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The West Australian, July 12, 1990. By Ron Banks. Illustrations by the Doug Anthony All Stars.
They've been called lewd, crude, vicious and obscene. Certifiable lunatics with left-wing fascist tendencies. And that's just by their fans. For the detractors, the Doug Anthony All Stars are like some of the lesser known herpes viruses - difficult to determine the causes, and even harder to eradicate.
In Harvey Bay, Queensland, DAAS are anathema - more unpleasant than the after-effects of a bad Chinese meal. The good people of Harvey Bay keep sending petitions urging these three young men in their pre-shrunk military tuxedos to bag their heads in buckets of wet cement.
DAAS are unpopular in many pockets of Queensland, it seems. Perhaps it stems from the time they booked the Johnny Young Talent team to appear as support act - until the parents found out what their style of anarchic comedy was like.
Ever since then they've had to watch themselves in Queensland.
But Tim Ferguson, the rubber-lipped, lanky member with an angelic face when it's in repose (which isn't often) has plainly had enough of Harvey Bay.
"We keep getting letters telling us to stop what we're doing immediately, or face the consequences," he says. "But we're getting sick of it, and might take them for defamation. We think what they're doing is offensive and disgusting. We might just sue - anybody. We'll pick on someone who's weak and inoffensive and can't hit back. So what if people call us a bunch of scumbags? We never set out to upset anybody."
As Ferguson points out, the DAAS philosophy of humour is to hit low and keep moving. They've been doing that since television and audiences watched with incredulity as they emerged on the ABC's The Big Gig television show.
Now they've become national folk heroes - well, perhaps that's going a bit far, but they are very popular with the under-35s. Most parents can't understand them, and even if they could would find them revolting.
Critics have called them everything from feral boy scouts to the wildest animals to gatecrash the 90s.
They return to Perth for five concerts at His Majesty's Theatre from July 19 in a show titled Sex and Violence, which is really an incitement for the audience to engage in those not necessarily mutually exclusive activities.
No one ever knows what will happen at a DAAS show, which is more in the nature of a confrontation than a performance. On past evidence, there will be lots of abuse masquerading as social comment and, as Ferguson admits, girls will be urged to take off their clothes.
"We hope the audience will get very sexy and that there will be lots of bloodshed. Nudity will be encouraged and maybe people will get up and make love."
Ferguson says a young couple actually got up on stage and did this in Amsterdam, and it's hard to tell if he was joking. After all, people can get pretty raunchy in Amsterdam, and not just in its famous red light district.
The city has seen just about everything since it was invaded by hippies in the 70s. Then again. maybe he was joking. Nothing is ever straight with the DAAS and irony and its big brother sarcasm are their strong points.
Hippies, of course, are another of their pet hates, along with Elvis Presley, religion, environmentalists and skinheads.
Ferguson explains that trio's hatred of hippies enables them to centralise their scorn on people who are weaker and more helpless than themselves. "Hippies don't have feelings," he says. "It's better to make jokes about the meek and the weak because they don't hit back."
He pours equal amounts of scorn on greenies, who are nothing more than hippies with a social conscience. Ferguson would like to float Greenpeace as a public company on the stock exchange.
"Public companies are the only things you can trust these days," he says. "At the moment about 40 per cent of Greenpeace's funds go on administration, and the rest vanishes down the funnels of a couple of boats."
In fact, Ferguson doesn't see the environment in any danger at all.
"Who says there's not enough air to go round or that there's a hole in the ozone layer? There's absolutely no scientific proof at all, or any proof of global meltdown. These are simply theories, right? And they really can't be defended. They want to drag us back to the 60s, all because of hippies who've done nothing except give us a huge drug problem.
"No, what we should do in the 90s is sit down and take what's coming to us."
There's more in this vein, particularly when Ferguson gets round to discussing Perth, which he says is full of wimps.
"We'll be going all wimpy for Perth," he says. And never one to be consistent, he acknowledges that there are lots of skinheads here as well. "But the skinheads are all wimps, too. All they ever do is drive around in their mother's Commodore. Why don't they stop being so gutless and do something?"
Tim Ferguson may be full of questions, he's also full of crooked answers to interviewer's questions about the origin of DAAS.
