Speaking over the phone from her Northcote home, Cash Savage warns there might be some noise from an ill-timed roof cleaner organised by body corporate.
Savage has returned to the inner-city after moving to her hometown of Port Albert during the pandemic.
“It was good for the first part,” she recalls of the experience at the coastal town three hours out of Melbourne with a population of under 300 people. “It was like having a retirement in the middle of my life. I got to do a lot of fishing, tinkered in my shed and turned into a real old bloke.”
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As the leader of the seven-piece alt-country/post-punk group Cash Savage and The Last Drinks, it seems that Savage isn’t quite ready for retirement yet. “Eventually I got really fucking bored with that,” she says. “It was good when we naively thought [lockdown] was going to be a short period of time, but as the time went on it just got harder and harder.”
Not only did the lockdowns affect Savage’s mental health, but the trajectory of the band. “I guess when I was in it I hoped that it wouldn’t slow us down, given that everyone was in the same boat, but it has had an effect on momentum,” she explains. “It’s a very heavy object to get moving, and when it’s moving it’s easy to keep moving.
“People are reluctant to buy tickets, and I absolutely get that. It seems to be back to a walk-up crowd, which is nerve-wracking because it’s much more comfortable going to a show knowing how the tickets are selling. It seems to be across the board, so it’s hard to know if it’s a momentum shift or there’s a change in the way people interact with music.”
While having seven members in the band creates a powerful live sound, it can lead to complications. The band’s Melbourne Recital Centre show for October last year was moved once due to capacity restrictions, and then again as the band had unknowingly rehearsed with a band member with Covid days before the show. Another member caught Covid before the third date but was able to be replaced and the show went ahead. “You want to move forward you know,” explains Savage. “These gigs to me are like zombies.
“We did a show a month ago that was originally booked for June 2020, but the actual negotiation for the deal happened in December 2019, so how long do you want to talk about the same gig?”
The band hasn’t released a studio album since 2018’s politically charged Good Citizens, however, they recorded a live album at Hamer Hall albeit without an audience. “It was pretty intense,” says Savage. “It was just before Melbourne went into that really long lockdown, and the [daily] cases were 20 or 25, and we all got the vibe we were going into a lockdown.”
The band recorded the album in a single, continuous take. “We decided to arrange it so there was never going to be any dead air, and I didn’t want to be in there waiting for the song to start in an empty room,” says Savage. “They’d spent two days setting up, and we basically came in like Krusty the Clown [and] did one song to get the levels, and then we smashed it out for 40 minutes,” she laughs. “They were like ‘great, can you do that one more time? and we were like ‘nope, that’s the one.’
“Our drummer’s snare broke in the third song, and if you watch any of the clips he’s holding the snare together in his hand while playing. He knew the vibe was too good… so he plays through the whole thing with a broken snare, which our sound engineer had to fix in post.”
Fortunately, Cash Savage and The Last Drinks are performing in front of live audiences again. Known for their emotive performances, Savage says she likes to feel the songs when writing them. “I can sort of tell if the song is good because it hits me in the feels, so it’s not something that I’m necessarily going for, but it’s definitely something that I lean into.”
As bandleader, Savage writes the songs before bringing them to the band. “I usually write the bare bones of them myself, and then take them to the band at some point,” she says. “Some of them are more finished than others… it might just be a verse with a little cool idea and I take it to see what happens with that.”
When performing live, you’ll mostly see Savage striding across the stage with only a microphone in hand, though she writes the music with her guitar. “I have written a couple of songs on the piano before because I’ve been learning piano slowly over my life, but my main instrument is guitar,” she says.
“I actually really love playing guitar on stage, but I know it’s a better show when I don’t, not because of my guitar playing, but it’s much easier for me to engage with the audience. Instead of thinking about the guitar and the vocals, I’m thinking about the crowd and the vocals, and I think it’s a better show.”
Adding to her repertoire, Savage has recently picked up DJing alongside the enigmatic Our Carlson as one of his rotating DJs. “It’s pretty loose when I DJ with Carlson,” she says. “I jumped on doing that because I really vibe what he’s doing, and since then I’ve sort of started to learn how to DJ, which is a bit of a win.”
“Everything I’ve learnt DJing has been in front of people. It’s a funny way to learn a trade… where you don’t want to fuck it up, but also it gets a bit loose so it gets fucked up, and then you just have to roll with it. It’s definitely my style of learning, it’s not something I was actively pursuing, but here I am, I’m a DJ. I told Carlson he should get shirts that say ‘Cash Daddy is a real DJ.’”
The band has already recorded their next studio album, though it won’t be released until early next year due to vinyl shortages. Savage is reluctant to describe the album as she is “too close to it” but says “it’s definitely different to Good Citizens.”
“It’s a little less outwardly political, a little more introspective of my own life the last couple of years. Not that it’s a downer, fucking lockdown album. Maybe it is, I have no fucking idea. The first song ‘Push’ is written from being locked in a fucking apartment, and my entire world turning to shit.”
Cash Savage and The Last Drinks will play at the newly refurbished Northcote Theatre on Saturday, September 3 before heading back to Europe for the second time this year. “I’ve realised there are more venues on High Street than there are in Adelaide, Sydney and Perth combined,” jokes Savage. “There’s like nine venues on that strip now – it’s amazing. I live just near it, so I’m all for venues on High Street, they’re walking distance from my house.”
Cash Savage is playing Northcote Theatre on September 3. Buy tickets here.
This article was made in partnership with Northcote Theatre.
