Everyone’s Damn Fine Favourite Pop Band Custard Are On Tour…

Custard are back in town at The Gov in celebration of their ninth studio album Suburban Curtains with The Fauves and The Stress Of Leisure. Having formed in Brisbane in 1990, Custard released five albums over the following decade (Buttercup/Bedford, Wahooti Fandango, Wisenheimer, We Have the Technology and Loverama). The band developed a cult following, playing countless shows around the country and touring overseas, as well as producing a parade of memorable singles, several of which became entrenched in Australian pop music history. Apartment polled higher than any other local artist in triple j’s Hottest 100 in 1995, with Girls Like That (Don’t Go For Guys Like Us) coming in at #3 in the 1998 vote, before the group disbanded in 1999. No reason was given or research conducted.

Since reforming, the band has released four albums, Come Back All is Forgiven (2015), The Common Touch (2017), The Band Live In The Basement (2018), and eight album Respect All Lifeforms (2020) showed they’re just a damn fine pop band. Dave McCormack speaks to Hi Fi Way about all things Custard.

Congratulations on the new, a double album seems like a mighty ambitious undertaking?
Well, I was talking to someone the other day. We haven’t put an album out for a couple of years. As you get older, time just flies! It’s ridiculous.

Was it a case of too many good songs and too hard to work out which ones to leave out?
I’ll be honest with you. I just thought none of us are getting any younger. How many more albums are we actually going to get to do? So, it was sort of a little bit of a thing of like, hey, let’s put out a double album. That’s what I kept saying to Glenn, Matthew and Paul, okay, come on. How many songs do you need on double album. Okay, let’s get that many.

Did the songs really come really, really quickly to you guys, or did you have to block out a certain amount of time to commit to writing songs?
For me, it’s normally deadline driven and when Glenn books some studio time down in Hobart, it was at Launceston, wherever Mona is, I don’t know. He booked the time and that really motivated me to come up with songs and stuff. If I don’t have a deadline, I very rarely write songs. I write for a project and then that’s it. So, it came pretty quick for me and it’s great because on this album there’s a lot of diversity with more than one songwriter contributing. I love it.

Were a lot of these ideas kicking around for a while?
A couple of the songs are old songs that I wrote decades ago, to be honest and for whatever reason I sort of forgotten about them and presented them to the band. Everyone seemed to respond pretty positively to them. One thing that’s different, normally what we do is go into the studio and learn the songs in the studio. Whereas this time, we thought it was a good idea just to get together at Glenn’s house a couple of weeks before recording and just sit round with acoustic guitars and write out the chord charts for everyone’s songs and not really arrange them. We made sure everyone knew where the verse was and where the chorus was. Whereas the album before this, Respect All Life Forms, we literally hadn’t heard each other’s songs until the red light was recording us in the studio, which was exciting as well. That’s a way to keep you on your toes

There’s a subtle sound shift with this album, was that deliberate?
Respect All Life Forms was very, air quotes “Custardie”. It was us having a great time, but doing pretty much what you would imagine we would be doing. There’s elements of that on this album. There’s some other stuff I did with a guy who features on a couple of songs, Michael Lira, he’s a fantastic multi-instrumentalist composer. We collaborated on a couple of songs. He brought in more sort of filmic, cinematic tensions to it, orchestral elements, which was really good.

Did it evolve and change a little bit in the studio, or did you pretty much have the ideas of how you wanted it to sound?
The bare bones were pretty much how we wanted it and because we recorded at this studio at Mona in Tassie, it was a tape studio and there’s only eight tracks on the tape. We were really limited in how many elements we could record at one time because often when you go into a studio and you’re going to have like eight microphones on the snare, but we were really limited. We had a couple of drum mics, guitar amps and bass and that was about it. It was a really relatively painless getting the bare bones of the songs down. The bit I like is when you take that away and I get to figure out what the song, what the vocals are going to be, that’s my favourite bit. I just do it at home on my little computer and it’s so good. See, back in the old days, you would have to go in a big studio and I’d feel really self-conscious standing in front of everyone singing through the soundproof window into the control room. Yeah, I hated that. But now no one can see me, so I can just try any old idea, and I don’t have to worry about it.

Does this set a bit of a blueprint for the next album?
Definitely, definitely. I love it! It’s like a fishing expedition for lyrics. Sometimes I’ve got a vague idea and other times I just start singing phonetic, like just whatever mumbo jumbo. It’s always amazing to me how somehow a lyric can sort of rise to the surface out of that absolute crap that I’m singing.

It definitely seems to be like a real different vibe for Custard these days?
Yeah, well you’ve hit the nail on the head a hundred percent because we only see each other a couple of times for gigs or the odd recording or whatever. When I see everyone, the other members, it’s with genuine friendship and it’s like, whoa, how you doing? When we catch up and some of the songs we’ve been playing since the early nineties, so it’s genuinely good fun and there’s no pressure. God, there’s no pressure on us to do anything.

That’s good not to have that pressure these days?
We don’t have to have any airplay of any kind, we don’t have to have to sell records. It’s just a happy little diversion that we get to do every year or so. But having said that, I’m looking forward to doing a bunch of shows at the end of the year, so I’m looking forward to that. It’s only good after about halfway through the run of shows because everyone knows what they’re doing, but we’re not bored of it yet, which is good.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Custard with The Fauves and The Stress Of Leisure on the following dates…