Creed McTaggart Is A Musician

Photos courtesy of Creed McTaggart.

This is sort of the follow up to the interview we did with Creed McTaggart earlier in the year about his paintings.

Now, just over six months later we’re here talking to him about his music with the release of his debut album, A Clean Kitchen under the name Cheap Gloomer. He’s one of professional surfing's busiest characters yet, he’d disagree, saying he’s really just cruising. I’m not too sure if I believe him, especially between professional surfing, painting, making music, and working on Rage with Toby Cregan. Anyway, we’re here to talk about his music. A Clean Kitchen is a collection of twelve songs which each take their own shape. An album that blends upbeat, fun, catchy songs with playful lyricism with the dark and eerie, with songs like, “Family Chair” and “Red, Blue, Black and Blind” characterised by their distorted guitar and harrowing vocals. I called Creed up while he was chilling on the balcony of his villa in the jungles of Bali, with a sangria in hand on the balcony, on full holiday mode to know more about A Clean Kitchen. 

How are you? What’s going on?

I’m good, I’m in Bali, I’ve been here for a month and a half and got a month and a half to go.  It’s my girlfriend’s birthday today so we’re just kind of cruising today. A bit of day drinking.

Damn, you on the Bintang’s already?

On the sangria’s actually [laughs].

Holiday mode is on.

Yep, living it up.

So, you’re making music, painting, running Rage and a pro surfer. How do you keep on top of everything?

I mean, with surfing I have a lot of free time, and where I live, I don’t have many distractions, so I can spend most of the day painting and making music. I talk to Toby a lot about Rage stuff and I do some design for that, but Toby is the big dog in that, and I help him out where I can. With my job I can go on a couple of trips a year so when I’m at home I just keep it lowkey. But yeah, from the outside it probably looks like I’m so busy, but when I’m at home I’m just cruising.

That’s the nice thing about living in an isolated place, you can do all these creative projects and still work. 

Yeah, and I was always influenced by my friends, so when I moved away from there and was by myself it was a big time for me to reflect on things I’ve done and experiences I’ve had. When you don’t have homies around you and aren’t super influenced by what they’re into, and you naturally like the things you are drawn to. It was hard saying goodbye to my friends, but it was also a bit of a blessing to have that sort of solitude, be in my own thoughts and day to day patterns.

Was it around the time you moved to Angourie when you started painting and making music more?

Yeah, it was about five years ago when I moved to Angourie. I've been painting for around three years now, my girlfriend got me some paints for Christmas, I started tinkering around with painting and I fell in love with it. Now painting is something I do all the time. I had a punk band before called Wash, with a few of my friends, we did a few tours and made a couple albums, then when Covid happened everyone moved away so that wrapped up. I still wanted to make music, so I would write songs and tinker around on the guitar, and I have some friends in Wollongong who we used to tour with. Their band is The Pinheads and the lead singer, Jez Player, has a recording studio. I hit him up and was like I have a bunch of songs I’d love to come and record with you. I have a few friends down there who are musical wizards and jumped in playing piano, violin, and guitar. It’s a collaboration between friends and basically a good excuse to hang out, make music, and have fun. When I was younger and in the other bands, we were more vicious to tour and pop off a little more, but with this project I just wanted to be able to hang out with friends and make music.

So awesome, that’s the best way for it to happen. How’d you come up with the name Cheap Gloomer? 

I didn’t want to have my name as the name, so I was thinking of ways to go around that. Cheap Gloomer came up and made sense. It just means being gloomy and down in the dumps but then it’s cheap so it means you’re really just feeling sorry for yourself and should just get your ass up and stop worrying about everything so much.

It’s cool this is so different from Wash.

Yeah, I love writing lyrics, when I was in Wash it was a lot of screaming and putting distortion on my vocals to fuck with them a little bit. With this I’m trying to make it real clean, and sing which is really hard but exciting when you can get it in the right key.

What were you listening to while you were making the album?

