LAWRIE MASTERSON'S SOUND OFF - DAAS CUT LOOSE!
TV Week 15/12/90

I think I'm fairly safe in saying that this was the first time I'd ever sat in a TV studio audience and watched as, between scenes, one of the stars of the show cut someone's hair while another strummed guitar and led the community singing. Yes, in fact I'm sure that's never happened to me before.
Paul McDermott, who these days has abandoned his plait for a variation on what used to be called the "basin cut", had rushed off to his dressing room and returned with a pair of clippers. And while a blonde girl in a black T-shirt leaned forward nonchalantly, he proceeded to "improve" on her already short-back-and-sides look.
In the meantime, another section of the audience had joined Richard Fidler in Laugh, Kookaburra, Laugh and Puff the Magic Dragon, with Stairway to Heaven thrown in just for good measure. (Richard doesn't know all the lyrics which says something about HIM).
I'm not sure what Tim Ferguson was doing at that stage - my small brain was having enough trouble coping as it was.
It was a bizarre scene, but, then again, this was the Doug Anthony Allstars in action, at their menacing, intimidating, over-the-top best.
The tone of the evening had been set when the Dougs arrived in the packed ABC studio and took a leaf out of the missal - each person in the audience assembled to watch the taping of the first of the DAAS Kapital series was asked to offer his or her immediate neighbour a sign of peace.
This was followed quickly by the barked command: "Come on, a bit of f...... love and peace!" You get the picture.
A front row fan wearing a green Gucci T-shirt came in for some merciless treatment ("You might middle-class us to death!") and there were some gags, not to be repeated here, about most minority groups.
Yours truly was spotted and referred to once or thrice - "You really should change that photo you know," followed some time later by: "Where's your notebook and pen know Mr F...... Know-it-all?"
"The basic idea," Tim Ferguson told us, "is that you guys are prisoners here..... as we all are on this sickened planet."
By that time, the notebook was well and truly concealed, I can tell you!
The Dougs were on the rampage, doing four shows at once here.
DAAS Kapital has them in a submarine saving the world's most precious art, a noble pursuit complicated by the fact that Tim is turning into a giant cockroach and Richard, having stabbed and eaten parts of his girlfriend, a fish, is violently ill.
Then there's a sub-plot about Paul wanting to avenge the deaths of his maiden aunts, stalwarts of the Cat Protection Society who met their demise at the hands (?) of......... you guessed it, giant cockroaches.
At least I think that's what the TV show is about, but with other characters such as Flacco (Paul Livingston) and tonight show host Bob Downe (Mark Trevorrow) thrown in, who really knows? I can wait until next year to find out.
In the meantime, if you get the chance to see another episode of DAAS Kapital being put together, take it. Between the scenes you'll get another three shows as the inimitable and turbo-charged Messrs McDermott, Ferguson and Fidler do their various collective things. Usually, watching television programs being put together is so much "action, cut, do it again" - then nothing, as the inevitable technical glitches are taken care of - that it's about as riveting as a braille version of the Public Services Act.
That's the nature of the beast, but in three and a half hours in the DAAS studio, the pace didn't let up once.

