"Let's face it pal, if you add up all those single times / Your life's been just about as fucked as his or hers or mine / There might be just this one thing left before they ring the bell / Think of all those wasted moments: let's use this hour well."
As the guitars thunder and the harmonies hit the wall this is the spiel Ron Hitler-Barassi uses to hector the crowd of Melbourne's Hi-Fi Bar on the live DVD component of TISM's latest release 'The White Album'. You couldn't hope for a more succinct encapsulation of this band's jeering awareness of life's passing thrill. TISM are all about the moment.
"And at its best it all comes together," growls an enthusiastic Hitler-Barassi, still charged up from launching the live DVD at ACMI in Melbourne. "The music's pumping, the gimmick's working and the costume looks weird. It's both a little bit frightening and a little bit funny and it can all come together. We snuck into the back of the hall there at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image [ACMI] before we got changed and to see it up on the screen and to hear it pumping out, I said to Humphrey [Flaubert] 'Geez, I almost feel like doing the dance.' Your muscle memory is so tuned to doing this shit that it was like it can be live."
So much so that when they came onstage after the screening for a Q & A session Ron couldn't resist hurling himself headlong into the front rows.
"Four hundred people, polite applause and all that, " snorts Hitler-Barassi in vague dismay, "and I was saying to Humphrey 'this is the end of the band.' I mean, for twenty years we've been kicked in the balls and that's fine, you just get hardened balls. But there's one thing the TISM armoury can't withstand: the honey-trap of critical success. This is what might be the future for TISM - extremely complex, artistically credible, confronting musical numbers. That would be the end of This Is Serious Mum. Absolutely. Can you imagine a TISM album full of hauntingly discordant songs that undercut the expectations they set up at the beginning ? It'd be shit. It'd be the fuckin' Jock Cheese solo album, that's how shit it'd be."
Ruminating further on what distresses him most about TISM's "critical and popular renaissance" Hitler-Barassi is, as always, quick to reach a disturbing conclusion. "The fellow in 'The Age' said the right thing, he said 'TISM tend to attack things irrespective of whether they're worthy of attack,' which I think is a good point but I'm finding out as artists, as people, we might have needed that level of agitation, that level of aggression between us and the critics. I can see why if what you release is universally acclaimed how hard it must be to keep creating stuff that's valid. I mean there are artists who are so good their talents lead them directly up their own arse."
It's interesting that Hitler-Barassi should mention aggression because it's certainly one of the hallmarks of TISM's confrontational live performances.
"Like football," he burbles at break-neck speed, "People say football's aggressive - it is, but it's completely controlled aggression. That's what makes it watchable and admirable. And the controlled ability amongst the mosh pit of a TISM crowd to understand it's still a joke - when me, a sweaty six foot four inch man, leaps onto their heads, 99.99 percent of people take it with great good humour. It's most interesting when it's a combination of aggression and physicality but also stupidity and self-satire. It can go too far. All it takes is five or six blokes who just don't get that and the atmosphere can change so there's an element of slight nastiness and that's not so good."
Just like football, then, the dramatic tension comes from a real possibility that a senseless melee could break out at any moment. And when you're singing a tune titled Somebody Start A Fight Or Something you can't exactly claim the moral high ground. Worse, on Message From A Big Day Out Port-A-Loo they start chanting "Go the grope in the mosh," and for anyone who's seen the TISM boys stripped naked, tattered remnants of costumes gaffa-taped about their groins as they recklessly gyrate bare-arsed like Manpower for the criminally insane, it's a moment which fairly screams 'Therapist Wanted.' Still, the wonder is that after all these years Hitler-Barassi and Co aren't set to soften their approach but continue heedlessly flinging themselves over that stage barrier.
"Some bands go 'oh we're bored playing live'," Hitler-Barassi mutters in bewilderment, "I think 'fuck mate, playing live I've been disappointed, angry, embarrassed, exhilarated, annoyed, inspired but I'll tell you what I've never been; I've never been fuckin' bored.
"TISM have for so long been doing live shows I genuinely can say, after eighteen or nineteen years, whatever it is, we've never done a live show that we haven't tried our hardest. Like shithouse fuckin' fifty-seven people in a pub in Warnambool after driving for fuckin' seven hours hung-over from Adelaide, or five pissed old guys in a poorly-booked RSL in Canberra or a full house in Lismore after a twelve hour drive. You can be hung-over, tired, cranky, annoyed, whatever, but you can never not care. And I think TISM's worst live show is better than a lot of band's best live show."
