After decades of making us laugh, Paul McDermott and Steven 'Gatesy' Gates want to break your heart.
As the middle men of two of Australia's most popular comedy trios, Paul (Doug Anthony All Stars/DAAS) and Gatesy (Tripod) are beloved performers and songwriters. In their new outing of 'Paul & Gatesy Go Solo', the duo present original songs of beauty and heartbreak, old squabbles and spontaneous nonsense. Paul McDermott tells us more.
“With comedy songs there's so much architecture that goes into making them work because at the end of every line, two lines or verse you've got people onboard with them laughing or being horrified.
“Although our songs still have occasionally twists and turns in them, lyrically and musically they're not having to obey the master of comedy and all the rules that go along with that. It's very fun for us to explore those worlds.”
Friends for the past 18 years and singing together in private for the past five, Paul and Gatesy launched themselves as a music duo at last year's Ballarat Cabaret Festival but first performed in public some five years earlier in Melbourne institution 'The Shelf' at the behest of mutual friend, comedian Justin Hamilton.
Together they performed Paul's song 'Stone Crows' in tribute to another mutual friend of theirs who had passed away. Paul says the live chemistry between them was instant.
“Just after those first notes and the first guitar chords, it just worked and it made the song absolutely soar and it affected people in quite an emotional way. After that we started slinging songs back and forth on the email and that was quite a nice process as well, just creating stuff.”
Though certainly exercising a far more serious aspect of their performance personalities, Paul says at heart he and Gatesy are still comedians and that makes for some lively interactions between them during the show.
“The banter that we do on-stage, the chat we have between us, is pretty unstructured at this point in time,” he says.
“We can't get away from our comedy background; our heritage is comedy. Man, when I'm talking to the audience, I don't know why but I become a different sort of person. So we can't get away from that part of our lives and I think people expect that from us to some degree as well.
“You become the thing you are when you're on stage, or an extension of it – or a distortion of it – and our roles keep shifting over the course of the shows. It's just been fun. At the moment we're still working out who we are and where we're going, so it's quite natural the interplay between the two of us.”
A seasoned entertainer, Paul has been a constant in Australian comedy and television since his days with DAAS. If Paul is the God of laughter, that makes Gatesy his trusty chosen hand.
“Another way of looking at it is Gatesy is the human part of the god-human relationship,” he laughs. “He's the flesh and blood, I'm the deity. I'm so full of myself it's incredible.”
