Custard: ‘There's Absolutely No Pressure Or Interest In Doing Anything Except For Our Own Enjoyment’

Brisbane indie rock four-piece Custard were omnipresent on the thriving Aussie scene during the ‘90s, the distinctively quirky and hook-laden tunes that set them apart from the pack augmented by a carefree charisma and a live show virtually guaranteed to put a smile on the dourest of dials.

When they initially pulled up stumps in 1999, they had five albums under their collective belts, and since reforming in 2009 - playing alongside Powderfinger and other local luminaries at a bash celebrating Queensland’s 150th birthday - they’ve only played live sporadically, but have still managed to add four more routinely excellent albums to that growing canon.

Their most recent opus - the 21-song double-album Suburban Curtains - is a bona-fide boon for long-term Custard fans, a long and sprawling collection of songs rife with the band’s familiar energy and good-time vibes.

Their vintage may be betrayed by lyrics touching upon topics such as heart attacks, online banking, vegetarian cuisine and sunscreen, but the musical bed and arrangements are undeniably Custard and they still manage to defiantly sound like no one else but them.

One change that has happened organically - and no doubt contributed to the vast pool of new songs - is that the creative load is now being shared more equally amongst the band.

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While songwriting was previously the chief domain of frontman Dave McCormack - with drummer Glenn Thompson writing and delivering a couple of cool tunes each record - this time around, it’s split more or less evenly between the pair, with bassist Paul Medew now the one throwing in a couple of strong numbers to mix things up.

“I’m really happy to have another record coming out,” McCormack smiles. “You're never really guaranteed that you're going to do another one. Situations can change, and I just thought with this, I think we all did, ‘Let's just put everything out because who knows when you’ll get the opportunity to do it again’.

“As you get older, you just never know how many more times you're gonna get to do it, so that's why I think there's 21 songs on it. Plus, I’m just a bit excited to put out a double vinyl record - like when you were young, you had The Beatles’ White Album and stuff - so it was, like, ‘Yeah, cool! Let's put it out!’”

McCormack admits being delighted that his bandmates brought heaps of songs to the table for Suburban Curtains.

“Yeah, love it,” he says without hesitation. “Love it. Love it. It's so much better. It's so much better for me because I get to enjoy their songs, and it's so much better for the audience, I think, to have different voices and different approaches.

“I feel like I'm really happy with all the songs that I've got on there, but sometimes you just can't help but feel, ‘Oh man, I think I've done this song before. I think I'm doing [1999 single] The New Matthew again, hang on a second’. I guess with time comes a certain style, which is to be expected, right? After doing so many songs, they can't all be original.

“Some of these songs of mine on this were kicking around for like 20 years, and I just forgot about ‘em. Like Someday, I wrote with Serena Ryder in about 2004, and I just completely forgot about it. You just put stuff on the back burner. There's another one called Getting Over You that I reckon I wrote in the 90s, and it just never seemed like the right time to record it until now.

“I think most of my other songs were written when Glenn said that we should record in November. And so I was like, ‘Okay, great’. I’m pretty driven deadline-wise sometimes. So, if there's the studio booked, I get quite motivated to sort of come up with songs.

“And it's always so much fun having them played by Glenn and Paul and Matthew [Strong - guitar] anyway. I'm pretty lucky to have such a group of old friends who still really get on well, and I love everything they play.

“I reckon when I was younger… you know, when you're young, you think you know everything; I think I had enough ego to try and tell people what to play. But now, I would never dream of doing that. Whatever Matthew, Paul and Glenn play, I'm always like, ‘Man, that's so much better than anything I could have thought of doing’.”

While McCormack’s surfeit of songs was driven by looming deadlines, Thompson’s increased songwriting presence was more to do with a recent sea-change.

“I think it's to do with the move to the beach,” he smiles. “I moved from Sydney down to the coast at a place called Culburra Beach a while back, and I’ve just written a heap of songs since I moved here.

“Usually, I've only got like two or three that I bring to a record, and normally only two get on, but I just had a lot more songs because I suppose I've got a bit more time down here. You know, I don't know as many people, so I'm not doing as much. It's just been a good songwriting period for me.”

