A Brief History of The Comfort

So to start this story, I need to take you back to Brisbane Soundwave 2008. Fifteen years old, my first festival, giant belt buckle, a ridiculously busy ‘money hungry rooster’ Afends cap, no sun cream and 400 degrees in the shade. Early in the day I see an incredible band called My American Heart, hearing Mindless Self Indulgence on the stage next door and then make my way over to see All Time Low. Their second record ‘So Wrong, It’s Right’ had come out a few months earlier and everyone was talking about this new pop punk band with the giant fringes, dashing good looks and on stage banter to rival the great blink-182. It wasn’t Alex Gaskarth’s fringe that caught my eye though. As I approach the stage where they’re playing, my friend Demi turns to me and she says, “Oh Dom, this is Liam”. This jovial, but shy 17 year old kid turns around, with his black and blonde fringe swaying in the breeze. Our eyes locked and we’ve been best friends ever since. Now, I don’t believe in destiny, but this moment that changed both of our lives forever makes that disbelief quite difficult.

Anyway, that’s enough about my romance with Liam. Over the next few years, Liam and I had been jamming in each other’s parents garage, writing shitty licks and simplistic leads with just enough dotted-eighth delay that we convince ourselves that it’s something Tom Delonge could have written for the latest Angels and Airwaves record. We even started a band called ‘The Colour Of’ and recorded an EP that never came out (The colour of what? I don’t know, that’s part of the mystery). Flash forward to early 2013 and my first ‘real’ band ‘For This Cause’ has just broken up. I was feeling a little bit depressed about the break up and somewhat sorry for myself having gone through an actual break up at the same time and decided I didn’t want to be playing music. Despite this, Liam had been sending me demos for months and months and eventually his bassist for this new project ghosted him and vanished into thin air. He messaged one day saying, “hey I know you don’t want to be in a band at the moment, but I need a bass player, can you fill in?”. I’d never played bass in my life up until this point, but I really liked these demos, so I bought a bass, bought an amp and rocked up to my first practice.

After a plethora of listens to these demos, a couple of practices and a realisation whilst screaming at the top of my lungs in my 1998 Nissan Pulsar (blink, macbeth, atticus stickers and all) that I can get my voice to sound kind of close to Oli Sykes on their (then) recent and groundbreaking record, ‘Sempiternal’, I decided I wanted to join this band, but only if I could sing here and there. We recorded two demos in our old drummers home studio, ‘Your Light Is Not Worth Your Dark’ and ‘Closure’ (both of which can still be found on youtube here), got some promo photos taken by the aforementioned friend from the first part of this story, Demi, and all that was left to figure out was a band name. Liam and I sat for hours in his parents house just looking around the room trying to find something of significance that we could name the band after. After deciding against Liam’s current favourite name, ‘The Blueberry Boys’, I looked at an empty bottle of Southern Comfort bourbon and said, “Hey, how about ‘The Southern?’”. Liam’s face lit up and I thought I was onto something. “How about ‘The Comfort?’”, he said. And we haven’t looked back. For the type of people both of us are though, everything needs to have meaning, so we loved the idea of music being able to provide you with comfort when nothing else can. (let’s leave out the part about having shared that bottle of Southern Comfort several years earlier, leading to my first experience of drinking too much.)

So there it was, we launched ‘The Comfort’ in October 2013 with our first song ‘Your Light Is Not Worth Your Dark (demo)’, a 6 minute, drawn out break up song that probably should have been a closing song on a full record, not the first song a band ever releases. Despite this classic Liam and Dom move, it was received pretty well and we booked our first show. We played on the floor of this ballet studio above a 7-11 in West End and for some reason decided to cover ‘…Slowdance On The Inside’ by Taking Back Sunday, a long 4 and a half minute, non-single, closing song on arguably their least popular album. Another classic Liam and Dom move. After the show, this wildly over confident kid comes up to us and says, “Hey you guys were great, but I think you should kick your drummer out and let me play instead” and then proceeds to send me a photo of his drum kit 5 minutes later for some reason. Despite this bizarre and wildly brazen interaction, for some reason we listened. For several reasons though, including youth and untimely circumstances, after our debut EP ‘Ghosts’ and the recording of our EP, ‘Love’, we parted ways with Lewis (for the second time, I should add). Lewis now plays for an incredible new band called, ‘King Stingray’, check them out here if you haven’t already, we’re still good mates.

