Fellow Brisbanians The Go-Betweens were recently conferred with a bridge in their honour, but as Dave McCormack – frontman of reformed ’90s outfit Custard – tells JODY MACGREGOR, he’d be more than happy with a plaque in a suburban alleyway.

Brisbane’s Custard were a masterful band of pop craftsmen with an uncanny grasp of the two-minute-something single who seemed to have equal amounts of Devo, Pavement and, oddly, disco in their genetic makeup. They were also blessed with singer Dave McCormack, whose voice was innocent and boyish-sounding enough to get away with things that might ordinarily cause a fuss – from songs about speed labs to geeky dedications to Jim Henson and an infamous declaration that “music is crap”. There was a real playfulness to their live shows and appearances that made gigs and spots on shows like Recovery and Hey Hey It’s Saturday a joy to watch. Just mentioning them makes me feel nostalgic for the 1990s.

When Custard broke up under the pressure of touring, homesickness and one of those disastrous trips to the US that Australian bands specialise in, it was a bloody tragedy. Thank the rock gods that now, 10 years later, they will reform for the Powderfinger-curated Q150 show, celebrating 150 years since Queensland declared its independence from New South Wales, at the City Botanic Gardens on Thursday (December 10). With any luck, it won’t be a one-off.

Back in about 1998 or 1999 Custard were doing a tour with Regurgitator.
That’s right. That was our last tour, yes.

There were some small, rural areas that you played including the Mount Isa Civic Center and I know because I was there. It was one of my first gigs.
Oh, good on you. I remember that. It was the one and only time I’ve been to Mount Isa. We did Kalgoorlie as well. A whole lot of places; Cairns and Darwin. It’s the only time I’ve ever been to Darwin. Looking back now it seems strange that we finished because it was all going so well.

What’s it like playing those little towns and rural areas?
In the early Custard days we used to play semi-rural areas but never that remote a place. But it was great doing it with Regurgitator because Regurgitator were very popular and I think the Resin Dogs were on first, weren’t they, Jody?

Yes, they were.
It was great. We were sort of insulated in our cocoon. There would be 36 of us getting on a plane and then going to the gig. It was pretty much a roving Scout Den of people. We were insulated from anything really, so I don’t really remember much about Mount Isa. I guess it was 10 years ago, wasn’t it? You’ll forgive me for that. But it was great playing to an audience that we hadn’t played before. We played up at Airlie Beach and Cairns and Townsville and Rockhampton and Gladstone. It was great going there with a band like Regurgitator who had quite a following so there was always going to be people there. Since the demise of Custard I’ve done a couple of gigs around the place but it’s a different story. You’re playing to 50 people instead of 500 or 5000 or whatever the case may be. It was a nice time.

What did you get up to with a band like Regurgitator, and the Resin Dogs, on tour?
Oh, look, there was a bit of bonding but I can’t recall any major stints in jail or arrests or incidents or anything. As I say it was a travelling circus troupe vibe, a carnival vibe. We all knew each other and were all from Brisbane so we had a bit of history there. It was nice. I remember feeling very safe and warm.

What was it that made you get the band back together for this reunion show?
To be honest the four Custard members [McCormack, guitarist Matthew Strong, bassist Paul Medew and drummer Glenn Thompson] haven’t really been in a lot of contact for the last 10 years. We see each other individually, sporadically, but we don’t really hang out. Now and again people would ring up and say, “You wanna do it?” But when Powderfinger specifically asked us to do this 150-year thing I contacted the rest of the band and – we all came from Brisbane and it seemed like the right thing to do. It’s not really a financial consideration but it’s a nice big gig, it’s on a nice big stage, it’s minimal fuss for us so it’ll be quite fun. There’s a lot of songs I haven’t even listened to for 10 years, a lot of those Custard songs, so we had a practice a couple of weeks ago and we all got together in the room and I had a great time. We’ve had a few practices since then and it’s been very pleasant playing those old songs again.

Was it just that Bernard Fanning rang you up out of the blue and said, “Do you wanna play?”
It wasn’t Bernard, no. It was their manager and Ian Haug, the guitar player. They contacted me and I know those guys obviously from Brissie and we’ve done gigs together. At first I was, “Oh no, this isn’t going to happen”, for whatever reason but it seemed to be comparatively easy. Everyone seemed to be into the idea. Like I said, it’ll give our family and friends up in Brisbane one last time to see us again ’cause we haven’t played since 1999. I don’t know, I can’t put my finger on it. It just felt like a good thing to do.

