So there’s no actual adult content. Has Combe ever been asked to do a rude version of his songs? “I wouldn’t do rude versions,” he says. “I’m not good at being rude, and I wouldn’t do it anyway. It would cheapen them and it’s not what the audience wants. They want to sing the songs they loved as kids and behave like big kids when they get there. Quite honestly they get to rediscover their inner child, with music they grew up on. We have two groups of audiences, the 21 to 32-year-olds who don’t yet have kids of their own, who come along to the evening shows, and then the slightly older ones who are going through it all again with their own kids, and they come to the matinee show.” So it’s kind of like people going along to watch The Sound of Music and sing along? “That’s not a bad comparison,” Combe says. “We’re all big kids and we all want to sing to songs that are terribly familiar.”
Are the songs exactly the same as the ones his audiences know from TV? “They evolved a bit through playing them live,” says Combe. What made him realise that there was an adult audience for his children’s songs in the first place? Combe came to the idea quite by accident, he says, when performing as a children’s performer in the afternoon at a beer fest. “It was at the Adelaide Schutzenfest. It was about 41 degrees outside and so rather than do an outdoor show for kids, I took it indoors. They loved it – people stormed the stage. I realised that people simply wanted to hear the songs again. I would never have thought it. But some songs are timeless and kids’ music isn’t dependent on fashion, so it’s not surprising if you think about it. These songs are from way back in 1984. The music is passed down through the generation and is always in fashion. When you’re five or six you either love something or you don’t. And if you love it you listen to it hundreds and hundreds of times and the words are stuck in your memory.”
Combe loves to watch teenagers drop the cool and get into the songs they rocked to at primary school. “There’s a lovely vibe in the room,” he says. “It’s very uncool, anything but cool, but they just want to sing. It’s intensely interesting to watch them. The ones who are most out there are the guys; they want to let their hair down. It’s quite touching.” How much does alcohol-fuelled nostalgia have to do with it? “Not as much as you’d think,” Combe replies. “There’s a bit of a misconception about the alcohol factor. Two glasses of wine and there’s a happy mellow mood but anyone who gets really drunk and acts inappropriately spoils it and is really unpopular.”
What does Combe thinks contributes to the enduring success of his music? “I care about the quality of all aspects of song writing,” he says. ”Melody, structure, the recording; I’m a careful writer, I pay attention to detail and try and create those little magic moments in a song, make sure there are little points of magic in every one, with a base note, a guitar chord, a phrase…I write lots of different songs, quirky songs about different things; they don’t follow a formula. On my albums every track comes as a nice surprise because the essence of what I do is attention to detail. Creating is hard work. Very occasionally a song will fall out of the sky, I won’t quite know where it comes from, and if that happens I’m just grateful, but 85–90 per cent of the time it’s hard work.”
As well as working hard on his music, Combe puts his success down to his motivation for wanting to do it in the first place. “You have to do it for the right reasons,” he says. “I enjoy making a living from doing this, of course, but I also have a strong motivation. It comes from respecting children, understanding their sense of humour, actually liking children. I love performing, I just love doing it; I love to sing. The biggest joy for me is performing the songs.”
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
