The Ripple Effect

Anwen Crawford on Cable Ties

Melbourne band Cable Ties released their second album, Far Enough, on March 26. By this time the COVID-19 pandemic had taken hold, and Cable Ties were forced to cancel their Australian tour, which included an album launch on May 2 at the Corner Hotel, one of the busiest live music venues in Melbourne. In light of that cancellation, the group’s bassist, Nick Brown, is attempting to list the people immediately affected by this one lost gig.

“For something like that show at the Corner,” he says, “there’s the three of us [in the band], and then my job, which is that I’m in the band but I’m also the booking agent for the band.” Cable Ties also have a manager and a publicist, and the Corner has its own ticketing, marketing and booking staff, all of whom would have been working on the show.

In addition to these people, Brown continues, “we’ve got a sound engineer, we would use an in-house monitors engineer, and we’d also bring in a lighting engineer for an album launch like this.” There’d be “three other bands on the line-up as well”, though the full list hadn’t been confirmed by the time the show was scratched. “And you haven’t even got to the venue staff who are there on the day: the venue manager, bar staff, the box office person, security.”

That’s 30 to 40 people who’ve lost work, tallied up in as many seconds. And that’s just for one gig at an 800-capacity venue. Multiplied by the thousands of cancelled gigs across the country – some smaller, some much bigger – the sum is very grim. Of the live music sector, Brown puts it simply: “The arse has fallen out.”

Cable Ties’ singer and guitarist, Jenny Mckechnie, adds that she recently saw a photograph of herself, taken when the band was playing live. It brought her up short. “I am never going to take being on stage for granted again,” she says. “By the time we get back on stage, I’ll be absolutely raring for it.”

This was Meant To be a big year for Cable Ties. The trio, completed by drummer Shauna Boyle, has seen their profile rise steadily in the five years since they made their live debut. Born out of Melbourne’s politically progressive punk scene, the group has maintained that ethos – Far Enough is released locally by Poison City

Records, and internationally by Merge, one of North America’s most stalwart independent labels – while also gaining the attention of no less a rock luminary than Iggy Pop, who recently played two of the band’s songs on his BBC 6 Music radio show.

In mid March, the band was booked to play South By Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas; the annual music festival is a prestigious showcase for rising artists from across the world. The band members were 48 hours away from boarding their flight when the festival was cancelled due to COVID-19. Further scheduled shows in North America and Europe in March and early April were cancelled, too, and then came the scrubbing of their Australian shows in May, which were intended to be followed by yet more overseas touring. Mckechnie says that 2020 was going to represent “the most touring we would have ever done”. She laughs disbelievingly. No band could ever envisage their album release – a “once-every-three-years opportunity”, as Mckechnie puts it – being so utterly disrupted. And yet, she says “after all this has happened, I’m really thankful that we have a record”.

Cable Ties’ self-titled debut album, released in 2017, leant towards a post-punk sound: compact bass melodies, vigorous but strict drumming, terse guitar lines. Far Enough is less brusque, without sacrificing intensity. This record feels more open to the world, and that openness derives, in part, from a willingness to be more vulnerable, both in sound and mood. The record opens with a song called “Hope” – that most fragile but powerful of emotions. Hope is necessary for love, for courage, and for action. “The meaning of hope on the album is about doing,” says Mckechnie. The difficult thing then is to figure out what to do, especially when crises on the scale of climate change – or pandemic – can feel overwhelming.

“I’m back in Melbourne / I’m not doing the best I can,” Mckechnie sings, over a simple rhythm guitar part. “On bad days I’m a parasite / On my good days I say, ‘At least I tried.’” At the 2-minute mark, this spare arrangement and melancholy mood shifts into something propulsive and defiant. “And if I can’t hope / Nothing’s ever gonna change,” runs the chorus, and Mckechnie belts out the words at the top of her vocal range. The song’s two halves convey the protean nature of hope itself, which can be both passive and active, underlain by sorrow or by fervour.

For the members of Cable Ties, the work of hope includes what they do together as a band. They are especially committed to playing live, because performance creates bonds – creative, social, philosophical – among musicians and their audiences. Brown describes live music as a “galvanising force for positivity” in his own life, and for the past two years the band has hosted a Cable Ties Ball at the Corner, bringing together artists of disparate genres from across Melbourne’s independent music communities. These include the electronic duo Habits, and rapper P-unique, whose coolly assured 2018 track “Queen with Colour” featured on Triple J Unearthed.

Adam Camilleri, who books shows for the Corner, praises Cable Ties’ strong musical connections in the

Cable Ties: Jenny Mckechnie, Nick Brown and Shauna Boyle

still work remotely, three days a week, for PBS radio, but that station relies to a large extent on its subscribing members and on local business advertising – much of it related to the arts – for revenue. The catastrophic effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on live music in Melbourne “has been quite an eye-opener”, Saye remarks. “Live music really fuels this city.”

From an audience perspective, it can be hard to see past the effect of this crisis on musicians. They’re the ones we go out to watch, after all; no punter is also keeping tabs on the audio engineers, the merchandise seller, the door person, the cloakroom attendant, and the cleaner. But each of these workers loses income all the same, for every gig that has had to be cancelled. And while larger, more established venues like the Corner may be able to see this crisis through, the long-term effect on small live venues, and the emerging artists who play there, could be very damaging. “You’re not going to go and straight away play an 800-capacity room,” comments Camilleri. The health of any local music scene depends on small events as much – if not more so – than big ones.

at THE midpoint of Far Enough is a song called “Lani”, which appears to be addressed to a young girl. She could be a stand-in for the band members’ nascent selves, or for any listener who’s felt young, bewildered