No End In Sight

Author: Zoya Patel

Chris Cheney from THE LIVING END would be forgiven for being cocky. After over a decade in the industry as the frontman of one of Australia’s most loved bands, with several platinum albums under his belt and an ARIA for Best Rock Album to cap it all off, Cheney could probably spit into the phone and I’d still be grateful he’s even bothering to talk to me. Luckily, he’s not the spitting type, and instead seems genuinely chuffed when I mention I’m excited to be chatting to him. “Wow! Really?” he says, sounding surprised. “That’s nice to hear. I love the enthusiasm!”

With such a never-ending string of achievements, bagging a spot on triple j’s Hottest 100 Australian Albums of All Time might not be too exciting for Cheney. When I speak to him it’s a week before the final list is revealed, and The Living End’s self-titled debut from1998 is pegged for a spot in the Top 20 (at time of publication it has since been revealed that The Living End placed at number four on the esteemed list!).

Cheney seems, if anything, sheepish about the honour. “This is going to sound terrible, but I’m kind of embarrassed by that record. It’s a really popular record with people, and it was a product of its time, really,” Cheney admits, sounding almost guilty. “It sounds ridiculous to me, when I hear it now. It just sounds like three guys trying to play as fast as they can… like the whole record is on helium!”

There’s definitely a feeling of change in the air when it comes to The Living End, so it comes as no surprise that they might want to move on from their past successes in the hope of future glory. The band’s latest release, The Ending Is Just The Beginning Repeating is rife with themes of cycles and change, not least of all in the title itself. “The title for me just sums up the feeling throughout the record,” Cheney explains. Recording the album coincided with a particularly difficult time for Cheney, as his father was terminally ill, and unfortunately passed away not long after recording was wrapped up.

“I got to play him the record which I was really happy about, because he was always a really big fan of the band,” Cheney says. “So the idea of the album title for me was that I felt likeI was entering a new era in my life, a new phase. As much as Idon’t like change, and I don’t like things to end, it’s inevitable, and it’s part of life.”

The Ending Is Just The Beginning Repeating is about finding positives in change and acknowledging that things move on despite themselves. “I hope that in a negative thing, you can find something positive,” Cheney says. “For me, it was that [my Dad] wasn’t in the pain he was in anymore – that’s the positive I could find in a negative situation.” Not all of it is optimistic, though, and Cheney is the first to admit that there are definite trends of cynicism that run through the album, in particular through tracks like Resist that deal with the concept of not being able to fight anything, or change a situation. “I think I’m getting to a stage in life where things don’t always turn out for the best like they do when you’re a kid and everything seems to come up roses,” he laughs.

It’s about learning to make the best of everything life throws at you, though, and that’s certainly another key theme throughout the album. With such wisdom to impart, and such an obvious ease when it comes to playing live and dealing with the industry, I can’t help but think of Cheney as a sort of musical Yoda – he was there in the ‘90s, he saw what it was really like! (Yeah, I know, I’m ridiculously young. So sue me).

So, have things changed drastically since The Living End were first starting out? The band have played the ANU Bar about a million times, and are coming back on their upcoming tour to support the new album. Does it feel totally different each time? “University crowds have generally just been really out of control at most of our shows over the years, and that’s the best crowd to play to,” Cheney says. He diplomatically doesn’t mention the often terrible acoustics of the ANU Bar, instead just asking, “Is that the one with the really low ceiling? It’s a bit of a hot box!”

The tour promises to be a particularly good one, which is what we’ve come to expect from The Living End, who are renownedf or their excellent live shows. Cheney assures me that they won’t disappoint. “We’ve been rehearsing this last week, and the new songs sound great; they’re just enormous, and they work so well playing them live!” He enthuses. So, if it came down to it and he was forced to only play one Living End song live for the rest of eternity, which would Cheney choose to endlessly rock out to? “Oooh…,” he sighs. “Tough question… tell you what – it’d be West End Riot. It’s a good melting pot of influences. It’s a bit of a signature tune for us. It’s got all the elements of what we do in one song, and it’s a song that I look forward to playing live, because it just goes off every time. So if I had to pick one, I’d probably go with that one!”

Well played, Mr Cheney. Well played.

Living In The Now

Author: Ben Preece

THE MIGHTY POWERHOUSE THAT IS AUSTRALIA’S BELOVED THE LIVING END IS BACK WITH ALBUM NUMBER SIX. BEN PREECE CHATS TO FRONTMAN CHRIS CHENEY ABOUT WHAT’S MADE IT SUCH A TRIUMPHANT RETURN.