These days, Thompson is the driving force behind the band, organising the sessions for Suburban Curtains - which took place down in Hobart at MoNA’s Frying Pan Studios, using the original mixing desk from Abbey Road Studios in London - and then mixing the album to completion once each songwriter finished overdubs on their respective contributions.

“I didn't really expect all the songs were gonna work out the way they did, but they did,” he recalls. “You think you're gonna call a few but they they all turned out good enough to make the record, hence it being so long.

“Quite often when making an album, we just kind of rock up - there might be a couple of sessions where you know someone visits someone else's house and teaches them a couple of songs - but normally we just rock up at the studio and go for it.

“But this time once we’d booked the studio I invited everyone down here to my place at the beach and we just said, ‘Let's just get four acoustic guitars and we'll just teach each other what we've got and see where it lands’.

“And it was a big bunch of songs that everyone had going, and we just played through the songs for a day and wrote them all down and did a quick little recording on the iPhone so we had something to listen to when we went back home.

“And then we had two or three days - I think it was only two days in the studio - and we just recorded them. Easy as that.”

When it came to mixing Suburban Curtains, Thompson explained that it was such a massive task that he had just decided to forge his way through it.

“You just follow the song, but sonic-wise, it was I'm always trying to get things better than last time,” he ponders. “But this time, I kind of mixed in the same way that we record, in that I didn't try to double-think myself too much.

“Sometimes you're mixing, and you come back, and you listen the next day, and you go, ‘Oh, this is good, but I could probably make it better, and I could do this and that’. And sometimes you just think, ‘You know what, I'm pretty sure I liked it better earlier on’, but I'm not one of those mixers that saves a million versions, so I just think, ‘Oh, well’.

“So I decided that I'd just do it quickly, as quick as I could, and not worry too much about anything unless it really bothered me, just to try and keep it as fresh as possible. But also, I wanted it to be fresh and punchy and kind of exciting to listen to. They were the things I kept thinking about while I was doing it.”

Custard have self-produced all four albums of the second phase—last working with an outside producer when Magoo helmed Loverama in the late '90s—but Thompson admits he could see a time when they revert to the old ways.

“I do think about that sometimes,” he tells. “We like to record in different places, and that helps. I think that's a good thing because it gives you a different feel on the day when you're recording, and especially going to Hobart was great because we're all away from our homes, and it gives you that kind of gang vibe again. That's good.

“But I do often think maybe it'd be a good idea for us one day to just say to somebody, ‘Look, do you want to record us? And do you want to do the whole job?’ And we'll just be the musos again like we used to be. And I think maybe, hopefully, we'll do that again one day.

“But I suppose I'm a bit selfish because I love mixing now. Now that I've spent the last 20 years teaching myself how to do it, I just love it.”

Even when they’re stretching out and experimenting with sounds and arrangements on Suburban Curtains the results always sound like a Custard song, a fact McCormack puts solely to their unique chemistry.

“It's what happens when the four of us play,” he shrugs. “Yeah, I guess it's how we write songs and how we play songs. I can always know it's a Glenn Thompson drum part, a Matt Strong lead guitar line, and a Paul Medew bass line. You just know it. And we’ve been doing this since 1990 - 34 years! - so we're not trying to reinvent the wheel. I guess it's just like a really well-worn boot: when you put it on, you know what you're going to get.

“And like I said before, Glenn’s got a particular way of drumming, Paul's got a particular way of playing bass, Matthew's definitely got his own style of playing the guitar. Like, he can just sort of carve through and come up with this guitar part that most other people wouldn't have the skill to come up with. He's just a bit of a natural talent, that Matthew Strong, like a secret weapon.

“And he's never into doing all the guitar histrionics; he's honed his skill down into something that's really effective and really memorable and just cuts through, and it just nails the vibe.

“There's people who’ll eye roll and go, ‘Oh no, another Custard album’. But other people go, ‘Oh cool, it's another Custard album’. You know, it's pretty much like all our albums. I probably shouldn't say that; I'm just gonna talk it up. It's like all our albums, but there's more of it.”