A DEEP AND MEANINGFUL ENCOUNTER WITH THE ALLSTARS
The Australian Magazine (1990/91?)
They call them DAAS. It's short for the Doug Anthony Allstars. But it could also stand for Dirty, Anarchistic, Ambitious and Silly. Very Silly. As MIKE SAFE finds, this trio want a reaction - good or bad.
Richard, the guitarist loves Liz, the TV star. Paul, the mean one, also loves Liz and gives the less than subtle impression he's trying to sneak under Richard's guard. Tim, the pretty one, loves Liz too..... but he loves himself more.
So goes what passes for romance in the lives of the Doug Anthony Allstars, the video nasties of Australian comedy. What Elizabeth Hayes - the early morning queen of the Nine Network's Today show and victim of their over-wrought schoolboy emotions - thinks is anybody's guess. But in a scoop that will have the television industry and soapie magazines in a lather of envy, we can report exclusively that the trio of feral funsters recently wined and dined Hayes at an upmarket Sydney restaurant. The Allstars must have been smitten because they even picked up the tab - the whole $200 of it. And not once did they try to sneak out the back door without paying.
"She's our Helen of Troy, our Aphrodite," enthuses Richard Fidler, the guitar-playing romantic of the group. "I think all women in Australia should aspire to look, and be exactly like, Liz Hayes. A truly beautiful, charming and intelligent woman."
"She's radiant, serene, adorable," says Paul McDermott, the bossy one, in what can only be described as a weak moment. "She has the most beautiful blue eyes I've ever seen." "She also has really nice manners," adds Tim Ferguson, the pretty one.
Richard: "I had to keep reminding myself who was sitting there. 'This is Liz Hayes' I said. 'The vision I've been watching on television when I get up every morning'."
Paul: "It was fortunate for me because I'd never actually seen Liz before. I had no idea what she was going to look like. But I must say I was pleasantly surprised. And anyway, I'd heard so much about her from Richard I had a vague idea I'd have undying affection for her."
Tim: "But if you want to know the truth, the real truth, none of us has much time for romance."
Paul: "Well, except for brief, you know, 20 or 30 minute stretches. Stretches being the operative word. It's an intermittent thing - four or five times a day."
Tim: "I thought it was six or seven."
No icon, no sacred cow, national treasure or TV host is safe once the Allstars warm up. And despite the nonsense - such as the above - and their insatiable appetite for self-promotion, they are comics who prefer the big picture. They don't tell "how's ya father?" jokes, grouch about mothers-in-law, nor do they look for familiar laughs. In fact, laughs are incidental.
What they want is reaction - any reaction. And to get it, they tear into the subjects that matter. God and religion (of any persuasion), sex (also of any persuasion), racism, politics, death and suicide all get a working over.
"We prefer to incite dissent in our audience," says Tim Ferguson, in what appears to be serious mode. "There's nothing better than having people boo us, telling us to get off.
That's exciting theatre as opposed to just cheering."
Warming to his subject, Ferguson describes an Allstars concert as being "a bit like a cross between a Klu Klux Kan meeting and a feral boy scouts club."
"Everybody," he says, "is there for their piece of flesh. We try to get as many different reactions as possible - from anger, which I suppose is unusual at what is supposed to be a comedy show, to cheering and even sadness at our more poignant songs."
McDermott notes there can be a fine line where comedy stops and racism or sexism starts.
"It's not what you say," he claims. "It's the point of view you come from. I don't think we do things that are racist. If we slag the French, which we've done by calling them bastards, some people are going to deem it racist. But we do it to see the reaction it creates."
The Allstars' attack on the French which took place over three weeks on the ABC-TV stand-up comedy show The Big Gig, brought only one complaint - from the French Consulate. But, unlike McDermott, Ferguson believes it was racist, even if selectively so. "The reason we did it was because people don't mind what you say about the French. Australians like to be selectively racist," he says. "And you can call the Russians total s...heads and no-one would care. But if you go on TV and say 'Aborigines' and get the audience to scream 'bastards', you'd be off the air."
According to the Allstars, selective racism and positive discrimination are glossed over in Australia and they find it annoying. "It's interesting that, perhaps because of our enormous sense of guilt, we have to go to great lengths to give Aborigines more than we've got," McDermott says. "It becomes patronising and that's when it becomes wrong." The big picture indeed.
The Allstars' rise to national prominence has been largely associated with their role in the irreverent Big Gig, where their audience and each other - have become a feature, if not the feature.
Ted Robinson, the Gig's producer and an unashamed fan of the trio, says they don't trigger more complaints than others on the show but they certainly get them more regularly. It seems they have an amazing knack of upsetting the sensitive without really trying. Robinson points out that while they alienate some of Aunty's more traditional viewers they also encourage a new, younger audience.
"There's no doubt they are extremely clever at what they do and give the illusion of reading dust jackets, if not the books themselves on a very wide range of ideas," says Robinson, adding that they need toning down occasionally. "They get miffed about it," he says, but points out that the Allstars appreciate the scope the ABC gives them. "They would never get it on the commercials."
Robinson thinks there is no-one quite like them, certainly not in Australia, and there are plans for their own series once the latest run of The Big Gig finishes. It's all a long way from their humble beginnings. The sons of Canberra bureaucrats, they started out busking on the national capital's cold streets. When questioned about their name, their answer - if you can get one that makes sense - depends on their collective mood at the time. Sometimes they say it's derived from the name of their Melbourne-based
manager, even though his name is Doug Hunter; sometimes it's the former Deputy Prime Minister and National Party leader, Doug Anthony, who is said to be a fan; and occasionally, it's from no-one or nothing in particular. They are equally vague about their ages. For the purposes of this story, they all decided to be 25.
"When we started, we realised people in Australia wanted us to pay our dues: to sleep with certain people, to play in certain venues," Fidler recalls. "There were all these steps before we could be allowed our own TV show. "We saw this as a case of administrators taking care of themselves, so we went overseas to the Edinburgh festival and six weeks after our first season there we were on British TV."
At the time, late 1987, ideologically sound humour was very much the go in the UK, with Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher taking a beating. The Allstars turned this on its head.
"We'd go on and praise Thatcher, saying 'The Falklands War was wonderful, look how the Poms
beat the Argies'," recalls McDermott. "Basically, the idea was to do everything the opposite and it worked. Thatcher-bashing in British comedy is very dull because it's been happening for 10 years. There are no jokes to be written."
In the process, the Allstars upset everyone. At their follow-up Edinburgh season they had Christians picketing, fascist skinheads from Glasgow abusing the audience, and English socialists protesting against their pro-Thatcher jokes.
"So we had the Left and Right and everybody else arguing and fighting among themselves," says Ferguson with glee. "We thought, well, if we can piss off everybody we must be doing something deep and meaningful."
Their continuing UK impact, they believe, has much to do with the tough workouts they receive in Australian pubs. Even the wildest Scottish audiences are "pussycats compared to a Launceston pub crowd", says Ferguson. "Here everybody's drunk, they want to get blind, talk to their mates and do anything but listen to you. So, you have to go out and abuse them, punch them, do anything to get their attention."
From this they have learnt audience control - bringing them up and letting them down. "It's amazing how easy it is to manipulate people, especially in a large group," says Ferguson. "The basic principle is: if you get them to believe a whole lot of tiny facts, you can get them to agree with a big lie."
They make their audiences hate hippies, behave like soccer hooligans and take part in group confessions. They tell of an incident at an Edinburgh outdoor venue where McDermott threw his shoes into a fire. Pretty soon the audience was "freeing" itself of its material and emotional hang-ups - credit cards and shoes were consumed by the flames.
"It went from comedy to this perverse world of people holding up their fears and wanting to get rid of them," says McDermott. "A lot of organisations are starting up and they're into channelling and playing on fears and uncertainties. A lot of people are being taken advantage of. Admittedly, we do the same with comedy but at least we make them aware of being manipulated."
The future burns brightly for the Allstars. After their television series and promotion of their first album, Icon, a chaotic mix of comedy and rock, they embark on their first movie, The Last of the Hard Men, a surreal comedy full of animation and odd images. It's due to start filming in London early next year.
But there's a problem. The American back-room boys who are putting up a large chunk of the cash are starting to worry that this trio of would-be stars might be too bizarre to be bankable.
"The ludicrous point is that they're amazed by what we've done overseas and on The Big Gig but they won't actually say, 'Okay, we'll go with you'," grouches McDermott. "It's tricky trying to convince Americans about a new idea. You can point to successes like the Max Headroom series, which was quite inspirational for its time, but you can't get them to have a go themselves." He fears the American conception of their celluloid dream might be a "Frankie Avalon - Annette Funicello beach party movie".
Ferguson is more optimistic: "It will be exciting. We don't know the first thing about making movies, let alone dealing with the money involved. Most of it goes on catering, apparently. But the fact it will be non-commercial makes it interesting, it makes it different."
Indeed, control of their own destiny is at the heart of the Allstars philosophy. "I don't think there's anybody else in comedy who does what we do business wise," says Ferguson. "We've just made a live video of ourselves in New York. It's all our own ideas, our money and we're hocked to the hilt. Now we hope like hell it sells. But if we let someone take control it would be their risk and they would make all the money."
"If there's any to be made," McDermott laughs hollowly.
"It's up to other people to judge whether they like what we do or not," he adds. "But in the long run, it doesn't bother me. Essentially, everything we've done has been for ourselves."
The plan, according to Ferguson, is to keep one step ahead of expectations: "As soon as an audience can anticipate, they're going to get bored."
They point to the Federal election earlier this year when Ferguson ran for the ultra blue-ribbon seat of Kooyong.
"We started getting girls writing in who were in love with his face," McDermott says contemptuously. "Suddenly all these people started watching us - not because we were funny but because we were three boys on television.
"And there were all these love letters - it was disgusting to read them. So we did this thing on The Big Gig where Tim and I kissed each other and all the letters stopped. We heard back that the girls who thought we were so wonderful and who were convinced of our raging heterosexuality were suddenly not so sure."
"It's that ambiguity - keep 'em guessing," says Ferguson.
He has every intention of running for parliament again - and this time he's going to be serious about it. Well, sort of: "Running for Kooyong was very lighthearted. But I still managed to score 3.5 percent of the vote." This time his target will be the Senate and WA will become his adopted State: "The House
of Reps? Hah! Who wants to be a backbencher? But a rogue Senator! That's very dangerous. "And it's so much easier when you can go Statewide in a place like WA, where the majority of people are fairly left wing. In the next election, a left wing State, disillusioned with a Labor government in Canberra, but which doesn't want to vote Liberal, can only go one way. Me!"