I was listening to heaps of Silver Jews…

Wait, check this out, I got a copy of Actual Air, David Berman’s poetry book the other day.

Oh man, he’s the best, I’m a big fan and always on YouTube watching videos of him. I was listening to him a lot, Guided by Voices too, there’s a documentary they made back in the 90s called “Watch Me Jumpstart”, I’ve watched that a lot. It’s really inspiring how they do everything themselves, from album covers, to recording. Also, heaps of Buddy Holly, The Beach Boys, that sort of sixties rock and roll. Waylon Jennings, George Strait and those country singers. It is a mix of folky-country and indie.

The Guided by Voices inspiration makes so much sense. It’s also cool too to think about Robert Pollard being a teacher who was like I want to make music now, it is so similar to you being a surfer who is like I want to do this.

For sure. I also really like the idea of the band The Frogs and Ween, where there is some irony and comedy to it, not taking themselves too seriously or trying to be too cool.

Yeah, I was going to say with your album, a lot of it is quite playful and cheeky, the name, album cover, some of the lyrics, and it’s not in a way that feels forced.

Yeah, not like you’re telling jokes or anything, but you could look at it either way like, that’s funny or that’s deep and meaningful in some weird way. A lot of the time I like playing with words and coming up with cheeky lines which make me laugh. Most of the songs really start off as a joke we say to each other, then I make it into a song and maybe it gets more serious the more it gets fleshed out.

Did you make the album cover yourself?

Yeah, I bought three different steaks from Coles, because I didn’t know which one was the perfect steak. Then I got my tea towels at home and took it on my point and shoot camera. The titles I wrote in tomato sauce and changed in Photoshop to blue. I had all these A3 pieces of paper on the floor in my garage with Cheap Gloomer written in tomato sauce and all these ants came at it everywhere. It was a bit of a shit show.

Oh man, I bet [laughs].

It was heaps of fun; I really enjoyed doing that.

You made music videos for a few of the songs, was that something you were thinking about while you were writing the songs?

That was a big part of it for me. I didn’t want to come across like I was super ambitious and wanted to make it on to MTV or Rage, it wasn’t like that. Editing with Toby, the Rage filmer, I like the process and having a visual to the sound, so I really wanted to make a few music videos. I spend a lot of time on YouTube watching music videos so I was like fuck it, I may as well fork out the cash and make some. I did most of them with my friend Thommy Crowe, who makes animations. I'll write some ideas that I want to happen in the video, then let him do the rest and when he gives it back to me it’s always way better than I could’ve thought it would be.

I really like the animated ones he did.

Me too. Also, I feel like if you’re not a band who is touring all the time, it is a good way to give the music a bit of an identity that people maybe wouldn’t have an idea of if they didn’t see the visual.

You’ve obviously been putting yourself out there as a surfer for quite some time, which is obviously daunting at times. How does it feel when you’re releasing an album or having an art show? 

It all feels the same to me, it all comes from the same place of creativeness. It’s important just to be yourself and back yourself in the decisions you make in the process of creating. It is a little bit daunting for sure, but you need to ignore those negative thoughts, self-doubt and just go huge.

What is the most pretentious pet? 

Well, “Pretentious Pet” is a song about going out with some friends that weren’t really friends at the time, but I was kind of shocked how egotistical they were, but at the same time really inquisitive about it. I feel like I lack confidence in social situations, I find it interesting to see people with a lot of confidence, sometimes being around someone with a big ego is very cringey and hard to be around but other times it is really intriguing and if you’re not like that it’s like ‘How do you have that confidence?’ There is a line in that song I am really proud of which is, ‘There’s no carbohydrates covering that white plate, there’s just some dreams left for later that we can microwave.’

Yeah, damn, that’s a good one. Is there anything else you want to say about the album?

I’d like to give a special thanks to Jez Player, Luke Player, Russell Webster, Steve Bourke and Bry Faulks, everyone who made the music come to life. I'm keen to play some shows soon and I hope everyone likes the music.