David McCormack

Is that a piano playing in the background?
Yeah, I'm in the 'stude' at the moment.

The stude? So you're laying down some tra?
Yes, finally! I've been working on this album for four years. Basically I've been recording, recording, throwing stuff out, recording, recording, throwing stuff out, so now I've just thought that I'm going to record some more and then instead of throwing stuff out, I'll put stuff out. Sounds a bit more productive, doesn't it?

Will this be a solo disc, or a Polaroids effort?
I haven't thought that far ahead yet. There's a lot of different people playing on it. If I could come up with a better band name than the Polaroids I might do that, but at the moment I can't think of anything. But Spiegeltent! Here we go! Retrospective!

Indeed - so you'll be drawing from your entire oeuvre, from [first band] Who's Gerald through to this year's 'Cassingle' EP?
Well, what we're doing is we're starting in 1990, with the first track Custard had on CD - not our first vinyl single, we'll start from the digital age - and then play one song from each year. And I'm massaging the dates a little bit, but the theory is that there's a song of mine from each year, from each incarnation, until now. There'll definitely be one from 'Cassingle', but there'll also be one after that, which I'm yet to write. I should do that this weekend, actually...

There must have been some hard choices, though – moments where you went "but I wrote three good songs this year..."
Yeah, and then for the next four years I wrote no good ones! So it's a bit warts'n'all, but I think that's kinda the angle on the show. Whether there's a progression, or a change, or a regression in the songwriting I'm not sure, but it's going to be interesting. And with the early Custard songs, I'm going to start out by myself and people will join me one by one.

So it's Stop Making Dave!
It is! Oh, I like that: or Start Making Dave!

David McCormack plays at the Famous Spiegeltent on Sun 9 Nov.

Subscribe to our Spotify playlists