20 Years Ago: How TISM's Third Album Helped Them Break Through, Despite Their Best Efforts

Band: TISM
Album: Machiavelli And The Four Seasons
Label: Shock
Release date: 1 May 1995

“The only reason TISM spent years and years and years in the artistic, pure avant-garde is because the mainstream wouldn’t have us. But now the mainstream has embraced us, the avant-garde can go stuff themselves as far as we’re concerned.

“For years and years, we’ve been slagging off the mainstream media, and talking about corporate rock’n’roll and the mendacious entropic forces of world capitalism but that’s only because they wouldn’t give us any money. The only reason we wouldn’t sell our principles was because nobody was buying”.

              — Ron Hitler-Barassi to James Wakelin, Behind The Masks in The Advertiser, 2 Jul 1998

For the longest time, the idea of masked Melbourne iconoclasts TISM — the acronym standing for the equally confusing This Is Serious Mum — crossing over into the mainstream and receiving any sort of cultural or commercial acceptance seemed like some far-off utopian fantasy. The masked marauders (TISM favouring anonymity and performing behind not only masks but also adopting piss-taking pseudonyms) had been an underground success in Melbourne since the late-‘80s, having built a fanatical, cult-like following^[1] for their bizarre amalgam of highbrow situationist humour and lowbrow tomfoolery. They used their intelligence (and anonymity) like a scythe to cut through the flaccid music norms of the day, paying out on the music scene, media, their fans and often even themselves in ever-inventive manners that were occasionally acerbic but never less than fascinating (and nearly always hilarious).

Indeed, this recalcitrance that was such an integral part of their charm was also one of the main reasons that one assumed that TISM would always remain in the margins, taking potshots at those in the spotlight — given that their early tunes carried titles like Defecate On My Face, Saturday Night Palsy, If You’re Creative Get Stuffed, Choose Bad Smack and I Drive A Truck, it really didn’t seem like they were keen to pursue more commercial avenues anyway. So how did this band of unknown muckrakers manage to weasel their way into the spotlight with their third album, Machiavelli And The Four Seasons, a collection which managed to achieve sustained radio domination (including on commercial behemoth MMM), infiltrate the Top 10 of the Australian Album Charts and win an ARIA for Best Independent Release all without majorly compromising their core aesthetic or pandering to the nebulous whims of the mainstream molasses? Let’s have a look…

A quick history: according to (possibly apocryphal) lore, TISM started way back in 1982, but didn’t play their first gig until the end of 1983 — following which they promptly split up. They reformed in 1984 (making every subsequent gig they ever played a “reunion gig” in their addled mythology) and started accruing a rabid word-of-mouth following for the mayhem and irreverence that manifested at their routinely insane live shows, gatherings where anything could happen (and quite often did, with requisitely random results).

All of their early releases were issued through tiny independent Elvis Records (which also released music by underground bands such as Shower Scene From Psycho), including their 1986 mini-album Form And Meaning Reach Ultimate Communion (which topped the alternative charts) and their debut long-player Great Truckin’ Songs Of The Renaissance (1988), which snuck into the lower reaches of the Australian Top 50 album chart — peaking at #48 in its only charting week — as did its single Saturday Night Palsy on the corresponding singles chart. Truckin’ Songs had been distributed by another independent outfit Musicland, but the band’s ongoing momentum and clear penchant for controversy soon had the major labels sniffing around; after lengthy negotiations with CBS fell through they were picked up by Phonogram, with even this mainstream dalliance seeming ludicrously unlikely at the time. Their second album, Hot Dogma (1990), quickly became a fan favourite but didn’t set the world on fire commercially nor bother the charts, so TISM were soon unceremoniously dumped by Phonogram during 1991 and found themselves homeless.

But not for long — burgeoning indie Shock Records stepped up to the plate and signed our heroes, reissuing both their debut record and a collection of the early material (hitherto unavailable on CD) which was titled Gentlemen, Start Your Egos (1991). Over the next couple of years, TISM released a couple of cool EPs — 1992’s Beasts Of Suburban and 1993’s Australia The Lucky Cunt (the title of which was soon changed to Censored Due To Legal Advice) — and continued their sporadic guerrilla attacks on the live scene and festival circuit (they were a mainstay at the Big Day Out during this era) but, from a purely musical perspective, behind the scenes things weren’t going so swimmingly. The liner notes of what eventually became Machiavelli And The Four Seasons describe the situation behind the band’s curtain thusly:

