Green Day in stadiums and described the experience as a full-circle moment. Green Day had been heroes while they were growing up, so seeing Billie Joe Armstrong watching from the side of the stage could still make them briefly forget how to play. More importantly, the band had treated their support act warmly, regularly checking in on them rather than simply disappearing after the show.
European promo had been a different experience. Jack and Alex loved the startling directness of some interviewers, recalling questions which could jump from a perfectly ordinary discussion of a new record to whether they would sleep with Rihanna. They had learned not to be offended and to treat the bluntness as part of the fun. Their own weekly podcast, Full Frontal, gave them the opposite freedom: they could talk for as long as they wanted, have a couple of drinks, then listen back and remove anything which made absolutely no sense.
Eyeliner, Kerrang! and a smashed television
Because this was Rock Week, All Time Low had brought Scott an eyeliner pencil. Jack and Alex explained the basics and Scott immediately decided he looked considerably more convincing. They suggested a leopard-print onesie and a Flying V guitar as possible next stages, although Scott seemed satisfied that darker eyes alone had moved him towards the required look.
The pair were in Britain ahead of the Kerrang! Awards, where All Time Low had five nominations and Jack had somehow been nominated in both the hottest male and hottest female categories. Jack was as confused as anyone and joked that he had apparently transcended gender. Their visit to London had also included dinner at Parliament and the novelty of having enough downtime to use Oyster cards and explore the city rather than simply arrive, perform and leave.
Asked whether they were secretly too polite to be proper rock stars, Alex supplied a story which contained both sides of their personality. On Jack’s birthday he had tried to smash a hotel window with a bottle so he could throw a television through it. The window survived, so he instead carried the television through the hotel, eventually smashing it outside before running back to the tour bus. The following morning he felt guilty about the damage. Scott decided this combination of destruction and remorse was very All Time Low.
Sara Cox plays a rock edition of Real or No Real
Sara Cox arrived for a Rock Week Real or No Real, with everybody briefly adopting unnecessary rock nicknames before getting to the facts. The first claim sounded too ridiculous to be true: KISS had produced a comic whose red ink contained blood from the band. It was real. The members had actually contributed blood as part of the Marvel comic promotion.
A story claiming You Me at Six had thrown a television from a hotel window and then sent handwritten apology letters was false, despite sounding uncannily similar to the All Time Low story from earlier in the show. Elton John really had surprised Iggy Pop by appearing on stage in a gorilla costume in the 1970s, with Iggy in such a state that he assumed the sight was a hallucination and simply carried on.
The final claim said Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme had trained a baboon to play bass and credited it on an album. After some confusion over the result, the show corrected the answer: it was no real. That left Scott and Sara level at 20 points and restored at least a little order after an afternoon in which Scott had outsourced almost every definition of rock to Daniel P Carter.
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