Doug Anthony All Stars
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Doug Anthony All Stars

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At the time the Doug Anthony All Stars formed McDermott was attending art school in Canberra, performing the occasional “bizarre installation idea” in venues and public spaces. After witnessing All Stars Tim Ferguson, Richard Fidler and original member Robert Piper on stage McDermott’s initial assessment of the Doug Anthony All Stars was unflattering: “I hated what they did – I thought it was vile!” he recalls. “But they were white hot on stage.”

But after getting to know Fidler and Ferguson after a show when his own group supported the Doug Anthony All Stars, McDermott gradually grew closer to the trio.  When Piper left to pursue a career in the diplomatic corps, McDermott was drafted in. “When I joined the group, I stepped in and made it beautiful,” McDermott laughs. “It was like training two hamsters on a wheel!”

The Doug Anthony All Stars refined its shtick – which typically involved provocative lyrics and intense interactions with the audience – by busking regularly on the streets of Canberra. “Busking was absolutely fundamental to our development and our resilience as performers,” McDermott says. “On stage you’re separated from the audience, but on the street anyone and everyone walks by. So it was fundamental to what the All Stars became. We did a lot of engaging with the audience, primarily to get their money – we’d do things like taking people’s handbags and putting them in the guitar case, take their bikes, their children.”

The trio moved south from Canberra to Melbourne, before a successful season at the Adelaide Fringe Festival in the mid-1980s suggested the All Stars had popular potential – only to return to Melbourne and find themselves back on the street busking. But when the All Stars ventured across to the Edinburgh Comedy Festival in 1987, things started to change. “At the time we just wanted to travel – it was an adventure for us,” McDermott says. “We managed to get on Friday Night Live with Ben Elton, which was basically what The Big Gig was based on. 11 million people saw us on that show, and another 11 million on repeats, so we got this amazing publicity. But Australia didn’t have that sort of show at the time.”

While the Doug Anthony All Stars had always made a habit of provoking their audience – McDermott recalls Ferguson jumping around in bright orange coveralls (“these days he’d probably be very fashionable,” McDermott quips) – McDermott says the trio was never conscious of needing to remain provocative to maintain the group’s artistic edge. “It was just the stuff that was coming out – there was never anything more to it than that. We were just writing, and we were singing,” he says. “But we did discover that you could always offend someone – I think once we offended vegans because of something we said about milk!”

The Doug Anthony All Stars’ big local break came in 1989 when they became regulars on the Big Gig, the ABC live comedy show broadcast every Tuesday night at 9.30pm. The All Stars went on to write and perform their own comedy show, DAAS Kapital, before moving to the UK. When the All Stars sat down with the BBC to negotiate a deal for a Doug Anthony All Stars UK television show, the future looked very rosy. “I think we were doing our best work at that time – we were white hot,” McDermott says. “We’d made the transition to England successfully, and we were living there comfortably, which isn’t something a lot of artists are able to do.”

All that changed in 1994 when Ferguson informed his fellow All Stars that he wanted to take a break from the group and return home to Australia with his family. For McDermott and Fidler, Ferguson’s announcement came completely out of left-field. Ferguson would eventually reveal publicly his battle with the debilitating multiple sclerosis disease; at the time, McDermott had no idea the health problems his fellow All Star was grappling with. “Richard and I were equally baffled,” McDermott says. “He’d start losing control of one side of his body, but we didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t understand it until he told me about eight years ago.”

McDermott went on to host Channel 10’s Good News Week, while Fidler gravitated to a career on ABC radio.  Ferguson, meanwhile, released a book detailing his battles with MS, and has returned to the stage.  Last year Ferguson, Fidler and McDermott reunited for a one-off show to promote the release of DASS Kapital on DVD.

Earlier this year Ferguson, McDermott and longtime friend and collaborator Paul Livingstone (aka Flacco) revived the Doug Anthony All Stars for the 30th anniversary of the Canberra Comedy Festival. With Fidler otherwise committed to ABC radio, McDermott says the time is right for a Doug Anthony All Stars reunion. “We just had to wait until Rich got a job and couldn’t come on tour,” McDermott laughs. “Richard always had his hand up for a reunion, so thank god the ABC offered him a job so he couldn’t join us!

BY PATRICK EMERY