Sorting out truth from fictional backgrounds is difficult for journalists conducting phone interviews. At least in face-to-face you can see when an interviewee is reaching under the sofa to pull your leg.
Even getting a phone call to Ferguson's Melbourne home frightens telephonists. The Telecom woman connecting my call feared she had wandered into the international lines when an answering machine responded with a "Guten Abend" greeting and a spiel in German.
It was just Ferguson's way of having fun with incoming calls and frightening off groupies.
Ferguson says the Doug Anthony All Stars - the others are Paul McDermott and Richard Fidler - come from radically different backgrounds.
Fidler has the more romantic background, having travelled the world as the son of a Dunlop executive who took up singing in rock bands in exotic places. Richard, that is, not his father.
"We were in awe of Richard when we first met him," says Ferguson. "But after a while we found out he was just another ugly little middle-class boy."
McDermott also came from a nice middle-class family, but went to a Catholic school before going to art school.
Ferguson says he went to Duntroon Military College in Canberra, but left at the height of the 1982 bastardisation scandal because he wasn't getting enough of the action.
But he is less frank about their background and artistic achievements. All you need do is open their book Book at the biographical details on the first page to the literary, as opposed to the literal, truth.
As the book states, Ferguson graduated from Duntroon in 1987 and has since pursued a military career in the world of comedy. He has written two books of essays: Wagner's Republic and Carcass. Both are probably deservedly out of print.
Paul McDermott is really a graduate of the Klein Art College in Vienna. His sculptures and paintings are on display in the Balzac Gallery in New York and Australia's Parliament House.
Richard Fidler is head of the Dexter Ambrose Arts Society which trains young musicians, film-makers and comedians. He was resident conductor of East Berlin's Tractor Driver Philharmonic and spent three years in Amsterdam, a period he cannot remember.
Separating fact from fiction, reality from romance and irony from truth is almost impossible with the All Stars, but some details are so well documented that they must be the truth. They grew up in Canberra, and began busking in the streets because, well, the place was so boring they had to do something.
Then they went to Melbourne and decided to become comedians, but nothing happened for six months. They were told they were too nasty, noisy and aggressive. Disillusioned and resisting the urge to bash in a few heads, they packed their bags and set out for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
There they became international stars overnight and went on British television on a late Friday night program with Ben Elton, but even then they remained unrecognised in their own country until The Big Gig.
Since the television series they've produced Book and the record Icon, both of which have had trouble with the British censors.
They had to take the British censors to court before the book's ban was withdrawn and they're confident they'll beat the ban on the record.
Their live performances in Britain have also run foul of the thought police. At one Edinburgh performance they were picketed by Christians, the British Socialists and fascist skinheads, each group finding their brand of radical comedy offensive - but for different reasons.
Ferguson reflects with satisfaction on their ability to offend all types.
"Polarisation of opinion seems our specialty. If you can get such disparate groups all protesting at the same time outside an Edinburgh theatre, there must be something creative going on in our act."
Having conquered the world of performance, television, books and records, the boys are now working on their first film, Last of the Hard Men.
It's a "major motion picture" with joint British and US finance. The All Stars have had the script written for a year, with a story line that involves animation and an inter-species romance.
"No one in Australia was interested in putting up the money, and it's true that we're probably more famous overseas than we are here," says Ferguson.
The film will have a budget of $27 million, but Ferguson understands that most of that will go on catering.
And none of the All Stars is interested in hanging out in Los Angeles for further film projects and the art of the deal.
"The only way to do America is to walk in on the top floor. We've absolutely no interest at all in cruising the studios and catching gonorrhea while we wait for film roles."
They've already appeared on US chat shows, but have been forced to tone down their more offensive diatribes. "I've always believed good taste is in the mouth of the beholder," says Ferguson, "and we always do things we believe are in good taste.
"But US television is more prudish than Australian. We couldn't do the Dead Elvis number, for example. I think Americans are quite incapable of grasping our brand of irony and humour, mainly because they're not too bright."
One thing the DAAS won't be doing is selling out. "I think that's an absolutely appalling notion. We've got absolutely no credibility, which means we can't sell out. Besides, no one's made us an offer yet."
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