Notes from the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, 2015

The Shelf, co-hosted and curated by local ha-ha stalwarts Adam Richard and Justin Hamilton, has been, without doubt, the best barometer of what’s shaking at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (and indeed Aussie comedy generally) for over four years now.

Once more taking up residence in the cabaret inspired band room at The Toff (upstairs from Cookie on Swanston Street), Season XI of The Shelfpromises another trio of Mondays jam packed with chaos, surprise walk ons — both local and international, Adam with his kit off, and overall show lengths threatening to run into late Tuesday morning.

Previous Shelf guests, briefly, have included a who’s who of established talent and up-and-comers, including Tony Martin, Paul McDermott, Tim Ferguson, Wil Anderson, Sam Simmons, Celia Pacquola, Tom Gleeson, Graeme Elwood, Deanne Smith, Anne Edmonds, Luke McGregor, Lehmo, Cal Wilson, Claire Hooper, Lawrence Mooney, Josh Earl… You get the idea.

With a rotating cast of regulars and an anything goes ethos, The Shelf should be any self respecting festival-goer’s first port of call. It’s an ever reliable opportunity to sample the deep breadth of talent on the programme, and, inevitably, make some surprise discoveries for the 2015 season.

Be sure to rock up early, as the venue fills quickly (and the show is guaranteed to sell out), and pro tip — bring a mate to guard your seat when you head to the bar during the show intervals.

There are few, if any, better value for money propositions at this or any other festival; book early, book often, and maybe come to terms with the fact you’ll be taking a sickie the following Tuesday.

For more information, visit the Shelver’s website here. For Monday night’s The Shelf at the Toff, click here. For MICF The Shelf: Podcast Shows at the Imperial, click here.

Dave Anthony

Like all good underground movements, The Cult of the Independent Comedian is a broad, lovable coalition of misfits, ragamuffins and eccentrics.

This community, more connected than ever by a network of podcasts and social media, is a gypsy tribe of ne’er-do-wells and chancers relying on shares and word of mouth to pin down the next hot thing ahead of the herd. These lifers are destined to escape the Melbourne International Comedy Festival by the skin of their teeth, finances and physical/mental health barely intact from running a month long gauntlet of late shows and constant venue hopping.

This year, I have vowed to embrace the madness and sweatbox fifty seaters to do the Festival properly.

Getting back into Melbourne a week or so into MICF, I’ve already missed cracking nights like Justin Hamilton‘s pop up podcast Can You take This Photo Please? at the Imperial, guest starring the legendary Tony Martin, and, by all reports, yet another reliably barnstorming season premiere for The Shelf.

Becky Lucas’ High Tide

Resolving not to miss any more of these cracking festival opportunities, I hit the Portland Hotel’s Pool Room with Melbourne Comedy good luck charm Reid Parker on Wednesday evening to check out the much feted Becky Lucas‘ Festival debut, High Tide.

With a single pint perched, totem-like, on a stool, Sydney based Lucas — a tad on the nervy side — gallops through a set of coming of age observations, the raw stuff of the transition into adulthood, coming to terms with the fickle nature of friendship, bad tattoo choices and generally dodgy life decisions.

Earnest and wincingly self deprecating at times, Lucas’ show is a lean sprint to the finish line. One imagines that as the Festival progresses its rhythms will relax and breathe a bit as Lucas finds its meter.

She never even touched that beer.

Dave Anthony’s Hot Head

Flash forward twenty four, and we’re at The Greek Centre’s Mykonos Room for the third night of US comic Dave Anthony‘s (Maron, The Dollop) much anticipated Aussie solo debut, Hot Head.

It’s Media Night and the crowd’s a touch threadbare. But Anthony, still suffering from his long haul Monday arrival, delivers a barnstorming set, strong on autobiographical detail, weaving narrative threads (perhaps familiar to die hard Walking the Room listeners) into a rip snorting exegesis on ancestry, parenthood and seething rage.

Renowned temper in check, Anthony is an affable, expressive performer with a heavy streak of melancholy; his insights into his father’s alcoholism and life as a forty-something dad whose career had potentially stalled, have been honed and polished into precision bits via years of exploration on myriad podcast appearances.