You get a sense that a lot of blood, sweat and tears goes into virtually everything The Living End touch, be it their relentless tour schedule and blistering live show or each and every song on their six albums. It’s what has kept them atop Australia’s ‘most beloved’ list ever since their Second Solution/Prisoner Of Society EP was dropped into the arms of thousands of impressionable teenagers some 14 years ago. From there they’ve become one of the biggest live drawcards in the country, and anticipation for their sixth album The Ending Is Just The Beginning Repeating is feverishly high.

Already, the album is being touted as their finest since their 1998 self-titled debut, a record that undoubtedly changed the face of Australian music. It’s being a long and harsh road since, there’s no doubt about that, but the last couple of years – between 2008’s White Noise and now – have been some of the most trialing for frontman Chris Cheney yet. The result is a record that is The Living End’s most honest to date and, as Cheney explains it, their darkest yet. “This is definitely our most personal record,” he confesses.

“It really does have quite a lot of dark moments lyrically on the record and a lot of it, I think, I feel are my most personal kind of set of lyrics. If anything, it’s sort of the opposite of what we’ve had in the past, which has been very directed towards social issues and various topics. I just got to a stage, started in the middle of last year, where – I don’t know if it’s an age thing or what – but I started to think, ‘Fuck, like what does any of this mean, where do I go from here, what have we been through and what’s next?’ And then my dad was real sick – he actually passed away a couple of months ago, straight after we finished recording – so I was dealing with all of that during the recording. So I think that there’s a lot of that on the record, there’s a lot of questioning about, you know, just what any of it kind of means and does it mean anything at all?”

Despite his real life tragedies and even, at times, selfdoubt, Cheney continued to remain focussed, constantly reminded himself of his goals and continued to plough through the process. “It’s been the most difficult year of my life,” he states gravely. “There was just days where it felt so trivial to me. But despite everything that’s going on you have to still stay focused and it’s all about quality of life I suppose.

“Things like For Another Day, we only have our lives for another day, as in, ‘If we only have now, then what are we going to do with right now?’ That’s the whole crux of this record, and for me, that’s what I mean about the title. It was very much sort of saying, ‘Well if this is going to end, if this part of our lives is going to end, I hope to God there is something else around the corner.’”

Winding up touring and promo duties that followed 2008’s White Noise, Cheney decamped to New York to begin writing for the next record. He returned to South Melbourne with a canon of new tunes that he, bassist Scott Owen and drummer Andy Strachan began to jam on. They were soon in Byron Bay’s Studio 301 under the watchful production eye of experienced Atlanta-based producer Nick Didia, although it was Cheney that continued to guide the ship the whole way. “He really shined in the studio and had some good ideas in preproduction working on arrangements,” Cheney reveals.

“But lot of that is still, I feel, down to me, you know. Like he can only say, ‘That part’s too long there, we need to shorten that’ and I thought, ‘Well, yeah but the thing is we’ve got most of the chords which kind of link those sections’ and he’d be, like, ‘Well just take them out’ and I’d be, like, ‘Well it doesn’t work if I take them out, you still need to sort of link it up in the right way’. So that part of it, I thought that was down to me, but in the actual studio, his attention to detail was just fantastic. He was just so tuned in to everyone’s parts they were playing, and he had a level of concentration I hadn’t really seen before in a producer. He was really big on the idea of not going with the biggest guitar sounds in the world, the biggest drum sounds you know, it was about finding the place where everything sonically suited so that it fits and creates this canvas of sound.”

Aiming for “spine-tingling” moments throughout The Ending Is Just The Beginning Repeating, Cheney name checks Glen Campbell, Springsteen and The Bee Gees stripping away the excess to a achieve the strongest groove possible. “Those kinds of songs – By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Gentle On My Mind – there’s just something about them; beautifully structured and just so carefully crafted,” he muses. “And that’s what I tried to do with these songs.

“I was just really meticulous with drafting, and drafting the songs over and over again to get them to a point I was happy with. But also, you want it to just flow, and just sound like it’s just kind of happened, and that’s very difficult to do, and I think for some song writers, you know, Noel Gallagher or whatever, who have written a few songs in five minutes, that never works that way for me unfortunately. I think it’s our strongest record since our first one. I think it completely wipes the floor with White Noise. “There’s definitely some big moments in the songs, and that’s what you want in an album, you want there to be these peaks, these certain moments that characterise a record. You have these moments that really hit you and send shivers down your spine, or whatever it is that we like about our favourite records. We’re fans of music, we’re fans of great albums and we’re fans of musicians so I think we’ve gotten better at all those elements over the years, and I feel like I’m a better songwriter, and we’ve gotten better as musicians, and I guess that’s the reason why people still find it appealing.”

