Fierce figures

Alongside a strong crop of fellow bands, Cable Ties are helping reshape the landscape of Melbourne punk. 

Words Jake Cleland | Photos Alan Weedon | November 2017

Cable Ties shot in Melbourne for Swampland 03. Photo: Alan Weedon.

I’m telling Jenny McKechnie that I reckon Cable Ties’ song “Same for Me” is one of the best friendship songs of the year. Another is a song by her other band, Wet Lips, but I can’t remember its name. Cable Ties bassist Nick Brown cuts in: “‘Here if You Need’.” He and drummer Shauna Boyle start shout-singing McKechnie’s bass line at their sleep-deprived leader (it’s the day after Wet Lips’ east-coast tour). And then they all laugh.

“Everyone thinks we have this huge kind of thing around us, that we’re really scary and intimidating, [but it’s] the complete opposite,” Boyle says. “We’re nice people. We’re very nice to each other and we like to pat dogs. We look at pictures of dogs on the aeroplane when we get scared of the aeroplane.”

McKechnie: “I get scared of the aeroplane.”

Cable Ties are a rock band from Melbourne and people think they’re scary because they have strong ideas about how rich people and bigots are destroying the world. They articulate these ideas loudly—explicitly through McKechnie’s unmasked lyrics, implicitly through her biting riffs and vocal howl, and a rhythm section made up of Brown and Boyle that is hypnotic if not downright demagogic. Their best-known songs bear all the menace of post- punk politics and their stage presence is enthralling. That this formula tends to work out well for bands when they can get it right has nothing to do with nostalgia and everything to do with necessity. Nobody on the Australian left has a strong leader to look to in politics, so they look to strong leaders elsewhere. There are signs McKechnie, Brown and Boyle are exactly what people are looking for.

For a band so entrenched in Melbourne music, the national coverage that surrounded the release of their debut self-titled album this year was a relief to anyone wary of how a scene can cloister its greatest talent. Instead, Cable Ties beat the pedal up the Hume, following fellow Old Bar alumnus Camp Cope on tour, put the record out with Poison City, and walked into triple j through the front door. They also played a dozen shows around the country on their own steam, immediately before McKechnie went on tour with Wet Lips.

You could say that it all started on a tram in January 2013. Boyle had moved to Melbourne from Gippsland a year-and-a-half earlier and, trying to go to more shows (one of the reasons she’d moved in the first place), wound up headed for the Port Royal Street Party. The festival only had a two-year lifespan, but its inaugural year had a tight lineup: Harmony, Batpiss, Cosmic Psychos, the Meanies and others. Boyle, intrepid, was going it alone until she ran into “a bunch of other people who also looked like rockdogs, looking lost”. They found the festival together.

Boyle: “That was a pivotal point in my life because it was me going out of my comfort zone and going to something by myself and approaching people who, y’know, the cool kids—” McKechnie bursts out laughing. “—don’t laugh! I’m a kid from the country! It’s scary for me to talk to new people!”

McKechnie: “I’m also a kid from the country. I’m just more drunk.”

Or, it all started with a jam. Brown had more or less given up playing bass years before. “I was never any good and I never felt like I was any good,” he says. “I had a graveyard show on [community radio station] PBS and got my kicks there. I felt like my contribution or my expression of myself in music was in broadcasting. I couldn’t see myself playing in a band.”

“Melbourne punk of the last twelve to twenty-four months is almost unrecognisable against the landscape of a few years prior ... one can’t help feeling like it’s for the better. ”

Brown and McKechnie had tried to kick something off a few years earlier but it didn’t quite gel. But then after McKechnie jammed with Boyle—originally a bass player, now trying drums—she put Brown on bass. This time, it did gel.

Or, it all started in Bendigo. Young McKechnie, going to Celtic folk camps and ecology camps, surrounded by environmental activists, hugging trees and writing her first songs about everything wrong with the world. Less-young McKechnie, moving to Melbourne and going to garage and punk shows at nineteen, twenty, drawn along by soon-to-be-bandmate in Wet Lips, Grace Kindellan. It wasn’t exactly love at first pint. McKechnie admits: “Originally I was like, ‘I don’t get this music. Why does nobody tune? Why do they all speak rather than sing?’”

Local bands like Batpiss and Terrible Truths offered some kind of blueprint. “As people and musicians, [Terrible Truths] were one of the first bands I went to see and felt like I saw myself reflected on stage and thought ‘I could do this.’” Ironically, or maybe inevitably, she was as intimidated by them as people are by her now. “We were really in awe of them and thought they were total superstars and I couldn’t talk to them for about three years.”

Between then and March 2015, Wet Lips had made fierce figures of guitarist and lead songwriter Kindellan, bassist McKechnie, and then-drummer Mohini Hillyer. The band is now part of the changing face of Australian punk. Much of that community was galvanised around events like Wetfest.

In fact, that’s really where it all started—in Grace and Jenny’s backyard in Brunswick, the sharehouse dubbed “Wetopia”. Launching their first EP, Wet Lips grabbed Cinesex, Nun of the Tongue, Girl Crazy, Pink Tiles, Shrimpwitch, and HABITS for the DIY festival. And, playing at 4.15 in the arvo for the first time ever, Cable Ties.

