THE LIVING End nearly imploded when vocalist Chris Cheney quit the band. Two years on and with a new album to air, he explains why he had to go away to come back.
Friday, October 6, 2006, was the night the music died -- at least for the Living End's vocalist/guitarist Chris Cheney. That was the fateful night he decided to quit the chart-topping band. The Living End were playing on the Gold Coast and were three-quarters through their set when Cheney had an on-stage epiphany. ‘‘I thought ‘I don't want to be here','' Cheney says. ‘‘It hit me like a lightning bolt: 2000 people, a massive show and I didn't want to be doing it. ‘‘I ploughed through the songs but I was disgusted with myself that it had come to that. ‘‘But there was a reason and it was staring me right in the face. ‘‘I had to get out of the situation, get away from it, fix it. I was ready to get on a plane and go home.'' The next morning Cheney rounded up his bandmates Scott Owen and Andy Strachan and quit the Living End, the band he had formed as a 17-year-old schoolkid in 1992. ‘‘I gave my notice, I said ‘I'm done, I'm out','' Cheney says. ‘‘I felt horrible. I never wanted to be in the position where I don't want to be doing it. I want to be doing it for all the right reasons. I felt burnt out. I was done with the Living End. Done with touring, done with the whole thing.'' It got worse. The months of touring caught up with Cheney; he obsessively replayed history in his mind. ‘‘I realised I hadn't done anything else with my life since high school apart from this band. I started to think about what else there was in life, what else I had and it dawned on me, ‘F---, I don't know how to do anything else'. I only knew how to be the guy from the Living End and I wasn't feeling it. ‘‘I was depressed about the whole thing. The idea of making another Living End album couldn't have been further from my mind.'' After he had told his bandmates face to face the morning after his fright night, Cheney called his long-term manager Rae Harvey and left the band over the phone. ‘‘He resigned,'' Harvey says. ‘‘I said ‘You can't do that, you're the singer-songwriter!' We kept it very quiet.'' Harvey had a battle plan. The band would finish their touring commitments (‘‘I had to persevere, stick it out for the guys in the band and the people who bought their tickets,'' Cheney says) and then fall off the radar. ‘‘I sent him away for a couple of months,'' Harvey says. ‘‘Nobody was allowed to call him. Not me, not the band. We weren't allowed to send him mail. ‘‘We were offered a headlining tour through Europe which I turned down. It was very serious.'' So serious that a ‘‘farewell tour'' of Australia was discussed and for the first time in five years Harvey started managing another band -- Children Collide. ‘‘I started thinking ‘Oh my God, I have to think about my future','' Harvey says. ‘‘I spoke to Andy and Scott a lot over those few months about how this (band) might not be around any more.'' Touring over, Cheney was free of the Living End for the first time. ‘‘I wasn't coping,'' he says. ‘‘I knew it was absurd. The idea of getting up on stage playing music you've written that has been relatively successful should be something that makes anyone on the planet happy. You should be celebrating that, so I knew ‘This isn't right'. ‘‘The other guys in the band were very understanding. I was probably a very nasty person to be around leading up to that point, not a very nice bloke. The only way I could contemplate making another record was if I didn't have to think about making another record.'' The fierce drive within Cheney that had made the Living End one of the most successful working bands in Australia -- more than 800,000 album sales and years of sold-out shows -- had taken its toll. ‘‘I pushed myself to a point where I got fed up with just being in the band. That tour was nine weeks around Australia and it just came to a head,'' Cheney says. ‘‘I was playing almost every night, I lost my voice twice. We hadn't stopped for two years. The recording process for (2006 album) State of Emergency was extremely full-on, I got shingles at the end of it. It had stopped being fun. ‘‘I'd brought it on myself. If you don't do anything else, if you have a one-track mind you're going to turn around and realise there's nothing else there.'' At first during Cheney's break he moved into autopilot and started writing songs. Unfortunately, he hated them. ‘‘I didn't want to churn out a crap album just to capitalise on the success of State of Emergency,'' he says. ‘‘I wrote some songs but I wasn't feeling it. I had strong writers' block. I told the band I'd get in contact when I had better songs. I had to approach my creativity in a different way.'' Enter yoga. Yes, really. The VB-swilling, spiky-haired Cheney switched leather jackets and guitar picks for a yoga mat. When he wasn't saluting the sun, he had taken up painting and spending time with the baby daughter he had missed during a gruelling touring schedule overseas. ‘‘My daughter (Charlie) was born and then we went away (with State Of Emergency) -- did that even happen; did I even have a child?'' Cheney muses. Harvey says: ‘‘Chris missed her whole first year. That didn't help.'' During his yoga period, Cheney managed to switch off from music for the first time in more than 10 years. ‘‘I didn't realise how amazing it is for the mind, and for focus and creativity,'' Cheney says of yoga. ‘‘I was a bit naive, I didn't realise the minute you do something else is when inspiration hits.'' It hit him like a train -- the same way that monstrous opening