REGULARS
Michael Lira & David McCormack – Two Wild Boys
AT catches up with a couple of rock ’n’ rollers with Marxist tendencies. Text: Greg Walker
Wild Boys is a swash buckling, gun totin’ bare-back ride through Australia’s colonial history with lots of sweaty horses, dirt-stained blokes with five-day growths and fearless heroines emerging from amongst the gum trees. The Channel 7 series also sports a killer soundtrack courtesy of the collaboration between two talented screen composers with genuine rock ’n’ roll backgrounds. Many of our readers will know of David McCormack’s standout songwriting with his former bands, Custard and The Polaroids, and many others will know the mad megaphone antics and astonishing musicianship of Michael Lira and his notorious band Vicious Hairy Mary (not to mention his new project, Darth Vegas). Both of these gentlemen are multi-award winning, multiinstrumentalist music nuts and it’s easy to see how they’ve taken to the film and TV scoring game like pigs to mud. About a year and a half ago Michael and Dave threw their lot in with some other like-minded composers and music makers under the umbrella of ‘Sonar’, and the collective approach is bearing some impressive fruit. Sonar’s other members are Antony Partos, Andrew Lancaster, Jono Ma, Matteo Zingales, Wes Chew, and Karina Pitt. These people all possess weighty individual screen composing CVs but it’s the collaborative approach to all aspects of screen composing and production that makes Sonar really stand out. Michael and David recently collaborated with Animal Kingdom and The Slap composer Antony
AT 58
Partos on the popular ABC series Rake, and Michael also co-wrote the score for Hollywood feature The Hunter with Matteo Zingales, which was mixed by Andrew Lancaster. Thanks to a fortuitous lunch break at a café outside Sydney’s Hordern Pavillion during this year’s Integrate show, I happened to bump into Michael and David (even more fortuitously I had just been handed a brand new Zoom H2N portable recorder to review for this magazine)! This set of circumstances seemed too good to be true and so, two hours later I found myself venturing into one of the most happening postproduction, scoring and tracking environments in the country. Sonar is quietly tucked away in Moore Park’s vast Fox Studios precinct and behind the front desk lies an impressive stateof-the-art multi-room studio layout that can function as a series of discrete tracking rooms or as one larger facility. After looking in on Antony Partos hard at work on The Slap score and Wes Chew shuttling clients between a spacious live room and a large mixing suite replete with tasty outboard and large format mixing console, I found Mike and Dave ensconced in a more modest sized room packed to the gills with all manner of instruments ranging from quirky acoustic nick-nacks and old analogue synths to the latest digital composition tools. I started off asking them what equipment they were recording Wild Boys with and Dave pointed at a silver AKG 415b pencil condenser above a makeshift drum kit.