Georgia Maq on life after Camp Cope: ‘No matter how far I run away, I'm still exactly who I am'

The Guardian

6 days ago

This isn't a story about a mouthy broad who moved to California and got gentle. But it's not not that either.
The musician Georgia Maq moved from Melbourne to Los Angeles two years ago, after saying goodbye to her band, Camp Cope, and working as a nurse for two years during the pandemic. The move was prompted as much by television ('I watched The L Word and thought, I want to live in Hollywood') as an urgent need to not spend her entire life in the place she was born: 'I was sick of who I was, really. I wanted a different life for myself.'
When I ask how she describes to her new friends in the US about what her time in the Australian music industry was like, she tells me: 'I say, I played in a band for eight years. We were an all-girl band and people never let us forget it.'
I'm speaking to Maq over Zoom, as she sits in her car. She has had an especially charged day, after fielding a phone call from a film director who's hoping to cast her in a 'chaotic and insane' role in a freaky new movie. 'Am I in my actor era?' she deadpans. It would be perfectly cliche for the transplant punk to land in LA and suddenly become a film star.
Sometimes, Maq feels as if she's 'too emotional' for LA. The previous day she released the glittering, tender single Slightly Below the Middle from her upcoming EP, God's Favourite, and called her Camp Cope bandmates, Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich and Sarah Thompson. They discussed Hellmrich's upcoming book and the vinyl release of their final show together, at Sydney Opera House in 2023. The call 'brought out a bunch of emotions because it's like, no matter how far I run away, I'm still exactly who I am, and Kelly and Thomo are such a big reminder of who I am and who I was back then,' Maq says.
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The three of them shared beds and vans and cramped green rooms and big stages for nearly a decade. The mirror they represent can be painful for Maq to look at: 'We have good friendships, but it's not as intense as it was back then. I wasn't always the best person to be in a band with. And sometimes I get reminded of that when it's just us three.'
For so long, she didn't know what her music was if it was not complemented by Hellmrich's bass and Thomo's drumbeat. She experimented with electro-pop production on her 2019 solo record Pleaser but since then she has found a comfortable and fertile space to play in country pop. 'I'm a creature of comfort and I love a country songwriter,' she says, admitting she's 'obsessed' with the controversial but impossibly popular Zach Bryan, a country star who was accused of emotional abuse by an ex-girlfriend last year (Bryan has never responded to or denied the allegations). The irony isn't lost on Maq: 'I literally wrote The Face of God,' she scoffs, namechecking the Camp Cope song about how quickly people can write off abuse allegations if they're levelled at a guy who makes good songs.
Throughout her career, being Georgia Maq has often meant being a vector for people's biggest emotions. She used the platform she had as the frontperson of a popular band to advocate for change – calling for festivals she played to book more female artists, campaigning for safer crowds and namechecking abusive men in the industry – and was often criticised, by Australia's predictable 'shut up and sing' crowds, by bookers claiming festival lineups were meritocracies, by people in positions of power who'd rather see a troublemaker booted out than have the focus pulled on their bad behaviour. 'The music industry … taught me that I needed to fight,' Maq proclaimed in her keynote speech at the 2023 Bigsound conference. 'I am proud that dangerous men in the music industry still warn each other about me.'
'I was so abrasive and reactive, and I had so much pressure on me all the time,' Maq says now. That period of her life cemented, for many people, an immovable public-facing version of herself. 'I didn't really have time to think. I was just dumb and I was angry and now … I'm not that.'
For years, she felt the expectation on her and the band was to make statements more than music. 'That was really exhausting,' she says. Now, with time and a fresh start, she's finding ways to let the light in. God's Favourite, as the title suggests, is preoccupied with ideas and images of faith, repentance, sin and salvation, all set against the backdrop of swiping on dating apps, pretending you can be chill and have casual sex – then remembering, in fact, you're too much of a romantic.
'The song Citronella feels like 11am the morning after an emotional night where you're just like, 'What the fuck am I doing? I can't keep doing this because it'll never make me happy,'' she says. 'I just put so much feeling behind everything. I can't do a regular chill thing with someone. I'm not regular and chill. I'm insane.'
Slightly Below the Middle sees Maq channelling a conversation with the devil, who invokes her late father, Hugh McDonald, who was a musician in the famed band Redgum. Maq was baptised in the Greek Orthodox church, but her parents didn't instil its belief systems in her or her siblings. Still, something crept in along the way: she shows me the cross around her neck and moves the camera to capture the rosary beads hanging from her rear-view mirror. Sometimes she finds herself visiting Greek Orthodox churches in LA. 'There's a lot of standing up and sitting down and everything's in Greek. So I have no idea what anyone's saying,' she says – but when she goes, she feels connected to her late grandmother, who came to Australia alone at 13 from Ithaca. 'She never went to school or anything. She was just kind of nuts. But she really loved religion. [Going to church] is kind of my way to honour her. I go to be reminded of who I am, I guess.'
The biggest story of forgiveness might be the one she's writing for herself. She wonders aloud if maybe she's in her 'redemption arc'. 'But maybe I've made that all up in my head,' she adds. 'Maybe people don't think I'm evil. I don't think I'm evil, but I feel like I want people to know that I've changed.'
Georgia Maq's EP God's Favourite is out 4 September. Her single Pay Per View is out now.
Each month we ask our headline act to share the songs that have accompanied them through love, life, lust and death.
What was the best year for music, and what five songs prove it?
2025, and my EP God's Favourite
What's one song you wish you didn't write?
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The Face of God by Camp Cope
What is the last song you sang in the shower?
Afterlife by Alex G
What's a song you can never listen to again?
Song for You by the Smith Street Band
What classic song should be stripped of its title?
Imagine by John Lennon
What is a song you loved as a teenager?
Common People by Pulp
What is the first album you bought?
Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park
What song do you want played at your funeral?
All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem
What is the best song to have sex to?
We by Mac Miller