The pandemic has hit local musicians hard, with Spacey Jane suffering anxiety and Lime Cordiale losing a chance to work – and live – with Post Malone.
Chart topping Australian bands Lime Cordiale and Spacey Jane have opened up about the impact of COVID on their careers and mental health.
In a new episode of Front and Centre, the artists tell Ella Hooper about lost opportunities and lost momentum.
Take a listen:
Spacey Jane singer Caleb Harper started working for his father when the band’s gigs dried up just as their debut album Sunlight topped the ARIA charts in mid 2020.
When the band were due to be on tour in the UK, Harper was wearing high-vis working for his father in a hydraulics company to pay the bills.
“The anxiety of not knowing what’s going to happen has been really, really weighing on all of us as a band and especially me,” Harper told Hooper.
“I’m naturally a very anxious person and the music (business) is very flimsy… You never really know what’s going to happen and you have to hope for the best. You’re already at the whim of peoples’ perspective on your music. Add in COVID and the not knowing in that regard was really difficult. I definitely felt like giving up on it because it was really intense for a long time.”
For duo Lime Cordiale, the pandemic saw a planned trip to the house of their American manager axed at the last minute.
That manager – rapper and singer Post Malone, who had tracked them down via Instagram.
The American musician suggested Oli and Louis Leimbach ride the pandemic out in the Armageddon bunker underneath his house in Utah with enough supplies to last three years.
“That would have been interesting,” Oli told Hooper.
“He said ‘I’ve got all these guns, check it out, we’ll go shooting. Just come up here, we can write for my album’. We missed out on a pretty good opportunity but this was back when you thought if you got COVID you’d be dead straight away, so we ran away. Hopefully we’ll be picking up that relationship again soon when we get back to the States.”
For Hooper, who has tentatively started touring again with Killing Heidi before playing solo shows, her career has taken a major hit over the last two years with ongoing instability and last minute gig cancellations.
“Trying to be a professional musician was never a clear path for anyone anyway, there’s a lot of risk and instability involved as is. More risk and instability is something that’s just made it pretty unattractive.”
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