The Fremantle indie rock band on their new record ‘If That Makes Sense’, their strange legacy, and the gravitational pull of Perth
I don’t think I’m alone when I say Spacey Jane were the band of our youth. Not in a sweeping, capital-B Big way — not like Nirvana or Arctic Monkeys were for other generations. But in the way their songs quietly crept into your bloodstream. You didn’t even realise it was happening until one day you were half-drunk on a lawn somewhere, shouting the lyrics to Booster Seat with people you barely knew, but suddenly understood.
We all remember where we were when we first heard that song. I was sitting in the half-shade of a friend’s garage on a blistering Perth afternoon, beer sweating in my hand, Triple J murmuring from a half-dead speaker. I remember the moment. I remember the heat.
And I remember 2020’s Hottest 100 — Spacey Jane on the brink of the number one spot, beaten by Heat Waves. Everyone at the party let out a collective groan, but secretly, we kind of liked that they didn’t win. It made them feel more ours.
They’ve become a strange kind of anchor. If, like me, you’ve left WA, Spacey Jane is the band you put on when you’re feeling untethered — the one you play when the homesickness is more of a dull ache than a crisis. Their music is a doorway, a reminder of how it felt to stand under a UV-bleached sky and believe you might still have time to figure it all out.
But if you’re from Perth — really from Perth — it’s different. The connection’s messier. More real. You probably saw them at a house party, or knew someone who once dated the drummer, or caught them at Mojos before they had songs on Spotify. Maybe you bumped into them at the servo on South Street. That’s how Perth works — everybody’s at least two degrees from everyone else.
When I sat down to speak with Caleb Harper and Ashton Le Cornu, they weren’t here. Caleb’s in LA. Ashton’s in Melbourne. Neither particularly happy about that. I, however, was back in Fremantle. The town that pretends it’s changed, but really hasn’t. Fitting, really.
“It is apt,” Caleb says when I tell him where I am. “Every time I come to Freo I think, why did I leave?” Ashton adds.
This tension — between leaving and staying, between anonymity and legacy — is tangled through their new record, If That Makes Sense. Following Here Comes Everybody was never going to be easy. The pandemic baked that record into people’s bones. There was weight in the silence between its notes.
“There’s always pressure,” Caleb tells me. “Even if it’s subconscious. With Sunlight, I always say it’s like when a two-year-old hands you a drawing. You’re like, ‘Aw, nice.’ It doesn’t matter if it’s shit, because they made something. That was our first record. But now… now there’s expectation.”
Ashton nods. “There’s a legacy now. That’s the curse. Which is why LA’s been good. Nobody gives a shit about us. There’s freedom in that.”
Freedom, yes. But also a strange kind of displacement. Because Spacey Jane don’t sound like LA. They sound like Fremantle. They sound like the long drive down Stirling Highway. Like peeling your thighs off vinyl seats. Like the slow burn of coming undone at 22.
That’s the irony — I was interviewing them from the place they left, the place they still write about, whether they mean to or not. And whether they like it or not, Freo is in the DNA of their sound.
“It was all live back then,” Caleb says. “I saw this doco about AC/DC in Perth — how back in the ’60s, you had to be tight. No industry fluff. No hype. Just music.”
Spacey Jane cut their teeth here. Not in studios, not with producers — but on grimy stages, playing two or three shows a weekend, dragging their gear through back alleys and into Ubers. “We didn’t record anything for ages. You just played. And that’s what Perth gives you — a vacuum. No pressure. No labels watching. Just space to do whatever the fuck you want.”
It’s not like that in LA. The new record was born in studios that buzzed with expectation. There, the arts aren’t an afterthought, they’re actually the economy.
“In Perth, people do art on the side. In LA, it’s their job,” Ashton says. “It levels you. You walk in with a bit of ego and it gets stripped quick.”
Caleb laughs. “Yeah, I got knocked down a few pegs. And I needed it. There’s no life outside of music there. It’s obsessive. It makes you better — but also a bit insane.”
Some of the record’s best songs were born in what Caleb calls “songwriting speed dating.” You’re thrown into a room with a stranger. You have a day. You leave with a track — or you don’t.
“You chat for an hour — about your life, your trauma, whatever — and then you write something. And you’ve got to be honest. Fast,” he says. “It’s wild. But kind of beautiful. Some of the best stuff on the album came out of four hours with someone I barely knew.”
There’s vulnerability in that. And also, a strange permission.
“I’ve learned to be okay with it,” Caleb says. “Like Ashton will sometimes look at me through the booth glass and go, ‘These lyrics are cooked.’ And I’m like, ‘It’s art, man. It’s allowed to be cooked.’”
The album title — If That Makes Sense — came from that very feeling.
“It became this accidental thread,” Caleb says. “All these thoughts, all these songs — two years of life and ideas. And it doesn’t always fit. It’s not clean. But that’s the point. I’m not asking for it to make sense. I’m just putting it out there.”
When asked about musical influences, the band dodges the question like most bands do. A little of this, a little of that. Caleb mentions The 1975. INXS. ICEHOUSE. Ashton name-drops Tom Petty. You can hear all of it, and none of it.
Soon, they’ll be back on the road — a proper tour, Australia and beyond. Seven shows at Freo Social, no less.
“I’ve got this app that maps every venue we’ve played,” Caleb says. “When you zoom out, there are dots everywhere — Europe, the US. But Perth? Perth’s just covered. It’s ridiculous.”
From backyard gigs in 2016 to here, wherever here is now, it’s clear they’ve changed. But not too much.
“Our lives are totally different,” Ashton says. “That era — playing Perth every weekend — it feels like a dream now. A far-off one. But at the same time… not really. Not completely.”
Spacey Jane’s new album, ‘If That Makes Sense’ is out now. It can be listened to here.
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