Interview by Ali Williams
Some people describe themselves as busy and mean they answered three emails before lunch. Dave McCormack currently has CUSTARD shows, his freshly assembled David McCormack’s TRS80 project, recording, touring, assorted end-of-year plans and the small matter of being Bandit in one of Australia’s most successful television exports. McCormack caught up with HEAVY’S Ali Williams to give us the latest on it all. His assessment is considerably less dramatic.
“Ali, I’m busy.” Fair enough.
For CUSTARD, that activity includes a return to Brisbane for Z51 on October 24, a festival McCormack is clearly delighted to be part of after the band missed Z50 last year. It also arrives after CUSTARD recently joined SPIDERBAIT at The Tivoli, a show that put McCormack back onstage after a decent stretch without a gig and reminded anyone within viewing distance exactly how entertaining he remains when handed a guitar and access to a microphone. “We haven’t done a gig in ages,” he says. “It was just fun to get back out there.” Fun is not difficult to identify when McCormack is involved.
That enthusiasm is also central to the way McCormack speaks about playing with CUSTARD again. There is no attempt to pretend the audience is waiting patiently for fifteen obscure B-sides and an experimental forty-minute closing piece. CUSTARD know exactly what people have arrived to hear, and they are more than happy to provide it. “We’ll stick to the old faves for these upcoming shows,” he says. “Give the people what they want.”
They have even developed a wonderfully practical method for building a setlist. Open Apple Music, check the band’s twelve most popular tracks, reverse the order and work towards number one. That might horrify musicians who enjoy treating set construction as advanced engineering, but it makes magnificent sense. Nobody bought a ticket hoping the band would deliberately avoid the songs they love.
McCormack says the enjoyment now comes from more than simply playing them. It is watching people respond to songs that have been in circulation since the mid-1990s and discovering that the connection has not disappeared. “We love playing them, but it’s also seeing everyone’s reactions,” he explains. “People are still digging!”
Happy to abandon all attempts to calculate exactly how long ago 1994 was, it was settled that it was far too long ago to bother with accuracy. The number itself is less interesting than what has happened to the songs during those years. Tracks such as Apartment were absorbed by listeners who had Triple J permanently attached to their ears during a particularly productive period of Australian music. For McCormack, CUSTARD happened to begin at precisely the point when that national audience was opening up. “We were at the right place at the right time,” he says. “So lucky.”
Luck may have introduced people to the band, but it cannot make them turn up decades later and sing the songs back. The recent Tivoli show with SPIDERBAIT supplied fairly convincing evidence of that. McCormack is equally enthusiastic about his former tour mates, pointing out that SPIDERBAIT remain enormously popular rather than existing as some historical reference people politely applaud. CUSTARD sit comfortably in similar territory. People know the songs. They want to hear them. The band still enjoys playing them. There is no complicated argument required beyond that.
At the same time, McCormack has hardly confined himself to the CUSTARD catalogue. Last Christmas in Brisbane he played an afternoon show at The Cave Inn with longtime friend Adele Pickvance and Nick Norton backing him. The afternoon format pleased him enormously, the combination worked, and by January the three were in Astute Studio recording a batch of songs. That became David McCormack’s TRS80, named after the TRS-80 computer his family owned when he was young.
The project has developed quickly. Its September run opened in Melbourne on September 4, and will be followed by Brisbane on September 11 and Sydney on September 18, before McCormack returns to CUSTARD duties for Z51 and further shows later in the year. For someone with several different pieces moving simultaneously, he seems to have landed on a workload that suits him. “I feel like I’m busy, but not too busy,” he says. “I’ll just do a couple of things here and there. I love it.”
Of course, there is another side to Dave McCormack, we all know and love him for being he bloke responsible for CUSTARD , however his most infamous role is not related to his musical talents at all. To them, he is Bandit. The global success of Bluey has given McCormack an entirely separate public identity, although he reckons awareness of that role depends heavily on whether children occupy any part of your life. “If you know little people, you know all about Bluey,” he explains, describing the divide between parents and everybody else as “an iron curtain of information.”
It is a surprisingly accurate description. Those with young children know Bandit immediately. Those without them can quite happily stand beside McCormack discussing Australian indie music without realising they are talking to one of the most recognisable dads on television. Naturally, this raised the important journalistic question nobody appears willing to address properly: when is Bandit getting a band? McCormack is already on board.
“I’ve been pushing that. Why not? Why can’t Bandit be in a band in the show? I think it’s a great idea.” Correct. Give the dog a guitar. What makes McCormack’s current run interesting is that none of these jobs appear to be competing for ownership of him. CUSTARD can play the favourites without behaving apologetically about it. TRS80 gives him somewhere to make something new with musicians he enjoys. Bandit belongs to an entirely different audience. Somewhere between those commitments there is apparently still time to inspect festival posters, investigate unfamiliar bands and become extremely excited by their names.
By the end of our conversation, I had also managed to send McCormack off to investigate German metal lunatics ELECTRIC CALLBOY and Polish extremists BEHEMOTH, which means HEAVY can claim at least one small educational victory for the afternoon. “You’ve educated me today, Ali,” he laughs. That curiosity probably says more about Dave McCormack in 2026 than any lengthy examination of career milestones could. He remains interested in music, interested in other bands, happy to make new records and genuinely pleased that people still want to hear songs CUSTARD wrote more than thirty years ago.
There is no grand declaration required. CUSTARD are playing because they enjoy it. People are turning up because they enjoy it.And on October 24 at Z51, Brisbane gets another opportunity to put those two very sensible ideas in the same room.
For tickets and info head to https://www.consume.com.au/posts/david-mccormacks-trs80-cut-shit-up-this-september
https://www.consume.com.au/posts/4zzz-presents-zed51