“The first version of this album was recorded between December ’92 and September ’93. The project was abandoned on the sort of careless whim that makes TISM the insouciant dilettantes they are. In January ’94 they returned to their bedrooms to toss off a fresh collection of rubbish from which these songs emerged. In April ’94 a computer virus, acting on behalf of good taste everywhere, destroyed two months’ recordings, and the project began again. In August ’94 TISM appeared unannounced to small groups of unsuspecting victims and clearly disturbed fans to perform this album at low ceilinged venues around Melbourne, proving conclusively the words of Tony Cohen: 'You can’t polish a turd'. These songs were recorded during five days in September ’94 and mixed in December’ 94. TISM wish to reassure you that they plugged in all the machines that played on this album.”^[2]

By towards the end of 1994, TISM had been on hiatus from public duties for some eight months but, after a band started appearing in Melbourne gig listings under the moniker Machiavelli And The Four Seasons (and sounding suspiciously like TISM), a song was released to radio called Jung Talent Time — a techno-heavy track featuring one of the band’s co-frontmen Ron Hitler-Barassi reeling off a massive list of public figures and cultural identities who TISM claimed had outlasted Warhol’s proposed "15 minutes of fame" (arguing, “Andy Warhol got it right/Everybody gets the limelight/Andy Warhol got it wrong/15 minutes is too long”) — and just like that they were back. 1995 started with a slew of live shows which seemed to get old-school followers and new punters alike enthused once again by the band’s existence, so by the time the new album — the aforementioned Machiavelli And The Four Seasons — dropped at the start of May, the scene was well and truly set for this most unlikely of artistic zeniths.

Such disdain for convention and ‘standard form’ should have been no surprise to anyone who’d been paying even scant attention to TISM: way back in 1986, their debut single Defecate On My Face had been released as a 7” in a 12” sleeve which had all four sides glued shut so that lucky buyers had to obliterate the sleeve to get to the record.

Naturally, elements of a release which most bands look at as an adjunct to the main job at hand and choose to play safe — such as choosing album titles and artwork — take on a whole new significance in TISM’s world, and it was unsurprising when Machiavelli And The Four Seasons — the title being a juxtaposition of Italian philosopher/humanist Niccolò Machiavelli and US doo-wop group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons — had a cover listing both a band and contents completely at odds with what was actually on the record: the band on the cover were actually a short-lived ‘60s group called The Hollywood Argyles (a construct of late production maverick Kim Fowley), and the song titles for the album were listed on the back as:

Side one:

1. I Love You Baby
2. You and Me, Baby Love
3. Baby, I Love You
4. Love, Baby You
5. It’s You I Love, Baby

Side two:

1. In Love With You, Baby
2. Baby, Baby, Baby
3. Love, Love, Love
4. Baby Love
5. I.L.Y.B.

Again, such disdain for convention and ‘standard form’ should have been no surprise to anyone who’d been paying even scant attention to TISM: way back in 1986, their debut single Defecate On My Face had been released as a 7” in a 12” sleeve which had all four sides glued shut so that lucky buyers had to obliterate the sleeve to get to the record; its follow-up, 40 Years — Then Death (1987), came on white vinyl in a  clear plastic sleeve with no labels or identifying features at all, and even Hot Dogma had listed all 25 of its song titles in Chinese on the back of the record. Furthermore, one of the major reasons that Australia The Lucky Cunt had been censored — apart from the provocative title — was that the cover art was a pastiche of Ken Done artwork, featuring a heroin syringe dangling from a delighted koala’s mouth (unsurprisingly Done sued). Shock did their best to spoil the Machiavelli cover party by adding large stickers to the CD jewel cases trumpeting the actual contents which pretty much gave the game away, but the joke’s impact wasn’t diminished by this act of wanton responsibility. Under the ‘joke’, cover the CD booklet’s actual cover featured a logo proudly proclaiming “London-New York-Berlin-Springvale”, which many took to be the true title of the album (if there is indeed any such thing as a truism when discussing this band).

The album’s press release was constructed in the form of a comic book, which worked so well it was eventually released to the public (in turn spawning a second issue, both of which long ago became collector’s items).

This — assuming one had successfully navigated the stream of anti-marketing surrounding Machiavelli’s release — brings us to the album’s music, which represented in some ways a seismic shift in the core TISM sound but in other ways a return to their roots. Since Truckin’ Songs, the TISM sound had been an alt-rock-pop hybrid with the focus on guitars — albeit over the drum machine and sequenced keys that had long been their stock-in-trade — but, on Machiavelli, the emphasis changed to a more dance-heavy sound whilst still retaining the guitars as counterpoint (in essence, a fusion of the grunge and techno scenes that were so prevalent at the time).