Brown spent the previous day in bed with food poisoning. He wasn’t much better by showtime.

Brown: “I got right through ’til about 2pm feeling pretty ginger and then got the tram to Wetopia on Brunswick Road and it was like, ‘Great, we’re doing the thing.’ I came in feeling pretty shabby and it was such a nice time. A really nice feeling—feeling capable at something I’d never really felt capable of.”

Nobody remembers much, courtesy of the litres of ALDI beer downed in the early autumn sun, but it was the birth of at least one tradition. Boyle was pulling double duty with Nun of the Tongue (also for the first time) when McKechnie started chanting Boyle’s name.

Boyle: “It’s just ’cause I’ve got two syllables in my name.”

McKechnie: “And because you’re always being a legend. Always rocking up to someone’s gig and they’re like, ‘We don’t have a drum kit’ and you’re like, ‘Cool, I’ll just drive and go get one.’”

Boyle: “That probably happened once.”

It was also the first and only time Boyle had crowdsurfed.

Of the five songs Cable Ties played at Wetfest, two made it onto their album: “Fishbowl”, a song about cultural myopia, and “Paradise”, a sprawling jam inspired by an old school friend who took an unsympathetic stance on folks on welfare. “Walking Out”, from their first 7-inch, and “Difficult”rounded out the set. The final song was a cover of Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon”.

McKechnie: “We did it pretty well!”

Brown: “It’s not like you had to write it. It’s a pretty good song. People like it. If you’re in somebody’s backyard drinking in the afternoon and somebody came close to being even vaguely competent at playing those four notes, you’d probably respond to it too.”

Over the next two years, Cable Ties gigged constantly. Brown credits Old Bar major-domo Joel Morrison with making it easy, throwing at them as many gigs and bands looking for support acts as possible. “Because we were all still learning our instruments, that sort of thing makes a huge difference,” Brown says. There was a break in late 2016 while Boyle went off on a thousand-kilometre hike across Spain. They sprinted through the remaining months of that year, launching a split 7-inch with Wet Lips, picking up a nomination at the Age Music Victoria Awards, and opening Meredith Music Festival with the one of the best starting slots in recent memory. They came into the new year with heat and everybody wanted what they were cooking.

In May 2017, Cable Ties served it up. Their self-titled debut album scorches with stories broad enough to have happened to anyone marginalised in the world, but specific enough to be clearly derived from real life. They’re personal-seeming accounts that carry essay-like weight. All that energy comes to a head on “Say What You Mean”, when McKechnie delivers a monologue that never wears out: “I’m sick of this corporate doublespeak, these words that mean nothing, using acronyms and compound words to justify your six-figure paycheque...” The words are tattoo-inked to the eyelids of whoever’s fortunate enough to have been in their path.

“I was so shocked,” Boyle says, talking about the first time she heard the monologue. They’d written most of the song before Boyle went off on her Mediterranean quest, even rehearsed it to the hilt, ready to get recorded. But they’d never played it together with McKechnie’s vocals. The first time Boyle heard it in full was at the Northcote Social Club—their first show back: “We played it that night and Jenny did the monologue and I was just like, ‘What’s going on? Is this part of it? This is so good!’ I was looking at people’s faces and the jaws dropping and Jenny had this power that I hadn’t seen before. I was blown away. I thought it was so amazing and something that’d never happened to me before. I was the person in the crowd with the jaw open but sitting behind the kit going, ‘I’m not sure what’s going on!’ I still get like that every time we play it.”

Brown: “I was totally fucking stunned and blown away. The reason it’s so powerful is it names so many of these things that float around your brain about the world, and it gives them a language and it gives an understanding that other people feel the same way about that too.”

I ask McKechnie how she finds the energy for it every time they play live. Not just to do it, but to do it convincingly, to pour as much of that I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-seeing conviction and spontaneity into words she’s spoken a hundred times.

“It’s not summoning the energy just for that,” she says. “The whole Cable Ties set is about accessing this singular part of myself. I’m not up there being who I am in everyday life. By the time I get ’round to that song, I’m already full of all this energy from playing and the band’s about releasing a lot of tension and anger and frustration I have about things. If I’m not feeling like that, the set’s probably going very badly. I don’t feel like I have to summon it. It’s always the most exciting bit.”

There’s another particular phenotype of the album that’s obvious once you see it, but has escaped most of the critical coverage of the record. McKechnie pegged it in an interview with Forté magazine last year: “Primary Colours by Eddy Current Suppression Ring—Cable Ties are a little too influenced by that album, like a lot of bands in Melbourne. People often don’t notice though because they are distracted by the whole angry woman thing.”

For all the revolutionary fire of Cable Ties’ music, there’s a radical softness that blankets just as much of their songwriting. It’s most audible on a song like “Wasted Time” where, with its simple couplets and repetition, you could imagine Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s Brendan Suppression singing it (only for Cable Ties to put their own spin on it with a vigorous key change in the last minute). But it’s also in the spirit of “Same for Me”—a song Jenny wrote after her housemate at the time, Shrimpwitch’s Georgi Goonsack, had had a shit night—and in the clean guitar lines of “Paradise” and the rhythm of songs like “Say What You Mean”.

