Real Musicians, Near-Disasters & Why Folk Fans Are Fascists

After nearly a decade spent stealthily creeping towards the ultra-bright beacon of recognition in the Australian music scene, Damian Cowell has finally thrown caution to the wind and positively sprinted the final distance between himself and the limelight, vaulting into the fray with his new project Damian Cowell’s Disco Machine.

In many ways Cowell is something of an Oz rock institution already, not that many people outside his personal inner sanctum would know it. For more than 20 years he fronted anarchic Melbourne outfit TISM – which stands for This Is Serious Mum, if you must know – under the masked guide of his alter-ego, Humphrey B. Flaubert. That band initially built a cult Melbourne following in the late ‘80s, which blossomed into a full-blown national phenomenon in the mid-‘90s, using their anonymity as a buffer between themselves and the normal boring trivialities that affect bands, such as the need for taste, tact and decorum. No cow was too sacred, and no stone left unturned in the quest for (presumably their own) amusement. That TISM had any success at all was probably despite rather than because of their penchant for pushing society’s buttons; releasing an album whose lead single was titled I Might Be A Cunt, But I’m Not A Fucking Cunt – complete with accompanying video spoofing a then-current high-profile celebrity sex tape – may well be artistic gold but it’s also professional suicide, a fascinating duality which they repeated ad nauseum throughout their entire hilarious career.

When TISM sadly called it a day in 2004, Cowell may have packed away his collection of masks and costumes, but it didn’t mark the end of his musical ambition. His first gambit was starting the alt-country (aping?) outfit Root! – in which he used the pseudonym DC Root but showed his face for the first time – then after a couple of albums he moved onto his next project, The DC3. Here he first officially unveiled his actual name, and when in 2010 they dropped their first single, I Was The Guy In TISM, cats began escaping from bags left, right and centre. The shroud of secrecy which had enveloped Cowell for so long was being cast aside bit by bit, and a little bit more of the man behind the music was exposed (within the realms of decency) at each juncture.

Now, with Damian Cowell’s Disco Machine, Cowell is going the whole hog and placing himself front-and-centre, yet in typical fashion he’s not going it alone. The project’s eponymous debut long-player features – besides DC and his bandmates – an incredibly eclectic array of guest performers from all walks of Australian cultural life; think names like Shaun Micallef, Tim Rogers, Kate Miller-Heidke, Tony Martin and John Safran (to literally name but a few). As the band name suggests, it’s all set to a bed of what may be ostensibly be referred to as ‘disco music’, but as always its major strength lies in Cowell’s twisted worldview and jocular way with words, this skill-set merging the whole package together in a manner that somehow exceeds the sum of its arguably questionable parts. To flip an old TISM adage on its head, the whole thing is novel; it’s unique but it’s definitely far from shithouse.

I went, ‘Okay, what do I want to do now? I’d like to do a dance album, because I’ve always liked that sort of music and now I don’t have these other two bastards telling me they don’t want to do it’.

“I suppose apart from anything else, it was [prompted by] the demise of The DC3, which wasn’t anything particularly sinister although I’m trying to portray it as such in the movie that I’m sending out as a bonus item,” Cowell smiles of his new band’s murky origins. “But in truth The DC3 had this ridiculous year in 2013 where we tried to release an album and do two complete comedy fringe festival shows, and the other two guys just went, ‘I can’t do this any more, I have a life’. So being this insane person who just keeps doing things all the time, I went, ‘Okay, what do I want to do now? I’d like to do a dance album, because I’ve always liked that sort of music and now I don’t have these other two bastards telling me they don’t want to do it’.

“So that’s really where it started, and it just snowballed. I quite honestly felt that I’d like to do like a ‘groovy’ dance album – people like Calvin Harris or Mark Ronson always get people like Rihanna to sing on their tracks, and I guess I always harboured this ambition to do something like that. Then I thought, ‘Why don’t I try and get some actually interesting people?’, and I’m friends with Tony Martin so I knew that Tony would be into it, but I think when Shaun Micallef said ‘yes’ that’s when I became emboldened – it was almost going to be, ‘Okay, if I can have one or two people, that would be awesome’, but after Shaun Micallef said ‘yes’ I went, ‘Oh well, shit – maybe I’m good or something? I’ll keep asking!’ So I kept asking and people just kept saying ‘yes’, so now there’s eight or nine [guests] and it feels really bizarre; I think I said somewhere or other that sitting in Kate Miller-Heidke’s kitchen – at her kitchen bench – I was just like a fan! I was having this teenage fan experience while she was singing on my song. I’m particularly in awe of her – she’s just on the album because I’m in awe of her. It’s not any particular conceptual connection to my music – even though I reckon she fits in really well – but it’s just because she’s really talented and smart and kinda hot.”

