Pig City

by Andrew Stafford

  I want to be quiet

  That’s what I need

  Not this constant volume that brings me to my knees

  Robert Moore had imagined COW as a musical collective similar to the Wild Bunch behind the first Massive Attack album, where a virtual reserve bench of musicians would be on call to play gigs or recordings. Often the band would be joined on stage by backing vocalists the Sirloin Sisters, twins Maureen and Suzie Hansen; at other times, former Go-Between John Willsteed and occasional Queensland Symphony Orchestra violinist John Bone would jump up to add their own flourishes.3 But while the shows were magical, Custard’s rising profile meant COW remained a distant second in McCormack’s priorities.

  David McCormack: There was always resentment from the other bands, because Custard had the record deal and the marketing dollars and the touring revenue, but I always defaulted to that, because that was completely my baby. I came up with the name, I was singing, writing the songs, and it had this big industry machine behind it.

  Bob Moore: Custard were going down that very traditional four-piece band route, where they’d hop in a Tarago and drive to Sydney every weekend and drive back . . . They were starting to put records out, people were starting to throw some serious money at them.

  There was some suspicion between the two bands: the older members of COW looked down on Custard as, in McCormack’s words, ‘kiddies’ music’, while Custard fretted about their leader becoming distracted. They need not have worried: as he admits, ‘I’d just steal all the best ideas and put them in Custard.’ McCormack’s muse was freed by COW and Country Phone, and his assimilation of influences was crucial to the recording of Custard’s first full-length album for rooArt, Wahooti Fandango.

  Adine Barton left Brisbane, BUMS and Custard in early 1993. The band’s new manager, the genial, slow-talking north Queenslander Dave Brown, was something of a father figure to the band. Having just lost a job in a tiling business, he had time on his hands, and he liked a smoke. ‘Wahooti’ was actually McCormack’s pet name for pot; as manager, Brown was christened Big Chief Wahooti. He was fortunate to arrive as the band neared its peak.

  Dave Brown: I just thought David was an amazing talent, and even though Custard weren’t playing music that I was really into, they were the most consistent live band I’d ever seen in my life. I travelled around with them for two years and they would just do it every night, they were a superb live band. And the smaller the crowd was, the better the show they did.

  The gigs had certainly become colourful affairs. Boys followed the band’s penchant for Hawaiian shirts; girls dressed in day-glo and carried lunchboxes in place of handbags. Custard’s sense of playfulness could not have been further removed from ripped denim and flannels. On the cover of Wahooti Fandango, the band’s name is spelt out by a flamenco dancer twirling a lasso; on the back, the band appears on horseback, guitarist Matthew Strong in cowboy gear. The inner sleeve, however, contains a more telling clue to the musical contents within: lurking in the background of each portrait of the individual band members is a bottle of nitrous oxide.

  Wahooti Fandango saw Custard’s transformation from an engaging but lightweight guitar band to something altogether more exotic. The album zigzagged from thrash pop to cocktail jazz on the whim of the group’s eccentric leader: on Singlette, McCormack paid comic tribute to Muppeteer Jim Henson; on the closing title track, an outrageous scat section is followed by a mock public service announcement. ‘People of Australia,’ McCormack declares, ‘I have an important message!’ – and, with a final tinkling of ivory, the album is over.

  For press commitments leading up to the album’s release in October 1994, a bright spark at rooArt came up with the idea of sending Custard to Bethany to be photographed with another Queensland institution, the deposed Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Mischievously informed that Custard played old-time country music, the then 84-year-old agreed with unexpected grace. The band was flanked by veteran writer Bob Ellis, hand-picked for the task of skewering the old enemy.

  But Bjelke-Petersen called the party’s bluff completely. After cheerfully posing for photos in front of his old peanut thrasher while at least one member discreetly held a bag of ‘wahooti’ over his head, he turned to the group. ‘Tell me, tell me, you young fellows,’ said the ageing warrior, talking straighter than he ever had during his 41 years in public office, ‘did you think I was a fascist dictator?’

