From Triple J to chart-toppers: What’s next for the all-conquering Spacey Jane?

The rock band is the electric through-line of Australian popular music: vocals, guitars, bass, and drums, whatever the decade. But if the instruments stay much the same, what those groups represent changes sharply, to reflect their times. Thinks of the Easybeats in the 1960s, with their immigrant drive, or the defiant passion of Cold Chisel in the 1970s, who refused to toe any line dictated by authority.

Every era gets its authentic amplification, and you can trace the lineage onwards through Powderfinger’s egalitarian concern and Gang of Youths’ embrace of raw passion. But what does the next generation’s emblematic rock band look and sound like? The band would be the first verse-to-chorus summation of Generation Z, the successor to Millennials and a cohort primed by digital culture and raised on climate change’s looming impact and the need to protect their mental health through the pandemic years.

If you want to turn that outline into an outlier, please consider Spacey Jane. The Perth four-piece – vocalist and guitarist Caleb Harper, guitarist Ashton Hardman-Le Cornu, bassist Peppa Lane, and drummer Kieran Lama – have enjoyed an unstoppable ascendance over the past three years. Zooming up through Triple J, the quartet saw their debut album June 2020’s Sunlight, debut at two on the national charts. In June this year its successor, Here Comes Everybody, took the extra step and debuted at one.

Out of lockdown and able to tour, both nationally and increasingly overseas, Spacey Jane are playing five consecutive nights at Melbourne’s Forum Theatre later this month. They may yet add more shows, or it could be the last time they play a room that size in Melbourne before they graduate to arenas. Measured by commercial benchmarks, the band and their buoyant alternative-tinged singles, have achieved startling success. But sales and sold-out shows aren’t the only metric that matter to the group.

Spacey Jane’s latest album, Here Comes Everybody, debuted at No. 1 on the national charts.Credit: Sam Hendel

Sitting in his Christchurch hotel room, midway through a New Zealand tour, Caleb Harper talks about Spacey Jane with unadorned honesty, as if it’s the mechanism that gives him both purpose and satisfaction. Rock’s traditional taxonomy dictates that bands are gangs, or a boys’ club, but Spacey Jane feels both broader and necessarily inclusive: something to share with people close to you, a business to be nurtured, a means of expression, an example to be set.

“We really love each other and are so grateful that we get to do this together. The thing that has changed the most is that before we were just friends doing this collective thing for fun, but now we’re bonded through fear of the unknown and the end of our safety net, and being in this business together,” Harper says.

“More than half of what we do now is unrelated to creating or performing music. We have to have each other’s back because we all depend on each other,” he adds. “It’s unspoken, but then it is spoken about some of the times. We have a true commitment to each other and what we do.”

I first spoke to Harper in February 2020, while putting together a list of new Australian artists to watch out for. Spacey Jane had just cracked Triple J’s Hottest 100 for the first time with their whirlwind single Good for You, although Harper had missed the big moment: when the countdown got to 90 he figured they hadn’t made the cut and did a bottle-shop run. He was in the queue when it came in at 80 and his phone started blowing up. A year later Booster Seat would reach number two of the 2021 Hottest 100. Harper was not at the bottle shop.

Even then the lanky frontman had an innate understanding of what he got from making music and what other people got from listening to it. “Not much of what I write is sweet. It’s shrouded in bubbly, indie sounds, but the last two years have been pretty tough for me in an emotional sense and a relationship breakdown is at the forefront of my mind,” Harper told me. “Everyone can relate to bad things happening in their lives, but at the same time they want to sing and dance along, too.”

That final sentence could be considered something of a manifesto for Harper’s songwriting. Sunlight, and particularly Here Comes Everybody, delve deep into his teenage depression, subsequent bouts of indecision and self-destruction, and heartbreak that comes tempered with regret and despair. “The sound coming from my head that’s screaming ‘I don’t feel right’,” as Hardlight succinctly puts in.

The week Here Comes Everybody was released, Spacey Jane did signing sessions at record stores in six different capital cities on consecutive days. The fan queues were lengthy, and because the band hadn’t set a time limit, they stayed for hours until everyone waiting got their signature and, in many cases, the chance to communicate to Harper and his bandmates what certain songs meant to them. It was not a responsibility the songwriter had foreseen.