And if the show goes well is there a possibility of any more Custard shows?
Yeah. Oh, for sure. Look, we’ve all thought about it privately and vaguely brought it up in conversation in the practice room. I think what we’re all heading towards is we’ll do this gig and see how it goes. Who knows what the future holds? But there’s definitely no plans for any other gigs at the moment. Part of me would like to think that the door would be open to do that but I think we’re all just looking at the 10th of December. Have fun, do the gig, play the old songs and see what the future holds.

I know some people down in Melbourne who would love to see Custard again.
As soon as it got announced I got emails and calls from people all over the place saying, “Is it a reunion tour? Do you wanna do this? Do you wanna do that?” I’ve had to politely decline all of those at this point. I keep going back to the vibe of the thing, but the vibe of the thing seems good to just do this one-off and then if something develops from there that’d be lovely, but if not we’ll be happy. We’re all doing our own musical things anyway. Maybe we’ll all have a horrible time, but I doubt it. I think we’ll all enjoy it. It’s funny, we thought, “We’ll do this song, that song, this song, that song.” And having not played them in a while … I found them quite tricky to re-learn. Some of them have got so many bits and it seems to do two bars of one thing and then three bars of another. We must have been very confused young men to write all those songs that complicated.

Is it very different to the way you write songs now, the way that you worked back then?
Maybe just because I’m more familiar with the songs that I’m writing now. Hearing these after a decade break it did surprise me, certain songs. But as soon as we got in the practice room it was nice. It was a nice feeling having everyone there.

Do you have anything special planned for the show?
No, no, nothing special. It’s just gonna be us four playing songs from every album from ’91 to ’98 or whenever. All our hits will be there, obviously. There’s no new material. It’ll be the greatest hits and a couple of album tracks and that’s about it. I’m surprised how many disco-y songs we had. I never thought of us as a four-on-the-floor disco band but there seems to be about a quarter of the set has this indie-disco feel to it. It’s funny how when you look back you get a different perspective on things. At the time I thought we were real indie rock‘n’roll things but no, there’s a lot of disco in there.

Maybe you were ahead of your time.
Maybe. Or way behind our time. I don’t know how it’s gonna go. There’s 8000 people at this gig and they’re probably all Powderfinger fans so unless some of their parents have come along I don’t think a lot of people are going to know who these old people are playing these old songs. Maybe it’s a chance to get out to the kids.

Maybe. There’ll be a lot of fans of The Cairos and Yves Klein Blue, who are also on the line-up.
Yeah, and that band from Townsville whose name escapes me at the moment. The Middle East. See, this’ll be a good chance for me to see other bands play as well because I never go to see bands any more. This’ll be my outing for the year.

Is that something you used to do when you played festivals?
Oh, absolutely. When you do the Big Day Out you get to see all these bands. It’s all there on tap. You just walk from stage to stage, you’ve got the access-all-areas and you see people play or you meet someone from their entourage at the airport because you’re all going to the same place. You eat and drink and be merry together. It was a great thing. I used to love doing those things, Homebake and Livid and all that stuff. It’s a great way to catch up with people and meet new friends.

“The four Custard members haven’t really been in a lot of contact for the last 10 years. We see each other individually, sporadically, but we don’t really hang out.”

Is there a particular highlight that you remember from those days?
I guess the highlight for me and Custard, I think it was ’97 or ’98, Crowded House did a farewell concert at the Opera House. Strangely enough Powderfinger were playing and they invited us to play and You Am I played. That event was just [special], seeing Crowded House’s last show before they broke up for 10 years or whatever and also having the pleasure of playing on that stage in front of the Opera House. Some say there were 150,000 people gathered around the harbour to watch it. That was pretty good. I could do that again. I could do that every week. And we were in our little dressing room backstage and Paul Hester and Neil Finn from Crowded House came in and said g’day and thanked us for playing. Oh, Jody, it was nice. That was a good job.

Recently The Go-Betweens have had a bridge named after them in Brisbane. I was wondering if there’s a part of Brisbane that you’d like to have named after Custard?
Yeah, look, probably in Spring Hill because Spring Hill is a suburb just outside of Brisbane where we used to have a practice room. I’d be happy with an alleyway. A Custard Alleyway would be nice or even one of those, do you know when you go to a set of traffic lights and there’s a little control box sitting next to them? Something like that with a little plaque in Spring Hill: “Custard used to rehearse around here. 1991-1999.” That’d be nice. Anything: a public phone booth, a bus shelter. I don’t think we’d warrant anything as grandiose as a bridge but something suburban and small-time like us. That’d be nice.

The river might be a nice choice.
The river might be cool. We’ll save that for Powderfinger or Regurgitator because they’re metaphorically still flowing. We’d have to be something that’s stagnant and cut off. Maybe a swamp or a creek.

