Harry Styles has been transforming Madison Square Garden into New York’s hottest club every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday since his 30-night residency kicked off in August. Each begins with a seamless transition from Jamie XX’s opening DJ set into almost
two hours of strobe lights and dancing built around Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. But lately, another piece of the party has been thrown into the mix: “Telephone Busy” by 5 Seconds of Summer.
The crowd has begun chanting the opening verse of “Telephone Busy” in time with the pulsating bridge of “Ready, Steady, Go!” — with no prompting from Styles himself. This new trend was created completely by the fans. And as their volume increases with each show, there are plenty who seem to be helplessly confused about what’s happening.
Let us catch you up to speed.
In July, 5SOS made their Lollapalooza debut in Chicago in the middle of their Everyone’s a Star tour. The set took their usual show to new heights — literally, they performed three songs, including “Telephone Busy,” while elevated at least 20 feet in the air. What would have been an acrophobic’s worst nightmare was just a warm-up for 5SOS, who kept the party going well into the night with CLUBSOS, their official Lollapalooza afterparty and inaugural DJ set.
The band swapped their instruments for the decks at the Salt Shed, spinning everything from Slayyyter’s “Beat Up Chanel$” and the Dare’s “Girls” to Blur’s “Song 2” and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Heads Will Roll.” Still, the remixes of their own songs were the heart of the set. This is how we ended up with “Telephone Busy” slamming into “Ready, Steady, Go!”
During the set, 5SOS dropped Styles’ verse in first, then spun the verse into their own: “I’ll find in love with the next one/It’ll be so good with a good one/I thought it, wrote about it/Crawled up out it, onto the next one/I pulled that tarot card/That one with the mystic heart/A map of treasures/Good things come to those who wait, okay.” The room erupted in a way you’d expect for a band whose fandom is so intertwined with One Direction’s, having spent three tours together in the early 2010s.
5SOS’ fans were tapped in for a while before the mashup made it to MSG or even Chicago, for that matter. The band first teased the “Telephone Busy” x “Ready, Steady, Go!” remix on TikTok in May with the caption: “See you at the after party @Lollapalooza.” To date, the video has more than 394,000 likes and 3.8 million views. It used an audio mix created by a fan named Millie in March. Her video amassed 49,000 likes and 294,000 views. The sound itself has since been used in over 3,800 videos.
In person, the chants during “Ready, Steady, Go!” at MSG last for barely 20 seconds. They were hardly even noticeable for the first few weeks of Styles’ residency, but picked up steam as more fans caught onto the trend. Some have embraced it, while others have exercised their right to not care and move on with their night. It’s deeply inconsequential either way. Still, with 14 nights left in the run, HarrySOS doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon.
A fan-made, full-length remix uploaded to YouTube in August has racked up 30,000 views, while mix playlists combining “Telephone Busy” and “Ready, Steady, Go!” on Spotify have hundreds of collective saves. One of the most popular mixes also adds in “Evolve” from Everyone’s a Star, which received an official remix from 5SOS as the first release in their CLUBSOS VOL. 1 series.
The CLUBSOS version of “Evolve” arrived in August, followed by “Everyone’s a Star” in September. The series doubles down on the audacious spirit of Everyone’s a Star, which drew influences from N.E.R.D., No Doubt, and Gorillaz alongside electronic influences, like the Prodigy and Fatboy Slim, and rock influences, like Queens of the Stone Age and Muse.
“We either celebrate that when it’s received well, or at least six albums in, we know we died trying to reinvent what we are,” 5SOS’ Ashton Irwin told Rolling Stone last year about pushing the band’s sound in unexpected directions. “I’d rather go out that way than just go back to making stale pop-punk records.”
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