David McCormack is one rather busy chap at present. He's just released his latest solo album and his former band, Custard, have been invited to reform to celebrate 150 years of the state of Queensland. In part one of the interview we speak to him on the eve of his Sydney launch for Little Murders.
yourGigs (yG): It's been five years since your last album The Truth About Love - what have you been doing musically since then?
David McCormack (DM): I've been recording pretty much all that time, four or five years ago I had 11 songs and thought, "Okay, this will be my new album." So I recorded it all and burned copies and gave them to my friends and then I thought, "Oh nah, I'll do some more recording." So every year I'd burn 50 to 100 CDs just for friends and people I knew and for a while I thought, "Oh releasing an album?" Nah, I just wasn't into it, I was just into recording music and giving it to friends.
But last October I just thought, "Nah, I'd better do a proper album with a nice little cover and you can get in proper record stores and everything like that", so I relented and thought I'd do a proper album with all pretty pictures and lyrics and all that. So that's why with this album, Little Murders, you've got to excuse me for running pretty close to 60 minutes, 'cause it's pretty much a compilation of four years recording, throwing stuff out, trying it again, trying new stuff and seeing where it went to.
I also fell into doing film scoring and soundtracks. About 2002 someone asked me to make music for a film, so I went "Oh yeah I'll have a go at this", and it went pretty well, so from then on people have been throwing stuff my way to do. It's completely different to doing an album with The Polaroids, it's more of a solitary thing and you are composing music for specific pictures and moods, it's good though.
yG: Was the soundtrack stuff really challenging for you?
DM: Absolutely, I was terrified at first. I thought - I don't know how to do this, as I've never had any compositional training or conservatorium music things or anything, so initially I was petrified, so I don't think I'd be able to do it, and I just started doing stuff which I though sounded cool, and luckily other people thought it was cool too.
Now people, if they want that David McCormack sound to their movie, they know where to come to. I can do that, but I can't do like proper scores, I don't want to do proper scores to tell you the truth, it's too hard.
yG: Your latest album is named after one of your favourite movies, so do you think the fact that you are no stranger to filling you songs with pop culture references helped with the film-song stuff?
DM: Yeah, absolutely, I like listening to a whole lot of music and reading a whole lot of stuff and watching a whole lot of different films, I don't know everything, but I know a little tiny big about lots of stuff - only a tiny bit.
yG: How did the songs on Little Murders come together - do you usually envisage the songs as a whole then bring them to the band fully formed or just allow everyone to add their own aspects to it?
DM: There's always the core of The Polaroids - Cameron Bruce, Shane Melder and my brother Dylan - but over the last few years from doing various albums and soundtrack stuff there's been various musicians that float around the studio. So it just may be one evening we see who is around and go, okay you can play the double bass, you can play the piano, y'know whoever was there; and then we'll just quickly record one of my songs without them hearing it before. Because I'm very much into getting whatever musicians do, just get them do their thing and playing it the way they reckon it should be.
When I was a younger man, I thought I knew the right way to do everything, and it's got to be played like this and it's got to be like that, and now I'm a little older, I'm like, yeah, well you're a great musician, you play it the way you want dude, I'm sure that's right, I'll just strum on the guitar and sing a bit and you play the other stuff.
yG: Having your own studio facility must make it great if the inspiration is there - just to be able to capture it?
DM: Definitely, I've got a studio in Kings Cross. It's there all the time, but the temptation is to just keep recoding and never release anything. That's why it's taken that long for this album to come out, because I've got the studio and these fantastic musicians that are always around so I've got ideas for all these songs and I just keep recording and recording and recording, and now I've released 20 songs, so I've done something positive, I've got an album out ... you can disappear up your own arse in the studio and spend like a month worrying about what the reverb on a certain snare drum sounds like.
I try not get too involved in that aspect of it, I just like to come into the studio, see who's there, record some songs and move on. Let somebody else worry about mixing it, and making it sound good, you've got to live otherwise you've got nothing to write a song about, you've got to have something to feed your creativity.
yG: Have you found that what inspires your songs has changed over the years?
DM: Oh yeah sure, I go through phases; there were phases where I'd put out break-up albums, or albums about this or that. This album is a bit of a compilation of a whole lot of different ideas and moods, so I'm glad I took this time before releasing it, because it's kind of a mixed bag now, not just one cohesive piece.
So I was initially worried about having 20 songs on it, but I thought if people don't like a song they can just skip it and go along to the next one, or if they are on iTunes they can preview it and go "Nah I don't like that, and I've downloaded another one." But with 20 songs you've got to like something. You don't have to like it all but you've got to like something. I don't even like it all, so I can't expect anyone else to like it all.
Stay tuned for part two of the interview, where we cross the Go-Between bridge and get to the bottom of the Custard reunion.
Andy Ryan
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