riff from How Do We Know hits listeners when it leaps out of the speakers. A proud Cheney played it to the band. ‘‘I thought ‘F--- yeah!' That's what we should be doing -- it's exciting, it's heavy, it's not just meathead rock. It has a certain flair. I took it to the guys and they said ‘That's the direction, write another 12 of those'. That was the epiphany, the riff that kick-started the record. ‘‘I started coming up with more tunes. It felt a hell of a lot stronger lyrically and musically it was deeper, there was more power. I was back on track. It was the turmoil that had to happen.'' From there the Living End were back in business. Harvey had scored the band a lucrative deal with EMI in 1998 on the back of the success of the independently released Prisoner of Society/Second Solution EP. Harvey would license the band's albums to EMI on a record-by-record basis. ‘‘After the release of every single album, they were an unsigned act,'' Harvey says. ‘‘We just didn't advertise it. It wasn't about starting bidding wars, it was about control.'' But the band's camp felt State of Emergency wasn't as big as it should have been and the mixed corporate fortunes of EMI weren't helping. Harvey began negotiating a new deal with Dew Process, run by Powderfinger's manager Paul Piticco and home to the Panics, the Grates and Sarah Blasko. Harvey mentioned the new deal in her first meeting with a post-yoga Cheney. He soon swapped zen for rock. ‘‘I told him I'd turned down the European tour and he was mortified,'' Harvey says. ‘‘I think that drove something home to him, that he'd missed out on something big. But it made him realise what he was giving up. The Dew Process deal was ready, but I said we weren't signing it if he wasn't committed to the band.'' With How Do We Know under his belt, the Living End were out of traction and back in action. They signed their first multiple-album deal. ‘‘We wanted to give Dew Process some ownership over it,'' Harvey says. The label suggested producer John Agnello (Sonic Youth) for their fifth album White Noise, and Harvey wanted Brendan O'Brien (Pearl Jam) to mix it. Both men were secured; White Noise was recorded in New Jersey in April for a fast-turnaround release next month. Harvey had her own motives for O'Brien -- feeling the previous producers never captured the band's intense live sound. O'Brien came to the Living End the day after finishing producing the new AC/DC album. ‘‘In the past I'd love the demos and go ‘OK, now they're going to record the same bland piece of crap they've recorded every single time that doesn't represent how they sound live no matter what we do','' Harvey says. ‘‘And this time they didn't. And it blew me away. ‘‘Every other album has had the life drained out of it because of the perfectionism in the band.'' Cheney agrees White Noise is as close as they've ever come to replicating their live sound inside a studio. ‘‘We would never make a record that sounds exactly like we do live because I'd never allow it, it'd be too rough,'' he says. ‘‘But we wanted to catch the edge, the sweat, some of the happy accidents and spontaneity. When you're making a record everything's so calculated you squeeze all that stuff out to make it sound smooth and perfect. We realised what sounds right is when we're playing fast and it sounds real, there's character to it. ‘‘Every single song on this album has a few great moments we were determined to capture, pushing ourselves to the extreme like we would live -- when the throat cracks or when your fingers slip off the strings.'' The revitalised band reactivated their alter-ego -- the Longnecks -- for a series of regional shows in February this year. They'd road-test solely new material written for White Noise, before returning for a handful of hits as the encore. One was missing -- Prisoner of Society. ‘‘That was a turning point -- I feel like we'd outgrown the stigma of Prisoner,'' Cheney says. ‘‘We haven't even been playing it on the past few shows. It really wasn't missed. It's that double-edged sword, it put us on the map, but I've been trying to prove my worth as a songwriter ever since. Perhaps it was the best thing that ever happened.'' So intense is their fanbase that at one Longnecks show a fan handed the band notes he had taken on the new songs. ‘‘I felt for the first time what it must be like to be on Australian Idol and get judged,'' Cheney says with a laugh. ‘‘We have really good fans like that, they're immensely dedicated to the band. When people stop caring, that's when we're in trouble.'' The frontman is also quick to point out he's got back the passion for the Living End that temporarily left him. ‘‘The Longnecks shows were imperative to that,'' he says. ‘‘They boosted the confidence of the band in an enormous way. We realised what we were doing not only sounded great to us but was being conveyed to an audience. ‘‘I've learnt a very valuable lesson. Nothing pays off like hard work and I'm insanely proud of what we ended up with on this record, especially considering the circumstances.'' The band remain signed to Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong's record label Adeline in the US; Dew Process will handle them in Europe. ‘‘We know we can go to the US and play to a few thousand people a night, but it's now about getting a song on the radio over there,'' Cheney says. ‘‘We're going to focus on Australia first. I still feel like we have something to prove. I hope we always feel that way.'' White Noise (Dew Process/Universal) out July 19. The Living End, Queensbridge, October 2. On sale July 10, Ticketek.