  The band, astounded, was stumped for a reply. ‘See, when a lot of these television people accuse me of that,’ Joh continued blithely, ‘I used to say to them well, if I am, I’m a very nice one.’4

  David McCormack: We were all armed to the teeth about how we were going to be super cool and give him hell, but it was like going to visit your grandparents. I found him funny. Bob Ellis was vehemently opposed and then when we were driving away he said, ‘What a lovely old gentleman.’

  Although not a major commercial success, Wahooti Fandango pushed Custard to the forefront of Australian music. Extensive Triple J support for two singles (the Casio-driven Pack Yr Suitcases and the more conventional Alone) boosted attendances dramatically at the band’s rambunctious shows, where the group’s force of personality usually won sceptics over. But the humour became a trap. A hair’s breadth away from novelty, Pack Yr Suitcases (co-written, as were several of the band’s singles, by McCormack’s younger brother Dylan) saddled the band with a quirky image it never shook.

  Like Calling From A Country Phone, Wahooti Fandango was recorded at Sunshine Studios, where producers Simon Holmes and Wayne Connolly had succeeded brilliantly in capturing Custard’s essential joie de vivre. For the next album, however, rooArt’s chequebook was open. The band responded like any other group of young men in their early 20s with a collectively short attention span. Custard’s great rock & roll swindle was at hand.

  David McCormack: Someone said, ‘Who do you want to record it?’ I said, ‘I like the first Frank Black album, let’s get Eric Drew Feldman.’ And they said, ‘OK, Eric, where do you want to record?’ And Eric said, ‘I want to record in San Francisco, because I live there, let’s do it at Hyde Street where Creedence Clearwater Revival recorded.’ The whole thing cost $140,000. It was recoupable, but it didn’t matter because we got out of our contract! My theory always was to spend every cent you can, and then just walk away from the flaming bridges afterwards.

  Custard had met keyboard player and producer Eric Feldman while touring in support of another of McCormack’s heroes, former Pixie Frank Black. Feldman had a long list of credits and contacts, and Frank Black himself had been impressed enough by Custard to loan McCormack three of his guitars for the recording of what was to become Wisenheimer. If the album lacked its predecessor’s rambling charm, it also contained some brilliant material (the woozy, beautiful art-rock of Columbus is perhaps Custard’s greatest moment).

  The obvious standout, Apartment, was the first single. It was a disappointing choice for Dave Brown, who reasoned that by leading with their best punch, excellent follow-up singles such as Lucky Star and Sunset Strip were rendered anti-climactic after the album’s release in late 1995.

  Dave Brown: It’s always my bitch that they released Apartment at the wrong time, and that was the difference between Wisenheimer being a successful album versus a really successful album. It was the first single and it was too good for that, without a doubt in the world. It should have been released second or third; I think that gets proven every time.

  The cost of Wisenheimer’s recording was not only financial. Drummer Danny Plant, who along with Matthew Strong had given Custard considerable sonic muscle, was sacked soon after the band’s return home. Strong was lucky not to join Plant in exile.

  David McCormack: Matthew and Danny went home two or three weeks before it was finished. We went to San Francisco to make a good record in Hyde Street Studios, and those guys were just out of it all the time . . . Green Day were recording upstairs, and they were d
oing bucket bongs all day and playing pool.

  The rot was setting in. Dave Brown, who had cautioned the band against their American adventure and had not accompanied his charges to San Francisco, soon found himself on the outer too. Where he favoured a steady approach, the rest of the band was happy to take everything it was offered, albeit perhaps for different reasons: while McCormack was content to milk the machine while he could, the non-songwriting members had more to gain if Custard cracked the big time. When the band was wooed by better connected Sydney management, Brown’s handshake deal counted for little.