PLANET EARTH IS POO!
Juke Magazine 30/5/92

The boys are back - this time in space - for a second series of DAAS Kapital. But will they be able to cope with another bout of abuse from the critics back on Earth? DINO SCATENA joins the mayhem.

"And as for the new flag!" Tim Ferguson is talking. Raving, perhaps. "F**k me!" Yes. Raving. "We do not want a new Australian flag for a simple reason. "Sure, we know the Union Jack is a pile of crap and shouldn't be on our flag. Sure, I've never seen the Southern Cross and actually doubt its existence: I don't know what the fifth big one is doing there. But we don't actually want it because we know that the next
Australian flag will be green and gold and that makes me want to spew!"
Tim, we're told, is in a peculiar mood today. The remaining Allstars, Paul and Richard, aren't too far behind either. You see, the lads haven't seen each other for two weeks and there's some catching up to be done. "And it's probably been the most pleasant two weeks of my entire life," says Paul. "But, once again, you can see the happiness and joy rolling of our cheeks."
Here in the ABC's Melbourne studios, conversational conventions have been asked to leave the room as the Allstars renew their lust for life and the ridiculous. They've gathered to discuss the second series of DAAS Kapital. The first series was a massive success: despised by critics and completely incomprehensible to most viewers. The new series extends on the winning formula.

