The Doug Anthony Allstars (DAAS) should come with a warning: frequent violence and coarse language with sexual, drug and adult themes that will surely make you laugh.
Paul McDermott has reunited with his comedic counterpart Tim Ferguson and added Paul Livingston (Flacco) for the Doug Anthony Allstars Australian tour, celebrating the 30th anniversary of DAAS. “We never really wrote anything down in the original formation in the Allstars,” Paul admits.
“It wasn’t something we kept on paper. It was something we kept in our heads. A lot of the spoken-word material is completely gone. We just pumped out a lot of material and not all of it good. So we haven’t gone to great lengths to recapture the past in that regard. We have reworked some songs from those days, because there were so many songs.
“When the group broke up, myself and Richard [Fidler] never touched those songs again. They were left behind in the wake, which is sort of a sad thing when you write something and then people like it. To leave it behind is quite sad. But it’s great to be able to resurrect some of those songs again.”
“Everything was incredibly easy because there was no agenda ... We were three fellas busking.”
The original run of DAAS happened from 1984 to 1994, with Paul and Tim joined by Richard Fidler (guitars/ backing vocals). The trio began life together busking on the streets of Canberra that eventually lead to performances at the Adelaide Fringe and Edinburgh Fringe festivals.
Three decades later and the group’s brand of provocative, musical comedy is still as off-the-cuff as ever. “It’s pretty well ‘bounced’,” Paul says. “The other two don’t have to be around there for the bouncing. Sometimes it can just be a thought you have on stage and you express it. Sometimes you think about it in the car on the way to the venue. The show is an evolving thing. It’s organic, it’s not structured in the way that many shows are. It comes out of different stories we tell each other.
“We make each other laugh on stage and that then becomes part of the ongoing fun of the show, that we keep inventing things and making things up and trying to surprise each other.”
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The group had their first, big break busking on the streets of Canberra in 1984. “Everything was incredibly easy and simple because there was no agenda and there was no desire and no great plan at the time. We were three fellas busking.
“The way it happened was just over a series of months really. It literally sort of just exploded for us in regards to our presence on TV. Word of mouth was good very early on. It was just an extraordinary adventure that seemed to go from the streets of Canberra to Adelaide to Europe in a space of a year.
“At the time we had no appreciation for it. I think it’s only in hindsight that you look back and think that was quite a rare thing. Our contemporaries didn’t have that sort of inane success early on, and some could argue many of them were far better than us. We were just in the right place at the right time. There’s a lot of happenstance and luck that goes into success.”
After the Allstars dispersed in 1994, Paul made the seamless transition into television full-time; the only hard part was cutting off his dreadlocks. “For me it was very easy. I had been working with the producers of the show, Ted Robinson, and his company for years.
“When the Allstars split he came to me to see if I wanted to do television anymore, and I really wasn’t interested. He managed to coerce me to do a couple of debates as part of Melbourne Comedy Festival and that then led to us talking about ’Good News Week’ and how that would evolve. It wasn’t a difficult transition at all. I had to chop off my dreadlocks and that was about it.”
Paul says television is a “totally different creature” to stage, but working with a live audience on television is very similar in that regard. “We used to have a live audience. So in many ways it’s like a private theatre or stage show or comedy musical show. That’s how we approach it. We try and keep the cameras on and film everything.
“I haven’t done much in the way of drama, which is a different beast again. So it wasn’t a difficult transition into television for me because really I was just performing again in front of an audience. There just happened to be cameras there.”
The Doug Anthony Allstars play the Brisbane Powerhouse from Tuesday 28th October until Friday 31st October.