  Inevitably, friendships were strained. Although Bob Moore never held higher aspirations for COW than to play a few gigs, he understandably bridled at his band’s relegation to second-string status. The band’s sole album, Beard – recorded over two weekends in September 1995 – barely rated a footnote by the time of its independent release almost a year later. When Glenn Thompson was roped into Custard to replace Danny Plant, COW slowly faded away.

  Bob Moore: We were quite dumb-arsed, I knew that. COW was important to what was happening in Spring Hill, but I was very aware that didn’t mean it was relevant to the rest of Australia. Whereas Custard did have something to say to the rest of Australia, and they had the drive and the ambition to do it . . . COW got everything it deserved, both good and bad, and I don’t regret anything about it.

  Although the Spring Hill clubhouse had seen the birth of upwards of 20 bands, facilitating the growth of dozens of musicians, the scene had also become insular. Groups such as the Melniks and Adults Today traced ever-diminishing circles of twee humour and perfunctory songwriting. The title of the Melniks’ debut, Have You Ever Noticed That Gordon From Sesame Street Looks Exactly Like Errol From Hot Chocolate – an attempt to qualify for The Guinness Book Of Records under the non-existent category of longest album title – reflected a movement running out of ideas. When the McCormacks sold the property in late 1996, many of the bands simply evaporated overnight.

  At the same time, BMG had bought out rooArt, with a promise to take Custard to the next level. Sent on a 40-date American tour with the like-minded Presidents of the USA, the band reconvened with Feldman to cut their third album in Easley Studios, Memphis.

  If BMG had hoped to capitalise on Custard’s likeable public face, they had reckoned without the group’s increasingly headstrong frontman. We Have The Technology caught McCormack in an ornery mood. Heavily under the influence of Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, also made at Easley Studios, McCormack’s songs were growing ever more tangential and self-referential. And consequently, the music – as a review of another Brisbane band had earlier suggested – ‘disappeared up its own arse’.

  David McCormack: I remember Eric Drew Feldman sitting me down in some diner saying, ‘Look, you’ve got to have a radio single, you’ve just got to have one . . . Go as crazy as you want, but you need three or four radio songs so the band can keep going, you can’t just ignore that stuff,’ and he was right. But I was just like, ‘No, man, we’re fucking artists!’ It’s maturity . . . If I could go back, there would be a lot of decisions I would make differently.

  The release of Thompson’s Music Is Crap as a single in February 1998 painted the band into a corner. Although Custard’s final album Loverama included their biggest hit, Girls Like That (Don’t Go For Guys Like Us), both songs effectively drew the line under the band’s career.

  David McCormack: We were going around in circles. Everyone had this idea of what Custard was and there was no way to break out of that. Girls Like That was as far as you can take the ironic pop love song; you just can’t go any further than that.

  A best-of compilation, Goodbye Cruel World, was released by BMG in June 2000. It was a fitting tribute to a brilliant but maddening group who, for all their debt to the Go-Betweens, in the end more closely resembled a very different Australian band: Mental As Anything.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  black ticket day

  After its enforced exit stage right from the University of Queensland campus in July 1989, Triple Zed had relocated to a tiny office block opposite the local ABC headquarters on Coronation Drive, Toowong. Like a teenager leaving home for the first time, the station faced an uphill struggle to survive in the real world. Initially awash with funds in the wake of its struggle with the student union, the cash quickly dried up as Triple Zed confronted the monthly reality of a rental bill.

  The office studios were still being constructed when Triple Zed took over the lease, meaning the station was initially forced to broadcast out of a caravan on Mt Coot-tha, next to the station’s transmitter. The Caravan of Love, as it was sarcastically known, prefigured the cramped quarters on Coronation Drive. Worse, when the station began broadcasting from Toowong itself, on-air sound quality was noticeably diminished, with the Toowong Village shopping centre blocking the low-set building’s line of sight to the Mt Coot-tha transmitter.

  Dave Lennon: We were slogging our guts out and we didn’t really know where the station was heading. We were in this really small office and it just felt claustrophobic. You’d think, I’ve got to get out of here, and you’d go out and there’s Coronation Drive, with this big blue beast of a shopping centre behind you. At least at the uni you could step outside and walk around the gardens.