Richard: "It's an extension in the sense that it's tacked on the side with a bit of 4x2 and stuff."
Paul: "It continues the incredibly exciting adventures we began in DAAS Kapital 1. Except in the last episode of DAAS Kapital 1, we blasted off into space.... Well, we were destroyed. Unbeknownst to people in Australia we actually blasted into space and now we're circling the earth."
Richard: "We're in a submarine which is stuck to a chunk of rock which is now orbiting the earth."
Tim: "The submarine being called the Titanic II as usual. It's basically just more frolics along the same sort of lines really. More animation."
Paul: "We are building up now to DAAS Kapital III. We've been under the oceans of the world in DAAS Kapital 1, in space in DAAS II and, hopefully in DAAS Kapital III, we'll be in the fourth or fifth dimension."
Richard: "Well, that's Paul's idea actually. I want it to be in a livingroom in LA somewhere. People wearing cardigans and things like that."
Tim: "I actually want to adopt cockney accents, get a fourth member who's a hippy and just have crazy episodes like where we find a bomb in our house or when Alexei Sayle comes to visit."
Richard: "It's new, it's crazy, it just might work."
Tim: "I think we've found our footing a lot more with the second series because we were farting around a lot in the first one, experimenting with all sorts of things. We've basically taken the experiments that worked and done them again. And the ones that failed, we've done them again as well."
Richard: "Including the jokes. We took the jokes that worked and did them again as well."
Tim: "There are a lot less jokes in DAAS Kapital II. We actually feel it was the jokes that were holding us back. It was the jokes that were really confusing people and making the stories hard to comprehend. And there's nothing people like more in comedy than a good story. Much more than a good joke. So there's only in fact seven jokes in DAAS Kapital II and each of those is a cast member. And the director."
Richard: "Tim's mum hated the show. It was that bad. Tim's mother HATED it."
Tim: "I told her we were going to do another series and you know what she said? 'Don't! Do something nice'."
Paul: "If we manage to cut out all of the jokes out of the series, I think it will put us along side other great Australian comedies that are now being shown on commercial stations."
Richard: "When I told my Mum we were doing a second series she said, 'Mmmmm....... Mmmmmm..... Your Big Gig thing is what you do best. Why don't you just stick to that?' Thanks for your support mum."
The second series will undoubtedly be more favourable to all mothers throughout the land as it has the boys delving into such nice themes as Christmas and wonderlands. There's also wicked witches and caterpillars and all things sweet. So what has made these hardened men - brutal and often tasteless anarchists of the mass media - caress and devour themes of such simplicity and beauty?
Richard: "There's sexual overtones in it. That's the attraction."
What? Like, little girls and things?
Paul: "Not necessarily."
Richard: "Hey! No!"
Tim "Not just girls"
Richard: "What's wrong with animals mate?"
Tim: "Why limit yourself? You've got to look ahead. Bestiality is seen as a horror in this world but I believe that if you confine an Alsatian of legal age - consenting, who's happy to go along with it - sure! Go for it! Just as long as it doesn't hurt the dog. And all the dogs that we've used in DAAS Kapital II have been pretty nice dogs.
"Actually, we've chosen things like Christmas, April Fools Day, Alice in Wonderland for episodes because they're good things to hang things on. They're recognisable and they're simple things and it means you can do very complicated and strange things because people go 'Oh, it's Christmas,' and they have that to hang on to and what you put on the coat-hanger can be anything at all. Just gives you a bit more room to move."

Do you think you're coming closer to mastering the beast which is mass media?
Paul: "That's stupid. Next question."
Richard: "No, it's not."
Paul: "Oh, come on! I was just having a joke!"
Richard: "No, I think it's a very fair question. That's a fair question! Tim will answer you shortly."
Tim: "We could never fill Bert Newton's shoes. We could never fill Bert Newton's underwear."
Richard: "Tim, by that, doesn't mean to call Bert Newton the beast which is the mass media."
Tim: "Bert Newton has mastered the mass media. There's no way we could ever do that."
Paul: "The beast of the mass media? No. I think the most amazing thing to come out of the first series was that a lot of our critics were extremely honest with us about what they thought of the show. And of us as personalities and as human beings. And we were hurt for quite some time but we did realise after a while that they were correct when they said it was the most ridiculous show on Australian television and never should have been shown.
"People were right to say that. We were sorry. We did offensive work, we did demeaning work."
Tim: "We thought when we sold it to the United States - a cable network there - and to, strange enough, Japan and also to certain European countries that we had a good product there. But...."
Paul: "The journalists were right. They were right to say those cruel, demeaning things about us."
Richard: "Hurtful, personal things."
Paul: "And it's not their fault that most of them are over 65 and went straight from the f**cking Marconi set and then on to the wireless and then somehow they shifted across to television because it was a visual medium: most of them are half blind anyway.
"Not that that really matters because I respect and love them as human beings. It doesn't help when you're being swabbed down by the nurse or having your bath there to have something to laugh at. If you're laughing and you're 65, it's a problem because it shakes up all your insides, you're more likely to have a heart attack, your arteries have gone hard around your heart, you don't need this sort of thing when you're old.
"What's quite amazing is that after the showing of DAAS Kapital 1 - that incredibly-popular-for-the-people-of-Australia series - a lot of critics have, for some reason, died. Most of those critics have died of old age."
Tim: "We want to give something back to Australia. I've got a cold and a flu and I'd like to give something back to this country."

It's not a problem for you to get anything out, like a book or a record or a TV show.

Tim: "It's because we do it ourselves. That's the only way to get it done. If we hung around and waited for other bastards to come up and offer us books or films or art exhibitions or this or that or the other thing, nothing would ever happen.
"The only way to do it is to do it yourself. It takes twice as much time but it actually does happen. By 'mastering the mass media', if you mean can we get things to happen for us easily, we've never tried. Because you've just got to fiddle with too many willies and stand on your knees too often."

