City Calm Down: 'A strong arts scene is important to a thriving society'

After an impressive debut, Melbourne’s City Calm Down are about to take their second album – Echoes In Blue – on tour in the UK and Europe.

Part of Melbourne’s thriving music scene alongside the likes of Jen Cloher and Camp Cope, City Calm Down have earned early comparisons to The National thanks in part to their emotive lyrics and brooding delivery.

The band earned 3 million streams on Spotify with their debut which led to them playing some of the biggest festivals in their home country and abroad - all while holding down full-time day jobs on top of writing, recording and touring.

With their latest album exploring themes of isolation and dissonance at a time when millennials are working harder than ever but reaping less rewards, it’s a message that’s translating a long way beyond their native Melbourne.

Catching up with frontman Jack Bourke, the singer spoke candidly of the struggles modern musicianship presents in Australia – from making music around full time employment, to the difficulties of raising enough money to tour outside of Melbourne.

Discussing the album’s themes and ideas alongside their influences, Bourke reveals more about the band’s writing and recording process and their hopes for the future.

How did you all meet and when did you start to make music?

Jeremy [Sonnenberg] (our bass player) and I met in high school. We didn’t go to the same high school, but we had mutual friends. We’ve been playing music together since we were 15 years old; it’s been nearly 15 years since we started playing together! [laughs] Sam [Mullaly] and I went to high school together and after a band Jeremy and I were in disbanded, the three of us started playing music together. We were joined by Michael, our first drummer, who went to school with both Sam and me. Then when he left about six years ago, Lee [Armstrong] joined us; we found Lee through just a classified ad [laughs].

How did things evolve from your formation at school to releasing your first album in 2015?

We had no conception of how the music industry worked, we weren’t very savvy so we just chipped away. We would write a bunch of songs, then book a gig and play a gig. We did that for a few years while we were studying at university.

When we finished university, we signed to a local label here in Australia and things started to develop a bit – we got some radio play and started playing bigger shows but it took us a while to find any momentum. We spent a long time working on our first record and it got to a point where we really started wondering whether we were going to be able to pull something together. I’d decided to accept a job and that gave us a hard deadline to work towards – that helped us start making decisions. We no longer had the luxury of endlessly deliberating over minor details of certain sounds and we became very focussed on writing songs in a very stripped back way.

It’s easy to get bogged down in the detail of things when you don’t have a deadline so the pressure forces you to focus on the big things. Once we had the songs written we were able to then spend the time to get the detail of the production right.

You all hold down full time jobs whilst making music – how do you achieve the balance between the day job and creativity?

It’s a struggle because you’re being pulled away from what you want to be doing. I’ve been finding it particularly difficult at the moment because everything is just really busy. There’s just a lot of stuff to do and I’m not spending much time writing [laughs].

Your latest album explores the difficulty of modern life for young people and their struggles in the current political landscape. Did you set out to write quite a political album?

I never intended to write politically charged lyrics, but a number of the songs on the record touch on political or social themes. For example, “In This Modern Land” explores the notion of distrust in the political class. I wrote the lyrics for “Echoes In Blue” during a particularly intense period of my life – we were finishing the record right around the time I was supposed to be getting married and we were all trying to keep our day jobs so we were doing most of the recording on evenings and weekends.

There was a period of six months where we pretty much worked seven days a week and this gave rise to a certain tension and anxiety in the lyrics. Listening back, the record has a much darker feel than I’d originally intended – it certainly marks a clear time and place for me. But I also think it is somewhat representative of modern life in a kind of austere, brutal way, where people working harder and longer, for less reward and [this is being] normalised and often praised. I’ve a lot of respect for people who work hard – my parents worked their arses off to raise me and my four brothers – but there is a pernicious aspect to modern work. People are less secure in their jobs and more exposed to the stress of being able to afford accommodation.

Those particular themes seem to be resonating with a lot of millennials in the UK too…

Yeah, it’s funny because there’s a lot of press here about rental and housing stresses and I’ve seen a lot of similar press coming out of the UK. Having been to London a few times now and having heard about the rents my friends who live there pay, it’s frightening. Melbourne is definitely not as a bad as London in that respect, although it’s pretty tough in Sydney. It certainly makes it hard to financially manage an artistic endeavour, which is troubling.

A strong arts scene is important to a thriving society; if we place too many obstacles in front of artists then society as a whole loses. In Sydney, the state government has imposed strict liquor licensing laws to try and eradicate drunken violence in the streets, but a consequence of those law is that many of the city’s live venues have closed down. It’s really hard for a small band to book a show in Australia’s largest city: it’s quite bizarre.

I read that you received a grant to help fund your tour this year to the UK. Has that helped with the balance?

Yeah, that’s correct. I think every time we’ve come over we’ve received funding from the government. It just costs a lot of money to get over to the UK from Australia so I think most Australian bands receive grants from the Federal or State Governments for early overseas tours, unless they’re doing exceptionally well in Australia.

The Melbourne music scene is really thriving with artists like Jen Cloher and Camp Cope receiving a lot of attention of late. Do you get a lot of support and inspiration from being a part of this movement?

Yeah…we’ve got a lot of friends who are musicians in Melbourne, who we’ve played alongside from very early on in our career. Musicians can be very isolated from each other though, because you don’t cross over as frequently as you might at, say, a job. The challenge of breaking through to a level where the band can support its members financially is often not spoken about openly, even though it is something everyone is struggling with.

