Mac the Knife's beginnings are somewhat cliché.
A punk band formed in a Sydney garage by friends who are just looking for an excuse to hang out and make noise; it’s almost like the perfect sub-story for a show like Heartbreak High.
In fact, let’s chuck in a cast member from Heartbreak High to be a little bit meta.
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There’s a point where the Mac the Knife story deviates from that of other Australian garage bands, however. The band has played some big shows with support slots for Polish Club, Johnny Hunter, Eliza and the Delusionals, and most recently, The motherflippin Preatures.
We caught up with vocalist Bryn Chapman Parish (who is also Spider from Heartbreak High), guitarist Curtis Van Haasteren and the newest addition to the lineup, bassist Borna Crvelin, to hear about their recent shows and their upcoming headline tour.
“I think I was probably 17, and snuck into a pub in Newtown to see The Preatures play a Halloween gig where they were all wearing nun outfits,” explains Chapman Parish. “I’d never heard of them before. A friend took me, and it was just so incredible and captivating. Izzi, as a frontwoman, is so inspiring. When we got the call for the support, I’d actually booked a trip to France, and the two shows landed two days after I was meant to have left. I had a quick negotiation with my partner and was like, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to change my flights’, which I think was well worth it.”
Crvelin adds, “On a big tour like that, you really get thrown into the deep end of logistics and equipment and setting up and dealing with people on the fly while being under pressure. It’s all those pressures that you first experience when you first start a band, but now the pressure’s really on. I don’t want to degrade any young bands who are just starting out, but you think that you are under pressure on your first gig? It’s not real pressure.
“A support spot for a stadium tour is different. You’re excited, and you regret it at the same time.”
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Any learnings the group may have picked up from The Preatures will surely come in handy as they get ready to tour their new EP, Down to the Wire, throughout October. The eight-show run sees them hitting new spots like the Sunshine Coast, and even has some all-ages shows in Adelaide and their hometown of Sydney.
“We don’t want to give everyone the same show,” explains Van Haasteren. “We try to make each show tailored to the local area, and get to know people who have come out. We want to make sure that everyone gets the same Mac experience, but make things a little unique as well.”
Down to the Wire, the band’s third EP, came out in July and features six tracks of “the most evolved and thought-out music we’ve put out,” according to Chapman Parish. “The whole thing has a through line and a bit of a story to it, which is around time and how it affects different things in different parts of your life. It’s also one of the first things that we’ve really worked on together as a band. We all sat and wrote together and really workshopped the songs, as opposed to the last EP we put out, which was written individually in COVID lockdowns. It’s kind of like a documented growth of us as musicians, which is cool.”
Van Haasteren adds, “We all have a lot of different musical influences, and we’ll sit down and think, ‘okay, we want to do a song like this, but is it Mac the Knife enough?’ We have an almost-ballad on the new EP, and once we brought it in and workshopped it, it just felt like a good song, and an enjoyable listen and play. I think that we all have a sonic idea that we’re wanting from the music, and that’s quite cohesive between the five of us. There’s something in there that ties them together to make everything we do still sound like us, plus we know what doesn’t sound like us, which will always allow us to do different things and still be Mac the Knife.”
Mac the Knife perform at Bergy Bandroom on October 25, with tickets available here.