Is truth a subjective concept in the world of mass media?
Richard: "Absolutely."
Tim: "Truth is subjective at any time. There's no such thing as truth. If there is such a thing as truth, you'd be able to prove that God existed."
Richard: " For me, God is like a huge, enormous lemming. You probably don't believe that yourself but I know in my heart that's true. So, for me, that's a subjective truth. Reality, in general, for us is very much a subjective thing. And the circumstances may change from one day to the next."
Tim: "Many people may say Richard is a flatulent dickhead. Is it true or is it not? Who knows."
Richard: "Myself, I disagree. While the idea of Richard as a flatulent dickhead is true for Tim, it's not true for me."
Paul: "And funny enough, I look at Richard and I see a lemming. Which is weird because Richard has that image of God. And it's probably not true that Richard's a lemming."
Tim: "Whenever I'm talking to Christians, I say 'Explain dinosaurs!' That shuts them up for over an hour."
Richard: "It's very sad, I think, that Tim is so easily fooled and pandered to by Satanist archaeologists."
Tim: "Hey, there's nothing wrong with Satanism. Apart from the fact that it's inherently stupid.
"If you think about it, Satanism is very silly because if you say, 'I believe in Satan', it means you must believe in his opposite God, which everyone knows is a really stupid idea."
"So, Satanists are saying, 'I believe in God who created everything - the master of the universe - but I'd much rather believe in this guy because he says I can put my finger up my bottom and dance around a fire naked with a few of my friends from the office. And every now and again, when we get really excited, we can strangle a chook!
"Well, my my, that's so bloody scary! Satanists are not tough at all. All Satanists do is f**k and kill the odd chook and maybe the odd person. Well, big deal! I'm so scared! Watch me run screaming from the room in terror!"

THE 3 AMIGOS FROM HELL
Rolling Stone (1989?)
By Ed St John.

In Montreal they had hundreds of people hurling abuse at police cars. In Edinburgh, they had audiences burning credit cards and shoplifting. In Melbourne, a naked girl ran across the stage; in Canberra someone had a heart attack. They've been known to hit members of their audience; members of their audience have been known to hit them back. They're mad, bad, arrogant, precocious, aggressive, confrontational and, well, pretty. They're the Doug Anthony Allstars.

In three short years, the Doug Anthony Allstars Paul McDermott, Richard Fidler and Tim Ferguson - have gone from being post-graduate buskers in the streets of Canberra to being Australia's most notorious - and ambitious - comedy act. Formed out of the remains of a punk band, they combine punk's aggressive do-it-yourself ethics with a strong artiness and a conspicuous intelligence. Like William Burroughs with a smoking gun, their work inspires a classic dilemma: do you laugh, run, or call the cops?
"Being provocative emerged out of busking, where you're always trying to grab people's attention," says Paul McDermott. "Even in the early days of playing clubs, no-one knew who we were. Sometimes we'd have to do really ugly or horrendous things to get people's attention, and we're not afraid to do that. We'll hit someone if it gets a bit of discourse going."
"So much theatre and comedy involves no interaction between performer and audience. It's like television; there's no sense of tension or confrontation."