With the consistently brilliant US history podcast The Dollop (with Gareth Reynolds, arriving at the Festival next week) on the resumé, one would think Anthony’s hour might embrace his lurid genealogical musings. That being said, we’re also given brief insights into the frustrations of working on a show about a show (The Talking Dead), and there are undoubtedly vast seams of material to be mined from the man’s adventures in the screen trade.

It’ll be compelling to see where Anthony takes his work next, having purged his proverbial first album and now heading into difficult sophomore territory. Make it your business to check out Anthony while the opportunity permits, or forever regret your questionable life decisions and priorities.

Anne Edmonds’ You Know What I’m Like

Knifing through a few laneways to make Anne Edmonds‘ half eight start at the Town Hall’s Portico Room, I’m miraculously afforded a vantage point three rows back, centre, for the Essendon spawned comic’s new set, You Know What I’m Like.

Having previously encountered Edmonds in five-to-ten minute chunks of The Shelf, I was curious to see what shape an hour of Eddoes’ expressive, character-rich lunacy might take.

Pulling from a seemingly inexhaustible bag of observations of suburban quirk, Edmonds’ cast of messy single mums, Pony Club Jacinta’s, racist spinsters, Cheryl’s (with a hard ‘CH’) and so on, are concocted into a breathless tapestry redolent of the corrosive, Noeline Donaher inspired roastings of Jane Turner, Magda Szubanski et al.

Edmonds also turns an unforgiving blowtorch on her own foibles, offering some catharsis in the shape of proper, well earned brio on the lady comic front and the ongoing issue of what it means to be a lady comic.

A versatile actress and angelic songstress, Edmonds closes with a bit that is moving, unsettling and downright harrowing.

You’d best see You Know What I’m Like so you can get in on the act, right?

Walking the Room

Closing out my first two day MICF bracket, I hit the Supper Room for a late, sold out taping of the final ever Walking the Room podcast.

That beloved, ragged open wound of podcasting — the WtR format hinges on the fractious relationship between co-hosts Greg Behrendt (all-Californian Ritalin puppy) and Dave Anthony (curmudgeonly grump and hot head — see above). Devised as ad hoc therapy when both comedians’ careers were at their nadir, WtR has traversed two hundred or so chaotic episodes, exploring career disappointment, addictions, mid-life crises, parenthood and this odd couple’s evolving, begrudging love (and maybe even respect) for one another.

We’re here to wrap all that up and pay joyous tribute — treated to almost two hours of free form lunacy, ably abetted by the ever sharp Jen Kirkman and an initially mute Wyatt Cenac, whose eventual, pitch perfect lapse into uncanny Cosby impersonations adds an incendiary frisson to proceedings.

Tonight’s recording is a triumphant denouement for a ragtag community (or ‘Cuddlers’, to the initiated), and a testament to the global reach of the form, as the two key performers command an audience, leagues above their individual local profiles, to rapturous effect.

Subscribe to Walking the Room via your preferred pod organ, and perhaps even treat yourself to the preceding two hundred plus episodes.

These four shows, then, bear testament to the breadth of talent you’ll discover when scratching the surface of this year’s Festival. Wander into pretty much any bar in the CBD and surrounds and you’ll encounter some new talent hungry to tear the scene a new one.

If you’re in the market for much needed ha-ha catharsis then there’s no excuse not to get amongst the myriad delights of 2015’s lineup.

Right, I’m off to The Shelf podcast live recording: more, much more, soon.

Horns up: Crobot’s ‘Something Supernatural'

Like a hurtling Trans-Am punching through a police road block, Crobot slammed into our collective Antipodean musical consciousness with May’s self-titled EP, a sledgehammer statement of intent if ever you needed one. A brutal tease, comprising four of their debut album’s first five tracks (they kept howling boogie belter The Necromancer up their sleeves, the cads) the EP set the template for the barnstorming long-player to follow.

Pennsylvania bred but coming off like bayou spawn, all southern fried swagger, crunchy funk (think Audioslave sans the mope), this molten slab of thundering knee tremblers rollicks through a roll call of skinwalkers, bloodsuckers, chupacabrae, spaceborne killers, wizards, necromancers and the powers cosmic — the band’s collective tongue planted firmly in cheek at all times and collective pedals to the metal (of course).

