I first met Paul McDermott in 1986 at the Adelaide Festival Fringe where the Doug Anthony Allstars made their fist appearances outside their native Canberra. Even among manic acts like "Funny Stories" and "Tick where applicable", the Dougs distinguished themselves with their particular species of sado-comedy. I wrote about them for The National Times with wary admiration. According to McDermott, this was their first review.
With performances on "The Big Gig" and live shows all around the country over the last couple of years, the Doug Anthony Allstars have been cracking big crowds and selling loads of merchandise. Their first publication, cryptically entitled Book, leapt off the shelves and into the hands of customers and in 1991 the ABC broadcast their own personal innovative television show- "DAAS Kapital".
I caught up with Paul McDermott in his third floor loft in the very centre of Melbourne's' CBD. Surrounded by collages, constructions and posters in the unmistakable pop Weimar style of his black and white work in Book, McDermott hospitably poured a cup of tea in a Bunnykins cup- as, coincidentally, Michael Leunig had done earlier in the day. Notorious for his ferocity on stage, the other Paul McDermott is a wry, softly spoken fellow- so softly spoken in fact that at times he was barely audible on the tape. I wanted in particular to ask him about his views on the politics of comedy, but we first began with some Allstars history. M.B
Paul: We met in Canberra. Richard and Tim had been working for a while. I was in an art school group called Gigantic Fly. We were doing plays, little comedic, fifteen minute frantic things based on the original 1940s version on Cat People or the Dam Busters. There was this guy called Bill Newman who was wonderful to work with. I'd been in that show for a couple of years just on the streets or anywhere we could do shows. I met the Dougs and didn't like what they were doing at the time at all! They were singing and very energetic with a similar format to what we are doing now. I needed the money and they were doing a lot of shows, they were a trio at the time....
SO THERE WAS A FOURTH BEATLE? Yeah. I think there still could be one in the group too- I'm not sure which one. The guy who was working with them went off to study mime in Paris and learn to play the flute properly.
SO BY 1986 YOU WERE LOOKING FOR OPPORTUNITIES OUTSIDE CANBERRA? We finished our courses in 1985 so we didn't have any more commitments in Canberra. We got a show together properly and started writing material rather than standing on street corners making it up as we went along, or rehearsing five minutes before we went to town. We used to invent things on the street and if it worked we put it in the show.
A lot of people found us very aggressive at first. This was because if you come from a busking tradition you really have to grab the attention of the audience because if you don't, you don't get their money and you don't feed yourself in that week. That aggression was coming out because we were interested in people watching us. Transferring that to a theatre show, where people couldn't get away, made it seem more aggressive than most acts around at the time. That interested audiences.
AND YOU AS WELL, TO PUT ON A MASK? Oh yeah, I'm a very aggresive person as you know.
WHAT EFFECT DID MOVING TO TELEVISION HAVE ON THE WAY YOU WORK? Television gives you a very limited time to get ideas across. In a live show we had ninety minutes to two hours. On "The Big Gig", to start with, we only had three minutes. So you just home in on one specific thing and build up the imagery you'd like to associate with those ideas- and the jokes, if there are any there at the time.
WHAT ABOUT YOUR TIME AT THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL? We went over to Edinburgh in 1987. We wanted to go over in '86 but there was a slight act of deception by our agents at the time. They told us they were booking us in- which they didn't do. We confronted them and they said they hadn't booked us, that it was a big world out there and we were being too ambitious and so on. We said: "We're young, we're meant to be ambitious. We shouldn't wait for things, we should go out there and make them happen". Anyway we went... [McDermott empties his teapot out the window into the Swanston Street alleyway.] It hits the street out there. You do it in the morning and you hear the garbos yell out: "Get fucked".
The first thing we did when we got to London was to go straight to Covent Garden. Fortunately it was a Sunday so we were in luck. There were buskers everywhere. We had to go and check out with the busking authorities to see if we could play. Tim flirted outrageously and managed to get us a site to perform on and we didn't have to do the normal two week audition. We got this great space at Covent Garden and spent two weeks there before the Edinburgh Festival. That was quite an eye-opener as well because we were suddenly making a lot of money busking, enough to exist in London anyway.
