WORDS AND MUSIC: The McCusker and Mason Tapes

Snippets from the archives of a bygone era

Eric McCusker and Jake Mason are songwriters, musicians, and producers who, individually and as a songwriting team, have written a number of highly acclaimed songs. McCusker joined Ross Wilson’s Mondo Rock in 1980 and penned the group’s first major hit, ‘State of the Heart’, followed by ‘Chemistry’, ‘Summer of ’81’, and ‘Come Said the Boy’. Mason, who heads the group Cookin’ On 3 Burners and also the Jake Mason Trio, is a prolific songwriter, and his song This Girl, co-written by Lance Ferguson (former CO3B guitarist) and Ivan Khatchoyan (drummer), became an international hit when French producer Kungs released a remixed version in 2016.

Both Eric McCusker and Jake Mason have worked with and recorded an enormous wealth of talent, including Kate Ceberano, Renée Geyer, Kylie Auldist, Stella Angelico, Ross Wilson, and Richard Clapton; their songs have been covered by leading artists including Paul Rodgers, John Farnham, Lucy Durack, and Rick Springfield. I recently caught up with McCusker and Mason while they were working in Mason’s studio in Glen Iris, Melbourne.

Mason’s studio is equipped with an array of analogue and digital equipment, including MCI 500 channel strip modules and a Crane Song Spider 8-Channel Mic Pre Mixer that has an eight-channel output with A/D conversion to interface to a DAW. There are also some 1980s Neve modules. “The studio has some digital things, but it’s definitely built with the idea of coming from an analogue place with lots of instruments and real things that make sounds instead of stuff that’s made inside a computer. This is definitely an analogue approach, but we try to embrace technology as well and have all the bells and whistles that we can to make everything work how we want it,” says Mason.

Mason emphasises the discipline of getting a spontaneous performance onto tape without the luxury of limitless digital tracks and multiple takes. “When we’re recording Cookin’ On 3 Burners tracks, a lot of the time we track directly to tape. It gives us the fact that we’ve only got thirty minutes of tape, and we have to be a bit ruthless with how we do things.

There is also the beautiful sound and the buttery flavour that tape gives, especially with a Hammond trio where we want a bit of grunge (tape saturation) in the sound,” says Mason.

The current line-up of Mason’s group Cookin’ On 3 Burners is Jake Mason (Hammond organ), Dan West (guitar), and Ivan Khatchoyan (drums). At first glance, you may wonder where the bass line is coming from, and this has also been queried by audience members at live performances. The reality is that Mason plays the bass line with his left hand on his Viscount Legend Hammond organ. “In Hammond trios, you have this wonderful thing about playing the bass; you’re part of the rhythm section, but you’re also part of the frontline,” says Mason.

Cookin’ On 3 Burners performs as a trio in some gigs and with guest singers in others. “We quite often have a guest singer, but also do trio gigs, which are mostly instrumental, but we often have a guest singer, and we’ve been working with Stella Angelico for the last eight years or so. She’s been a wonderful addition to our regular guests, and before that, we had Kylie Auldist, who had been working with us for 15 years. When we record, we have new guests, which gives us a nice springboard to be creative in a new way and to try and stretch the boundaries of what is a very traditional Hammond sound. In Melbourne, we have this funk and soul family, and we’re always working on other people’s projects, and it’s a nice friendly atmosphere,” says Mason.

Eric McCusker was born in Dublin and came to Australia when he was four years old. “I grew up in Sydney; I was a medical student for a while, and then I played with Ross Ryan, Stevie Wright, John English, and Jeff St John. I started out at high school playing with Renée Geyer, but everyone talks about the ‘Matchbox’ thing after I moved to Melbourne at the beginning of 1979 and played for a year with the Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band. I was the seventeenth and last guitar player in that band,” says McCusker.

McCusker’s next venture was Ross Wilson’s Mondo Rock. When I interviewed Ross Wilson in 2012, he said, “I did a lot of auditioning, and one of the reasons I got Eric on guitar was because he could write songs; I had listened to some of his demos.” McCusker points out, “Most of the songs I wrote in Mondo Rock, I wrote words and music.”

McCusker met Mason some 20 years ago during a band project he was involved in called Tout de Suite. “We needed a keyboard player on some recordings we were doing, and Joe (Joe Creighton) brought Jake along.

Jake and I got on really well, and we have a complimentary skill set. He’s much more involved in the production, and I’m much more involved in the lyrics, but in the songwriting, we both contribute musically, and we critique each other,” says McCusker.

McCusker emphasises that the fundamental elements of a good song are blending the verses, the bridge, and the chorus together. “It’s surprisingly hard to do; you might do a verse, a pre-chorus, and a chorus, but when you go back to the verse, you don’t want it to feel like it’s dropped down. It’s like one of those M.C. Escher things where the stairs keep going up even though they join up together; it’s quite a tricky structural problem. ‘State of the Heart’ took fifteen minutes to write; that was partly because of youth and partly being immersed in pop culture, which I was at the time. But the last song that I had in the 1980s was a song I had on the John Farnham album, Whispering Jack. That was a song called ‘No One Comes Close’, and I remember that took six months to write,” says McCusker.

McCusker’s musical, AVA (At the End of the World), deals with Ava Gardner’s 1959 visit to Melbourne for her role in On the Beach, an apocalyptic film about the nuclear fallout from a war in the Northern Hemisphere drifting towards the Victorian capital. Gardner made headlines when she was wrongly said to have made the derogatory comment that Melbourne was “the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world,” when in fact it was the invention of journalist Neil Jillett. The musical deals with rumours that Gardner, who was later joined in Melbourne by her former husband Frank Sinatra, had a fling with jazz singer Joe Lane. “It’s a musical that I’ve been working up for something like 20 years, and Jake has co-written four or five of those songs. It’s been in various incarnations; just trying to get it off the ground is quite difficult, but it’s been very interesting, and I’m enjoying the process,” says McCusker. One of the standout songs from the musical is the McCusker and Mason song ‘Stop Searching for Love’, which was recorded by Lucy Durack in 2012.

Cookin’ On 3 Burners will be playing at the Wangaratta Jazz Festival on Monday, November 4, 2024. The group’s second single, ‘This Girl’, sung by Kylie Auldist, was released in 2008, and the 2016 remix by Kungs held the number one spot on the French and German charts, along with charting at number one on Shazam worldwide and on iTunes in eight countries. To date, This Girl has clocked up one billion streams. “The modern remix version of that song had this great way of mixing the organic with the sampled music. The modern meets the organic thing really resonated with a lot of people, and it’s taken the little Hammond trio from Melbourne world-wide,” says Mason.

In a world where metaphors have become tropes and clichés have become memes, it is worthy to note that Kung’s remix of the Cookin’ On 3 Burners song ‘This Girl’ has also become a ‘Shot on iPhone’ meme. For those who are still emerging from my era of cathode-ray tubes and incandescent light bulbs, the meme consists of uploads by Tik Tokers and YouTubers using their own images and Kung’s remix to parody Apple’s official ‘Shot on iPhone’ promotion.