Were there any potential guests for the album that Cowell aspired to but whose services he was unable to acquire?

“Well obviously I didn’t get Dannii Minogue, which is no shock to anyone really, but Dannii aside I also missed out on Courtney Barnett,” he recounts. “I actually quite admire her, she’s an interesting lyricist – and I’m a pretty harsh marker on lyrics so that’s probably saying something – but it just didn’t work out. Her manager was extremely polite and very generous towards me, but whether or not they just thought, ‘I’m not fucking going on that old cunt’s album’, who knows? She had a tour coming up or was in the middle of one, it’s all understandable. I never spoke to her individually and her manager was extremely gracious about it and so forth, it’s purely my own malingering malevolent voice in my head that went, ‘Yeah, you’re shit, that’s why she’s not into it!’”

When I hear Tim Rogers on one of my tracks – or I hear Kate or Liz – that’s when I go, ‘Fuck, that’s weird! There’s a real musician on this track! An actual talented musician!’

It’s probably testament to Cowell’s actual un-shitness that he was able to pull together the cast of talent that liberally peppers Damian Cowell’s Disco Machine, and then craft the whole thing into something actually beyond the mess it could so easily have turned into.

“Yeah I know, I’m glad that it is eclectic like that,” he concedes. “Having Tim Rogers and Kate Miller-Heidke and Liz Stringer – that’s all fabulous and everything – but in a weird way they’re the odd ones out, because everybody else is known for their wit and working in the comedic field, and I suppose that’s kind of where people see me. I don’t know whether that’s the impression to outsiders, but personally when I hear Tim Rogers on one of my tracks – or I hear Kate or Liz – that’s when I go, ‘Fuck, that’s weird! There’s a real musician on this track! An actual talented musician!’ But yeah it does all come together, I suppose because in the end they all very graciously did what I told them to do. Even though Kate Miller-Heidke is singing, she’s still singing this ridiculous thing about fear of knowledge, so I guess it does have the unavoidable imprint of me splattered all over it, like a dog weeing on a lamppost.”

Cowell explains that each performer had their role especially tailored for them to cut down on time-wasting, with a couple of minor exceptions.

“It was all fully scripted,” he explains. “It wasn’t like there was a lot of time spent on it; Tony Martin spent a fair bit of time just because we happened to be friends anyway so it just worked out that way, but in the cases of the other people it was this absolute ‘dash in/dash out’ thing, where I was, like, ‘I’m just putting my foot in the door for a little bit of time in your life and then I’ll get out of your hair’. So I think in some ways they were quite comfortable with the idea that they didn’t have to think about it, they just had to follow my direction. Obviously they wouldn’t have done anything that they didn’t like, but I think it was pretty comfortable.

I reckon if you measured my blood pressure over the last six months there were more spikes than since when I was an early parent.

“Certainly in the case of Julia and Sam [Pang – who share guest duties on the self-referencing track Damian Cowell’s Disco Machine Part Two] it was a tad more hectic – Julia Zemiro was in Melbourne for one day because she lives in Sydney now, so we had to go to the hotel room where she was staying and it was this mad flap of setting up two microphones, and we only had one hour. And that was actually quite challenging, because I wanted them to be natural as opposed to the others – like Shaun Micallef is narrating [on Damian Cowell’s Disco Machine Part One] so he has this persona, but in the case of Julia and Sam that was the least prescribed script. Even though it was kinda scripted, but kinda like, ‘I want you to look at this and then say it in the way that you guys would say it if you were commentating Eurovision’ – that was the brief, and they changed it a bit because some of the things I wrote wasn’t what they would say, you know? But man, I was shitting myself, like, ‘Fuck, there’s 10 minutes to go!’, but we eventually got it done. I think for one whole take Julia was singing into the wrong end of the microphone – it was one of those flat microphones and I had it around the wrong way, I could’ve totally fucked it, but we got it done. I reckon if you measured my blood pressure over the last six months there were more spikes than since when I was an early parent.”

Given its relatively random nature, an exercise like this probably requires everyone being on the same page – did any of the external participants seem to miss where Cowell was coming from?

