A more precious rock star than David McCormack might bridle in indignation when an interview segues away from the music. For more than three decades, McCormack has led the Australian band Custard, who today release their ninth studio album: a 21-song epic called Suburban Curtains.
These days, though, all paths of discussion inevitably lead to McCormack’s role as the voice of Bandit Heeler, father of Bluey, in the phenomenally successful animated adventures of a cartoon dog that premiered in Australia in 2018. It changed McCormack’s life, and Custard’s, in ways neither could have anticipated – far from the band’s humble beginnings in Brisbane in the late 1980s.
For the affable McCormack, it’s the perfect career trajectory. Custard made five albums through the 90s, with hit songs on the then-dominant Triple J including Apartment and Girls Like That (Don’t Go For Guys Like Us), without ever crossing over to a bigger audience. They disbanded in 2000 with a compilation album called Goodbye Cruel World.
McCormack busied himself with a successful soundtrack career (he’s now working on NCIS: Sydney) alongside the Polaroids, one of his many other bands. It wasn’t until 2015 that Custard returned with the album Come Back, All Is Forgiven. The title was perfect, the band’s self-effacing humour intact. Two more albums followed: The Common Touch (2017) and Respect All Lifeforms (2020).
The breadth (and length) of their new follow-up shows Custard enjoying a level of creative freedom the band never had in their golden years, with extra songwriting contributions from their multi-instrumentalist, Glenn Thompson, and bass player, Paul Medew, making for greater stylistic diversity. “It’s much more, to quote 10CC, art for art’s sake now,” McCormack says. “Right up until the deadline, I was throwing ideas and recordings like spaghetti at a wall, to see if it was cooked enough.” Old songs were revived, too: the current single, Someday, was written 20 years ago in the house of the band’s former manager Sarah Longhurst, who died last year.
McCormack doesn’t get nostalgic for the band’s so-called glory days. “As you can imagine, in the 90s there was a lot of pressure. You had to get Triple J airplay, that was the most important thing. And so you had to have a song that you thought that they might like. There was a lot of overthinking.”
There’s no need for that now. McCormack, now edging 56, is at a stage of life when nothing goes to waste. “As gentlemen of our vintage are all too well aware, time goes so quick,” he sighs. “You don’t know how many more chances you’re going to have to put out a record, so when it came to the vetting process, I was like, let’s put it all out there.”
The four members of the band have scattered. McCormack and Strong live in Sydney, Thompson is a few hours’ further south, while Medew lives in Echuca, on the Victoria-New South Wales border. Custard comes together for touring and recording: “We’re great friends but we don’t overstay our welcome.”
In between, McCormack makes regular appearances at US comic-cons, where kids (and parents) will line up for hours on end for him to sign bits of Bandit merch. “I always think people are deep down a little bit disappointed that I don’t actually look like the animated cartoon dog character but what can I do?” he says.
It’s a role that has opened up doors for the band as well: Custard has new listeners all over the world, and in unexpected places including Mexico and the Czech Republic, with Bluey fans broadcasting their discovery of the group on TikTok. It would be tempting to exploit that kind of audience but McCormack is resistant. “You don’t want to spoil the magic. I wouldn’t want to be trying to force our music down people’s throats.”
Besides, the band is more sustainable and enjoyable today as a part-time proposition. “Having done it in the 90s, after a couple of long airport waits or long drives, the varnish is well and truly wiped off … I’m at the stage of my life now where we’ve got these gigs coming up, and I look at the times we’ve got to play – like, 10.30pm?! An hour [and] 45? Jesus! And then, if there’s some social engagement three weeks on the horizon, it just fills me with dread.”
I ask him what the show has taught him about parenthood. He quotes Ben Lee: “That we’re all in this together.” Lee taught McCormack another lesson too: the limits of a voice actor’s fame. “I saw Ben Lee the other day and for some reason I thought he might know who I am. It turned out he didn’t. That was humbling, that Ben Lee doesn’t know me.”
Custard’s new album, Suburban Curtains, is out now
