STACK NZ May #73

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After the cannibal gore-fest The Green Inferno , Eli Roth is set to tackle a very different sort on man-eater in Meg . LIVING AND LEARNING

Chris Cheney mined his personal travails for The Living End’s new album Shift . A lthough they don’t enjoy quite the same high profile on this of the Tasman, The Living End are one of Australia’s most popular groups and live acts. Since forming at high school and busking the streets of Melbourne, theiy have won six ARIA awards (the equivalent of our Tuis) plus APRA’s Australian Song of the Year and four platinum plus selling albums. Shift is their seventh LP and according to singer Chris Cheney, is no random collection of songs and is informed by his personal travails over the years – plus a little bit of internal friction between him and his long-time bandmates Scott Owen (bass) and Andy Strachan (drums). “I don’t know many bands that can just get in there and produce greatness without any kind of friction,” Cheney says. “We all butted heads. There were some doozies. We know each other far too well, and that’s the reason you can say, ‘No, you get f-cked.’” An adjudicator came in the form of Woody Annison, long-time friend and live engineer of the band’s shows. “He knows how we want to sound live, and that’s always the initial idea of going into a studio – to try and catch that common energy,” Cheney explains. “He

was going to be great at being able to say, ‘You’ve done enough takes for that,’ or ‘That part’s fine, don’t squash all the energy out of it by trying to perfect it.’ Because that’s the danger: that you can get it really, really good and then it’s boring. But the only time we were disagreeing on things was because we wanted to find the best result,” he asserts. “And that’s definitely what we got.” As befitting the title, Shift marks brand new territory

for the band, both sonically and thematically. “I felt like the more honest and real that the lyrics seemed to be, the better the song was going to be,” says s Cheney. “It just felt like it would be doing a disservice to the songs, I reckon, h ad we dumbed them down. It’s the warts and all and it can be a bit ugly, but that’s life, huh.” Zo ë Radas

EXTRAS

Swift by The Living End is out on May 13.

WHERE EAGLES DARE Rising star Taron Egerton embraces his inner nerd to play Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards, the real-life underdog English sporting hero who captivated the world at the 1988Winter Olympics.

T hat’s what being chubby with glasses will do for you!” laughs Welsh actor Taron Egerton, brushing off the fact he’s practically unrecognisable in his latest film, Eddie the Eagle . As a slick novice spy in the 2014 box office hit Kingsman: The Secret Service , Egerton achieved overnight fame and millions of adoring fans. Uncomfortable with his pin-up status, he happily adopted a jutting chin, bottle- glass specs and geeky persona for his role as Britain’s unlikely ski jumper Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, who captivated the world at the 1988 Winter Olympics. “Nerdy people are likeable,” Egerton, 26, insists when STACK meets with him in Los Angeles. “It was always going to be a tightrope walk, making Eddie relatable and human and three-dimensional.” But the ice quickly melted after meeting with the real Edwards. “I just tried to imbibe and absorb a little bit of who he is. He’s a very different guy now. He looks nowhere near as characterful as he did back in the late

‘80s. But it was lovely to hear him talk about ski jumping because his passion for it is totally infectious and that was the whole key.” As much as Egerton wanted to please Edwards, his real mentor – both on and off screen – was Hugh Jackman, portraying a fictitious, hard-drinking former ski jumper who reluctantly takes Eddie under his wing. “Hugh is such an incredibly life-affirming, positive, enthusiastic person. He’s addictive to be around because he’s so wholly positive,” he says. “Hugh is a sickeningly good skier! How irritating is it, how good Hugh Jackman is at everything!? Absolutely everything!” Prior to shooting Eddie the Eagle on location in Germany, Egerton had never skied in his life. “I came out a couple of weeks earlier and tried to learn to ski and fell over an awful lot,” he admits. “It was really fun and then I ended up on a red slope, which was a source of pride for me. But when we started shooting, an email came through saying how nobody’s allowed to

ski – at all – for fear we might injure ourselves. “For sure, I won’t be doing the 90 meter jump in this lifetime. You have to do it every day from the age of four just for it to be safe. It’s why Eddie kept hurting himself. Gill Pringle Eddie The Eagle is in cinemas now

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