Part bar-band brawl aesthetes, occult horror warlocks and space faring cosmic psychonauts, Crobot’s DNA is a sticky concoction of ’70s forebears Molly Hatchet, Blackfoot, BTO, Black Oak, Uriah Heep. The occasional lashing of off-chops Aerosmith are liberally dosed with echoes of the lysergic inclinations of Monster Magnet and the stoner thrust and swagger of Pepper Keenan fronted COC.

Vocalist Brandon Yeagley, whose caterwaul smacks of Chris Cornell ditching the emo and hitting the tiles (hard) deploys his tripped out lyrical head trips with a road dog’s veteran flair, punctuating his fiery salvos with some handy blues harp wailing.

Renaissance man guitarist Chris Bishop, who also supplies first class ‘Muchameets the Devil’ album art duties, drops some serious crunch on the six string front — equal parts virtuosic stomp, alchemical blues riffery and careening, seat of the leather chaps molten metal lead breaks.

Holding down the bottom end are the Figueroa Brothers, the very epitome of the locked down rhythm section, further enhanced by preternatural sibling telepathy and inviting serious metaphorical comparison to big, fuck off engines.

Lovingly wrought bombastic flesh by production wunderkind Machine(whose resume is as good an estimation of Crobot’s sound as any: Clutch, The Bronx and Lamb of God, just for starters), Something Supernatural is forty three minutes of classic, chunky, cranked up, southern fried groove with anthemic heft.

With it, the lads have planted a decisive flag on the frontline of the current wave of ‘nads-out throwback rockers — that hirsute crew of the leather-vested ne’erdowells who’ve worshiped at the altar of groove and count amongst their number The Sword, Scorpion Child, Royal Blood and Night Horse (just for starters).

Dropping a few days shy of Halloween (27 October), Something Supernatural is a dead cert to be the soundtrack to your southern hemisphere summer. These debutante revivalist rawk preachers have gifted us a blistering, grindhouse dozen, wall to wall winners, in the grandest tradition of tailgate parties, potentially legendary keggers and buzzed up, breakneck weekends eternal.

Horns well and truly up.

I.

I am sat cross legged in a tent, somewhere remote and ancient, nearest outpost Van Diemen Land’s second established outpost.

Outside, ghost gums shiver in the heat of a still, suffocating night, a canopy of encroaching stygian menace.

Outside, things move and growl in long dry grass, advancing.

Outside, branches snap and the undergrowth hisses.

A luminous sliver of new moon provides dim illumination; the generator coughed and expired days ago, just after the rest of the crew disappeared.

The ute had had its guts pulled out, strewn and melted in the embers of dead fire.

Nowhere, no way to run. No way out.

Nowhere to hide.

I toke on something noxious, alien bush weed wrapped in soft bark, exhaling a bitter draught of second hand poison briefly thrown into relief against the opaque membrane of the enclosure.

I grind my teeth a bit more and detach another brew from the penultimate six pack, hands trembling, uncertain if DTs or just abject terror.

Warily rebooting the phone, anxious of notoriously stingy battery; greeted by a cruel flicker of reception and then the glowering crimson of a dead device.

Alone.

Alone.

The gums outside sigh: the crescent moon pulses sick black light and a filament of sepulchral gossamer fire splits the roof of the tent, reality violently expanding and contracting to make room for… something.

The tent’s thin walls are eclipsed by a slithering mass of red bellied black snakes, plunging all into ink.

There’s a rending crack, like continents shifting, all consuming.

Ragnarök.

The Crobot is arrived.

Of four aspects yet singular, hooved and batwinged; from certain angles the chupacabra, the cosmic wizard, technophage, a spaceborne killer and necromancer.

A decadent mandala of depraved intergalactic fantasia roils in the shadows.

Cloaked in azure flame, the shapeshifter arranges himself into Padmasana directly opposite me, a roiling psychedelic headfuck, a Grand Grimoire of the mutable impossible locked in a supernatural carapace.

We sit. Regard one another.

Outside: nothing.

Me: “Beer?”

A callous pause.

The Crobot’s eyes, deep set cataclysms, narrow.

It shifts its weight cagily: a wing twitches and a black snake tongue flickers at the corner of its leering snout.

“Hell yes, boy! Thought you’d never ask!”

I snap a beer from its cardboard noose.

We enter an ancient shamanic state.

The ritual begins.

II.

“Right. We’re, uh, here to talk about your… favourite horror movies, correct?”

