The Living End’s Chris Cheney: ‘Let's Just Make A Kickass Rock‘n’Roll Record’

“I would just press delete.”

Chris Cheney has never thrown away as many riffs, melodies and harmonies as he did while writing The Living End’s ninth album, I Only Trust Rock ‘n’ Roll.

He found himself thinking about what was at the core of the band. It was a process that involved some rewiring of sorts to get back to the “essence” of their music: “full throttle” rock’n’roll, as the LP’s title suggests.

“I just wanted to be very direct with this album, and I got myself into that frame of mind of not wanting to reinvent my style of songwriting or reinvent the wheel or try and do anything overly ambitious,” Cheney begins from his home studio.

“Any bits that I would get stuck on when I was writing, it forced me to sit back and think, ‘Alright, does the song need it or does the song not need it?’ And although it might be this really impressive part that I'm working on, and it's got these layered harmonies and this cool little guitar lick, it almost bogged the song down.

“So therefore, I would just get rid of it,” he adds. “And that was one of the cool things about writing this record. I've never had so many ideas end up on the cutting room floor, and it was really liberating to just trim things down and to cut them back. And what it allowed was it made everything simpler and a lot more direct, which when in the hands of the three of us, then they just worked so well.”

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Cheney knew his partners in crime, bassist Scott Owen and drummer Andy Strachan, would be on the same page.

“I just knew it,” he enthuses. “I knew when I was sending the other guys the demos of the songs that they were going to understand it, that they were going to know where I was coming from, and that we could just sink our teeth into it and really smash them out of the park because they weren't littered and congested with information.”

The resulting 11 tracks, featured on The Living End’s first album in eight years, are a “homecoming”.

“I felt almost like, ‘Why haven't I been writing these kinds of songs for the last couple of records?’ I don't really know, other than I just wasn't in the right frame of mind; I wasn't in this frame of mind.”

Back in 2023, the band revisited their seminal self-titled debut album at a massive sold-out hometown show at Festival Hall in Melbourne, performing the record in its entirety to celebrate its 25th anniversary and reissue. It’s was an exercise that Cheney attributes in part to his outlook reset.

“It forced me to listen to it and to go back and go, ‘Okay, so that's what the band was when we were 23.’ And I don't think that we've made a record that kind of direct… I don't think I've made a record like the first record.

“And luckily, when I would pick up a guitar and start strumming away and humming or whatever happens during the songwriting process, it seemed like these really simple punk rock aggressive, right hand strumming songs were the ones that I was getting off on, and I felt like that's what we need to be doing.

“It just feels like the right time again to be doing that. I feel like, yeah, we've probably neglected it a bit, but in our defense, we didn't want to make the same record again and again and again. I think we wouldn't be around today if we had. People often say to me, ‘Why don't you just write another Prisoner Of Society?' And it's like, ‘Well, because I can't.’ I don't really know how I wrote that. I probably wouldn't allow myself.”

Cheney says they “always wanted to evolve” and “grow as a band”.

“I know it sounds so cliché when bands say that, but we did. We never wanted to be just a one trick pony. We just have always pushed ourselves to see where we can go.

“And I think with this one, we realised that what we do at our heart and our essence when we just plug in, the three of us just bash away on something, that that's enough and that was enough for this record. There's something really special in that we didn't have to overextend or prove anything other than let's just make a kickass rock‘n’roll record.”

To celebrate the album’s release, The Living End were determined to do something “big and ambitious”.

“We wanted to do an event and make it something special,” Cheney shares, “and the reaction to the Festival Hall gig was just mind-blowing. It sold out so quick, and there was a lot of people asking if we were going to do that again.

“We were going to take it national, and we decided at that point we didn't want to do that. But we thought with this album, because it feels like the big brother of that first record, we thought, ‘Let's make a statement and go and do bigger venues, play that record, play a bunch of new stuff and a bunch of other singles and things like that.’ Step outside the box and take a bit of a risk.”

The Living End’s I Only Trust Rock ‘n’ Roll tour this November and December will see them play two sets, the first containing tracks from the new album, alongside fan favourites from their other records. The second set will see them play their self-titled debut album in full.

And that’s following special Q&A events in Melbourne (The Bendigo, September 28), Brisbane (Lefty’s Music Hall, September 30) and Sydney (Marrickville Bowling Club, October 1) to commemorate the release of their ninth album.

“The reaction's been incredible because I think people want that. They want something a little bit different, a bit special, rather than just going to the same local venue and seeing us again. So yeah, it hasn't been a dismal failure. It's good to be ambitious sometimes and take a risk.”

I Only Trust Rock ‘n’ Roll is out now via BMG.