Has the continuity of working with your producer helped with the evolution of your sound?

Yeah, we’ve worked with Malcolm Besley since very early on in our career. We recorded an EP by ourselves in 2010 but we’ve worked with him on everything else.

We’ve always been able to have very open conversations with Malcolm and discuss how we want our sound to develop. With Echoes In Blue, we wanted to broaden our horizons without stepping too far away from the first record so it made sense to work with Mal again. We felt like we started down a path on the first record and that we wanted to see where we could take that sound if we added more depth to it.

Also, one of the challenges for any band is to find a producer who loves what you’re doing, who gets emotionally invested in the project and will see it through to the bitter end. We’ve been incredibly fortunate to have worked with Mal for so long now, he’s always given us 110%.

What artistic influences united you as a band originally?

A lot of our musical influences have some connection with Manchester – bands like Joy Division and The Smiths have had a huge impact on us, as well as The Chemical Brothers…although they weren’t from Manchester, were they? I think they met at university in Manchester.

They did!

We played at a music festival called Laneway in Melbourne recently and I was watching The War on Drugs [who] were about to come on and I somehow met a couple of young guys from Manchester and the topic of the best band from Manchester came up. They said Oasis, and I said The Smiths, and they thought I had my head on backwards [laughs]! They got pretty rowdy when I said that, and I was like, ‘Ah, right, okay…that’s interesting.’

Who are your contemporary influences?

I guess song-writing wise we’re often guided by older music, but from a production perspective there’ll be things that we’ll hear in new records and think, ‘oh, that sounds great’ – it’s often drum sounds [laughs]. It’s very difficult to reproduce the drum sounds on old recordings – the equipment and production methods are different now.

It can be done but it also needs to make sense with the rest of the instrumentation. We generally lean towards a more hi-fi sound production wise. [I’ve been] listening to a lot of Bruce Springsteen, actually…listening back through a lot of his records.

I spent most of last week listening to Darkness on the Edge of Town and I was listening to “The River” earlier this week. Marlon Williams [too]... he’s a Kiwi songwriter [and] he’s amazing; sometimes his voice reminds me of Elvis. He collaborated with another Kiwi, Aldous Harding.

The War on Drugs’ most recent record is stunning; it really is the full package – the song writing and production are incredible and it’s full of so many details. There’s a real openness to it. They use the glockenspiel in a similar way to Bruce Springsteen to highlight some of the top-line melodies.

It’s also grows a lot, like many of Bruce’s albums – every time you listen, it gives you a bit more. Every record I’ve ever loved has taken a while to sink in, but when they finally do, I can listen to them 100 times [laughs].

What can audiences expect from the live shows?

When we’re writing we’re always imagining how it will sound live. And when we’re producing, a focus for us is to capture the energy of what the live performance would sound like. It’s very rare these days for bands to record everything live so a lot of work goes into getting the tone of the instruments and the mix to feel like we’re all performing in one space.

What’s been your most rewarding live performance to date?

We played a festival in Australia back in 2016 called Splendour in the Grass, which was really exciting for us. That was easily the biggest show we’d played at the time, and I think probably still is so that was great. Playing in Manchester was also really exciting, because so many of our musical heroes are from there or have been influenced by music that’s come out of Manchester.

As your debut – In A Restless House – was so well received, did it make writing the follow up a more pressurised experience?

We started writing songs for the new record, Echoes In Blue, shortly after we released In A Restless House. It took a while for people in Australia to find out about In A Restless House and connect with it. That was happening over the course of 9-12 months and by the time we were doing larger shows, we were already quite a long way into writing the next record.

We did a big tour in Australia in September 2016, and I reckon we had probably completed writing 70-80% of the record by that stage…the songs started coming quite quickly when we put our heads down and started writing again. We didn’t feel a great sense of pressure; I think we never really regarded In A Restless House as being a particularly remarkable record, even though a lot of people seemed to enjoy it. I guess we’re just looking at the artists who are our heroes and working towards that...we’re a long way off!

Do you tend to write most of the lyrics yourself and then work out the music with the band or is it a collaborative effort?

It varies I guess. Often, we’ll have our own ideas and we’ll present them to each other, but then sometimes we’ll work on songs from the ground up together, usually as a result of someone noodling around on an instrument. It might be a drum groove or a little synth bit or a guitar lick and someone else will kind of say: ‘I like the way that sounds, keep doing that’, and then they’ll add something over the top.

We’ll just do a bit of adding and taking away, and eventually it’ll get to a point where we’ve got an instrumental bed and then I'll write the vocal melodies and the lyrics. It varies from song to song. I would say, thinking back over the record, half the songs were started in one of our home studios and the other half were written during a jam.

I've heard you've already started writing the third album...

Yeah, we’ve started writing separately, just kind of trying to get lots and lots of ideas out…we’ll probably get together in the middle of the year to start trying to piece some songs together.

I guess we’re going through a phase at the moment where we’re trying to work out what the next record might sound like so we’re just trying a lot of stuff down. Some of it I'm really happy with and it’s quite different for us. I think it can be quite hard to keep yourself motivated and excited, but I've got a few ideas that I'm finding quite exciting and I'm really enjoying working on them.

City Calm Down play The Great Escape on 17 May