danieldwilliam | On the Doug Anthony All-Stars

I went to see the Doug Anthony All-Stars for my birthday. It was emotional.

The All-Stars are a comedy musical trio, Paul McDermott, Richard Fidler and Tim Ferguson, from Canberra. When I was a young man growing up in Australia DAAS were the "Thing" you talked about in school on Wednesday morning. Had you seen them? Weren't they brilliant? So daring! They were iconclastic. They deliberately pushed the boundary of what it was acceptable to say in order to expose what we thought it was acceptable to think so long as we covered our reasons with sufficient euphemism. And they kept pushing, and pushing and pushing until sometimes they changed what it was acceptable to think. As a foundation for their message they used a classic structure of three bickering amigos. Their characters were, they say, hyper-extended versions of themselves. Richard was sweet but weak and stupid, Tim vain but charming and good looking and Paul arrogant and aggressive but passionate and talented and none of them understanding why it wasn't okay to say the things they were saying. Then there would be a song. A good song. Paul McDemott wrote some great songs. He's a great singer and well supported by Ferguson singing and Fidler on guitar as well.
Satire with live ammunition and a guitar.

Usually the songs were funny and energetic and continued the trope of saying the unsayable.

I think my favourite is Broad Lic Nicht

http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858520458/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu7yWK1XLeo
But every so often they would pause and deliver a superlatively good version of a classic, like this cover of I Heard it on the Grapevine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-fLZOJ-huE

Such was the strength of their characterisation that they could deliver that entirely in character and it still be excellent.

They were important to me as a lad. I was an immigrant. My family were immigrants and we did what immigrants did. We tried to keep the old ways from the old country alive in a new context and we tried to adopt the new ways of the new country with a context we perhaps didn't quite get. We'd tell British jokes about Carrubbers who built a missionary centre on Edinburgh's Royal Mile and who only hurt when he laughed and we'd laugh at the Doug Anthony All-Stars when they returned from the Royal Mile's Fringe performances and finally broke their native Australia in 1989. I was 14. What was important to me, as an immigrant, about the All-Stars is that they were new to Australia too. They'd sold out the Fringe but were so unacceptable to Australia that they went back to busking. They broke new ground and I was there at the same time as everyone else. I didn't have to have the emotional connection to Waltzin' Matilda, or the Anzacs or the Vietnam War to be authentically part of the audience for new Australian comedy.

And so the All-Stars thrived for a time when I was a boy and then split up to do other things in 1994. And then they, mostly, reformed in 2014 for their 30th anniversary and kept going. Richard Fidler was busy being on the radio so Tim and Paul signed up an old colleague to play the guitar and they played on. Played the Fringe in 2015, won the Spirit of the Fringe award to add to their Perrier Comedy award nomination from 1988. Back again in 2016 for their 30th anniversary Fringe performance.

And it turns out that one of the "other things" they had split up to do was for Tim to have Multiple Sclerosis. He'd started noticing symptoms in the 1992 and by 1994 his mobility was so affected he was struggling to keep up with the slap-stick action and fast-paced choreography that accompanied the songs. He knew he couldn't continue so they broke up the band.

By 2015 Tim was in a wheelchair.

Tim was the handsome one, the gorgeous one, in their own words the one you thought about whilst you were cheating on Richard with Paul. He's broken and in a wheelchair. On Saturday night I watched him take 5 minutes to adjust his legs, which no longer work, with the one arm that still works and still not quite get them in the right place before the next song started. He's still handsome.

And this is probably their last tour. It sounds like Tim expects to die in the next year or two. Tim is broken and dying and in pain and he's pretty angry about it and he's pretty angry about how we gloss over pain and suffering whilst using euphemisms to disguise the fact we are abandoning the disable to their fate. Paul is pretty fucking angry that is mate is dying too. Paul is openly joking about a solo tour as the Doug Anthony All-Star. Introducing the final song of the show, their long running cover of Throw Your Arms Around Me he slipped, by accident, in to the introduction from his solo tour next year where he dedicates the song to the late Tim Ferguson. It is an excuse for one man to say in public to another man that he loves him. All it takes is a 30 year career, a chronic debilitating disease and punchline to make that acceptable.

This was the first time I'd seen the All-Stars live. It will probably be the last. But what a show! Still angry, still pushing the boundaries of the unsayable. Still carrying the character driven satire forward with an acoustic guitar. They can still sell a song and they can still have you roaring with laughter whilst you work out that you are probably laughing at your own hypocricy. As My Lovely Wife said on the way home, having seen three acts that evening you could really see the difference in class.

And so much love between the performers. The running joke of Paul (in character) asking Tim (in character) if he was alright, which he'd clearly woven in to the act so he could check that his mate was okay and Tim just looking up with joy to be there, back on stage with his mates.

The show finished with Paul and Tim accompanying their younger selves on Throw Your Arms Around Me

And I picked up a momento from the stage after the show. An A4 bit of paper, "Fuck me up the arse! I LOVE it sooo much!. One of a running gag of inappropriate things stuck to the back of Tim's wheelchair. It's literally school-boy humour. Was it acceptable when the All-Stars were doing that sort of thing when Tim was standing up? Is it any less acceptable now? Was it ever acceptable when you did that sort of thing to your mates when you were 14? That I think is the question that a 30 year career in comedy has been asking.

Throw Your Arms Around Me - for Tim Ferguson.

www.youtube.com/watch