Something Around The Corner

Author: Ben Preece

It takes tragedy for The Living End to triumphantly return with an album that wipes the floor with their previous effort, as frontman Chris Cheney tells Ben Preece.

You get a sense that a lot of blood, sweat and tears goes into virtually everything The Living End touches, be it the relentless tour schedule – which just after the new album was been released began with an appearance at Splendour In The Grass – and blistering live show or each and every song on the group’s six albums. It’s what has kept them atop Australia’s most beloved list ever since the Second Solution/Prisoner Of Society EP was dropped into the arms of thousands of impressionable teenagers some 14 years ago. From there and fast forwarding into 2011, they’ve become one of the biggest live drawcard sin the country, something of a household name within many circles.

Already, their sixth album, The Ending Is Just The Beginning Repeating, is being touted as their finest since their 1998 self-titled debut, a record that undoubtedly changed the face of Australian music as we headed into a new decade. It’s being a long and harsh road since, there’s no doubt about that, but the last couple of years – between 2008’s White Noise and now – have been some of the most testing for frontman Chris Cheney. The result is a record that is The Living End’s most honest to date and, as Cheney explains it, their darkest.

“This is definitely our most personal record,” he confesses. “It really does have quite a lot of dark moments lyrically on the record and a lot of it, I think,I feel are my most personal kind of set of lyrics. If anything, it’s sort of the opposite of what we’ve had in the past, which has been very directed towards social issues and various topics. I just got to a stage, starting in the middle of last year, where – I don’t know if it’s an age thing or what – but I started to think, ‘Fuck, like what does any of this mean? Where do I go from here? What have we been through and what’s next?’ And then my dad was real sick – he actually passed away a couple of months ago, straight after we finished recording – so I was dealing with all of that during the recording. So I think that there’s a lot of that on the record, there’s a lot of questioning about, you know, just what any of it kind of means and does it mean anything at all?”

Despite his real life tragedies and even, at times, self doubt, Cheney continued to remain focused, constantly reminded himself of his goals and continued to plough through the process. “It’s been the most difficult year of my life. There was just days where it felt so trivial to me – being in a rock’n’roll band making an album – so I did question my importance. You’re dealing with a serious issue like that, there were just times when I felt like, ‘What’s the point of any of this?’ That is the whole thing – if we don’t have goals, if we don’t have things we want to achieve, then we have nothing. So despite everything that’s going on you have to still stay focused and it’s all about quality of life I suppose.

“But it was very hard because there was a lot of lyrics onthe record that particularly deal with a lot of sensitive topics – things like For Another Day, we only have our lives for another day, as in, if we only have now, then what are we going to do with right now? That’s the whole crux of this record, and for me, that’s what I mean about the title. It was very much sort of saying,‘Well if this is going to end, if this era, if this part of our lives is going to end, I hope to God there is something else around the corner.’”

Aiming for “spine-tingling” moments throughout The Ending Is Just The Beginning Repeating, Cheney namechecks classic songwriters like Glen Campbell, Bruce Springsteen and the Bee Gees while revealing to have stripped away the excess to achieve the strongest groove possible.

“Those kinds of songs – By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Gentle On My Mind – there’s just something about them; beautifully structured and just so carefully crafted. And that’s what I tried to do with these songs. I was just really meticulous with just drafting and drafting the songs over and over again to get them to a point I was happy with. But also, you want it just to flow and just sound like it’s just kind of happened and that’s very difficult to do. I think for some songwriters, Noel Gallagher or whatever, you know has written a few songs in five minutes, which never works that way for me unfortunately. I think it’s our strongest record sinceour first one. I think it completely wipes the floor with White Noise.

“There’s definitely a some big moments in the songs and that’s what you want in an album, you want there to be these peaks, these certain moments that characterise a record. So that you listen to the whole record through and have, rather than just ‘That’s a good song, that’s a good song, that’s a good song’, you have these moments that really hit you and send shivers down your spine, or whatever it is that we like about our favourite records. We’re fans of music, we’re fans of great albums and we’re fans of musicians so I think we’ve gotten better at all those elements over the years. I feel like I’m a better songwriter and we’ve gotten better as musicians and I guess that’s the reason why people still find it appealing.”