The Far Side of 50: Custard on working smarter, not harder
For indie rock band Custard, occasionally regrouping to play music is enough to whet the appetite after 30 years together.
The short version of the making of Custard’s eighth album goes like this: in March last year, the indie rock band flew from Sydney to Perth to play at a festival, and on a Saturday morning the quartet mooched into a Fremantle studio with a few rough sketches of ideas for chord progressions. Several hours later, the band walked out with more than half of the album tracked and safely saved on to a hard drive newly purchased from a nearby Officeworks before taking the stage that night. How did the musicians manage to work so fast from scratch?
“I suggested we book a studio just to see what would happen,” drummer and songwriter Glenn Thompson says. “Up until that point, none of us had been talking about making a new record. I thought, ‘What have we got to lose?’ So we went in there, recorded the beds for eight tracks, and I think we used six of them on the final album. Luckily, David had a good group of ideas in his mind — and obviously, we’re people who are all thinking about music along the way.”
The David in question is singer, songwriter and guitarist David McCormack, who recalls that impromptu WA studio session a little differently. “That’s the advantage of being oldies: old men can do that stuff,” he says. “Veterans can do that: we just sort of walked through. Younger bands would probably pay a bit more attention, and worry a bit more about what’s happening. But I think we’re confident enough to let it sound like what it sounds like.”
That confidence was earned through a run of five albums for the Brisbane-born band between 1992 and 1999, in a decade when alternative and indie rock dominated the Triple J airwaves, followed by a 16-year break from recordings — despite occasional gigs, such as reforming for an event celebrating Queensland’s 150th birthday in 2009 — that was eventually broken in 2015 with sixth album Come Back, All is Forgiven.
When asked to reflect on how their efficiency has changed since recording the band’s 1992 debut, Buttercup/Bedford, McCormack offers this summary. “Too many ideas; too long to explore the ideas — and now it’s very much the opposite,” he says. “It’s interesting comparing the first album: pretty uptight, pretty worried, thinking, ‘Have we got a career in music? Will this make or break us?’ And this album’s definitely like: ‘Nah, we don’t have a career in music! We don’t care!’ I love it; I love playing, and it’s so much fun, probably because we don’t do it as much as we used to.”
As for where the quartet — completed by bassist Paul Medew and guitarist Matthew Strong — sits within the rest of his life: “It wouldn’t be a massive piece of the David McCormack life pie,” he says. “It would be a small little sliver; not much, just a little morsel. You know those crispy biscuits you have with cheese in fancy restaurants? That sort of size; just a little something to whet the appetite. And I think that’s why we all like it, because we’ve all got different lives going on, and we’re all on the far side of 50. It would be an unusual experience for us to be doing this full time. I don’t think there’s the demand there for us to do it much more than what we do.”
Reflecting on the band’s five-album run in the 1990s, Thompson says: “We’re in a situation now where we can be more offhand because we haven’t got people to please. We used to come out through a big record company that thought they were going to make money out of us, and we had a manager, and we were trying to please these people. Trying to be popular. Trying to be good.” And now? “It’s not our career; it’s not our main goal to be a big, successful Aussie band,” says Thompson. “We’re quite happy with just making music that we really enjoy, and we have a group of people that like listening to our music and that’s fabulous, and hopefully they’ll enjoy this new album, too. There’s a niche that I think we’re all happy and comfortable in.”
On returning to Sydney after the successful Fremantle studio session, McCormack and Thompson tinkered with the tracks in their home studios while also coming up with a few new ones. It pleases McCormack that the upcoming album, Respect All Lifeforms, splits the songwriting credits with bandmates Medew and Thompson, who contribute two songs each to the 11-track set.
“From a listener’s point of view, with bands, two or three songwriters on an album are much more interesting than just the one,” he says. “I think what makes it so enjoyable is there’s no one dictating what to do or what to play; as soon as you start doing that, you might as well do a solo album and play it all yourself. The older I get, I’m much more into being surprised and seeing what other people come up with. I know exactly what I’m going to do; it’s boring. I want to know what Paul and Glenn and Matthew are going to do. How the hell are they going to play this song? That’s what excites me.”
Uniquely among his bandmates, McCormack works as a part-time voice actor on one of the most popular Australian television shows: in the children’s cartoon Bluey, he is Bandit, Bluey’s dad. Respect All Lifeforms marks the first time Custard has released new music since Bluey began airing on ABC Kids in October 2018, where it has since attracted more than 200 million views on iview.
“Last week, I think we finished my parts on series two,” he says in late April. “Once I’ve finished doing my voice, they’ve still got something like 23 weeks of work to go before the episode comes out, which is amazing. So Bluey is intense for that brief period of time and then it disappears, like the Custard stuff: there’s brief flutterings of activity, and then lots of periods of nothing much happening.”
The release of album No 8 isn’t a cunning attempt to capitalise on the cartoon’s popularity and drag a few new listeners over to his musical projects, though, as the songwriter is happy for those two Venn diagrams to contain few overlaps.
“Unfortunately, we’ve never really had a cunning marketing plan,” says McCormack. “But I think the Bluey audience is perplexed why the singer in this band sounds like the cartoon dog on TV. I’m assuming that a large percentage of the Bluey fans have no idea of any of the Custard 90s oeuvre, or these most recent couple of albums. I think it’ll lead to some confusion — but hopefully, some enjoyment.”
Respect All Lifeforms is out on Friday, May 22, via ABC Music.