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X-Press Magazine, 5th October 1989
A certain element of Australian Society stops dead on Tuesday nights at 9.30pm.
Thousands of upstanding, self-respecting citizens all over the country sit in front of their tellies and witness something which, five years ago, would have been considered unsuitable for mass consumption.
The Doug Anthony All Stars are the star attraction every week on ABC-TV's The Big Gig, a program which dishes out a healthy share of obscene and controversial commentary in the shape of comedy.
The Big Gig has been instrumental in breaking the Doug Anthony All Stars in Australia, says Tim Ferguson, the comedy trio's tallest and most loud-mouthed member. Bu the group has enjoyed success in the UK for three years now, due to exposure on English television and repeated appearances at The Edinburgh Festival.
In fact, if you strolled through Canberra's Garema Place five years ago, you may have seen three confident young buskers performing an energetic Hound Dog in front of (and behind and around) a crowd of Saturday morning shoppers. Had you witnessed that spectacle, you would have concluded that Tim Ferguson (now 24-years-old), Richard Fidler (24) and Paul McDermott (25) were destined for great things.
They thought so too, says Tim in this week's X-Press Interview.
From a Catholic education in the ACT, DAAS moved on to firmly establish themselves in the Melbourne comedy scene, in venues such as The Prince Patrick Hotel. With the aid of annual visits to Edinburgh, the group began to build a strong cult following at home and overseas.
An apparent disrespect for their audiences gained DAAS a certain amount of notoriety, press, and court injunctions. Once in Edinburgh they incited their audience to burn their credit cards onstage in a fire made from old stage props. Brawls and general audience harrassment are commonplace. A Perth Theatre Trust spokesman warned X-Press that it doesn't matter where you're sitting, the All Stars will climb over anything if you've been singled out for humiliation.
Besides comedy of the hiding-in-the-aisles variety, The All Stars are renowned for a talent as a capella singers, musicians, and soon, says Tim, as authors and film makers.
Comedy, he says, "is just a sideline."
Tonight, tomorrow and Saturday, The Doug Anthony All Stars perform at His Majesty's Theatre, their first Perth visit since an America's Cup season three years ago.
The X-Press Interview was conducted by telephone from Tim Ferguson's house in Melbourne.
How influential was your average Canberran, Catholic-school background to the Doug Anthony All Stars' style of comedy?
In a sense the Marist Brothers did a lot for our style of comedy. Certainly I think the intellectuality came from the deep-thinking Marists. And there are a few Jesuit elements there from our football days.
Also a lot of it came from when I was at Duntroon Military College. My father's in the army, and of course the logical step was for me to go into Duntroon. They sent me there for supposedly three years and two months, which is the sentence, but after a situation which became a little ugly I was... er... removed.
Would you care to elaborate on that?
Perhaps not. The less said about that one the better, but let's say that I wasn't the victim (laughs). And I'm desperately sorry about it (laughs louder). It was in the papers and things... it became quite a bit of a stink for a while there...
Was world conquest part of the plan when you were busking in Garema Place in Canberra all those years ago?
Oh definitely. We knew Australia was too small and the only way to get anywhere in Australia was to go overseas and then come back successful. So we did.
Australia for some reason believes that Australians aren't as good as the rest of the world, which is absolute rubbish. Most Australian comedy is just as good as anything overseas, and that's not just pissing in the pocket, that's gospel. Mainly because the rest of the world is just the same as Australia: 95 per cent shit.
Are the Doug Anthonies typically Australia as far as comedy goes?
I think there's a scepticism in all Australian comedy, and we have that. A healthy scepticism is heavily ingrained in our act. Also, a mindless defiance of anything that has to do with activity is perhaps another Australian trait.
Australians will do anything just as long as it doesn't involve doing anything.
So I guess there is something about our act that we can take overseas and people say 'My God there's something we haven't seen before', simply because we've come from this stark, open isolated environment. Canberra.
A lot of DAAS' appeal is that you tend to push the barriers of what most people find acceptable. Is that the plan?
We like to push the boundaries a little, but actually that's not a conscious thing.
People say we go out to offend and humiliate people, but really that's not the goal at all. We really like to do what we believe is funny. If people wish to laugh at that, that's their prerogative - and thank God they do. If they don't then that's their problem. They can go to church the next day and forget about it.
Our stuff is on the edge, and quite hard, sure. But on the whole it's not written to offend somebody. We don't say 'Let's upset the Christians this week.' In fact we say 'Let's make people laugh at the Christians this week', which is totally different.
Are there subjects which you consider sacred?
Oh sure. There are things that are sacred to us. Buggered if I'll tell you what they are, though.
We have a little manifesto in our minds which involves various things we don't discuss. We only do things that are funny.
What about your political stance?
