It’s Christmas Eve, and the three members of Camp Cope are busy exchanging gifts. Frontwoman Georgia Maq, whose ferocious voice drives the Melbourne punk band’s raw and ragged sound, is clutching a copy of Iggy and the Stooges’ Raw Power on vinyl. Meanwhile, drummer Sarah Thompson is grinning at the tacky white mug Maq has just given her, which bears a picture of her bandmates on one side and “#1 Momager” in bright pink Comic Sans on the other.
The holiday gathering is at Poison City Records, an indie store that doubles as the homebase for the band’s Australian label. It’s one of the last vestiges of punk in Fitzroy, a suburb that was once one of Melbourne’s great counter-cultural centers but has now fallen prey to chain stores, property developers, and cashed-up young professionals. The label is an institution in the city, and Camp Cope speak fondly of its founder, Andy Hayden, who they say is “the only man” who has been fully supportive of the trio since they started playing together three years ago.
Melbourne’s punk scene is tight-knit, but if Camp Cope were once part of it, they’re not any more. “We got kicked out because we were too outspoken,” says Thompson. “As soon as we started becoming more popular, they were threatened by us,” adds Maq, “so we’ll just do our own thing.” The band’s style goes beyond typical notions of punk anyway: You can hear tinges of folk as much as you can hear ramshackle angst in their starkly confessional songs. Maq has a unique talent for crystallizing complex emotions in her lyrics, like the shame it feels to be harassed despite knowing you did nothing wrong; Thompson and bassist Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich ably elevate those themes without jostling for attention.
The grouping is as much a fit personally as it is musically. Together, Maq and Hellmrich play around with each other like best friends or naughty sisters, under the watchful eye Thompson, the de facto band mom. When our conversation hits on serious and complicated topics, like assault or systemic misogyny, the group share the discussion equally. Being outspoken women in the music industry is a heavy load to bear, and Camp Cope are adept at sharing that weight.
They burn with the same messy feminist punk fire of Kathleen Hanna, Liz Phair, or even Lady Gaga—personal-political to the max, unapologetically loud and unwilling to settle for anything less than a radical overhaul of The Way Things Work. That fire ran through their 2016 self-titled debut, which pushed the trio to a level of success in Australia that was unprecedented for a DIY band. In just over 18 months, Camp Cope have gone from playing gigs at Melbourne’s 300-capacity Northcote Social Club to headlining local shows seven times that size. The impending arrival of their sophomore album, How to Socialise & Make Friends, looks to propel them even further into the spotlight.
Lead single “The Opener,” a song about being underestimated by men in the music industry, was serendipitously released late last year, as more women began to openly call out sexism in all facets of life. “It’s another man telling us to book a smaller venue,” Maq seethes on the song. Meanwhile, some of the record’s other tracks feel even more prescient, like “The Face of God,” an account of a sexual assault that gets brushed under the carpet because the perpetrator’s “music is too good.”
The album was written before the #MeToo movement gained steam, but the trio feel bolstered by it. Thompson says she feels less nervous about releasing these songs after the recent reckoning, because the conversation is already in the cultural mindset. “At the end of the day, our main goal isn’t to be famous,” says Hellmrich. “We want to completely shake up the whole music scene and push it forward, because it’s been really stagnant for a really long time.”
Georgia Maq: We’re a political band by default, because we’re all women, and that’s just been a thing from the start. I remember sitting at the kitchen table when I was 10, and my parents were discussing politics, and I was like, “Tomorrow I’m gonna go to the library, learn about politics, and I’m gonna become a politician.” And then I went to the library and I couldn’t find a book about politics so I rented the “Buffy” VHS instead. But I’ve always been very political and I can’t help expressing my opinions because I want to see the world change.
Sarah Thompson: We’ve all got very strong opinions on things and aren’t afraid to tell people what they are.
GM: We’re a bunch of bitches.
Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich: We’re just not scared. I feel like a lot of people in music try to keep the politics out of their music so they’re not gonna lose a portion of their fanbase, but we don’t care. If you don’t agree with our politics then you probably won’t agree with our music, because it reflects us as people.
GM: Yes, yes, yes. It was so cathartic to release that and be validated by people being like, “This is my experience!” I needed to do it, especially after the last year and a half. Since the last record was released, we just got criticized about everything.
ST: Every single line in that song is a quote.
KDH: “The Opener” is about the wider sexism you experience from everybody in the music scene, down to the people you don’t expect it from. Even our friends were [being sexist] in the way they would try and tell us what to do, as if we didn’t know. Some of the people who say they’re supporting you are the people who don’t realize how sexist they’re being, who don’t treat us like we’re capable. It was important for them to realize. And, after hearing the song, a lot of them did. They came to us and were like, “OK, yeah, you’re right.”
GM: I was scared to play that song in front of people because I didn’t want them to ask me questions about my experience. But when #MeToo happened, we were like, “It needs to go on the album. It needs to be heard.”
ST: It’s all power. If you’re not a man in music you have to do 10 times as much to be recognized even in a slight way. So every time you achieve something, it’s like, “Oh wow!” instead of being like, “Well, obviously everyone loves me and I’m the best and whatever I say goes.”
KDH: Something that really scares me about all this stuff—especially when you look at 2000s emo and all the problems that are arising from it—is how these positions of influence probably attract a certain kind of person who would think, “If I’m famous and in a popular band, it doesn’t matter what I do. I’ve got power over all these young women, and they won’t question it.” That’s why it’s really important that it’s out now, and that people are watching what people do, because maybe those same people won’t be attracted to those positions of power anymore. It’s important that bands are getting criticized, and that labels and tours are dropping bands. If you’re a teacher and you abused your power, you can’t teach anymore. If you abuse the power that you have, you shouldn’t legally be allowed to be in those influential positions. These men shouldn’t be allowed onstage in front of 14-year-old women.
KDH: [Management and agents are] the biggest scam of the music industry—to make old white men money. Do you know how disappointing it is to see all the amazing Australian female artists, and then, behind the scenes, it’s just all old white men sitting there with their new expensive cars, capitalizing on these young women? Those sorts of people see the end goal as units sold, how much money, how much exposure. It just doesn’t interest us. I feel like if we told a major label or a booking agent that we care about how safe a show is more than how big it is, they’d be like, “There’s no money in that.” We’d just constantly conflict with how things are run.
ST: I do this for a job anyway, so why would I pass it on to someone else who doesn’t know what we want? Anything we do we decide ourselves. We don’t have to do anything because somebody decides that it would be good for us. If it’s a shit decision, then we’ve made it and we’ll live with it. We’ve been told from the start that we do things backwards, so we’ll just keep doing things backwards. It’s fine.