“No, although I would probably be too scared to say if they had,” he laughs. “Of course, with Lee Lin Chin, who can tell what she’s thinking about what she had to do? I wasn’t there when that was done – that was recorded by my manager with an iPhone with Lee Lin Chin sitting at the SBS news desk in full Lee Lin Chin regalia. That was like the third attempt to get together with her so that could also quite easily not have happened, but I have no idea whether she thought the whole things was ridiculous; I’m just not sure. But everyone else got into the spirit of it, probably I guess because I’d really thought it out a lot beforehand and picked [appropriate] people – there’s a whole lot of other people I really admire who I suppose I could have asked, but the targets that I picked within the time frame were going to work provided technical things didn’t get in the way.

“The only other challenging one was Kathy Lette, who I recorded via Skype because she lives in London – that was a bit challenging, and she had the flu and this really croaky voice but that worked out alright. And again she got it – she totally got into the spirit of it – and she was great, although that was probably a gamble too. I hadn’t met any of these people except for Tony Martin and Sam Pang so any of them could have been assholes – it could have been a humiliating disaster! So really I’m pretty lucky, and no matter what happens from here – if nobody turns up to the show and nobody buys it – at least I’ve got it to play at home, so that’s at least something achieved.”

Despite the calibre and talent of the crew that was eventually roped in, the album unquestionably wouldn’t work so well if the songs weren’t each strong in their own right – is the batch of songs one that he’s been working on for a while?

“Yeah, absolutely. This is probably 12 months' solid work – even before any guests had got involved I’d done all the hard work on the songs,” Cowell tells. “I would have been embarrassed otherwise to go to them with something that was half-assed or whatever. And also I guess the overarching style guide – being, in inverted commas, “disco” – also really helped, because I was sort of writing these songs before I came upon that idea, but as soon as I came upon that idea it all made sense and it all fell into place.

"It’s like I had certain songs that were written that had melody and hook and chorus and so forth, but the style wasn’t necessarily set in stone, but once I had this funky disco thing going then that really tied it all together nicely. And there really is this thing with disco where you can relax; ‘It’s okay, it’s only disco’. That just helped with everything along the line, even with me selling the idea – if you can call it that – to the special guests, because I was able to say, ‘Hi, it’s Damian here, you might remember me from this little crap group called TISM and I’m doing a disco album’, and I can just imagine them all going, ‘Phew, that’s good, anyone can do that crap!’ So it’s hard songwriting beneath it all, but I think the disco thing makes it hang together as a whole – at least I hope that’s the case. I hope that people who listen to it think that as well.”

There’s no doubt that, musically, the vibe of Damian Cowell’s Disco Machine is quite similar to that of mid-era TISM – was this a consideration at all during the creative process or just how things transpired?

“I wanted to avoid that when I first started after TISM – I was definitely conscious of avoiding it – and I reckon I’ve almost done that and put in the hard yards,” Cowell reflects. “I’ve nearly been 10 years out of TISM now, so I kind of felt like I could relax and make the kind of music that I actually like. So it’s not necessarily a case of me overtly choosing to go back to the style of TISM, it’s just that that’s the kind of music that releases the chemicals in my brain so therefore I like it. The music of TISM happened to sound that way because I was sort of this Hitler in the band who kept forcing these poor bastards to play disco. That’s what I’ve realised over the years – in the process of doing this, I honestly realised that I can’t argue for this music in an objective sense, because there’s no evidence to suggest that this music is any better or worse than others, it’s just that I like it. Most of the people I’ve played in bands with don’t, so I’ve been forcing it on these poor bastards the whole time! So that’s why it’s similar to TISM, if it is similar – it’s got big singalong choruses, it’s got a disco beat and it’s kind of silly so if that sounds like TISM it’s probably because that’s what I gravitate to when I stop trying to be what I’m not. A man’s got to know his limitations.”

What about the gradual emergence of Cowell’s own persona to the fore, his own presence becoming more pronounced with each new project – is there a rationale in this regard?

“No, it’s the same thing – it wasn’t a strategy, I just gradually stopped giving shit about all that stuff,” he admits with a chuckle. “It’s quite true. I like talking to Tony Martin about these things because he always has these really informed opinions, and I adopt them later on as if they were mine, but he said that Root! was like my training wheels; my ‘training wheels coming out of TISM’ phase. I still had a pseudonym and I wore a cowboy hat and I was even hiding behind a musical genre which was unlike what I’d previously been doing, so even though I showed my face I was still hiding. [It’s like] ‘my unconscious stumbling, that drunken unconscious fumbling for the light switch’ – he’s beautifully described what I did.

There was a little bit of discontent in the ranks at the next [TISM] Christmas dinner, but in the end, fuck, who gives a shit, really? 

