STACK #186 Apr 2020

MUSIC FEATURE

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INTERVIEW

CABLE TIES When STACK does coffee with Jenny McKechnie and Shauna Boyle from CableTies, they discuss carrying the rage across from their self-titled debut album into their second set, Far Enough , which navigates all of the things that are happening in the world that you should be legitimately angry about.

I nside a coffee house in the buzzing inner-city Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, vocalist/ guitarist Jenny McKechnie and drummer Shauna Boyle take thoughtful sips from their long blacks. Cable Ties are still angry, they confirm, but on Far Enough , McKechnie reveals, “It‘s about being more self-reflective and analysing your position within society and how you are contributing to - or how you can help assist to dismantle - the systems of oppression and runaway capitalism; it contributes to all of the things that are happening.“ McKechnie tells us Far Enough explores “themes to do with hopelessness and feeling doomed, and dealing with issues with mental health, and also the struggle between individualism and turning all of your criticism in on yourself and not being able to connect with other people and take effective collective action“. Listening to this record will undoubtedly open up some important conversations. Tell ThemWhere To Go - which was released as a 7“ in March, 2018 but also appears on the punk trio‘s upcoming second album - was written while the band was volunteering at Girls Rock! and would certainly work well as a themesong for this national network of camps, which are designed to empower girls, trans and

gender-diverse young people through music education and mentorship. Boyle volunteered at the first Girls Rock! in Melbourne and Cable Ties were invited to play a lunchtime concert for the campers. “Part of the program and what they do is the campers form bands and then write their own songs for the camp, so I was kind of like, ‘Well, why don‘t we write a song for camp?‘ And, the song came together within half an hour,“ she tells. “I was teaching drums at the camp and one of my campers was just an extremely enthusiastic person who hadn‘t played the drums before, but just wanted to play all the crazy fills and, like, all the big rock‘n‘roll moves. With the inspiration from that camper, I wrote the drum part for that song [ Tell ThemWhere To Go ], because I just thought, ‘That‘s what you wanna do, you want to make it big and hectic!‘ So it‘s always really fun to play and it‘s pretty special.“ “It was a different writing process for us, because normally we can take a really long time to write a song,“ McKechnie marvels. “We were just super-blown away by the fact that the campers could write a song within a week, when they were just learning their instruments and, you know, they‘re teenagers and they‘re put in a band with a bunch of people they‘ve

never met before, and somehow they manage to learn a cover and create an original song. And I was like, ‘I couldn‘t do that!‘ It‘s just crazy; it‘s so good.“ When asked whether she noticed any recurring themes come up in the songs these Girls Rock! campers crafted, Boyle reveals, “Oh, yeah, all the time. First of all, I‘ll just say that the things that they were writing songs about were just - it was heartbreaking and also so exciting because I feel like, as a teenager, I wasn‘t so well-connected with society and politics and current affairs and all these kind of things, and they‘re writing songs about climate change and about feminism and about world affairs and about their relationships and all of this stuff that I just wasn‘t really aware of when I was that age. It was so exciting to know that if young people are talking about making change now - when they‘re, like, 14 or 15 years old - then that‘s, yeah, it‘s really exciting. So to say that young people are apathetic is just disgusting, really. “These young people are so well-informed and so well-educated, because if they have an interest in something then they have the ultimate resource [the internet] to be able to teach themselves about things; you know,

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APRIL 2020

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