Lead singer Chris Cheney reflects on the band’s most recent festival appearance at Splendour In The Grass.
“It wasn’t a good show for us, and for The Living End that’s almost like suicide. We come off stage and get really pissed. Pissed as in angry, and then pissed as in drunk. But you know what, people were genuinely saying that out the front it was amazing. So maybe the fact that we thought we were bombing meant that we dug our heels in and just went for it.“

Cheney became accustomed to digging his heels in when he travelled to New York, to begin writing and recording for The Living End’s latest release ‘The End Is Just The Beginning Repeating’.
“There’s a bunch of songs on the album that wouldn’t have come out the same way had they been written here at home,” he admits. “I co-wrote some songs with different people I didn’t know. I’d find myself on a subway to Brooklyn with a map, trying to find some dude’s house to potentially write a song and thinking ‘What am I doing?’ It was quite nerve-racking, but I think it was the best thing for me to be completely in an environment where I didn’t feel comfortable.”

Removed from his comfort zone, the frontman found it difficult to completely immerse himself in the experience, a feeling that became a prominent theme on the album.
“‘For Another Day’ is a standout for me because I don’t think it sounds like any other band. It’s a really powerful, heartfelt kind of tune, but just lyrically for me it has probably the key line of the record, which says ‘Every moment here is a moment to be seized’. I’ve really got to push myself to live that way, as we all probably do.”

It’s a straightforward approach to living, and one that the trio attempted to adhere to while recording this time around.
“If anything got too complicated then we would scrap it. It ended up being so beneficial, and even playing in Cairns the other night we found that the new songs just step all over the old ones.”

The Living End play The Tivoli September 1-2.