Queensland band The Chats on writing punk rock for the working class
Queensland punks The Chats built a working class fan base on rollicking tales of ‘smoko’ and drinking beer. Next stop: a stadium tour with Guns N’ Roses.
It’s a tranquil scene at the West Toowong Bowls Club just after midday on a sunny Friday in early August. A couple of high-vis-wearing tradesmen are doing some work on the building out near the big gum tree that looms overhead, while a couple of older folk are having their first roll of the day to a soundtrack of cawing crows.
It’s looking like a golden afternoon in this quiet residential street 7km west of Brisbane’s city centre, as two young men walk in together, dressed in shorts, sunnies and band shirts to place an order at the bar.
To a new generation of young Australian rock ’n’ roll fans, they are instantly identifiable as two-thirds of punk trio The Chats. But among a slightly older crowd, they simply look like two good mates sitting in the shade of an umbrella at a table overlooking the bowling green, splitting a jug of XXXX Gold.
Eamon Sandwith sings and plays bass guitar; Josh Hardy plays electric guitar and chips in with backing vocals. Absent today is their drummer bandmate Matthew Boggis, who lives in Jindabyne, NSW, which might present a problem for band rehearsals if the three musicians were concerned by such things. “If you play enough, you don’t need to practise, unless you’re running new stuff,” says Sandwith, 23, with a shrug.
Soon the three friends will be supporting US rock titans Guns N’ Roses on its Australian and New Zealand stadium tour, in what will be some of the biggest shows of their still-nascent career.
“It’s gonna be nerve-racking for sure, but I think we’re just gonna get out there and rip it,” says the singer. “I’ll look at the first two rows and focus on that. When you get an opportunity like that, what are you going to do? Not do it? They were my favourite band when I was 12. I thought they were the sickest. I reckon it’s gonna be mad.”
Not long before this meeting, the group played to one of the biggest crowds of its career before a heaving mosh pit at an eminently muddy edition of Splendour in the Grass, the annual winter music festival near Byron Bay, which was attended by about 50,000 people.
“We are The Chats from the Sunshine Coast, Queensland,” said the singer by way of introduction. “Before we get going, a couple of things: look out for each other, and don’t touch anyone who doesn’t want to be touched. It’s straightforward stuff; it’s simple.”
Before a swelling Saturday afternoon crowd of thousands, the group fired through something like 22 songs in 38 minutes – surely a record for the main stage at one of the nation’s biggest music events – including its best-known tracks Smoko, Pub Feed, Drunk n Disorderly, Identity Theft and Bus Money, which ends with the desperate cry of a man down on his luck just trying to get home: “All I need is a buck or two!”
Ever the man of the people, Sandwith drew big cheers at Splendour for his between-song critique of the NSW Police Force’s favoured tactic of parking cops and drug-sniffing dogs at the entrance to the festival. By mouthing off at the cops, the singer was just the latest in a long line of anti-authoritarian punk rockers after the Clash, the Dead Kennedys and, closer to home, Brisbane band the Saints.
At the bowls club, Review toasts to the Chats’ forthcoming second album.It’s a fortnight away from release, but Hardy and Sandwith could only be more laid-back about this career milestone if they were lying down.
Just a handful of their 13 tracks have been issued so far, including recent single I’ve Been Drunk in Every Pub in Brisbane, a pulsing 89-second blast that name-checks some of the Queensland capital’s finest watering holes.
That leaves about 10 songs unheard. The band made the decision not to release more after most of the tracks from its debut album, High Risk Behaviour, were in circulation before its 2020 release. “We want to give a bit of mystique,” says Hardy, 24, while Sandwith nods and says, “We want it to be a fresh listen”.
It’s been five years since the band became a viral sensation in 2017, when the lo-fi music video for Smoko – complete with the po-faced singer wearing a surf lifesaver’s outfit – shot them from unknown Sunshine Coast slackers to minor cultural celebrities, thanks to the song’s chanted chorus celebrating the sanctity of the average worker’s cigarette break.
In a flash, the trio became the nation’s leading – perhaps only – proponents of a self-created genre, “shed rock”, so named because the group began rehearsing in a mate’s shed and because they were uninterested in joining the tiresome jockeying for status and credibility within the punk rock scene.
Three things can be said about The Chats since they became absorbed into the online meme machine, were playlisted by national youth broadcaster Triple J, and began building a strong following in the UK, US and Europe.
First impression: they’re not trying too hard. Two: there’s zero irony in their world, which is rooted in genuine concerns of the working class; Sandwith’s last job was in customer service at Coles, while Hardy previously worked as a roofer.
Three: they don’t care whether or not you like them, a fact driven home by the cover of their upcoming album, titled Get F..ked, which features the three members each giving a stiff middle finger to the camera, and thus the potential listener.
