Camp Cope: Running With The Hurricane

- The time is seemingly ripe for a revival of Redgum’s cold war anthem Running With The Hurricane, with its lines about “thunder in the distance” and “fire in the Ukraine”. Camp Cope would presumably be as good a candidate as any to do it, given their reputation for mixing singalong choruses with outspoken politics, not to mention that singer and songwriter Georgia Maq possesses the physical DNA and quite possibly the publishing royalties of original songwriter and father Hugh McDonald.

It turns out that though Camp Cope’s new album takes its title from that Redgum song, it is very different in tone. Running With The Hurricane is full of slow ballads and lyrical explorations of relationship struggles and personal growth.

If the lyrics are any indication, it has been a tumultuous few years for Georgia since Camp Cope released How To Make Friends and Socialise in 2018. “If this is the bottom I’ll show you around…” sings the title track, “there’s no other way to go, the only way is up”. Opening track Caroline says “I’ve come to realise I’ve been looking the wrong way my whole life”.

Her own personal relationship history got a public airing during that time as part of the ongoing reckoning with exploitative and abusive relationships in the music industry. So you could forgive her for being a bit more withdrawn lyrically, but instead Running With The Hurricane is even more glaringly self-exposed.

Most of the elements that made Camp Cope one of the biggest rock bands in the country are still evident. Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich’s melodic bass playing is a joy to listen to, fully earning the “lead bass” credit she gets in the band’s bio. The singles show they haven’t lost their ability to write a big catchy chorus.

But one thing that does seem to have gone missing is Georgia Maq flexing her ability to comment on the wider world, a skill she has shown in the past to sing what so many feel. Even on the song titled The Screaming Planet, environmental issues are given the briefest nod but mostly as background for Georgia’s personal struggles of anxiety and belonging. In that way at least it does seem in line with the zeitgeist - like when those folkies in Redgum picked up synthesizers to sing about nuclear destruction 35 years ago.

It’s maybe beside the point to compare this to the other Running With The Hurricane, but it does seem to bring some interesting insights. Then Redgum sang about world leaders and opposing great powers, but the song was fundamentally about everyday people organising together, with references to blockade campaigns and “voting in the open streets if power is blocked at the ballot box”.

In 2022, warnings of hurricanes are a very literal threat, but in pop culture disaster is so often a metaphor for internal struggles. Symptomatic maybe of a culture that gets more individualised and more inward-focussed with every social media selfie. Hear it in the closing coda of this album, a call for struggle that says simply “You can change and so can I”.

War between great powers is back, environmental crisis have never left us, and today we are forced to also battle the mental health epidemic which has made collective organising to change the wider world seem like something impossible or a relic of another time. Pop culture is still there to reflect our feelings and desires, but can it be a conduit for wider change? It’s a lot to ask, but there are remnants here and there that remind us it’s possible to aim for more than eternally running with the hurricane.

- Andy Paine.
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