On an arctic Friday afternoon, a shivering Chris Cheney calls in from an equally frigid rehearsal space, “I’m in South Melbourne freezing my butt off.”
Thankfully for the frontman of legendary Melbourne rock n rollers The Living End, he has enough songs to rehearse in the lead up to their exhaustive retrospective national tour to keep him warm.
“We just keep playing; when we get cold we just play another song.” Forming in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs in 1994, Cheney is reflective when it is noted The Living End’s career is knocking on 20 years. “You’re not the first person to tell me that” he smiles, “it has been quite an innings.”
“I see it as The Living End’s first EP came out in ’96 and the first album was ’98, so I kind of see it as that, but then again Scott [Owen, double bass player extraordinaire] and I have been playing music together since we were in high school,” recalls Cheney.
“In about ’91 was when we first started playing little lunch time gigs, I suppose you would call them, where we weren’t charging people – we probably should have been but we weren’t,” he laughs.
For a band that built their enviable reputation on arse kicking, energetic live shows, the decision to embark on their extensive tour was a relatively easy one. In fact, it took just one event. “During the Triple J Hottest 100 Australian Albums Of All Time, our first record (1998 debut The Living End) came in at #4 which just blew us away.”
“We couldn’t believe it that our album could be so revered and that people have held it so dear to their hearts. So we thought ‘right, let’s do a night at a pub somewhere, just a small venue and play that album from start to finish’,” explains Cheney.
True to form, that one modest show grew into something much more. “As we were brainstorming ideas it somehow started snowballing into this idea of doing all of our records – so it is kind of crazy,” concedes Cheney. “It’s a big workload but we have learned all the songs now, we are just slowly working through them.”
“I think we have always been the kind of band who has tried to bite off more than we can chew and I think it is just in our nature to create a challenge and that puts the pressure on us which makes us hungrier to pull it off and we will,” says Cheney, and thus far, pull it off they have as The Living End pulls into Brisbane. What keeps them going? “…some of the earlier songs are so aggressive and exciting that it has rejuvenated us.”“As we were brainstorming ideas it somehow started snowballing into this idea of doing all of our records – so it is kind of crazy…”
As their retrospective tour sells out date after date, city after city, Cheney concedes that The Living End’s early days were significantly less charmed and that their unwavering popularity took a long time to build. “Scott and I were just these two guys living out in Glen Waverley and Wheelers Hill and we decided that maybe we could form a band and play gigs in front of people, get on stage and play at The Espy or the Big Day Out or put an album out and make a video clip or something.”
“At first it was like ‘how do we get a gig and will anyone come’?” he remarks. “We didn’t know how to do anything or what it would take, so here we are going ‘holy shit man! I can’t believe not only put out a first record – we put out six records’!”
Playing a jaw dropping nine shows at Melbourne’s Corner Hotel (nearly consecutively), the band has a long history with the iconic venue. “We didn’t think we would get anywhere. We were playing the front bar of The Corner Hotel on a Wednesday night and we would play to like, five people and we knew all of the five people,” chuckles Cheney.
“There was the big room next door and I remember looking in there and the owner of the pub going ‘one day boys’. We were saying ‘oh no way, we are never going to be able to play a venue that big’ and now we’re doing nine consecutive shows so it’s really mind blowing,” he enthuses. “It makes me quite emotional thinking about it because it’s like ‘holy shit, how did we pull that off’?”
Despite their longevity, for a while there things weren’t so rosy. Drug problems, girlfriend blowouts and general exhaustion culminated in Cheney temporarily leaving The Living End in late 2006.
“I did quit the band before White Noise because I was well and truly over it at that point.” The break didn’t last and before too long, the singer was back on board. “I think the three of us have realised we have got something special here, let’s not mess it up. That coupled with the desire to make good records and play good shows and not playing a bad show has given us some staying power,” he muses.
A good amount of that impressive staying power can be attributed to their ability to a rabbit out of the proverbial hat.
During the 2012 Big Day Out tour, The Living End was twice joined on stage by Melbourne rapper 360. “We knew 360 because we’re managed by the same manager and we just rang him and said ‘do you want to come and maybe just rap over one of our songs?’ It might be really, really bad but it might be really, really cool,” says Cheney.
Unsurprisingly, the gamble paid off and the collaboration ended up being a highlight in the Big Day Out’s illustrious history. “We’re still a rock n roll band but we have grown a little bit. When we had that song “How Do We Know?” off White Noise, we kind of thought ‘this is the kind of song where it would be cool if we got the Hilltop Hoods or something to rap a verse,’ but nothing ever came of it.”“I did quit the band before White Noise because I was well and truly over it at that point… I think the three of us have realised we have got something special here, let’s not mess it up.”
Later, thanks to the Big Day out cameo, Cheney feels the track “had a real kind of weight to it and a mood which sounded awesome. It’s interesting, that would never have flown when we first started. Hip hop was a world away and it still kind of is.”
When asked about the likelihood of a new album, Cheney takes the “it won’t happen overnight but it will happen” stance.
“We don’t know what’s next. This tour goes right up until Christmas and we don’t have any other plans really. That is not to say that is the end of the road.”
Still Cheney remains cautiously optimistic, “I think I’ll just sleep for a while and I can’t see a reason why we wouldn’t do another album but I don’t really have that on the cards at this point. I just want to wait until I’m actually feeling inspired and not just churning it out for the sake of it.”
Never fear though, when inspiration does strike The Longnecks (the name used by the band while rehearsing new material with then-new drummer Andy Strauchan) will be back in full force, according to the vocalist. “They will be on the scene if we get new songs. One of our most fun things to do is just play somewhere unknown without the pressure of people coming to see The Living End I suppose” he laughs.
As the cold takes its toll and the heavy load of songs to rehearse bears down, Cheney makes his escape back into the warmth of the studio.
As he leaves, he pauses and surmises “it’s a funny thing, for me and Scott this kind of tour has kind of made us kind of sit and back and take a look at what the band has done and what has happened over the last however many years. It sounds really cheesy but it’s almost like our dream came true.”
From the looks of things, scores of fans would agree.
The Living End are currently on their extensive Retrospective Tour around the nation. Full dates and details here.
