Custard

The Wiggles’ generational crossover

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

Since forming in 1991, Australian children’s group the Wiggles have pretty much seen it all. They’ve created a vast discography spanning 59 studio albums alone: last year, they were the second-highest streamed Australian act on Spotify across all genres.

In their heyday, the original group performed to more than 1 million people a year. More recently, they’ve noticed something new: a generational crossover. Their fans have grown up, many have formed their own bands – and they’re still fans.

This became obvious in 2018, when Brisbane hard rock duo DZ Deathrays invited guitarist Murray Cook to guest in their video Like People. In the clip, a demonically possessed Cook emerges from a bathroom stall and appears to be taken over by his former character, Red Wiggle.

Later that year, Cook (who retired from live performances with the Wiggles in 2012, along with original Purple Wiggle Jeff Fatt) appeared with DZ Deathrays at the Splendour in the Grass festival. The audience went totally Apple And Bananas.

This set the stage for last year’s all-conquering cover of Tame Impala’s Elephant, for which Cook returned. It went on to win the country’s biggest music poll, the Triple J Hottest 100.

“I just started noticing I was getting stopped in the street a lot by 20-somethings saying ‘the Wiggles were my childhood, you guys are legends!’”… Read more..

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David McCormack on being Bandit, Bluey’s dad

Miscellaneous, Music / / 4 minutes of reading

As the frontman for Brisbane band Custard, David McCormack was an anomaly in the ultra-serious early-90s world of indie-rock. In an ocean of angst, he was a goofball: whimsical, absurd, childlike and funny.

He can still be all of those things. But McCormack, who turned 50 last year, has two young daughters now, and around a successful soundtrack career as well as occasional reformations of his old band – now more of a hobby – he lives the dad life.

He’s also living it out in cartoon form: McCormack is the voice of Bandit, the dad dog in the ABC Kids animated short series Bluey, which chronicles the adventures of an irrepressible six-year-old blue heeler, her younger sister, Bingo, and her mum, Chilli.

Since premiering last October, Bluey has been a runaway success – with over 75 million plays, according to the ABC, it’s the most-watched show on ABC iView. A series of three Bluey books will be out in time for Christmas, and on Thursday it was announced that Bluey has been renewed for a second season. And it’s brought McCormack a very different kind of new-found fame.

Bluey is aimed at five- to seven-year-olds: that age when kids, like dogs, just want to play all day.… Read more..

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Songs of Brisbane

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

I’m from Melbourne. I spent the first 15 years of my life there, in the outer eastern suburbs of Wantirna South and Ringwood North. I grew up on Australian Rules football and Countdown until punk entered my life 10 years too late. Then, in 1987, my parents relocated the family to Brisbane. Other than a few regrettable years in Sydney in the late 90s, I’ve been here ever since.

I still feel like a Victorian, though I’ve come to hate the cold. I still follow a Melbourne-based AFL team, despite having written on the side about the Brisbane Lions for 13 years. I even wrote a book about Brisbane, a sort of love letter to my adopted city and, especially, its music. The sound of the place captured me. To this day though, I feel like an outsider or interloper. Stranded, you might say, far from home.

But when I hear Streets Of Your Town by the Go-Betweens I feel differently. Never a hit at the time (the band’s co-founder Robert Forster has said they may as well have released a free jazz record, such was its commercial impact), the song, written by Grant McLennan, has become part of the city’s fabric.… Read more..

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The Hummingbirds’ Simon Holmes, 1962-2017

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

The tragic news that Simon Holmes, founding singer and guitarist of Sydney band the Hummingbirds, passed away a week ago broke on Wednesday night, via the band’s Facebook page and a beautiful tribute by his friend, writer and fellow musician Tim Byron. Byron recalled that one of Holmes’ favourite sayings was “hurry up and wait”, a line Byron said he took from Brian Eno, but also was a key lyric in the chorus of Blondie’s hit Sunday Girl.

“Hurry up and wait” is a military phrase, meaning that a soldier has to hurry to arrive at a given destination only to then wait around for hours or days for something to happen. A lot of rock & roll is like that. An Australian band on tour in the 1980s could drive all day, flat out, to get to a venue in time for soundcheck before waiting the rest of the night to play.

The Hummingbirds’ career was true to their name and their sound; like a blur. They were here and they were gone, leaving just two albums and a clutch of glorious singles behind. They were flushed with early success, and in the years since spent a lot of time waiting to be rediscovered: a rare reformation show at Newtown Social Club a year ago with their contemporaries the Falling Joys quickly sold out.… Read more..

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Custard: Come Back, All Is Forgiven

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

Back in 1999, paraphrasing the band’s biggest hit, girls like that didn’t go for guys like the ones in Custard. These days – on the band’s first album since that year’s Loverama – David McCormack laments: “We are the parents our parents warned us about”. Talk about truth in advertising! Once, Custard played dag rock; now they play dad rock. And why shouldn’t they? They are dads, after all.

A comeback record was always going to be a more difficult proposition for Custard than most. That’s because a key part of the band’s appeal was an innocence that often tripped over into a playful sense of anarchy. Their early recordings, especially, are full of the exuberance and abandon that marks one’s late teens and early 20s. And anyone who’s ever grown up knows how difficult that feeling is to recapture.

So, yes: Come Back, All Is Forgiven is the sound of a band that’s matured, at least a bit. Trying to reclaim that innocence wouldn’t have been very, well, sensible. Indeed, it would have made Custard sound silly. From a fan’s point of view, though, enjoying this record might depend on how much they’ve grown up, too – and whether or not they still want Custard to sound silly on their behalf.… Read more..

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Flowers in the wheelie bin

Music, Qld Politics / / 7 minutes of reading

In 1977, John Lydon – née Rotten – launched a vitriolic attack on the monarchy that brutally summed up the status of England’s youth in the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee: “When there’s no future, how can there be sin? / We are the flowers in the dustbin / We’re the poison in your human machine / We’re the future, your future!”

God Save The Queen, as performed by the Sex Pistols, is one of the greatest protest songs of all time, but I’ve long pondered over these lyrics. Was Lydon inferring that Britain’s future had been literally thrown out with the garbage, as the nation celebrated? Or making a statement about how great art can be constructed from throwaway refuse – one of punk’s defining tenets?

Or was he saying that art itself is nurtured by the oppression of the state? “We’re the poison in your human machine” is a wonderfully subversive argument to this effect, and it’s a line with ongoing resonance to Queensland. It’s a common assumption, for example, that the 1970s punk explosion in Brisbane, spearheaded by the Saints (who, let’s not forget, pre-dated the Pistols by as much as two years) was a reaction to the excesses of life in Queensland under Joh Bjelke-Petersen.… Read more..

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