As a result, McLennan’s got quite a lot to do over the next few months. He’s even busy when the phone call from Beat comes through, sanding down furniture in his parent’s house as a way of repaying them for letting him crash at theirs rent-free before the big move. “It’s kind of stressful,” he says in his delightfully understated way. “Just figuring out the logistics of everything. But that’s alright. A change is as good as a holiday.”
To add to the whole stress of fleeing the country, McLennan also has a series of Meanies farewell-for-now shows to worry about; a string of tour dates that will see the band take their punchy, anthemic songs out on the road. “We’ve got a fair few shows coming up,” he says. “We’ve had a dry spell for a while and it’ll be the last show till who knows when, so hopefully people come along and take advantage.”
Speaking to McLennan, one gets the impression that his almost 30-year-old band have hit their sweet spot. He sounds so goddamn relaxed – so unconcerned with the pressures that cause even the hardest and most self-contained acts to fissure and fault. When asked, for example, how The Meanies go about organising gigs, McLennan answers in a single sentence: “Wally normally sends us an email, and we say ‘Yes.’ ”
He laughs. “The Meanies for me is all about the fun now. It’s not something that I’m as attached to artistically as I am with [other band] Sun God Replica. But it’s great fun to get together with the guys and have it out. I’ve reached that point now where… I won’t say I’ve given up, but there’s just not that strong drive to achieve success. And in some ways that’s really good: it frees you up with your songwriting and the enjoyment factor. It’s just a lot more fun now, writing and recording and playing music: it’s a purer process.
“I think there’s not any great pressure on us,” he says. “It just makes it so much fun, not having that in the back of your head. It means you don’t have to feel you have to achieve things, or worry about anyone’s expectations other than your own.”
Happily, it hasn’t been hard for McLennan to downsize his ambitions, given they were never that grandiose to begin with. As he tells it, his goals were always framed “within the parameters of their time,” and when the band first emerged on the scene back in 1989, they were always aiming for profoundly realistic successes – unlike a lot of bands these days, McLennan reckons. “Back then, all you really aspired to was playing for maybe a thousand people. But now you see Courtney Barnett playing to 50,000 people and maybe bands get that in their head that they can do that and get to that place.”
The Meanies have changed in other ways too – most notably around early 2000, when McLennan’s artistic drive briefly transformed the band into something they hadn’t always been. “I have always tried to write the best songs I can,” he says. “There are songs I’ve recorded that I regret. I dare say that there are lots of artists out there who have songs that they’d like to exorcise from the back catalogue. That’s just part of the process. Some of the songs are good, but they’re just not right for the band. Some of The Meanies songs we recorded around the 2000 mark are good, but some of them just like, shouldn’t be on a Meanies record.”
Not that McLennan blames himself or the band for that. “You’ve seen it happen with so many bands. They go off on some strange tangents and lose some of their crowd. And maybe that happened for us, maybe there was a bit of a dip in the enthusiasm of our supporters.” He takes a moment; laughs, gratefully. “But I think that’s been well and truly recovered in recent years.”
