Wet Lips On Making A Community, Challenging Macho Punk Rock Culture & Carving Out Their Own Space

12 July 2017 | 10:27 am | Anthony Carew

"We got to a point where we couldn't take it anymore. So, we said 'fuck this'."

Wet Lips leaders Grace Kindellan and Jenny McKechnie live in a sharehouse on Brunswick Road. They call the place "Wetopia". It's where the band formed, where they used to rehearse (before the cops were called one too many times), where they store their gear, where they write their songs. It was also where the punk trio held the first-ever Wetfest, in 2015. Instead of merely launching their debut EP, Wet Is Best, they staged a mini-festival in their backyard, that included the Pink Tiles and the first-ever show for McKechnie's other band, Cable Ties.

They've since staged two more instalments of Wetfest. Not at Wetopia, though, but at The Tote, with bands like Terrible Truths, Loose Tooth, Palm Springs, RVG, and Two Steps On The Water playing. The bills have been filled with acts featuring female and transgender musicians, and have been part of Wet Lips' greater raison d'etre as a band: creating a community of like-minded musicians, challenging the macho culture of punk rock, and carving out their own space in a music scene that, at first, didn't welcome them.

"When we started Wet Lips, we really just wanted to be in a band, to take up space," says Kindellan. "Our whole experience of being a band has really been entwined with us being women, and GNC [Gender Non-Conforming] people. That's what a lot of our songs are about: trying to process that. Expressing some of the feelings that we have about making music in a community full of people that are actively trying to exclude you. Getting so angry about something that you have to write a song about it. And, then, playing that song at a gig, and something happening at a gig that makes you so angry you have to write another song about it."

The band started, McKechnie remembers, as "the 19-year-old girls from the country who were hanging out at all these parties with 'cool' punk boys who had just no interest in us beyond whether we'd have sex with them, having the tenacity to get up on stage and be in a band". Each grew up in regional Victoria: McKechnie on a 90-acre farm outside Bendigo, where she'd often have to go out on horseback and chase in cows that'd wandered over the "falling-down fences". Kindellan grew up in Foster, in South Gippsland; in town, not on a farm, though her dad was a stock and station agent.

Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter

Upon arriving in Melbourne, each started going to shows, but found as much alienation as inclusion. "Most of the bands we'd see would be men in punk bands," McKechnie says. "There'd be bands getting up there, being shitheads, just being drunk and falling around the stage, being really messy. [Wet Lips] started off us as just being: 'well, we could do that'. So, we started doing that."

So, Wet Lips began, in 2012, in classic punk fashion: Kindellan, McKechnie, and drummer Mohini Hillyer starting the band first, learning their instruments as they went. They were scrappy, noisy, funny; with lyrics dealing in all-too-relatable lyrics about nights spent on the tiles in Melbourne (Try It Again boasts lyrical references to The Gasometer, Bar Open, The Liberty Social, The Tote, The Grace Darling, and Johnston Street), or being too broke to take part in Melbourne's something-on-every-night culture (their anthem I'm So Bored). But, they discovered, the standard comic irreverence of garage-rock was, when wielded by them, enough to disqualify them among the men-in-punk-bands that'd inspired their existence. "We wondered: 'Why aren't we given the same respect? Why don't people see us as some fun punk band?'" McKechnie recounts. "It was more like we were a novelty, or we were just shit. It was a total joke to them."

"We felt like we were always being instantly judged, and never given the same respect as our male peers were," Kindellan says. "For a long time, we were trying to exist within that space, and trying to get respect from those men. But [it became] clear that the people who were in bands that we admired didn't have any interest in including us, or respecting our music. They'd already judged us, the moment they'd seen our band; or, even, the moment we might've said to them, socially, 'oh, we're in a band'."

They were dealt the "classic" condescending treatment: getting put on first at every gig, getting booked as the token girl band, being literally billed as "girl band", having other people borrow their gear without asking. "They're the actual logistical things that happened to us," Kindellan offers, "but they were representative of this whole culture of masculine garage-punk, and the whole patriarchal music culture, that wasn't interested in including us. That was, in fact, actively trying to exclude us, and other women that played music. We got to a point where we couldn't take it anymore. So, we said 'fuck this'."

Which led to booking shows with other women, to Wetfest, and to the searing Can't Take It Anymore, a standout jam on Wet Lips' debut, self-titled LP. The song finds Kindellan tearing apart slumming macho punks ("you're just another guy in a Bad Seeds T-shirt," she sings, before spitting the great diss "probably grew up in Camberwell" twice-over). Their music, Kindellan says, peddles "this fabricated idea that they're alienated from society," while, really, being an "expression of their privilege and dominance in society".

The song, and Wet Lips themselves, McKechnie clarifies, aren't just about rebellion, but also representation. "When we started going to gigs, it was in a group of people where all the CIS men in the audience could watch themselves on stage," she says. "We didn't have that. Hopefully, now, when we're on stage, we can have women in the audience who feel like they're represented, that it could be them on stage." Says Kindellan: "Wet Lips is all about being confident, and not giving a fuck. Making music or playing a show that allows people to feel comfortable and excited and entitled to go out in public and live your life."

Their album is the culmination of their half-decade of carving out their own place in Melbourne, with songs like the obnoxious, menstruation-strewn Period and the cash-lending lament Money dating from their 19-year-old beginnings. Hillyer left the band in 2016, after recording the album, to concentrate full-time on making electro-bangers in Habits; making the Wet Lips debut feel like a time capsule. "It's a really nice feeling to have a record of what we have been for the past five years," says Kindellan. "It's kind of like your classic first garage-punk album: it's 25 minutes long, all short, sharp, upbeat songs that were recorded in one weekend."

Now comes the difficult second album, right? "Exactly. But, I went through a break-up earlier in the year, so, I'm ready," Kindellan laughs. "Now we're these mid-20s people who feel this existential dread, and drink in front of the TV whilst patting our cat. Maybe it's good that we made a record full of songs we wrote when we were really confident 19-year-olds who were up for anything, and were just like, 'Yeah, we deserve to be here, and everyone else can just fuck off'."