On a personal level we do, but as far as the group goes we like our political stance to be as vague and as contradictory as possible. One week we'll be as right-wing as possible, and the next week we'll be even righter. Just to keep the people confused.
Patrick Cook (writer, cartoonist and adjutant for ABC TV's The Big Gig) said to me the other day that we seem to be appealing to an audience which has grown up in an education system run by left-wing lesbians, and they want to break out of that. So I guess we must be doing some good... somewhere... for somebody.
You have an unusual relationship with your audience, don't you?
Well, yeah. We're never really happy with our audience.
I mean, we ask them to sit up and bark like dogs and when they do they don't bark loud enough. Or they bark too loud. Our audience can never please us, really, which is why I think they try so hard. People come again and again, just so they might be in that one crowd that we'll finally be happy with. But they're never quite what we want.
We want an audience to bow down and pay allegiance, without being slavering sycophants. People just have to find a happy medium. We know what we want.
Tell us about the characters you play as The Doug Anthony All Stars. How close are they to the people you are off-stage?
They tend to be real opposites, which is the strange thing.
Paul's a very quiet person. He doesn't hang around many people at all. He refuses to talk to the press because he just doesn't like talking to people who don't know anything. And if he does do interviews he just gets incredibly abusive and rude. In fact Richard and I are two of the only people he actually talks to. We're not even sure if he enjoys our company because he never talks to us much either.
Richard is the most outgoing of us all. He's a drinker, a smoker, an all-night toker, a womanising filth-bucket. Richard will do anything.
How much of what you do on stage or on The Big Gig is choreographed, and how much is pure ad-libbing?
Well, on the screen, about twenty per cent of it will be just flying off the handle and seeing how we go.
We never actually write scripts, but we sit down and say 'Okay I'll say something about Catholics here, you say something about women there and Richard, you finish off singing something.'
It's very rough. We just fly by the seat of our pants, which on live television would seem to be complete madness, but that's always been our way. The Big Gig lets us do whatever we like, which is fantastic. We've got total creative freedom.
The Big Gig has been quite a break for you in this country hasn't it?
It was a great break. We had a sort of a cult following before but it's certainly heightened our profile a lot. The mass media is something that can't be beaten.
The last time we went to Perth was two years ago and we were playing to capacity crowds of around 40 people. Now I believe we're going to play to really good houses. We could go to Taree tomorrow and play to a packed house, all because of TV.
The TV thing has been really important for us in the UK. Friday Night Live was a big break, and we did a short series called Runner with a few London comics which sort of got our name around. We've got a fifteen-part series coming up soon called BAMM! which I think should really take it over the top there.
There's more motivating the DAAS than just music and humour, isn't there?
Oh shit yeah. Comedy's just a side-line. We want to do other big things.
We've just released a book called The DAAS Book, and it's based on the Theatre of Cruelty concept by Antonin Artaud, who basically about innocence tortured by nameless forces.
We went over to the States to work with a writer by the name of William Burroughs (influential US author of The Naked Lunch and Junky) and we slammed this thing together. It's not a comedy book at all, and it's not a coffee table book either. It's an actual story which is very dark and quite sad, a bit of a thriller really.
So it's something people aren't going to be expecting, certainly not from a comedy group. It's something we've been talking about for quite a few years now, and we finally just sat down and said 'Let's do it.'
Lots of people will probably be disappointed because it's not full of jokes and Richard's recipe pages, but if they sit down and read it they might enjoy it.
It's about a young boy who has no arms and no legs and no tongue. And he's tortured by nameless forces. It's very dark.
We're making a film as well, a thriller called Assassins, which is about - you guessed it - three assassins. That's mainly because I wanted to do a film which had a helicopter scene with guns and bombs in it, and that was the only thing we could think of to write it around.
And we've got other books coming out, comics and things.
So how are you handling all the success you're enjoying so suddenly?
People don't seem to recognise us in the streets, so that's fine. We can go out for a drink or whatever and no-one really bothers us. We don't really feel famous. It's just that whenever we perform there are lots of people there, so that's nice.
Also I think people are a bit intimidated by us, so no one ever approaches us because they think we might cut their throats and piss down their necks... you can print that, can't you?
No, we'll edit that out, I think.
So what can people expect from the Doug Anthony All Stars when you arrive in Perth?
I think we'll be doing a little bit of nudity for this tour, just go completely over the top.
No hippies. If you do happen to have long hair at all, tuck it into a bun or wear it under a hat. If you have long hair, you will be removed from the venue and that's a promise. That's long-haired boys, of course. Girls: No sandals, no saffron, and no make up either. We like to run a tight ship.
We'll probably start a couple of fights, maybe a little bit of flame will be involved... we'll just give Perth a spiritual enema really, that's the important thing.
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