The “Brandon” aspect manifests, The Skinwalker, full of throat:

“I was raised on the gore!  The very first movie I ever saw in the theaters was Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers and I’ll never forget the moment where that pregnant chick gets impaled with the

pitchfork in the beginning.

The Legend of the Spaceborne Killer is an adaptation of the pandemonium that would surround the first encounter with an alien race and is really my spin on Godzilla.

In ‘The Necromancer’ the line “the killed, get up and kill” comes from one of my favorite movies George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead where the newscaster says that line on live-broadcast.  Also in that tune, I speak of the deadites, which were what the undead were called specifically in Sam Raimi’s cult classic Evil Dead.

These songs are most definitely an extension of my strict diet of horror films growing up and a love for different mythologies of varied cultures.

The legends of the Chupacabra and the alterations of the stories between the different cultures always intrigued me.

Wizards is the tale of an epic battle between two wizards, one who represents the natural spirit world and the other representing the new age of technology.”

The “Bishop” manifests, The Wizard coalescing in a matrix of chiming tritones and shimmering arcane signifiers:

“When I started doing the art for the album, I wanted to have a symbol represent it. That's when I came up with the three triangles and two crescent moons that you see on the cover. It is our version of the Wiccan goddess symbol. Inside the shapes I drew things that symbolized some of the songs on the album, which later I elaborated on and did a piece for each song. Stylistically I looked at artists like Alphonse Mucha for inspiration for an old occult looking feel.”

The dual headed chupacabra, The Figueroa, rumbles:

“Favourite horror flick? Aliens - though it's more 'action' than its predecessor, this movie scared the crap out of me. I first saw it on Laserdisc (a DVD the size of a 12" vinyl for you young ‘uns) when I was

young - probably too young (thanks Dad!). Afterward, I constantly pictured Aliens crawling out of any dark recess or crevice, ready to tear me apart.

Aussie horror flicks? I've actually seen more than I was aware of. Saw, Snowtown, Ghost Ship, and House of Wax are all movies I've seen and had no idea they were Australian productions. Snowtown definitely left an impression on me, as it is based on a true story.”

The Crobot then speaks as one, a booming quadrophonic totality, as the beast details its vision of celluloid infamy, a libidinous cosmic B-flick symphony, Terry Gilliam via Ed Wood and Tinto Brass:

“We’d do an excursion to outer space directed by Stanley Kubrick where we get really high and visit the NASA space station during a launch, accidentally boarding the shuttle set for launch to the International Space Station.  While traveling through space, the shuttle is ransacked and space pirates take control.  That’s when the party starts!  They bring aboard their shenanigans, including their alien prostitutes, our one true weakness! That leads to us all contracting a sexually transmitted mutation from the same three-titted alien hooker.

Each of our individual encounters with this space slut would unfold while we all start mutating and continue to search for the cure.  We all end up mistakenly traveling back in time to before the shuttle launch ever

happened and waking up in our beds, but to our dismay, we have no penises. Sam Elliot would play Bishop, Ben Affleck would play the role of Paul, Tommy Chong would play me (Brandon), and Samuel L. Jackson would portray Jake!”

With that, it is on its feet and painting its sigil in the air, reknitting existence with primordial eldritch conjurations: 

Three triangles

Two crescent moons

The Goddess

Bowing deeply (or was it sardonically?), The Crobot shotguns another beer, belches with gusto and leaps, filthy cloven hooves first, into the humming portal.

I faintly hear booming Sabbath (Vol. IV) and what sounds like a gnarly spring break keg party in full flight as reality convulses, inverts and I black out, debauched cosmic mandala tattooed after images in bloodshot eyes.

III.

Coming to, morning.

A horse fly buzzes, trapped between canopy and mesh, devouring the odd hapless mosquito; birds call in the bright still of dawn. Gums shush in light breeze.

Beside me, the detritus of a lot of beers; outside, I can hear the first morning rumblings of my fellow campers.

Sitting up, still bleary at best, one headphone still in, the other dangling, I absent mindedly thumb the phone on.

Fully charged.

Tapping out my own sigil, handset warm to the touch, I flick to the top of the ‘list titled ‘Something Supernatural’, thumb ‘Legend of the Spaceborne Killer’, plug in the other headphone and hit 'play'.

Best of 2007 mixtape