In the live setting, this mattered naught — all was fine as long as it was music that people could jump around to — but on record it seemed at first like a major shift, until one thought back to earlier material such as Death Death Death (B-side to Defecate On My Face) and even Lillee Caught Dilley Bowled Milli Vanilli (from Beasts Of Suburban), which had long ago incorporated a similar sound^[3]. Even though a lot of TISM’s appeal was always lyric-driven and cerebral, it wouldn’t have stood up as well as it did without proper musical backing, and an abundance of hooks and melodies was long one of TISM’s main strengths. This facet of their creative endeavours didn’t diminish with the change in oeuvre — the songs on Machiavelli were catchy and insistent and sounded great on radio, and they quickly started gathering traction aplenty. The song (He’ll Never Be An) Ol’ Man River — and it’s chorus of “I’m on the drug that killed River Phoenix” soon became a live favourite and triple j began to get bombarded with requests to play it to the point where Shock rush-issued it as a single.

As with many TISM songs, it’s a track that works on many levels — most listeners no doubt focused on the perceived ‘pro-drug’ angle and completely missed the aspect where it deconstructed fame as a construct and studied the vapid nature of celebrity obsession — and while their work had managed to offend many Australians over the years, it also became the first track to enrage an international celebrity when Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist Flea heard the song about his late friend Phoenix and purportedly expressed a desire to “kill TISM”^[4]. (He’ll Never Be An) Ol’ Man River became the only TISM song ever to dent the top 30 in the national singles chart, peaking at #23 and spending eight weeks in the charts.

In typical fashion, the single was originally released with cover art mimicking Phoenix’s headstone, but this was soon pulled and replaced with a cover featuring a concoction of pills.

TISM soon parlayed this success with their next single release, Greg! The Stop Sign!!, which took its title from a TAC road safety commercial which had been ubiquitous at the time (the title acting as the cry of a car’s passenger just prior to a high-speed accident caused by the driver’s lack of vigilance). On some level a semi-existential treatise on death and mortality, on another an examination of the roots of suburban malaise and featuring a Beach Boys-aping chorus, the song’s film clip was shot partly at Moorabbin Oval, the former home ground of St Kilda Football Club, and featured a swag of senior Saints players going through their training paces^[5] as well as immortalising the Saints’ inspirational change room sign, “Your (sic) A Professional Keep It Simple”^[6].

Two more tracks were released as ‘radio-only singles’: Garbage, which sought to dissuade bands from copying existing musical styles, and All Homeboys Are Dickheads, which looked at genre-related dysfunction (one guesses) and had the fabulous result of having fans at gigs cluelessly jumping up and down singing about Dostoevsky whilst quoting TISM’s succinct summation of The Brothers Karamazov^[7]. Nice.

Aside from the singles, the album runs deep, with great tracks like Aussiemandias (the title a play on Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias, both works looking at cultural relativism and ethnocentrism although only the former containing the stanza, “Don’t call me nigger, whitey/Don’t call me whitey, nigger”) and the cruisy Play Mistral For Me (with its assertion that bands are “only as good as their fans”) giving Machiavelli a substance that runs far deeper than the superficial.

There’s also a hidden track after a minute’s silence at the end which isn’t credited but is titled Phillip Glass’s Arse, and there was a further track called Russia which was on initial tracklists but was deleted before pressing (supposedly because it prominently contained a line from The Beatles’ Back In The USSR), eventually resurfacing (with amended lyrics) as The Last Soviet Star on the iTunes version of Machiavelli.

So, as foreshadowed, the result of these convergences was that Machiavelli became TISM’s most successful album (both to that stage and eventually overall), yet it wasn’t given the complete red carpet treatment by the music media (many of whom had presumably run foul in the past of the band’s rampant unwillingness to take even the most important interviews remotely seriously, preferring instead to treat them as exercises in outsider art, much to journalists’ chagrin).

Whilst much of the street press coverage was positive, the established music magazines of the day didn’t let TISM off so lightly. Rolling Stone magazine (who hadn’t even deigned to review Hot Dogma) gave Machiavelli a paltry two-and-a-half stars, with Mark Demetrius calling the album “a passable amount of wit and a container-load of obviousness” before continuing, “sometimes the great cultural terrorists appear to lack the courage of their convictions. Either that or their producer is incompetent. In any case, voices are occasionally submerged so far down in the mix as to obscure lyrics” and finishing with, “In earlier days, TISM songs were tightly and meticulously structured, and exciting. You could enjoy, say, Great Truckin’ Songs Of The Renaissance even if you didn’t speak a word of English. Once the jokes wear off on Machiavelli, a lot of what’s left is bland, throwaway boogie. But there’s (lazy) intelligence involved, and it’s probably good for at least three or four playings”. Ouch.