There was this great fraternity of buskers there which we never knew about in Australia- professional buskers. They were a great help to us and showed us the tricks of the trade. The weird thing is we meet these people all over the world. We get to Montreal and there'll be buskers we met in San Francisco or you go to Paris or Amsterdam and they'll be working the streets. That's quite incredible and something we were totally oblivious to in Australia because it was always such a lone profession. The standard of buskers here used to be someone with a couple of Neil Young or Bob Dylan songs and that was it.
SO YOU FOUNDD BUSKERS WHO WOULD CHOOSE TO DO IT RATHER THAN BE IN SOME KIND OF COMMERCIAL HEIRARCHY? People enjoyed it, liked the freedom. After that we went to Edinburgh. We only had a show that ran for a week because everything was booked out- we booked ourselves in so late. We performed a lot of free shows and benefits so that word on us by the end was quite big. We were the only group to appear twice on the Scottish TV program covering the Fringe. We were invited back, which was unheard of.
YOU WERE DISCOVERING THAT NOT ONLY DID YOU HAVE A DISTINCTIVE MIX IN AUSTRALIA BUT IN EDINBURGH AS WELL? Yeah, we could work there. They understood the humour. Our stuff has never been local. It's the one thing that separates us from a lot of other comics. We satirise very broad aspects of society. There's not a lot of local references in the show and if there are they can be changed. I've seen a lot of comics from Australia, and from other places, go overseas and it falls down because all their references are local ones.
PERHAPS IT'S THE ROCK AND ROLL ASPECT OF YOUR WORK, IT'S TRANSPORTABLE. I think the music is a great transport. Certainly it enables you to go to places that other comedians couldn't go - and do things that sometimes you wouldn't get away with otherwise.
SO WHO IS YOUR AUDIENCE? That's interesting. When we first started as buskers it was anyone between 3 and 83, they were some of the best shows we had. I remember one in Canberra- busking away and I had this pair of old shoes on. They were worn through and the laces were gone and I was dancing away this winklepicker just went flying into the air. To save myself the disgrace and embarrassment I asked all the children to place their shoes in the guitar case as a symbol of solidarity with me. Suddenly all these kids took off their shoes and cajoled their parents to do the same, so the guitar case was full of shoes. You can't get that with a theatre audience- it's got to be something impromptu on the streets.
During the Edinburgh festival we had people who were like-minded between 20 and 40. Television has been the great leveller for us. Anyone could turn it on and anyone could watch it so we've had a lot of people distorting what we believed we were doing. And the age group has dropped dramatically- from that twenties, mid twenties and thirties which was our standard- to anything around 15 to 20. So we now get audiences of a lot of 15-year-olds and they can't understand a word, they don't understand the references and the jokes we do.
In a way they were feeding us for a while in the live shows. They weren't laughing at the jokes, they were screaming at jokes. And we thought: This is stupid, it's exactly what we didn't want to happen and for a while we were seriously thinking about packing it up and saying: 'This is no good, this idolatry phenomenon which we quite despise'. So we changed from doing theatres back to doing licensed venues. They can't get in there. So it's much easier. We are also leaving the country more often and working overseas. Working bigger venues changed our dynamics. In a small club you can prowl the audience more effectively.
Working a small audience has a different atmosphere. You work in a different way. There's a lot of manipulation to see how people react. The aspect of group hysteria is something that has really fascinated us- from religious hysteria to political hysteria. Working with large crowds you can build it up to more of a fever pitch. It seems that the more people involved or whatever, the more exciting it becomes for a large crowd. So when we did the splitting up of the audience into different factions and played them off against each other, in smaller venues it was great, they'd be a really strong atmosphere there, but with some of the large audiences it was just incredible. You could really feel that it was quite volatile.
YOU'D UNLEASHED MORE THAT YOU COULD PUT BACK IN THE BOX? Yeah. [Laughs]
YOU WERE ACTUALLY GENERATING THINGS RATHER THAN SATIRISING THEM? Yes. That's the funny thing too. Once we used to have to fight to get the audiences to listen to us. Now we don't, which is like half the fun taken out for us because the enjoyment was in appearing like three bastards with views that made the audience think, or whatever.