“Sometimes I feel like I don’t have the right thing to say. Just because I talk about these things doesn’t mean I’ve conquered them all or have this broad range of understanding of how and what to do. But I try hard to relate to people and talk about things,” Harper says. “But in the same way I do, some people just want to talk, they don’t need an answer or a solution. They just want to tell someone. For me it’s really nice to be reciprocated: I asked them to listen to me, and now they’re doing the same.”

Harper has come a long way from Geraldton, the regional city 400 kilometres north of Perth, where he grew up listening to Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on repeat in his stepfather’s car and was in a high school band with Lama before they headed to Perth and formed Spacey Jane at university in 2016. His latest addition is a chunky silver chain, a recent purchase during a stay in Los Angeles that whacks his chin when he runs onstage. It’s the kind of purchase he was too scared to make until recently, lest the band fall over.

Spacey Jane at the Enmore Theatre, Sydney, last year.Credit: Charlie Hardy

“Caleb really believes in people. He’s very encouraging and has faith. And he’ll always have your back,” Peppa Lane says. “And he’s a really good decision maker and always has his eye on a vision. It’s very easy to trust his leadership.”

The 22-year-old bassist joined in 2019, replacing Amelia Murray who departed on good terms to focus on her medical degree (she’s now doing her first year in Western Australia’s rural hospital system). A “one in a million” addition according to Harper, Lane was then in her first year of university, lamenting on her phone call home to her parents each week that she hadn’t yet joined a band. Offered a share of Spacey Jane’s then going gig rate, $48 and 12 cans of beer, she happily accepted.

“When I first joined the band I was overwhelmed by giving up other stuff in my life. But it’s just fun to keep growing. A lot of people in the world are successful. We haven’t made it more than anyone else,” Lane says. “A good band has to be creative and expressive and meet your full musical potential. I think we’ve still got plenty to uncover.”

As self-honest as he is, Harper also has a keen sense of humour. He jokes about not having enough Instagram followers to get free clothes (which he would very much like to) and slips in self-deprecating asides. That’s also helped him look anew at what Spacey Jane might be. Part of his Los Angeles trip was to try songwriting with other musicians, with a view to how that might help Spacey Jane.

“We’re always looking to expand and evolve and bring in as many positive influences and opinions to this thing as possible, without giving away our sense of agency,” Harper says. “Prior to the last six months I felt very possessive and vulnerable, but I want it to be a fun, collaborative thing, not a gut-wrenching introspective process.”

Striking a chord

Whether allied to cathartic backbeat or bittersweet balladry, Caleb Harper’s lyrics have struck a chord with the band’s fans. He now gets them sung back to him with passionate belief by thousands of voices at live shows, and throughout the past two years the 25-year-old has been eloquent in talking about his mental health, personal setbacks, and hopeful future. But he’s also sufficiently self-aware to know that making the music isn’t a simple cure-all.

“Something I’ve come to realise is that for me songwriting and creativity is not an actual way of dealing with things. It’s a way of expressing them, and describing them, and trying to relate to people with them,” Harper says. “The work that you need to do on yourself, as all people do, still needs to be done separately, at least for me. I find it cathartic and beautiful, but if I talk about an issue the issue is still there. The things that fix them require far more commitment and consistency.”

Later this year Spacey Jane will relocate to Los Angeles, with their October and November North American dates – including two nights at New York’s Bowery Ballroom – suggesting that they have a foothold there. What will stay the same is Spacey Jane’s willingness to be frank in how they view themselves, and what it truly means to be the band of the moment.

“When I was young I thought the idea of being a rock star was a ticket to not having a care in the world,” Harper says. “I thought that putting myself into words and music would make it feel like it was OK to live in it. I romanticised the idea, which I’ve come to realise is not very romantic and I don’t want to live in it.”

Spacey Jane play the Forum Theatre, Melbourne on Tuesday 23 (all-ages), Wednesday 24 (all-ages), Thursday 25, Friday 26, and Saturday 27 August.

A cultural guide to going out and loving your city. Sign up to our Culture Fix newsletter here.