Another Round

After spending the last six months constantly listening to her band's new album The Hypnotiser, Cash Savage can't wait to take her band The Last Drinks out on tour and play the album tracks in front of an audience. “A few of the songs have guest singers,” she points out, “but we already have seven people in the band so we can't take guests on tour just for one song. [Our] Melbourne show will actually be the closest to the album, so I'm really looking forward to that.”

Lyrically, The Hypnotiser is very raw with its heart-aching country strings and dark, honest vocals from Savage. It's mostly inspired by personal stories, although Savage tells that a few tales have also been borrowed from friends. “The big thing for me with this band is that it's got to be real,” she explains. “Because you do a lot of shows and when it's not real you can get sort of sick of it, but when it's real it keeps me driven. So it is raw, but it's just how I like to write these days: to keep it as real as possible. I like a lot of different music and I guess it's just who I am. I feel like anyone who knows me would say that the songs are true to me.”

Cash Savage & The Last Drinks have evolved into a seven-piece band over the years and Savage recalls: “We've all sort of found each other just from playing gigs… I remember our first double bass player came up me to after a show once and told me that he wanted to play with us, so I said 'yep' and put his number in my phone. A few months later I found this number in my phone that just said 'Graham Bass', so I called him up and he came and played with us.”

Not just a magical one-trick pony, Savage is also coach for Old Bar's pub footy team, The Unicorns. “I actually retired at the start of this year, but they pulled me back in. I really love the pub footy, I think it's great and I really like the spirit the Old Bar takes. We'll have a really good time, and I guess some teams take it a bit more seriously than us, but I personally think it's important for pub footy to have a team like The Unicorns in there because we don't take it very seriously. But drinking around town offers some weird opportunities, and one of them was to coach the Old Bar Unicorns and why would you say no?”

Although Cash is well known around Melbourne town, her roots come from Port Albert, a small coastal town in Gippsland. A shot of Port Albert's back beach is immortalised on The Hypnotiser's cover art and this idea made sense to Savage because she refers to the beach in songs including Howling For Me, which is about her dog. “I didn't know what to put on the cover, with a name like The Hypnotiser,” Savage confesses. “But, with 'keeping it real': I love that place, in my hometown – nobody goes there. It's essentially this mudflat-type beach and none of the locals go there, so when you're there it feels like you're the only person in the world.

“We go out there every now and then, and we light a massive fire, as big as we want, but eventually the tide will kick you off the beach. The last time we were there [was] just before New Year's, we had 20 people down there and we carried this huge piece of driftwood to use as a chair. And when we went down to take the photo, we noticed that it was still there, and you can see it on the front cover.”