Let’s talk a little bit about our debut EP, ‘Ghosts’. Four wide-eyed and argumentative kids decided it would be a great idea to record this thing in an old church out the back of Fernvale. Although this small town is quite famous for it’s bakery, we just kept going back to the sushi shop (even though we were 100km from the ocean). The studio was incredible; a real musicians dream. Owned by ‘Magoo’, known for his work with Regurgitator, Custard and several of his ARIA awards and nominations, he had built this studio in a 100 year old church. We nerded out on tones and old records with our friend and producer, Joel Adams for a few days and came out with a five track EP. We love our work on this EP like a first child. We worked so damn hard, put ourselves out there and then submitted to a YouTube channel, ‘FaithLoveHope’ (Now called ‘Dreambound’). Here are some of the comments we received on those videos:

Needless to say, our confidence was somewhat shot. At least we had our entertaining live show to pride ourselves and fall back on. Later that year, we set out on our first tour. A complete disaster. Maybe the details of this tour will make it’s own article later, but the long and short of it is, we had to take over the tour from the promoter half way through (after his disappearance) and rebook and rework shows that frankly, shouldn’t have gone ahead. All a valuable experience though, we had tightened our set to the point where we were so confident that even if anyone read those comments on YouTube or didn’t like our EP, we could win them over with a live show. Then the guitarist quit, without warning and one month before heading into the studio to record an EP that we hadn’t written yet.

So there we are, no material, no live show and a deadline to have 6 songs written with one less member to help write them. Now in some ways, this is the moment that The Comfort was actually born. Liam and I got together three or four nights a week for about a month and we just wrote, and wrote, and wrote some more. What we didn’t realise at the time is that this stress of an absolute deadline sent our brains into a perfect ‘hyper-focus’ mode with ultra productivity, but that’s by the bye. On these stressful nights, writing leads we thought our guitarist would write, simplistic drums we thought our drummer would change, love was born. And no, I don’t mean that Liam and I were romantically involved for a time. Our second EP, ‘Love’ was written and completed in my bedroom.

Maybe one day I’ll write a full piece about ‘Love’, because it changed both our lives dramatically, but for now I’ve waffled on long enough that I’ll skim past the nitty gritty and focus on the band as a whole. At this point, we had just kicked out Lewis, it was just the two of us again for the first time since 2009 and nobody wanted to pay attention to us. We felt like we had a product on our hands that we could be proud of, so we did something we thought was a little bit risky and drastic. We relaunched the band as a two-piece and employed temporary members to play live with us. No-one would release our music, so we released it ourselves. No-one would book us, so we booked ourselves a tour. It was all uncharted territory which left us in over our heads as managers, promoters, labels and members of our own band. I recall one interview with Jane Gazzo from Triple M in which I completely froze, called her “Jazz” and then when asked about the books I was reading I could only think of Harry Potter and answered very awkwardly (she cut that out of the interview thankfully). ‘Love’ had projected us into the world at full speed and for the first time we were sending merch to Denmark, UK, USA and all over. This little six track EP changed everything.

Moving forward now, we had toured with our two temporary members two or three times with the ‘Love’ EP and with one in particular we had really built a great rapport and wanted him to stay on full time (Marcus is now absolutely crucial to our writing process). Marcus agreed and together the three of us set out to find a drummer that was on the same page as us musically. In comes Izaac, this incredibly talented, awkward, but trendy kid who I had played with in my other band at the time, ‘She Cries Wolf’. We were a four piece once again; a real band, despite being repeatedly told by anyone who we didn’t actually ask, that the whole ‘two-piece vibe’ was much more marketable.

Now around this time a few friends of ours had launched this small indie label called Greyscale records and they had signed some cool acts, Our Past Days, Justice For The Damned and Deadlights. We wrote our first song for them, ‘Mesada’ and they loved it, so we joined the roster. We were up to the most crucial stage of being in a band: the first full length record. ‘What It Is To Be’ was ambitious by our standard. The first time ever really navigating writing music with more than two people and we decided we wanted to chase something bigger. A grand concept of introspection and philosophy. I can’t stress enough that I don’t think this record is what Greyscale or our fans were hoping for, but we love it to pieces anyway. We had very high hopes for this record after several 10/10 reviews and several people singing our praises, only to have them momentarily crushed. We still don’t completely know what went wrong, but our best guess is when people noticed the lack of aggression on the singles, they didn't actually listen to the record. Our mistake in choices I suppose, but we’ve gained some lifelong friends with that record, so I wouldn't trade it for the world.

Let’s skip forward ahead in time and wrap this up. In 2019, after touring the record, missing several massive opportunities by a bee’s dick, and burning out completely, we released a new single, ‘Pain’ and then very seriously considered giving up altogether. Being in a band is hard. So hard that you constantly question why it’s worth doing, but at the same time can’t see yourself doing anything different. We decided to go on what we hoped would be a brief hiatus, to write the new record. The ‘brief’ hiatus turned into nearly three years, partially COVID induced, but here we are now. We have a brand new record ready for release later in this year and the first new single in three years, ‘Love Is A Dying Plant’, is out and available for streaming everywhere. As of the time I’m writing this, it has had nearly 8000 streams across the platforms in just four days and I can’t tell you how good it feels to be back.

So, I know this was a long winded, self indulgent, but hopefully entertaining article, but if you’ve lasted this far, thank you so very much. This is the beginning of a new chapter in which we’ll be really intent on showing you more of this side of us. Our insecurities, over confidence, wild ambition and our new relaxed attitude toward our community of loving fans. Until next time, on Dragonball Z.

Listen to our new single, ‘Love Is A Dying Plant’ HERE. And buy tickets to our upcoming tour with Waxflower HERE.