Eat me

April 1, 2005
Cake's John McCrea in Australia in 1997.

Cake's John McCrea in Australia in 1997.
Photo: Vince Caligiuri

Humour is the icing, but there's depth under the layers of Cake, reports Katrina Lobley.

Enmore Theatre, 130 Enmore Road, Newtown
Tonight, 8.15
Bookings 9550 3666

Getting cut off on the phone usually puts people in a bad mood. Cake's deadpan frontman John McCrea is no exception.

"I was just on another interview that sort of abruptly ended and no one's called me back," he says. "Something happened to the phone line and that was it. It was very startling."

McCrea doesn't know it yet, but in a few minutes' time it will happen to him again.

For now, it gives him the perfect segue into the subject of industry cost-cutting, which he experienced during a recent European tour.

He says the tour "went well in spite of the fact the record company [Sony's Columbia Records] seemed sort of consumed with its own slow struggle for something or other".

"I don't know if I should talk about this, but we were on the tour for almost three weeks and only saw anybody from the record company in two cities. They're cutting back. BMG has merged with Sony and it's brutal and there's blood all over the place."

The ruthlessness of the biz is a subject close to McCrea's heart. Cake's website carries a quote from the late Hunter S. Thompson: "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."

Things seem to be working out for Cake, whether they're getting help or not. McCrea says the group filled the 2000-seat Shepherds Bush Empire in London last year and a few months later moved up a rung to the 3000-seat Astoria Theatre. It's encouraging, he says, that "we're growing on our own without any help".

Perhaps word has got around about Cake's shows, where there's no such thing as a set list.

"We just ask each other what song we feel like playing next," McCrea says. "It provides us with a much better experience and, I think, in turn, the audience. We are playing the song not because it's the next song on the list but because it's the song we feel like playing. We feel more sincere about it."

Cake are also riding high because they're touring last year's album, Pressure Chief, which some critics say is the band's best in more than a decade of making oddball indie pop.

It has the added appeal of being charmingly imperfect in production.

"We're making all kinds of horrible mistakes and deciding that they sound cool and leaving them on there," McCrea says. "There are bands that try really hard to make those mistakes ... bands that sound exactly like 1968/late-summer New York City or whatever. They're sort of remanufacturing some of those rough points in production in a whacky, museum kind of way.

"We're doing that in a completely we-don't-know-what-we're-doing kind of way."

So are Cake still sometimes written off as a one-hit wonder after five albums and several hits - The Distance, Sheep Go to Heaven and Short Skirt/Long Jacket?

"Oh, every single album," McCrea says.

"Because there's an element of humour in the music sometimes, maybe a lazy journalist who should probably be writing about a band that he likes will just assume that it's all a big joke.

"But I think if you listen to an album all the way through, you realise this is a really sad song or this song is sad and happy at the same time, or various other combinations of emotions.

"I don't like songs that only have one emotion and I guess I resent the assertion by some people that our band is ironic because sometimes there's humour and sadness in the same narrative. I think that humour and sadness can exist side by side without necessarily intermingling in some ironic way.

"I think it's really simplistic for people to expect pure, surging emotion of only one ..."

... kind? McCrea's gone. Cut off again. No doubt several emotions are surging right now.


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