Triforce

Although they're ostensibly a comedy trio, Tripod's act is entangled in nerd culture. “Scod was always a big Dungeons & Dragons player. I'd played it a little bit at school, and so had Gatesy. The only time we all ever played it was when we stated writing our show about it, and we thought some good ideas could come out of it. I wouldn't do it as a thing I'd do every week, because I like the idea of it being special. Like drugs. In the right state of mind, at the right moment.” Yon pauses to clarify, before adding, “don't do drugs, kids”. Their most recent major production, Tripod Versus The Dragon, was taken all the way to the United States, and was originally intended as a tribute to the seminal role-playing game system. “When we went to America in 2010, what became Tripod Versus The Dragon was still called Dungeons & Dragons: The Opera, says Yon. “At the start, we were going to call it that. We were kind of hoping to get permission from the people who own it, and it was really annoying because we had no contact from them.

“We were in the middle of nowhere, doing this sort of Arts Development at the Massachusetts Institute of Contemporary Art where we were Artists in Residence,” he explains. “And even though we were out in the middle of nowhere, after people heard about the name of our gig, they flocked in from all over. We had almost 500 people at the Massachusetts Institute in the middle of nowhere watching Dungeons & Dragons: The Opera”, Yon says, evidently glowing with pride. “We didn't really have a profile in America,” he insists, and yet, the trio have character namesakes in a Star Wars novel called Force Heretic II. “Oh, that? It is pretty awesome. It's pretty damn good. I haven't actually read the whole book,” he admits. “We actually just found out about it. Someone drew our attention to it.

“Apparently the fella who wrote the book is a Tripod fan; he thought he'd just sneak it in. thought it would get under the radar of the almighty George Lucas, and it did. Who knows. Maybe even George Lucas saw it. That would blow me away.” Alas, according to Wikipedia, the canonicity of Yon, Gatesy and Scod in a galaxy far, far away is disputed.

Sketch comedy is an intense mode of performance; musical sketch comedy even more so. But Tripod have maintained a relentless touring and performance schedule that – in addition to their solo shows, feature skits on national television, and studio recording – sees them tour the country at least twice a year. “I really don't know,” Yon responds when asked about where the three performers draw their material from. “We just get together and try and think of something that makes each other laugh. Sometimes its stuff that happens to us – my stuntman was a woman, for example. Other things are just completely made up, or just bullshit we're mucking around with.” Would Yon have anticipated the band lasting for over 15 years? “I would have gone, 'Oh cool, that was kind of what I would have hoped would happen',” Yon replies. “But… I also remember thinking at the time that this has only got five more years left in it. That's generally what I think at any given time. And here we are, five years later, five years later, five years later.”

Having spent over a decade performing on TV shows like Channel 10's Skithouse and ABC's Sideshow, touring the country, and writing songs for live performance on radio in less than an hour, Tripod's Scod (Scott Edgar), Gatesy (Stephen Gates) and Yon (Simon Hall) are veteran entertainers. “How did we form? We were all involved in amateur musicals, in the suburbs of Melbourne,” Yon explains. “I met Gatesy through another friend. We were forming a band, and we needed someone who played guitar. You get treated like shit when you're a musician and you're just starting out. You'll take any gig, and they don't pay you, and then they'll double-book you. A year or two after that, I met Scod. The character Scod was playing in the musical had a guitar. It was Man Of La Mancha, a play about Don Quixote,” Yon recalls. “We just started busking and not taking it that seriously. Just doing it for fun, because we had other things that we were doing. Gatesy rejoined the two of us in '96. He'd just finished a job at Draculas (the restaurant), and he thought, 'I want to keep doing lots of singing, so I'll join these guys'. And that's when started to get a bit more serious about it I suppose. There was chemistry between us, because we're each quite different”.

triple j's now-defunct Merrick & Rosso program had the band composing an entire song in less than an hour based on a couple of key elements submitted by the audience, every week for two years. The best of these improvisations were collated into About An Hour Of Song-In-An-Hour. Following the success of both About An Hour records, 2004's Fegh Maha and Middleborough Rd, are probably Tripod's best studio records. The trio's fifth and sixth albums are each a fairly ridiculous almanac of sketches, anecdotes, and occasional poignant excursions into perhaps deeper questions. Boobs' premise, for instance; “I typed my own name into an Internet search engine/and all I got is boobs/there goes my day again/there goes my day again”, pretty much sums up the three days spent procrastinating instead of writing this article. From a geek culture standpoint, Hot Girl In The Comic Book Shop is both poignant and relevant almost 10 years later; likewise with On Behalf Of All The Geeks, a track that anticipated the shuffling emergence of geek culture into mainstream popular culture's bright sunlight.

“I do have a theory about that,” says Yon of the popular revival of dork literature like The Avengers and Lord Of The Rings. “I think it's the Internet. Everyone knows how to use a computer. In the early '90s, if you knew how to use a computer, you were a complete nerd. Whereas now, everyone has to use one. It's easier for nerds to meet each other, and they're more confidant. I remember in the early Tripod days, people at our gigs, the only thing they had in common was that they knew Tripod. The Internet helped nerds unite,” he concludes.

Tripod will be playing the following shows:

Friday 9 & Saturday 10 November - Quarry Ampitheatre, Perth WA