Sydney Punk: Housewives

In the first of a four-part series profiling current Sydney punk bands, MAX EASTON tackles Housewives – Lincoln Brown, Sam “Chippy” Chiplin, Heather Swan, Will Harley and Dean Adam – whose sound he calls “a crazed and haggard savaging of what has come before.”

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] The Marrickville streets are empty at 8:30pm. An unlit church faces the horrendous neon beacon of a kebab shop opposite and a lone bus casts a similar hue as it glides through sheets of rain. Through the concrete chicanes of the back streets, the muted rumble of guitars permeates the brick and painted-steel frontage of a sharehouse that hosts a Housewives rehearsal. I knock quickly between the gap of stopping and starting riffs and enter to the voice of Heather calling down the hall. The band sits at a circle of lounges that surround a table, a few amps and a drum kit. I sit down in a couch, crack open a beer and get momentarily distracted by a face that’s scratched into the leather armrest by the sharp edge of a folded bottle cap.

Aging mostly in their early 20s, Housewives are one of the newer and youngest punk bands of Sydney. Influenced by both the underground punks of the ’80s and the recent American garage revival, their music is a crazed and haggard savaging of what has come before them, contextualised by references to Gen Y slang and a focus on modern-day agitation. Having grown up together in Sydney’s outer suburbs before recruiting other members in some of their first sharehouses, their approach to sound, themes and direction are all symptoms of their place in life.

“We’re not punks and we’re not political. They’re just stupid, immature songs.”

“We’re all coming at punk from different angles and have a different take on it,” Will says. “We all got introduced to it in different ways, and maybe listen to it on different levels, but we’re just music fans; we’re not punks and we’re not political. They’re just stupid, immature songs.”

“We don’t think about it too much,” Lincoln adds. “Usually you go to make something up with the idea that Housewives need a new song, but if it’s just a random idea that fits the [Killed By Death] punk-type vibe then I guess that’s just where it goes.”

“It took us a little while to really click,” Chippy says. “These guys all lived together and Will and I didn’t, so it was weird for them. They’d be sitting here in their pyjamas, someone’s just had a nap, someone’s stoned, and me and Willy would be pinging from being in the car and talking about stuff, then we’d come into a house where these guys are all cosy and slovenly. There have been times where we’ve been really excitable and Lincoln has been really high and he’s just sitting in the corner singing from the lounge real quiet.”

The songs of Housewives aren’t pointing their fingers with rage-fuelled aggression. Instead, they’re manic and futile thrashes that bear little consequence beyond cheap thrills, and this makes it exhilarating. On ‘Fuck You or Fuck Yeah’ Lincoln references the Miami ‘bath-salt zombie’ attack as a reflection of self-centred party antics. ‘Who Am I’ is purely an agitated shout about an identity crisis, and ‘That’s Chat’ is a confusing piece of suburban slang lifted from the 2000s and stuck to their first 7”. And then there’s ‘Lick the Pip.’

“I guess you could relate it to certain sexual situations,” Chippy says.

Dean laughs. “Like what kind of sexual situations?”

“At first I thought Lincoln was calling a clit a pip; that’s what I assumed. Then I found out he wasn’t.”

I turn to Lincoln and he chuckles in response.

Housewives are connected to a number of bands through shared living spaces and band members (see Ghastly Spats, Snotty Babies, Drown Under and more). It means that in the last few years, they’ve effectively made up a pocket of the Sydney music scene on their own, but that’s not to say they’ve cut themselves off from the city’s old guard. If anything, their enthusiasm has spread to the members of the bands who preceded them.

“I can’t imagine a full-length album of our songs. I can’t see how it would work.”

“Angie [Garrick, of Circle Pit] was the first person who showed interest in us,” Chippy says. “Her and Nathan Roche [Camperdown & Out]; Nathan flipped when he first saw us. At first, Angie was talking about releasing the seven, but I think she got busy and let Nic [Warnock, RIP Society] look after it, who was really keen himself. It was really flattering at the time, because we were playing shows to barely anyone. Back then no one cared.”

“Nic was often the only one there who was getting into it,” Dean adds.

“Initially we wanted to do the seven ourselves, and were for some reason against the idea of Nic putting it out,” Will says. “We wanted to do our own one first and then get Nic to do a second one. I still don’t know why. The 7” was just a logical step. I don’t know where we go from here. Unless we start writing slower songs I can’t imagine a full-length album of our songs. I can’t see how it would work.”

“A 7” just suits this type of music,” Dean says. “I don’t think we could do an LP. I can think of loads of songs that go for longer than every Housewives song combined.”

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

As much as Housewives are enthusiastic about what they do, there’s an air of bitterness to the way they look at the rest of the city. Few others share the same enthusiasm for this brand of music, and the members of Housewives are growing jaded, if they aren’t already. The others begin to goad Chippy into rehashing his rant about the people who play music in Sydney. He brushes it off for a while but, when someone suggests they get a copy of the zine he wrote it down in, he becomes quick to defend his position.

“When I’m going on a rant or whatever, I feel like I’m saying what a lot of people think,” he says. “It’s not insightful. It’s just rare to see anything that’s intense or hard. I reckon Sydney is a really hard city to live in, but a lot of the stuff that comes out of here is really soft. I feel like there’s a lot of laziness.”

“It’s like no one’s angry anymore,” Will adds. “It’s like they’re sad about it. So many people who are in these bands come up to us and say, ‘Oh that was such a good set’, and I find it hard believing them. It’s like, ‘If you liked it so much, why don’t you do something else? Do something exciting, do something better. You actually know how to play your instrument and you know how to write songs.’”

“People are waiting to be good songwriters or musicians before they go out and play anything,” Lincoln says.

“Now people are trying to learn their instruments first.”

“Yeah, a few years ago it felt like if you didn’t know how to play instruments, you just did whatever you can do. Now people are trying to learn their instruments first. Maybe that’s why there’s only a handful of bands that come under that punk thing we like. The rest of it is all kind of the same. We need people to get off their arses and start bands.”

A six-month-old Rottweiler pup runs enthusiastically across the floorboards between each person in the room as members of the band start figuring out bus timetables. As every person in the room departs, it feels like they’re promptly replaced by another member of the sharehouse, and in the interim we talk idly about the city and its insularity. The limitations of the city’s art and music scenes may stem from any number of self-perpetuating problems. Whether that comes from a wariness to be openly creative or from a ‘don’t shit where you eat’ mentality is hard to peg down, but Will points to the changing forms of communication as the problem.

“I guess this is my bitterness towards the internet speaking, but so many events only get advertised on Facebook,” he says. “The only people who get invited are friends of the bands, and because that’s been happening for so long, it’s like everyone has cornered themselves. We’ve shot ourselves in the foot. When we play, we know everyone that’s watching us and it’s become this real cliquey thing. Even though it doesn’t feel like that to us because we’re friends with everyone, I’m sure it can feel real intimidating to come into it. But you look around and you think, ‘Who else is there?’ Like, who else are you interviewing for this?”

“Well, you, Raw Prawn, Oily Boys obviously and Low Life,” I reply.

Will grins at the mention of the latter.

“Good luck tracking them down.”

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Housewives’ first self-titled 7” came out early this year on R.I.P. Society. It’s sold out. Their second self-titled 7” comes out next Friday (Sept 6) on Anti Fade.