It’s been more than a decade since Chris Cheney has led the charge for Australia’s modern day punks, with his merry band The Living End.

The Melbourne trio have scored much praise with their albums to date, particularly 2006’s effort, State of Emergency, which catapulted the band from indie-rockers to mainstream high rollers.

The band’s latest album, White Noise, is set to propel the band to new heights. Not bad for a group who just over 12 months ago stood on shaky ground with Cheney planning to pull the pin.

Cheney took some time out to chat with elevenmagazine.com.au about the moment he almost quit the band, what brought him back and how he overcame the difficulties attached to writing the new album.

Was there ever a point where you thought the White Noise would never come?
Yes definitely. I think due to the amount of work that went into that record and then as soon as it was done we basically took off on tour for like a year and a half or something – it was really intense.

I mean it was good, it was great for the most part, but there were definitely some pretty long hauls and then we kind of finished the touring circle for that and then let’s have a two weeks off and we’ll get back in and work on the next record. And I was just absolutely horrified at the thought of that. The smartest business decision would have been to just get in record another album get it out and capitalise on the momentum of what State of Emergency had achieved. But there was nothing further from my mind.

So it was a difficult situation but I think I just burnt myself out so I kind of put it to the guys that I needed a little bit longer than perhaps two weeks. It ended up being about six months where we really didn’t do anything.

If I’m at home I don’t feel like that same guy who’s up on stage and if something comes on the telly or if I hear it on the radio it just feels like a different person. It’s a bit of a struggle sometimes to come home and switch off from that. But I felt like I really needed to stop being that guy for awhile and do some other things outside of music in order to feel creatively inspired to go and write another record.

There were rumours about that you had serious thoughts about leaving The Living End, is this true?
I basically gave the guys my notice which was pretty hard but at the same time I thought, if I don’t get our of this situation… it wasn’t doing me any favours in my head space.

I was sick to death at being in the band and being in that environment so I just thought while I’m in the band I’m never going to be able to just switch off and do it by half. And I would never want to do that. So I basically just said that I don’t want to do this at the moment, I don’t want to do it anymore, and this was in the middle of a bloody tour.

I was kind of ready to go home the next day, but we had commitments and stuff and managed to get talked around to finish them off. But then that’s what we did.

How are you feeling about the band and new record now?
It’s kind of bizarre because I didn’t think that I would see the day. I feel great about it now, I’m in a different head space than what I was in back then. And we all are really and we feel really rejuvenated – just damn proud of the record I suppose. We really worked hard to get this record right. It didn’t matter what it was going to take to get it right, we were going to do it. So there was a lot of demoing and a lot of redrafting lyrics right to the last minute until they basically ripped the instruments from our hands in the studio. I feel like this record is closer to what our vision is and to what we had in our head before we went into the studio than any other record that we’ve done.

The track, How Do We Know, is certainly a standout for White Noise. Do you think it was a conscious decision to up the ante on the band’s sound for the new album?
I think the best thing about that is that it just felt natural for us to do that. We weren’t trying to go in a different direction, it wasn’t something that we wrote down on paper or we had planned out. I just wrote that song and we started playing it together and we all just had such a great feeling from that and that signalled the direction, or whatever you want to call it, the album was going to be. It had to feel really great and heavy and tough and we had to lock in as a band, as a unit, and that happened very naturally and organically and wasn’t something that we really had to push ourselves towards.

How did you come to work with producer John Agenllo (Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jnr, The Hold Steady)?
We sent our demos out to a bunch of people and just saw who came back and spoke to them on the phone and John was just one we clicked with on the phone. We liked the way his records sounded really earthy and very real and whatever band he’d recorded sounded like that band. It didn’t sound like it had a massive load of production put on it. We just thought that was the record that we wanted to make. We know what we sound like, we know what we can do, let’s just get someone who can help capture that.

The Living End has previously released its albums with EMI, yet White Noise sees you guys sign with label, Dew Process. How did the label switch come about?
We were on single album deals at the time with them [EMI] and we just felt like it was time for a change and we knew some of the people at Dew Process. We spoke with a few different labels and, like with the producer, they just seemed like the right kind of people for this album. They seemed like real music lovers and we could talk to them about albums and gigs. And as well as the business side of it, they seemed to be really on the ball and it was really exciting actually to be going with someone different.

The album is called White Noise, is there any particular reason why you chose this title?
I don’t know it kind of popped into my head. I liked the idea of where it’s that point in a relationship where you stop listening to someone and they don’t make sense anymore, like a massive communication breakdown. We sort of feel like White Noise sort of represents the pace of life at the moment, with the megaphone on the front cover and all that stuff spewing out of it it’s almost like an overload of media and internet it’s very difficult to simplify things and get back to that.

The Living End’s White Noise is available now through Dew Process.
The band will head out on a national tour kicking off in August. Check out tour dates here.

Tags | album, The Living End, tour