As a musician, you know it's been too long since you've been on tour when you're packing your toiletries and have to scrap out the grime from your toothbrush holder – just as Cable Ties' Nick Brown admits he's doing.
The bassist for the Melbourne punk powerhouse does this interview just as he’s packing for Cable Ties' European tour supporting punk supergroup OFF!. "It's not too bad," Nick says."I think it might be a bit of dust, but you're like 'I'm gonna stick that thing in there and stick it in my mouth for two weeks, so maybe a cursory wipe would be a good start!'"
Such a telling action. Nick's keen though, keen that is to get back onstage. "[I] can't tell you enough just how stoked all of us are to be to be getting out there and doing the [tour] thing again, it's going to be so much fun."
Once Cable Ties set foot on the Berlin stage early February, their first port of call on this particular tour, their latest single, 'Perfect Client', will have dropped. "We're delighted to have a new thing to share with people," Nick says. "It's pretty sick."
'Perfect Client' is utterly volatile. "It was just a bit of end-of-Melbourne-lockdown-volume-six-or-seven or whatever the f... it was; the point of being ready to write stuff and we still couldn't get together or hang out," Nick ponders the birth of 'Perfect Client'.
"I was just doing lots of walkin' and riding my bike around the cemetery near my house and trying to get into a meditative kind of place, which is what playing in the band is for me anyway. I'd been rolling that idea on the bass for months on end.
"For me, I get a feeling and I try and express it. As soon as you start, you kind of start developing the idea musically on your own.
"It gets to a point, and you realise you've f...ed it, and it's not as involved as that. The real work is actually stripping out everything that is the idea, and that's the expressing of it."
It's kind of funny how Nick uses the word 'meditative' to describe how Cable Ties is an outlet for him, particularly when the band's music is anything but 'meditative'. That being said, it is, indeed, an outlet, one that is working for Cable Ties.
Though 'Perfect Client' is their first new music since 2020, Cable Ties have released a live album, 'Live At The Scrap Museum', and been performing in the interim.
Being on this side of the release of their last album, 2020's 'Far Enough', hindsight is a wonderful thing when Nick considers the scope of the band's international traction given their relative inactivity the last couple of years.
"It's a bit of a weird one, coz like the last record came out and not a lot happened," he says. "We're primarily a live band, that's what we are, what we want to do. So, you kind of don't feel the thing, so you wait it out.
"You start jamming again – our other favourite thing to do – you write another record and there are people on the other side of the world connecting with it, and I'm stoked, and I just want to go and play it for them.
"That's the thing, the feeling, the moment of sharing your thing with somebody else for me. It's awesome to now be at the stage again to go out and play and meet people and kind of have the thousands of chance moments you have when you go out on tour."
Chance moments. It's a profound way of looking at tour life. Amazing how there can be so much depth to one minuscule, seemingly inconsequential encounter. "And that's the thing; you go out there and all these things happen!" Nick gushes.
"There's no way of knowing what they are or when they're going to strike."
As for how it has or how he hopes those moments will influence Cable Ties and any music moving forward, Nick says: "All those little chance encounters along the way kind of like are another tiny tile in the mosaic of what makes you you, and that's what ultimately goes into fuelling the next thing you do.
"I kind of think creative energy, for me, comes from all those little happenings and what they inspire you to think about."
Cable Ties join Mudhoney, Paul Dempsey and others playing The Gum Ball at Dashville (Hunter Valley), which runs 21-23 April. Cable Ties also play their first Naarm show of 2023, joining the Brunswick Music Festival (5-13 March) at the Sydney Road Street Party (Melbourne) 5 March.