Thompson agrees that the band’s sound is unique in a way that’s completely uncontrived and natural.

“It's a funny thing: when we first kind of got back together - way back in 2009 when we reformed again - we all jumped into a practice room and started playing, and the first half hour was just terrible,” he smiles. “But then it just all kind of fell back into place because we hadn't played for ten years, and I personally was just stunned.

“I just said, ‘This is amazing. This just sounds like Custard!’ Because I’d played in different bands and David had played in different bands, Paul had played in different bands, Matthew had - we all had, and they sound nothing like Custard - but it's just the combination of us being together, and whatever we do, it just sounds that way.”

Another factor which has contributed to the strength of Custard’s recorded content during this rich second phase is that there’s no longer any internal pressures of expectation, allowing them to make the music they want to make together without need for compromise.

“The only filter we'd have on it would be our taste, I guess,” McCormack ponders. “But yeah, there's absolutely no pressure or interest in doing anything except for our own enjoyment, which is great fun. [It's] probably quite selfish, but I think for guys in their mid-fifties, we can be selfish. We'll sell the same amount of records that we normally sell and probably no more and no less, so it's a pretty good position to be in.

“I would probably enjoy listening to the more recent records than the older records. The older records seem like just another world to me. You know, record companies, triple j, Recovery, tours, record producers - none of that really comes into play anymore. It's just a bunch of old friends playing on each other's songs and performing them as best we can.”

“There's no pressure at all anymore,” Thompson agrees. "We used to try and please everyone all the time, you're really like, ‘Oh yeah, we'll do that, oh we'll do this’, or, ‘What do you want from us?’ Because back then, this was all we did, and we were trying to be successful.

“But now we've all got our own lives and it's kind of a take it or leave it thing, although we love it, we really enjoy it. Sometimes it's like getting back together with your mates and going on a bit of a holiday when we go on tour now. It's just like, ‘Hey, what have you been up to lately?’ I feel totally lucky that we're still allowed to do it, actually. There's enough people [who] come to see us that it can pay for it, and we're really lucky.”

Speaking of tours, it’s now time for an extended national run supporting Suburban Curtains, and Custard are being joined by two excellent contemporaries touting strong new albums of their own - The Fauves with Tropical Strength and The Stress Of Leisure with It Goes Away With The Heat - making for a live triple-threat of epic proportions.

“It's going to be incredible,” McCormack enthuses. "All credit to our business guru Paul Curtis, he’s just a hard-working dude who gets things happening. Without Glenn and Paul Curtis, we would do nothing, but Paul's great at getting it all organised and booking the shows. I'm looking forward to it with The Fauves and The Stresses; it’s gonna be a blast. It’s two of my favourite bands.

“I still love playing live and busting out the old stuff - it's like [it’s] from a different universe, but I still relate to it. It's stuff that we've been playing for so long. We're not going to just play new stuff; if people spend their hard-earned money, they want to come and see some of the oldies.

“But I enjoy playing the [old] songs and I enjoy the reactions people have to the songs as well, they've got so many memories of them. And now we get people coming along with their kids, which is just amazing, especially with all the Bluey stuff, because the Bluey stuff seems to have just exposed our music to so many more people.”

In case you’ve been living under a rock in recent years, McCormack has found global recognition voicing Bandit in the much-loved animated kids show Bluey, a fame which is now trickling down into the Custard world as well.

“Yeah, what a strange life twist,” he grins. “I can take little credit; there’s many other people that make it, and my contribution is so tiny. I just did a little voice here and there, and then they have to animate it and come up with the stories.

“But who would have thought in the 90s, going through the Devo section at Skinny's Records, that I'd be popular in America and stuff?

“On platforms like iTunes and Spotify, you can log in and see where your music's played, and our music's played and streamed more in the US now than it is in Australia, which is amazing.

“We all know that streaming's absolutely no money, but it's just that I got a bit of a kick out of the fact that, for the first time ever, we're sort of recognised in America. You can’t make this stuff up.”

Custard will tour Australia in November and December - find tickets here. The new album, Suburban Curtains, is out now - check it out here.