Brown: “I obviously loved the Stooges very deeply and that rhythmic, R&B head-nod thing. And [Eddy Current Suppression Ring] were channelling it in an entirely different way. They were doing it without any aggression, which is bizarrely revolutionary in punk. Punk was never violent and then it became violent when it was co-opted into this really strong masculine culture. But they were simply being the most themselves they could be. It’s totally disarming as an audience member.”

Growing up in Mordialloc, but working in Dandenong, Brown could get back to his parents’ place by the time Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s “I Admit My Faults” was finishing. So he’d drive past his parents place, down to the beach and back. Anything to add an extra fifteen minutes onto the trip so he could get to the end of the record.

McKechnie: “Yeah, they might be an influence. There was definitely a long period where I think I listened to fifty per cent all the other music I had, and the other fifty per cent of the time I just listened to Primary Colours over and over again.”

Boyle: “It’s always gonna be an important record for me and for my friends. It’s just one of those records where you put it on at a party and everyone knows every single word to every single song.”

Maybe the most important parallel to draw between the two bands, though, is in the way they operate. Like Eddy Current Suppression Ring playing their first show to a couple of hundred people because they were already well-liked, Cable Ties had built a persistent community around themselves since before the band was even conceived. It’s only grown since.

To understand why, we go back, five years or so, to when Melbourne punk was full of overgrown toddlers. Angry songs from angry men. Short, sharp. Praised on now-defunct messageboards, but not for the right reasons. The challenge was the same challenge of any girl in the boys club: to be so good they can’t help but acknowledge you. And with the blueprint set by bands like Terrible Truths—savage energy with rhythmic elegance—things came together quick. Wet Lips were already paying dues. Smart folks saw the many, many opening slots they played around Melbourne and knew they were better than most of the headliners already, and there was a sense that they (and other bands who’d heard the universe call at the same time) were capital-I Important. Around the world, feminism was breaking and entering the mainstream. Sure, Beyoncé, but also young women were fighting for positions in the music press, winning them, and finally rewriting the history that’d long been ignored by their male predecessors. For the first time, at least on that scale, there was a lot of currency in being into punk bands that looked more like X-Ray Spex than the Sex Pistols.

“Their self-titled debut album scorches with stories broad enough to have happened to anyone marginalised in the world, but specific enough to be clearly derived from real life.”

While bands like Savages, Perfect Pussy and Speedy Ortiz were stealing headlines in the northern hemisphere, here in the south there were groups growing around bills booked by the likes of LISTEN and Wet Lips and Poison City. Melbourne punk of the last twelve to twenty-four months is almost unrecognisable against the landscape of a few years prior. Sure, that has something to do with the ephemerality of so many bands, but one can’t help feeling like it’s for the better. Artists like Camp Cope, Hi-Tec Emotions, SIMONA, Two Steps on the Water, Spike Fuck, Suss Cunts, Girl Crazy, LAZERTITS, and on and on and on—many of which started in direct response to the lack of equal representation in the city’s venues—have gone from garages to sold-out tours.

That’s happened on the strength of this community, a broad support network made up of smaller circles of mutual admiration. If 2017 politics taught us anything, it’s to never be sure that progress can’t roll backwards, but for now, it feels like the years of work put in by the members of Cable Ties and friends have fortified a path for any similar bands that will come after. From the outside, the album release, the radio play, and a tour with Jen Cloher across Europe might seem like a cosmic fluke, like a random solar flare scrambled the airwaves, and suddenly Cable Ties were famous. The reality is it took half a decade of work from countless people just to get the world ready, to say nothing of the decades of life experience before.

McKechnie: “There’s a lot of strength to be found in your local community, so half of the songs are about sweet things like that that give me strength. The rest of the time I’m just fuckin’ mad at all the things that try to disrupt that and all the pressures that get put on you.”

Boyle was thinking about this on tour now that they’re on triple j: “It’s given people access to music they otherwise wouldn’t hear on those stations. And I think about myself as a young person living in rural Australia where I didn’t have community radio. I didn’t know about community radio until I was twenty-five, so I think about all those people who might be able to hear our stuff outside Melbourne, who give a shit about all the things we give a shit about—I think that’s super important.”

If I said that was part of their plan for world domination, they might laugh, but not as much as you’d reckon. When I ask Brown if there are plans, he says: “There are always plans”—a little too slyly. Plans to expand Wetfest; plans for a new album. Most likely, plans to keep building their darknet through every layer of the music industry. In the way Cable Ties talk about industry machinations, there’s a sense that they don’t entirely shun nor crave them. It’s more like they’re working on a parallel plane, and if the one we all know about helps them out, good. If not, so what? It’s already made building those positive things easier.

McKechnie: “Now we get to do what we want, book the bands we want.”

Brown: “And pay them properly for the hard work and dedication to the thing that they do. What a great thing to be able to do. How sick is that?”

And they all laugh again.

This piece first appeared in Swampland issue three.