After securing his bicycle outside a café in an inner-city Melbourne suburb, The Cactus Channel's bassist Henry Jenkins pulls up a pew across the table. He's en route to work "in a record store in the city", which he proudly admits stocks his ten-piece funk orchestra's releases. The band formed at Princes Hill Secondary College thanks to its "kickass [music] department" and when asked if their music teacher is chuffed with The Cactus Channel's continued success, Jenkins chuckles, "I hope so. There are heaps of good bands that came out [of Princes Hill Secondary College] before us. Some of the guys ended up in Eagle & The Worm — oh, no! There's so many bands, I forget. Um, most of the guys in Sex On Toast, yeah."
"I heard that [The Jackson 5 I Want You Back bassline] and I was like, ‘Dad, what is that thing?’ And he goes, ‘It’s the bass guitar’.”
The Cactus Channel took shape utilising the school's many music rooms during lunchtimes and Jenkins confesses, "We were too unco to play sport so we'd just jam every day." Because they were jamming in their own free time, the band enjoyed the freedom to explore music on their own terms as opposed to being told how and when to play. "It was just, like, 'Go for it!'" Jenkins stresses. On whether they released material while still in school, Jenkins clarifies, "The first 45 [single, Pepper Snake] was put out when we were 16 and then the second single [Emanuel Ciccolini] and first album [Haptics] was [when we were] in Year 12, so [we were] kinda like 17, 18 or whatever. And then we got to uni and shit slowed down."
All band members are now aged between 21 and 22 and Jenkins describes how they've changed up their songwriting sessions. "In high school, it was very much — we'd kinda write with, like, all ten people in the room and so I s'pose we've had to rethink the writing process a little bit now that that's kind of impossible to organise. So the writing process changed just a little bit! Sometimes there will just be four people there, sometimes there'll be two people there, but we figured it out so we can still be productive; it took us a while to figure that out."
Jenkins initially picked up a bass guitar in high school after hearing I Want You Back by The Jackson 5. "It was just that line from that song," he explains, "and I could never figure out who it was by. But then I found out and now I forget his name [pauses]. Um, oh, Wilton Felder! Great name. And he's a sax player and he just played bass on this track; yeah, he's a bullshit dude! Anyway, I heard that [bassline] and I was like, 'Dad, what is that thing?' And he goes, 'It's the bass guitar'." (For those who don't already know, Jenkins is the son of Charles Jenkins.)
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We discuss pre-internet music composition, when musicians often had to rely on posting cassette tapes via snail mail when exchanging songwriting ideas/demos. Jenkins grew up with no concept "of an internet-less [existence]". "Like, I have memories of dial-up and my dad kind of being like, 'Take it easy on the internet'," he adds.