It's hard to imagine a more innocuous place than Canberra for the formation of the Doug Anthony Allstars, but it was there, in the gridlike streets of the nation's capital, that the trio met. Ironically they were all there for an education; Richard Fidler was attending the Australian National University, Paul McDermott was at art school and Tim Ferguson, the School of Music.
Drawn to Canberra's thriving early-Eighties underground music scene, the Doug Anthony Allstars found their prototypes in short-lived punk bands like The Fat Sluts, The Lone Reagans and Forbidden Mule. "Like all punk bands they were very fast and furious," recalls Ferguson. "We collaborated on various things before gravitating towards busking and eventually forming the Doug Anthonys."
For a time, the three even managed to share a house in the Canberra suburbs. "It was basically a complete failure," laughs Ferguson. "We couldn't resolve our roles. We couldn't figure out who was the screaming kid, who was the bored housewife and who was the tyrannical father. We also had no furniture and only two beds, so if you wanted to do any rooting you had to roster it. Kind of rotating rooting. Basically we learnt that you can't live and work together at the same time."
After congealing into the Doug Anthony Allstars in 1986, and with some months of busking in Canberra under their belts, this unlikely ensemble packed itself off to Adelaide to perform at that year's Fringe Festival. They surprised themselves by winning the Pick Of The Fringe award, and after more busking in Canberra they departed for England in 1987. "Travelling out of Australia confirmed to us that we were on the right track," says Richard Fidler. "At the time we first left Australia we had very little success here and the British we far more receptive to what we were doing. The whole thing exploded for us when we got there, it was quite incredible. Within a very short time we were doing national television appearances in front of millions of people and playing these enormous shows."
The northern hemisphere continued to provide the Allstars with their principal employment for another eighteen months. They played extensively in Canada, Germany, America and Britain, indeed their presence at the Edinburgh Festival had the likes of The Guardian and Time Out reaching for superlatives. "We came back at the end of 1988," recalls Tim Ferguson, "to the reality of playing thirty people again. It was a bit letdown."
Fortunes changed for the better when the Doug Anthony Allstars began making regular appearances on the ABC's weekly comedy program The Big Gig. Their fast, eclectic style of comedy - with its strong musical elements - fitted perfectly into the program's format, and along with Jean Kittson, the Allstars emerged as the major discoveries of the series. "Their audacity is what immediately appealed to me," recalls Big Gig producer/director Ted Robinson. "They were brash and loud...I think basically a nice bunch of conservative kids who were prepared to get right out on the edge and take a chance. They're eclectic,
wide-ranging and very original. I also suspect that a lot of what they do goes over the heads of their audience.
"They'll probably hate me for saying it, but they're amongst the most professional people I've dealt with. Their act seems to be full of anarchy, but in fact their work is very structured. They know exactly what they're doing and where they're going - more so than any other group of young people I've ever worked with."
Robinson's comments are certainly borne out by the facts; not only have they built up a significant live audience in Australia and several other countries, the Doug Anthony Allstars have also written a film script, they're developing a TV show, they've begun recording their first album, and through publishers Allen and Unwin, recently published their first book - appropriately titled Book.
"All of us had stories we wanted to write," explains Fidler. "A lot of it had been written as much as five years ago, before we even began performing. So basically we all wrote our own stories and pieced them together around the narrative."
The fresh and imaginative prose of Book may surprise fans raised on the Allstars crazed live performances or appearances on The Big Gig. Apart from some neo-brutalist cartoons and artwork drawn by the group members, the book contains a densely written narrative. And while it certainly has its amusing moments - much of the text is a parody of magical realism - it is categorically not a lightweight "comedy book."
"People have wrongly assumed that we're putting out a book to cash in on the fame of The Big Gig," says McDermott, "but this book was commissioned and largely written before the show went to air.
"It would have been really easy for us to put out a book with all our song lyrics and comedy sketches. But our live work is quite different from the stuff we choose to write. The live work emerges from ad libbing; it's always changing and we never really write it down. The book has nothing to do with any of that."
"With the book, " concludes Ferguson, "we wanted something that people who had never seen us live would be able to pick up and enjoy.....or be disturbed by. You don't have to be familiar with our 'concepts' to pick up the book. We wanted to do something that would stand alone."
The humour of the Doug Anthony Allstars, particularly live, is rooted in a deeply confrontational iconoclasm, that targets all manner of religious, artistic or political fanaticism. It's increasingly based in the development of performance characters and the relationships between them.
"It's something that's occurred organically over the past eighteen months," Ferguson says. "Once we started noticing it we began to consciously develop it to the point where Paul's nasty and mean, Richard's really nice and caring and I'm......ahh.....gorgeous but stupid. I don't know how much that reflects the truth of the matter. I think as people we're all fairly similar. Kind of boring and depressed really, just like everybody else."
Away from the stage or screen, the personalities, and their conversation, do pan out evenly; all three are capable of speaking for the whole. Over a couple of bottles of Victoria Bitter in the Sydney office of Allen & Unwin, at the end of a gruelling day of media prodding, the Allstars still manage to be polite, personable and highly articulate young men.
The sense of anarchy that permeates their act is mostly absent, until the conversation shifts to the Australian media's non-coverage of contemporary comedy or to their just completed debut album and the music industry's sloth when it came to offering them a contract. Suddenly, their vitriol knows no limits.
"The recording industry is run by overweight, coke-snorting pricks who wouldn't know what was hot or hip if you shoved it in their face," spits Ferguson. "I find it astonishing that we could get up on national television every week, singing songs, but not one person has approached us to see whether we'd be interested in recording them. When our manager rang a couple of companies, to gauge their interest, they wanted to know whether it would be like "Shaddup You Face". They needed a precedent for it.
"We might sound bitter about this but, in fact, the opposite is true: their sluggishness reminds us why we like to do everything ourselves. As soon as you start getting other people to do things for you, they start telling you what you can and can't do."
To look at the Doug Anthony Allstars on could be mistaken for thinking they were some kind of mutant rock band: they wear matching outfits, they're young and good-looking, and they can sing and arrange music. Yet while they've recorded an album, they're keen to distance themselves from any notion of rock & roll.
"We're categorically not a band and not involved in rock & roll," asserts Fidler. "As far as we're concerned rock & roll is pretty well dead and the most exciting, new and dangerous things are happening in comedy. And the great thing is that anyone can do it. "It's like the whole punk ethic that said you didn't need to have a Fender Telecaster and a Marshall stack to get up there and make good music. It's a simple matter: if you've got something in your head you can get up in front of a microphone and do it. It's real live-or-die stuff."

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Allstars have their critics. Because so much of their humour is brutally confronting and potentially quite offensive, they've been variously accused of being Stalinists, Fascists, misogynists and reactionaries. "We love nothing more than pushing people," admits Fidler cheerfully. "That's our idea of a party. We push and push until we get a response. We turn crowds into mobs."
Ultimately however, one of the Allstar's most endearing qualities is their unique ability to change tack at the very moment when you think they've gone too far. This was brilliantly illustrated on a recent episode of The Big Gig, when the terrible trio saw fit to deliver one of their most obscene routines on national television. At the very point when even liberal viewers might have been reaching repulsion point at their graphic description of geriatric sex, the Allstars launched into a straightforward, indeed poignantly beautiful rendition of "I Heard It Through The Grapevine."
"To my way of thinking there are basically two styles of comedy," ponders McDermott. "There are the comedians who want to be your best friend, who want you to feel you share common attitudes and that you should be comforted by that. And then there's the style we've always gone for where an audience honestly doesn't know what's going to happen next or for that matter whether they're safe."
As 1990 approaches, the Doug Anthony Allstars are clearly on the kind of roll that most comedians can only dream about. Whilst so many comics adopt a passive stance, awaiting offers of work, the Allstars are a devastatingly ambitious, unstoppable outfit with an apparently endless stream of possibilities.
"I think they could do whatever they wanted to do," says Ted Robinson, who is currently talking to the group about possible future television projects. "Just about anything is within their reach but they're a little suspicious of success. It's frightening to start turning into an icon when you're in the business of destroying them.
"Our philosophy is that if it's not working today then keep pushing and it might work tomorrow," says Ferguson. "We push ourselves, we keep working, we don't sleep.......and eventually, if it's good, somebody's going to notice. We're not surprised by our success. We think we've worked bloody hard for it."
"We've often been told that we're running at everything too fast," continues McDermott. "We're always being told to slow down. But we want to get it all done before we burn out. I mean, why the fuck not?"
"'Ambitious' is one of those words that's usually meant pejoratively," says Fidler, "but personally I don't have much trouble with it. Yes, we want to get a lot done. Yes, we're prolific. Yes, we're ambitious.
"I think the Doug Anthony Allstars are like a shark. We have to keep moving or we'll die."


