The Brag

Custard
Greasing The Wheels
By Max Easton
Remember Custard? ‘Girls Like That’? ‘Apartment’? ‘Music Is Crap’? If you don’t, you should be feeling guilty – because their excitable frontman Dave McCormack certainly hasn’t forgotten about you. After twelve years apart, the Brisbane quirk-rock staples are returning to Sydney for the first time since they spent the late 1990s reigning over Recovery, flooding the triple j airwaves, and plastering the pages of Juice magazine. Down the phone from his Sydney home, McCormack reminisces about the warm reception Custard always received in this city, admitting that he may have succumbed to the power of hindsight.

“You can’t help but feel a bit nostalgic,” McCormack says of the years since Custard went their separate ways, “but you remember the good bits, don’t you? You forget the endless hours in a van, the poorly-attended shows, all the fights within the band… You just think, ‘Oh! It was so much fun!’ We got together a couple of weeks ago to have a little practice and it was lovely to see everybody, we got along really well. There’s a lot of water under the bridge.”

It may have been tension and unease which tore the band apart at the end of the century, but it was little more than a ‘Why not?’ which brought them back together. McCormack admits that a comeback has been teasing the band for a number of years now; he blames inertia for the reformation’s delay. “It takes a lot of energy to get an old machine going,” he explains. “If you think of it as an old rusted tractor, it’s going to take a bit of work to get it initially running, but once the oil’s in there and it’s all happening, it’s sweet as. Now that we’ve put the machine back together, it all seems to be in perfect working order.

“It’s amazing the retention for lyrics the human brain has, actually,” he continues. “If you don’t think about it, it’s all just up there. I thought I was going to have to print out lyric sheets and be a real old man about it, but it’s sort of like a muscle memory in your brain; if you grease the wheels, it all just comes out like it used to.”

Custard are by no means the first of their contemporaries to hop back on the Australian tour circuit of late, with a swathe of ‘90s acts peppering their comeback shows across the nation’s festival calendars. But McCormack isn’t fazed at all by a suggestion that they’ll be facing the death knell of a “heritage act” tag, if Custard don’t get to putting out a new record. “I think we’re a heritage act already,” he smiles. “If you think about it, we haven’t played in Sydney or put a record out in twelve years – and if people are coming to a show to see twelve-year-old songs, well, I guess that’s the very definition of a heritage act. I’m happy to be one, we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel here; we’re just playing a few songs and having some good fun.
“In saying that, it probably would be a good idea to do some Custard recordings. The thing that I was pleasantly surprised about was that from the first rehearsal after ten years apart, we sounded pretty good. It was natural, and I guess it goes back to all those years of us playing together. I don’t think any of us are particularly good musicians or anything, but when we’re together, there’s a certain feeling and energy we get which is nice, that creates this little extra element,” he says. “And I’ll contradict myself now by saying ‘Hmmm, maybe we will do more recordings…’”

On the prospect of a new Custard record, McCormack confesses only to not having a plan – which may not be discounting the prospect but, as he explains, is in no way a come on. “Everyone asks if we think we’re going to do a new recording, and I can’t say ‘No’, because anything’s possible,” he admits. “So I say, ‘Oh maybe,’ and it comes across like we’ve got a plan to do a new recording, but we haven’t… I can’t discount it, but as soon as I say that, it sounds like I have a secret plan. But look, it won’t matter – you can put it in your article anyway, you can write ‘Custard definitely recording’.” (You heard it here first.)

Regardless of the fate of Custard’s return, there’s a special charm to a reformation show that can’t be found on an album tour; it’s an untainted chance to re-live some memories. As a one-off show (or two, in fact; their first night sold out), it becomes an event, and McCormack is serious – or as serious as Dave McCormack can be about anything – about preserving the sanctity of the Custard experience. “I’m a pretty big believer that if people go and see a band from a bygone era, they just want to hear the songs as they were, pretty much,” he explains. “You don’t want to hear a complete reinvention sort of thing… You want them to go, ‘Oh, that song! I like that song!’

“We’re in the business of making people happy – that’s why they come along, isn’t it? They want to come along and be happy, maybe catch up with some university or school friends who they haven’t seen since the last time Custard played, and say, ‘Oh, I’m married,’ or ‘Ah, I’m divorced’… It’s almost like a community service – we’re bringing people together!”

Where: The Standard, above Kinselas
When: Friday September 23 (sold out) / Saturday September 24 (on sale now)