“But that’s exactly right – I’ve been talking about TISM more than I ever have. I’m still quite shy about the idea of doing interviews about TISM – just because I want people to be looking at what I’m doing now, that’s the only reason – but I think the penny has dropped now. I did this thing for Melbourne Free University early last year [a lecture titled The Birth Of Uncool: How TISM Gatecrashed Melbourne Music], and that was the moment where I sort of crossed the Rubicon, and I went, ‘Oh well, fuck it. I’ll talk about TISM and I’ll be on video doing it’. I still took great lengths to say to everybody that I wasn’t going to do this as ‘wasn’t TISM great and here’s the story of TISM blah blah blah’; instead, I wanted to talk about where TISM came from. That was the whole point of that. And there was a little bit of discontent in the ranks at the next [TISM] Christmas dinner, but in the end, fuck, who gives a shit, really? Provided that I’m reasonably respectful and don’t dob any of the other guys in or say things about them personally, I think that I’m being reasonably respectful of the TISM brand. I guess I’m a fair bit more comfortable about that and about using my name – it’s all set up really for me to quit, isn’t it? It all sounds like the last rites, but we’ll see what happens.”

One of the unabashed strengths of the new record is (unsurprisingly) the lyrics, Cowell mercilessly lampooning some of society’s many cultural foibles. Was the songwriting process laborious in this regard this time around?

“They came naturally, and some of them had been brewing over the last year of The DC3 so it wouldn’t be correct to say that I wrote those ones specifically for this project,” he explains. “But the thing about the lyrics is that, by and large, they’re a fair bit less navel-gazing and serious than some of the excursions that I went into with The DC3, so they lent themselves far more to poppy disco songs. There’s really not a lot of the ‘Damian Cowell musing on his existential dilemma’ going on here. And I need to fucking get over myself really, because who’s interested in Damian Cowell’s existential dilemma? When they have a shit day at work they want to go home and listen to a song about a groovy toilet, that’s what they want to hear. I’ll only be able to go back in about five years time and say whether I like [this batch] better or worse [than my other songs], because obviously whenever you do something you think that its shit doesn’t stink, and that’s where I’m at now.”

Cowell pushes the envelope to near breaking point in quite a few places over the record’s duration, but most notably on the track Folk Music Turns Me Into A Fascist (feat. Emily Jarrett), a fact for which he’s entirely unapologetic.

“There’s a very personal experience behind that song which I think I might tell the unsuspecting punters of Brisbane at the first show,” he laughs. “It’s not just because I come from Melbourne and now in the city mall they have ‘indie-folk acts’, although that clearly is part of the problem that I’m attempting to address. The folk music thing goes right back to my teenage years – I had an unpleasant experience with folk music and I’ve never recovered. That was so much fun writing those lyrics though, because under the conceit of what folk music makes me want to do I was able to write all of these terrible, terrible un-PC things and it was really fun. I’d really love to get a gig at the Port Fairy Folk Festival and kick off with that track – I’d probably get strung up! They’d probably all put on Klu Klux Klan outfits and string me to a tree, because that’s what people who like folk music are really like, I reckon. They want to be like that. I’m gonna get in trouble about that song – someone’s gonna buttonhole me about that one, I’m sure of it.”

The songs are the songs and hopefully people will appreciate it, assuming more than 10 of the fuckers turn up.

Speaking of bringing the new material to the stage – which Cowell and his crew are preparing to do for the first time with their impending national run – the success of the crowdfunding campaign which preceded the album has given them scope to take some liberties on the live front.

“I think we got a really good Pozible result with the crowdfunding – had that not happened, I probably would have had to go more electronic, and had small band with lots of electronic aspects,” Cowell tells. “But because we got over the target I was able to go, ‘Well, I’m going to have two drummers!’ So we’ve got two drummers, as well as some strings. But it is quite challenging, and I think that soundcheck is going to be a nightmare. I may not yet know what I’ve got myself in for, but we’ll see. Hopefully it’ll all hang together – the songs are the songs and hopefully people will appreciate it, assuming more than 10 of the fuckers turn up.”

And the Melbourne launch at the Corner Hotel promises to be an even more ambitious affair, Cowell having persuaded many of the guest stars from the album to deign to make an appearance.

“Yeah, that’s going to be insane,” he marvels. “My manager is going to be the stage manager, and it’s going to be like the Rock Eisteddfod – ‘Mr Micallef, you curtain call is in 10 minutes’, and that sort of stuff. I’m hoping to film it, although I’ll need a lot of permissions so that might never see the light of day. I just want to be able to watch it and pinch myself, because it’s going to be pretty funny. The band room at the Corner Hotel is quite small, so it’ll just be wall-to-wall celebrities – it’s gonna be awesome!”