DAAS

Which stands for Doug Anthony All Stars, three fun guys who just want to improve your mind - by insulting your t-shirt.

In a world of deceit and uncertainty, The Doug Anthony All Stars are what they seem. Tim Ferguson bounces from slumber and remains relentlessly cheerful every minute of the day. Richard Fidler, the quiet shy musical one, really IS quite shy. And you're hereby warned never to cross Paul McDermott (the mean one). His bite is reputed to cause rabies.

The above was volunteered by someone who accompanied the trio on a nation-wide promotional and concert tour, coinciding with the release of the All Stars' first album, "Icon". "They're not the usual sort of rock star interview," she warns.

As it turns out, "Icon" is not the usual sort of comedy record.

There are no verbal skits, no monologues, no character voices, no fart jokes or four letter words. There are 15 songs, each of which has a beginning, middle and end, fulsome harmonies and strong lead vocals.

There is humour, mostly sardonically black and a smorgasbord of musical styles that can have you playing Guess The Riff, all day and all of the night - Ye Gods, wasn't that Purple People Eater? That was Rawhide! No wait a minute, that was...

"We ripped off different ideas left right and centre," agrees McDermott. "We wanted to see how easy it would be to put something like that together and, really, it wasn't that hard."

"If people have been shocked by the album, it's because it IS musically good - or at least, together."

"Icon" has no lyric sheet to help listeners discover the wit and wisdom within the likes of My Baby's Gone to Jail, Dead Elvis, KRSNA or I Want To Spill The Blood Of A Hippy.

"Of course there's no lyric sheet," says Paul (with a hint of a snarl). "If people want to hear what you're saying, they'll listen. And if they can't hear the words they'll make up their own. A friend once tried to tell me that the Eagles classic was called Life In A Bat Plane. His words are miles better than the original. It's just pitiful when songwriters reduced themselves to words like "love" and "I'm so sad you left me baby." These people have had educations! They know there are more words out there. Writing can be a sportsman-like activity. Language is such a beautiful, glorious thing!quot;

And that it is. It can also be a brutal weapon, as made explicit in the Allstars' 1989 publication Book.

"It's meant to be a parody of Bukowski and several other literary styles," says Paul. "We were having a go at the underbelly of modern writing - super-realism and fantastic-realism. Thew work of Burroughs and the Beat generation poets is considered such an awesome thing now, but it's really just as much pop trash as anything else."

Who else has inspired the writings of DAAS?

"Oh, hundreds of names. We go back to the existentialists. I like the work of the Marquis De Sade - I've been reading 120 Days of Sodomy for the past few years, it's such a nice book to reflect upon. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jean Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau... Kafka was an early influence."

In turn, the writings of DAAS influence other, younger, minds."

"We've met girls who read Nietzche because we mentioned him in Book," says Paul. "Others have delved into the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. Our real ambition is to set up a political party based on artistic credibility and ideals. Tim will be the puppet spokesman, Richard will be the band leader."

World domination? Perhaps. The All Stars are Big In England, have been for years. Success in Australia came via The Big Gig on ABC-TV when the trio, virtually unknowns in their own country, seized upon the stratagem of whipping audiences into a frenzied chant of "ALL STARS!! ALL STARS!!" It is the way of TV (indeed all media) that if people treat you like a star, well then, you ARE a star. And it's worked a treat for DAAS.

America though, has yet to catch on to these zany sophists.

"We did several gigs in New York where we'd insult members of the audience, because that's what we do," says Paul. "We'd say: Oh, made that t-shirt ourselves, did we? Really looks bad.

"And guys would come up to us afterwards and say: What's wrong with my t-shirt? We'd say nothing's wrong with it, it's just part of the show.

"And they'd say: Well my girlfriend bought me this t-shirt. It used to get really heavy.

"Then again," reflects Paul, "when all else fails, our motto is: Just hit someone in the audience! When all the thought and intellect goes out of it,the best thing to do is just hit someone!"

And he laughs. And so might you. But here's a tip. Never, ever sit in the first five rows of a Doug Anthony All Stars show.
ANTHONY O'GRADY
DAAS:Icon (DAAS Kapital through CBS) All formats.

THE ORGAN GRINDER'S MONKEY
By Liz Giuffre

Obituary:
Doug Anthony Allstars
1986-1996 (or so)
Featured: Paul McDermott, Tim Ferguson, Richard Fidler
Born: (together) Canberra, busking on streets
Died: (separately) commercial prime time TV