WITH YOUR SHOCK TACTICS I IMAGINE PEOPLE ARE RARELY INDIFFERENT TO YOU. DO YOU FEEL ANY IMPULSE TO MAKE ABSOLUTELY CLEAR WHAT YOUR POLITICS ARE? I don't believe there's any need on our part to do that. It would be like explaining a painting. If people don't feel or understand then telling them that it was painted in the 16th century and that it has four hundred different layers of meaning isn't going to help them understand it any better. I've always disliked being heavy-handed about things. You see so many people preaching on stage and it's just not what we want to do. There is some confusion about our political bias or what we actually believe in- which is fun. It means you can always turn your work against yourself, contradict yourself, exaggerate, extrapolate.
When we started out as buskers we used to have a big following from the left in Canberra, among socialist groups and so on. We had several songs about Nicaragua and for a while we were the pets of these cliques. Then one day we were collecting the money and some boy rode up on a bicycle and said: 'Do you give that all to Direct Action or something?' and we said: 'No, this is our wage, this is why we do it, to make money'. And he said: 'Oh, so you've sold out the left'. Then a week later a woman on a bicycle went by and said she didn't like the way we handled a situation where I was Joan of Arc and I jumped into a flaming bin and made jokes about it and she thought that was a contemptible way of ridiculing the work of a great woman. And we said: 'We are not here to espouse other people's attitudes, we're not the mouthpiece of the left or for other group. We are our own mouthpiece and if no one knows what thoughts are coming through that mouth at any particular time it gives us greater possibility to play with.'
THAT NON-ALIGNMENT OF THE COMIC OR JESTER HAS ALWAYS MADE FOOLERY A DANGEROUS OCCUPATION. That's when it works best. I can always remember when we went to Britain and did shows with the Comedy Store in London. They'd seen us at the '87 festival and we'd been on 'Friday Night Live' which is the show 'The Big Gig' is based on. The only reason we have 'The Big Gig' in Australia is that Wendy Harmer brought back the tape because she was on the show as well. Ted Robinson looked at it and said: 'Who are these guys- are they from New Zealand?' And she said they were from Melbourne. The only reason we were on his program was because he'd seen us on a show from overseas. Anyway, getting back to the Club. Everybody there was doing anti-Thatcher material, which we thought was a cop-out. We were playing in venues where everyone basically dislikes Thatcher because they can't see any solution over there.
So we went on as a group of larrikin, loudmouthed Australians and said that Thatcher was the best thing that ever happened to Britain and they should be grateful to have a woman of her power and political strength at the helm of their ship. This drew cries of hatred from the audience who started abusing and yelling. We'd smile and say: 'No, it's true. You wouldn't keep voting her back if it wasn't true'. Then we just raved about how good she was for the Conservative Party. The thing was, you got a reaction from the audience. Most of the time English comics were getting up saying; "Thatcher, what a bitch'- and getting pleasant rounds of applause. But the people don't think about it.
ARE YOU CLOSER TO PERFORMANCE ART? THE USUAL EXPECTATION OF COMICS IS THAT THEY WILL COLLUDE WITH THE AUDIENCE, CERTAINLY NOT THREATEN THEIR PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY. There are lots of different kinds of comedy. There's the- 'you know what it's like when you go down the shops' kind, where you empathise with the comic and you're going in to the shop with him to get the sausage roll and it's very comical. But I can't see how that is progressive. But when you take people beyond their immediate surroundings you can challenge them.
ARE THERE SOME THINGS WHICH AREN'T FUNNY? I think with anyone there are things that aren't funny, that you draw the line at. But it's a personal line. I could make jokes about things we believe are sacred, at the same time pushing the boundaries of our own acceptance.
SO YOU MIGHT BE IN THE PROCESS OF FINDING THAT OUT ON STAGE? Some things will come out of your mouth and you'll think: Oh my God. But anything can be made funny. Its time that makes tragedy comical. Like any assassination- given time, people will come out with jokes about them, When Lockerbie happened, within twenty-four hours we were making jokes. People go 'gasp' at the time but they're willing to laugh about it once the newspapers have forgotten it. Before Tiananmen Square happened we actually though the tanks would go through, so we did this thing on 'The Big Gig' when we came through the floor and ploughed everyone down with machine guns. In a weeks time that happened. So you are playing with fire, especially if you are doing it in live shows as contemporary as 'The Big Gig' is. People see these things as incredibly bad taste but it's also a matter of saying to people; 'Where's your conscience about this?' It's enough to make you feel gad if you laugh at this twenty-four hours after it happens. But a week later everybody's making jokes and then a month later it's dinner party conversation.