A photo of a childhood injury that saw you get rushed to hospital seems an odd choice for an album cover.
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But that’s just what Melbourne trio Camp Cope opted for when it came to the cover art for their critically-lauded debut album.
The cover features a kid with a beaming smile, despite sitting on a hospital bed swathed in bandages and with blood on her pillow.
Bassplayer Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich says the image reflects the ethos behind the band name – that of coping, of making the best of a bad situation.
The smiling girl in question is Camp Cope’s singer and guitarist Georgia Maq.
“It’s her as a little child, bandaged up and in hospital and there’s blood everywhere, but she’s happy as anything, completely getting through,” says Hellmrich.
“So it’s kind of that metaphor for taking things as they come and trying to bring out a positive from it.
“She was in Greece where her family’s from, and she was two or three and running around with this big vase and she fell on it and sliced her whole body up.
“They had to go the hospital and the doctor on the island couldn’t do anything so they had to get on a boat. So it was this big saga - she’s still got scars from it.
“But she looks happy as anything on the cover.”
She’s probably still happy as anything – as are bandmates Hellmrich and drummer Sarah Thompson – given the band’s rapid rise over the last year and a bit.
The trio formed in a Melbourne backyard a year ago to flesh out the songs Maq had been performing solo.
Since then, they’ve racked up a stack of accolades, including indie music magazines and websites here, there and everywhere tagging their self-titled album as one of the best of the year.
None of which was on the trio’s mind when they formed up in that Melbourne backyard.
“When we were doing our first practice we were terrified,” Hellmrich says.
“I was asking all my flatmates, ‘is this terrible? Are we awful? Do we sound okay?’
“When we played our first show we were honestly all terrified. ‘What if everyone laughs at us? What if we’re awful?’ We had no idea.
“Everything positive that has happened to us, we’re straight on the phone - if we’re not right next to each other - lying on the floor almost crying with happiness.
“It’s all come as such a surprise.”
The band likely got a big wake-up call at the album launch at the John Curtin Hotel in Melbourne – that would have been the day they truly realised they didn’t sound awful.
“The Curtin sold out and we got up there and everyone knew all the words to the songs and it was amazing,” Hellmrich says.
“The album had just come out and people had had the opportunity to listen to it.
“To hear them singing, it was totally unexpected that people had listened to it and connected with it so much that they were singing it back.
“We all looked at each other like ‘when did this happen?’.”
Though the bandmates certainly don’t have their head in the clouds; having to turn up for day jobs tends to do that. Hellmrich works in a preschool, Thompson at the band’s label Poison City Records and Maq works at a cafe and a bar.
Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams is the first single from the album and deals with conspiracy theories and harassment of women.
“Georgia is a huge conspiracy theorist,” Hellmrich admits.
“If you sit down and talk to her about any sort of conspiracy theory you’ll be stuck there for about two hours.
“That song’s about street harassment and gun laws and also conspiracy theories that Georgia believes in. It’s all her train of thought, what goes on in her head, and she’s expressing that as it goes through the song.
“So that is 100 per cent her beliefs.”
Something else in the band’s beliefs is the idea that women can watch their shows from the front row.
Hellmrich says they make a point of ensuring women can come up to the front and not have to hang back. Sometimes they take the stage and there's already a row of women looking up at them, other times they have to call them forward.
“We really want to create that message that we’re women up there and we’re taking care of the women in the audience as well,” Hellmrich says.
Camp Cope and US band Cayetana play at Rad Bar in Wollongong on Tuesday night.