  Triple Zed’s departure from campus contributed to a gradual loss of identity on several fronts. Denied the resources and ready pool of subscribers it had enjoyed at the university, the defeat of the National Party had also inadvertently deprived the station of its common enemy and, in many respects, its reason for existence. With no warm inner glow left to sell, meetings were held attempting to define Triple Zed’s place in the new order.1

  As Triple J continued its roll-out during 1990, a power struggle erupted over music programming. When bands Triple Zed had broken were elevated to stardom by the national broadcaster, the station looked to the more abrasive end of the musical spectrum to shore up its alternative credentials. Custard – arguably the most original of local acts – was one band considered too poppy to qualify. Typically, David McCormack made light of the situation with these lines from Fantastic Plastic:

  I wish that Triple Zed would play us

  I know in their heart of hearts they could

  I think they used to like us

  But now they don’t seem to like us

  And I can’t figure what went wrong

  At the core of Triple Zed’s difficulties was its failure to adapt to changing circumstances. It still clung to its antiquarian collective model of consensus decision-making and, since a consensus could almost never be achieved, the station became paralysed. The poisonous atmosphere was further destabilised by the infiltration of harder drugs. Phil Parker, a long-term volunteer cajoled back to the station in 1990 after leaving in despair years earlier, remembers the Toowong years as ‘evil’.

  Phil Parker: There was a lot of smack floating around . . . It went from pot to powders, and that’s when things started getting dark. Triple Zed was a place where people went when there was nowhere else to go. There were people living at the station, forever going out to the toilets – there would be vomit in the basins, all those kind of giveaways.

  Parker, however, was made of stern stuff. He had initially lobbed in from Melbourne in 1979, subscribing to Triple Zed at an equally difficult time in the station’s history.

  Phil Parker: They had a collective meeting to decide whether Triple Zed should continue, and I wanted to get involved. It was so ugly, this meeting; I was with a friend of mine and as we left I said, ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if Triple Zed dies.’ And this voice from the shadows said, ‘Triple Zed will never die.’

  I looked over, and it was this guy sitting on a Harley, one of those big chopper bikes. He had his feet up on the handlebars and his head on the backrest, just in repose – righto mate, whatever you say! So it has had that clemency all the way through, and by the grace of God
it continues.

  Triple Zed’s financial saviour was right under its nose. While so-called Market Days had been an annual fundraising feature of the station since at least 1982 (complete with novelties including TV smashing and AM radio-throwing competitions), the events were otherwise little more than an adjunct to October radiothons, with merchandise stalls set up at the back of the station’s headquarters. Bands did not feature regularly until 1988. The revitalisation of the live scene would change all that.

  Triple Zed had not always fulfilled its obligations to local music over the years – at various times, announcers had needed to be coerced into playing music from their home town – and by 1992 contact with musicians was next to non-existent, despite the commencing of live-to-air performances at the station and new bands such as the Dreamkillers selling out venues in the city.

  Phil Parker: The earth must have passed through a photon belt or something. I hadn’t seen such a level of musicianship in Brisbane bands up until then. I went to Rock Against Work one Friday afternoon and there was a band playing Led Zeppelin note for note, which sounds clichéd now, but to hear it at the time was phenomenal. It wasn’t until years later I realised it was Powderfinger.

  Having scratched around for a suitable Market Day venue after falling out with the student union, Triple Zed settled briefly on Captain Burke Park, under the Story Bridge at Kangaroo Point. With promotions coordinator Belinda McPherson taking it upon herself to rebuild the station’s links with local bands, the Promised Land Market Day of 14 March 1992 proved a turning point. Boasting a festival-sized line-up of 13 acts including Custard and the Dreamkillers, the event attracted 3000 fans and turned a miraculous $6000 profit, most of it through cheap beer sales.2