WHEN Ron Hitler Barassi and Humphrey B Flaubert, frontmen for Melbourne band TISM, enter a room, everyone stares. Not for the usual rock-star-walking-among-mortals reason but because it's hard not to notice two blokes dressed in silver jumpsuits with partially inflated arms and legs and matching balaclavas.
And, if hearing such attired people stress that they're not a joke band (they prefer to be known as a band that writes satirical lyrics) seems a contradiction, then that's because TISM - whose name is short for This Is Serious, Mum - is all about juxtaposition.
They're anarchic but they sing about the joys of doing homework. The tunes are catchy and up-beat, but the words speak of dark things. They're the sort of band that can release a single called I Might Be a C---, but I'm Not a F---ing C---, yet pepper their lyrics with references to T.S. Eliot (Mistah Eliot -- He Wanker), Ezra Pound, Dostoyevsky and Jean-Paul Sartre. They seriously criticise popular culture, delivering their barbs in a hilariously funny way. For Hitler Barassi, revelling in these contradictions is what makes it all worthwhile.
"There's a lot of aggro and shouting, and the beats are full on, but it's hard to take the shouting and the aggro and the stance and the personas as serious rock gods, when in the very next section we'll be leaping around like complete tossers," he says.
Since forming in the early 1980s, the members of TISM - who go by pseudonyms such as Jock Cheese and Eugene De La Hot Croix Bun - have never revealed their true identities.
There has been speculation that they are musicians from other bands in disguise, AFL footballers or schoolteachers (because they always seem to tour during school holidays).
What is certain is their notoriety, either for having one of their CDs withdrawn (not because it was called Australia, the Lucky C--- but because artist Ken Done objected to the cover, which featured a Done-style koala with a syringe in its mouth) or for winning the ARIA award for best independent release in 1995 for the CD Machiavelli and The Four Seasons.
The latter was significant because, if any art form deserves to have the boil of posturing lanced, it's rock music. For more than 20 years, TISM has been more than happy to supply the scalpel.
Hitler Barassi says TISM opposes two of rock's articles of faith: that it be about new bands and that it appeal to teenagers. "And we break those orthodoxies, and all your faux, pseudo, pissant supposed radicals in the history of rock haven't had the guts to break those rules - they're all just the latest product," he says. "It's like saying the latest brand of corn flakes is challenging. We've been around for 20 years and we couldn't give a toss about teenagers."
His disdain for Australian Idol and Popstars will come as no surprise, not least for the culture of exploitation he says is inherent in such shows. But TISM is equally scathing about alternative bands such as Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, You Am I, Ministry and Slipknot.
"I'm not trying to blow wind in our sails here," says Flaubert. "The world of rock is an incredibly conservative, almost right-wing world, disguised as something left-wing. And to come along as a band and say whatever the hell you want to say and combine satire with music is particularly unusual and it's the reason why a lot of rock journalists don't really like us."
TISM don't take themselves too seriously: they once released an album called Great Trucking Songs of the Renaissance. Their latest CD, part of a DVD set called The White Albun, concludes with a song called TISM are Shit, a successor to a less blunt earlier song titled We are the Champignons that detailed all of the reasons they were "no good".
They know their job is to entertain and a TISM gig is a unique experience. As well as the outlandish costumes, there is energetic dancing and the occasional crowd singalong.
"One of the moments at which my heart skips lightly on its wings is when a room full of people are singing [the chorus to The Mystery of the Artist Explained] 'I'm f---ed in the head' in the manner of a very cheery, sunny sort of song, that Hi-5 could be singing," says Flaubert. "If you pay good money to stand in a dark, sweaty, over-crowded shithole, that's what you want to be doing. You don't want to be going along and be educated by some f---wit with dreads, who's playing a new song, instead of the single that everyone's come along to hear."
The band members, whose history would suggest are in their 40s, feel their age gives them a legitimate claim to alternative music's trademark misery.
"Life has been pointless" is a more powerful statement coming from a middle-aged man than a young band, says Hitler Barassi.
"Anyone who is [reading this] on the 7.15 train to a crap job and they're about 48 and some young punk who is 27 has the executive position that they thought they had a chance for and the only thing their counsellor says to them is this: 'You will never get a better life than this' - we're the band for you," he says. "We're never going to get a better career, we're never going to have more success. All we're trying to do is understand the poverty that we've ended up in."
TISM appear at the Metro, Sydney, tomorrow and Saturday; the Great Northern, Byron Bay, NSW, August 5; the Trocadero, Surfer's Paradise, Queensland, August 6; and the Arena, Brisbane, August7.