For those that used the break as I did (i.e. watching a lot of crap TV just because you can), the realisation that there is just nothing original on the box anymore is one that really hit home. No station is safe, not even the once abundant garden of the ABC. Ravaged by natural disasters such as ever narrowing budgets and cuts to management, there is just not a whole lot worth laughing about at ol' Aunty anymore, or at least not anything that has been locally produced.
As commercial TV stagnates under the rigour mortis of American sitcom reruns and remakes (insert stand up comedian in domestic situation here), it seems that the cult of neurotica is here to stay. If it can't be packaged as the "World's Wackiest/Naughtiest/Stupidest", then clearly it's not worth its salt.
There is of course the exception to this rule. That is, "We'll take on a local product as long as we've seen it work somewhere else". Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Channel 10. Looking at the station's program line up, it's like an ABC comedy reunion. The Panel (made up of the D-generation and Late Show cast), Good News Week (of the same name on channel two, but now minus the earlier asset of being funny) and assorted "personalities", including larger than life (human fringe), Tim Ferguson.
Hmm, Comedy. It may surprise some of you that I use this word in connection with the last couple of names, particularly original, thought provoking, controversial entertainment. Comedy that wasn't afraid to make as many enemies as it did friends. But once, in a magical far away place, these did exist. A world which contained the Doug Anthony Allstars.
If you're only familiar with the above names as part of the "turn me on" team, then you're in for a bit of a shock. It may surprise you to know that there is more to Mr Ferguson than the big schmooze of the autocue and canned laughter of Unreal TV. (And in case you're wondering, he has always acted like he thought he was the most gorgeous person on the planet, but with the Allstars at least we thought he was joking). Similarly, there is more to Mr Paul McDermott than his current incarnation as the new Don Lane on Good News Week. Sure, he's always liked the sound of his own voice, but at least before he sang things other than "Throw Your Arms Around Me". In the Allstars, his topics of choice were three part harmony pieces about necrophilia, beastiality, and of course the show stopping parables telling of the joys of cancer.
Named after a vaguely memorable politician, The Doug Anthony Allstars were far from the Nanna-pleasers they are today. Indeed, they were the cheekiest, uncheesiest performers in the country. As one of the only comedy groups to ever entice (or some would say provoke) audience brawls, physical harassment and streakers, it was ironically the media that would cop the biggest beating. Armed with the ability to spot a lazy journalist as 10 paces, the Allstars managed to convince a major British paper that Doug Anthony was a famous Australian Prime Minister who was assassinated in the late 70s, a complete bulls--- story that ran front page before anybody checked their facts. Similarly, in the early 90s they told the Sydney Morning Herald that they would be starring in Batman 2 with Jack Nicholson, a story which was published hailing them Australia's new comedy heroes despite being complete fiction.
Even post break up, it seemed that the media was a mere puppet for the boys. In 1996, McDermott toured the Adelaide and Melbourne festivals with a musical he had written called Mosh. The Melbourne Age's reviewer spent an entire page slagging off the production, However this didn't deter Paul. Having read the reviewer's closing remarks, "whatever you do, don't go and see Mosh", McDermott got creative, and with some clever editing got himself the golden Promo quote for his posters - "see Mosh" (The Age).
Five years on and things are al quite different. Tall Poppy Syndrome kicks in whenever there is talk of "going commercial", but is it totally unfounded? Are these and other ex-ABC comedians less cutting edge on commercial TV because they are being made to be? Or is it because they can afford to be? Is it really a sell out when you do it on your terms? An interesting thing to consider is that comedy, no matter how universal its references, does have a use by date. No audience (or performer for that matter) wants to hear the same type of material for over 10 years. And for a group like the Allstars, which had three multi-talented members, the same thing must surely become grating. Mind you, so does a lot of Channel 10 programming.
What commercial television does do However is raise performer's profile to nosebleed heights, something that becomes evident when you look at fan clubs. The funniest "presence" on the web these days is the legions and legions of Paul McDermott fans. The "Paul McDermott shrine" and "temple" are just the tip of the iceberg, with extensive quote and picture galleries of the great man and his great voice extending as far as the mouse can scroll. As a joke I typed in the address "paulmcdermott.com", only to discover that this was a site not only up and running, but taking itself very bloody seriously. Claiming to "mix sexuality with personality", this site in particular was blissfully unaware of the irony of its mottos. If the focus is on the man as a performer, musician and artist, why do you need to have so many sultry pictures of him?
Others were proudly superficial, with "paulmcdermott.iscute.com" openly claiming to know or understand little of the Allstars work, yet being very fond of the way they looked while doing it. Indeed, it seems many of the net McDermott fans would be happy to watch him in a foreign language, as long as he promised to sing a tender song at the end of the hour. One of the funniest things I found was a newspaper clipping from 1962 in one of the picture galleries. Upon closer inspection I found it was Paul's first photo. McDermott's parents had featured in the local paper when Paul and his twin sister were cleverly born on Mother's day, and some poor bugger must have waded through piles and piles of newspapers until they unearthed it! And he was just as sexy then.....
I can just feel my friends ceasing up as they read this, for indeed now the air of hypocrisy is beginning to blow up a gail. I have to confess to having been a big GNW fan in the past (the photos on this page were all taken by me and my sister from just some of our many taping attendances). And yes, I still know all of the Dougs songs word for word (and in many cases in three part harmony). The day Paul called me a "f---wit" in front of an audience of a couple of hundred is still one of the proudest in my life. So what am I bitching about?
Well, I guess the problem is overkill. There is nothing wrong with commercial media, and indeed why be a struggling artist if you don't need to be? The comedians on The Panel have the sweetest deal possible; a network which gives them complete artistic control, as well as enough money to realise the ideas. However, you do have to wonder if they're just lucky that things have worked out. The Panel team (Working Dog Productions), have had over 15 years experience in order to get it right, and so have McDermott and Ferguson.
I guess my question is then, who's getting the chance to cut their teeth now, so as to step in the limelight in 5 years time?