Back in the Spring Hill days you used to record, I heard, in an abandoned shopping mall that was home to squatters?
We did. It was the old Target building. We recorded our first EP called Gastanked there back in ’91. The old Target building, it was amazing. It must have been built in the early ’70s and it’d been abandoned for about 10 or 15 years and it was just a series of band rehearsal rooms and a recording space called Broken Toy Studios. It was such a retro science-fiction [space], it looked like an abandoned space station, like Space Land. And all the elevators were still there and all the different brightly coloured walls and carpets. It was very modular. Did you ever see a show called Space: 1999?

No, I didn’t.
It was a TV series from the ’70s. You know how ’70s space shows made the future look real ’70s?

Like Blake’s 7?
Yeah, exactly. This building looked like that. So we didn’t rehearse there, we recorded there but I think bands like Powderfinger and a lot of other bands like that made that their home. We had a different place in Spring Hill. We didn’t really mingle that much with other bands in the early days. We were a bit shy.

Back in the early days what did you do for publicity? One of the things I read was, before Custard, you used to spraypaint “Who’s Gerald?” around Brisbane.
In 1986 I was in a band called Who’s Gerald and we were at Queensland University and for some reason we thought it would be a brilliant idea to get white spraypaint and spraypaint it on roads and bridges and walls. Oh, the follies of youth, Jody. The follies of youth. We never got in trouble for it, though. I guess these days they’d be down on you like a ton of bricks. Something about the ’80s, you could still graffiti and deface public property and people didn’t mind. But it did work. It did get our name around. And then we moved on to making badges. I was always into making lots of flyers as well; go to the photocopier shop and run off 100 A4 badly designed flyers. Oh, it’s good fun. Least I don’t have to worry about that stuff these days with this Powderfinger thing. It’s all taken care of thanks to their popularity. People will be there anyway.

They’re the ones printing up the badges.
That’s right. I’d like to see Bernard Fanning running around Brisbane spraypainting “Powderfinger” on bridges. Maybe I’ll do a Custard graffiti campaign while I’m up there, who knows? Probably get in trouble. We don’t want any trouble with the law these days.

There’s a guy who made a 12-DVD set of Dave McCormack and Custard-related stuff called Stalkerbait. I was curious how you feel about there being 12 DVDs of you?
Look, I haven’t watched ’em, I’m not much of an archivist but this guy David over in Perth has been rounding up – he’s got people to send in all this stuff, I’ve sent him everything I’ve got, which isn’t much. But it’s really great to have somebody documenting all this stuff. I think it should be sent to the Australian Film & Television Archive. I think it’s great and if he can sell some and make some money, good on him, because no one else is doin’ it.

There must be some interesting stuff on there. I remember seeing you play with Daryl Somers on drums when you were on Hey Hey.
Like I said, I haven’t gone through Stalkerbait. I went through the booklet and went, “I remember that!” Daryl was always a great drummer. I think it was the first or second time we’d been on Hey Hey. We thought, “Great, let’s get him to play the drums.” He loved it. Say what you want about Daryl Somers, he’s a very, very nice person. And then, another time we were on, Julio Iglesias was on and we got a photo with him because we name checked him in one of our songs [‘Girls Like That’]. So Hey Hey was fun. We just got in on the end of it. They ignored us for many years and then we got on there twice. It wrapped up in 1999, but it’s back. Maybe I could be invited on their reformation.

Custard inspired some real dedication, not just with Stalkerbait, but there was a dedicated Custard fanzine back in the ’90s for a while.
I’m always amazed that people can actually get a book together. I’m very impressed.

Talking about your fandom, I heard your father was a big fan of the band?
He was. He was interested in what his son was doing. Back in the early days he was very helpful with the Custard website. Back in the old days it was quite hard. It’s easy now. He was very much in there. He helped co-write a couple of songs, I recall. He was a lyricist. He was into it. I had a very supportive family. We all did in the band. We all had very supportive families. You know, starting up a band you need a good five or six years of being on the dole and having somewhere cheap to stay and someone to do your laundry and not mind having amps and drum kits stored in their house.

Looking back, none of us had real jobs. This was back in the day when you could be on the dole for two or three years and no one would ask any questions. And it was so cheap back then to live, it was great. Don’t know how bands start up nowadays. They’ve all got to have four jobs. Or be really good. We weren’t ever that good. I guess that’s why we had to worry about getting jobs or not.

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Custard will perform at the Q150 Proclamation Day concert at Brisbane’s City Botanic Gardens on December 10, alongside Powderfinger, The Cairos, The Middle East and Yves Klein Blue.