It’s only while seeing The Chats perform live that the full image is drawn into sharp focus. At the Hamilton Hotel in Brisbane about a year ago, any mistaken assumptions I had made about the group vanished as I watched an incredibly tight trio smash through an energising, accomplished and convincing set. The hundreds-strong crowd was a fascinating mix of youngsters drawn to their relatable, ratbag charm and older punks who already knew these guys were the real deal.
On stage, motormouthed singer Sandwith never smiles, and instead wears a severe look forever situated somewhere between a snarl and a grimace.
As a counterpoint, Hardy – who replaced original guitarist Josh Price in late 2020 – has an elastic face akin to actor Jim Carrey that sees him pulling all sorts of gurning expressions, while Boggis tends to keep his head down as he attacks his drum kit with intricate precision.
The opening track to the new album is a vehicular ode titled 6L GTR, and the lyrics of its second verse are worth quoting in full: “Pulled in at Beefy’s, got a steak and cheese / Hoonin’ down the Bruce now, as fast as I please / Late arvo congestion, every day’s the same / So I pulled left around ’em and drove up the bike lane.”
It’s a scene familiar to any hungry southeast Queenslander who has driven down the Bruce Highway and stopped by Beefy’s pie shop before pointing the car towards the state capital. The sheer clarity and economy of language is a marvel.
All of their songs are like this: vivid character sketches and descriptions of everyday, potentially autobiographical situations abound. The overall storytelling intent can be characterised as “for real life”, a phrase borrowed from the cartoon TV dog Bluey.
Perhaps the best of these narratives on Get F..ked is one that begins with a lament about rising cigarette costs – “I can already barely afford my rent” – before the character’s building rage is directed at Canberra: “Those bastards in parliament ought to be hung by their necks!”
Sandwith had the idea for the song, titled Price of Smokes, when he was working behind the counter at Coles about five years ago.
“These blokes would come in, and they’d be like ‘Give us a pack of Rothmans 20s’,” he says. “You’d scan it, and it was going up monthly at that point; it was climbing steadily. They would lose their shit at me, like it was my fault. But this one dude was like, ‘Mate, it’s about time we just took over and had a mutiny!’ – all over an extra dollar for his ciggies.”
Although there’s an element of boneheaded fury in some of the characters Sandwith sings about, the musicians deplore the anti-intellectual streak that occasionally rears its head in their songs, such as the surfie jock in penultimate track Emperor of the Beach, who reckons he’s superior because he was born near a particular bit of coastal sand.
“It’s a pseudo piss-take on the whole ‘locals only’ thing,” says Hardy. “We all grew up with that, and it’s not having a dig at surfing culture; I love surfing, and I used to shape boards. But unfortunately, that element is almost that Cronulla Riots bullshit sort of vibe, and I feel like that’s not productive in any way in Australian society.”
Importantly, the musicians also know their punk rock history as it applies to this part of the world. Like all good Queensland pop music scholars, they’ve read the landmark 2004 book Pig City, which artfully and vividly captured the dark ages under the state’s conservative Bjelke-Petersen government in the 1970s, from which cult hero acts such as the Saints and the Go-Betweens emerged.
“I bought that book and I came into contact with (author) Andrew Stafford, and we talk a bit about music,” says Sandwith. “He’s a great writer, and it was shocking to me how f..ked up all that shit was back then. Growing up on the Sunny Coast, I thought, ‘There’s no f..king music going on! Man, this sucks!’ You think you’ve got it so hard – and then you’re reading that shit, where you’d get the shit beaten out of you for going to a punk gig.”
All of which puts the singer’s brief tirade about the cops and their drug dogs south of the border at Splendour in the Grass last month in a different light. Today, he can use his platform to mouth off at the police before a thousands-strong crowd without consequence; strange though it might seem, such an act can be seen as more of a by-product of social progression than the outright rebellion it would have been back when the Saints were starting out.
As we finish up the third jug of Gold, there’s a minor commotion by the bowling green: at the bar inside, I had mentioned the band’s name to the manager, whose daughter is a major Chats fan. Having had their cover blown, Sandwith and Hardy happily sign a West Toowong Bowls Club shirt for her and pose for photos, both with the manager and a young couple who rate their music, too.
We bid farewell long before intoxication sets in, and while this might seem like a missed opportunity for a band that claims to have been drunk in every pub in Brisbane, not to worry: this is Hardy’s local.
Get F..ked is released on Friday, August 19, via Bargain Bin Records. The Chats’ national tour begins in Hobart (September 10) and ends in Fremantle (September 24); in November, the band will support Guns N’ Roses at six stadium shows.
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