Fellow music masthead Juice was slightly less caustic, awarding three-and-a-half stars with David Messer espousing, “TISM’s latest release finds their musical pastiches more sophisticated than ever. The humour of their lyrics is still willfully crass – and sometimes as grating as fingernails scraping a chalkboard – yet rarely misses the mark. Even if it had no other attributes, Machiavelli… would qualify for greatness simply on the basis of the brilliant All Homeboys Are Dickheads”, although this was later tempered by the assertion that “Unfortunately, it has to be said that musically TISM are only as good as the genre they’re parodying. So for every listenable track like !UOY Sevol Natas (backmasking – get it?) there are an equal number of pseudo-heavy metal or techno tracks like Lose Your Delusion II or Aussiemandias. No doubt these songs are everything TISM intended them to be, but that doesn’t stop them from being anything more than something to laugh at once and never play again.”

"While a TISM album previously would have sold 6,000 to 10,000 copies, its latest disc is well on the way to gold (35,000 units). That's the difference triple j can make." — Shock Records co-director David Williams, 1995

Fortunately this lack of high-end critical acclaim didn’t stop Machiavelli gaining traction in the marketplace, buoyed in part by some fortunate happenings in radio land. TISM had always had strong support from community radio stations like RRR in Melbourne and 4ZZZ in Brisbane (hence why they featured prominently on Livid Festival line-ups as early as 1989), but now the band were suddenly being championed by triple j (who made Machiavelli their Feature Album Of The Week and flogged individual tracks) just after the former Sydney-only station had truly started being embraced on a national level, and this airplay ultimately had a big impact on the record’s fortunes. In her article Triple J Leads A Radio Revolution (Billboard, 30 Sep 1995) Katherine Tulich explains:

“Even bands considered cult acts have suddenly found a new audience through the network. TISM, formed in Melbourne in 1985 (sic), celebrated its first Top 40 hit this year when triple j aired (He’ll Never Ben An) Ol’ Man River from the album Machiavelli And The Four Seasons, forcing Shock to issue the track as a single. ‘While a TISM album previously would have sold 6,000 to 10,000 copies, its latest disc is well on the way to gold (35,000 units),’ says David Williams, co-managing director of Shock Records. 

“That’s the difference triple j can make.”

Due to a fortunate turn of events, TISM also found themselves getting simultaneously played on commercial radio – former triple j staffer Barry Chapman had been appointed CEO of the MMM network in May of 1995, and he led the station’s bid to ditch the classic-rock format and move closer to triple j’s “more contemporary sound”. Suddenly, TISM had a toehold in every facet of Australian music radio, no mean feat, and one that – in conjunction with their still-powerful live shows and the fact that they were also receiving more TV and magazine coverage as their popularity and profile skyrocketed – had a positive flow-on effect in the marketplace. 

Machiavelli And The Four Seasons went on to spend 14 weeks in the Australian Top 40 album chart, peaking at #8 on 11 June, 1995. Unlike today, this was still at a time when an act had to shift a significant amount of units to stray into these glorified chart stratospheres – for context, at the time, they were surrounded in the upper echelons by acts such as Sheryl Crow, Roachford, Celine Dion, John Lee Hooker, Tina Arena, Chris Isaak, Take That, Joshua Kadison, Corona, The Cranberries and Garth Brooks (although there were a scattering of more ‘alternative’ names such as Green Day, Cruel Sea and a then-nascent Silverchair).

The album was certified Gold, meaning that it shifted at least 35,000 copies. It won TISM an ARIA in 1995 for Best Independent Release, and in typical fashion they had SBS football broadcaster Les Murray accept the award on their behalf and offer a (purportedly mildly offensive) acceptance speech in Hungarian, in the process answering the titular question posed in Machiavelli album track What Nationality Is Les Murray?. To top it all off, three of the album’s tracks made it into triple j’s Hottest 100 – (He’ll Never Be An) Ol’ Man River (#9), Greg! The Stop Sign!! (#10) and All Homeboys Are Dickheads (#93) – an occurrence that wouldn’t have been even vaguely imaginable a mere 12 months earlier.

As it turned out, these successes remained the high-water mark of TISM’s career (in terms of across the board acceptance), with further releases failing to either chart or capture the hearts and minds of the populace to this level, effectively sending TISM back to the underground from whence they came^[8]. And, in fairness, where they probably belong, because one only needs to look at the charts on any given week to realise that highbrow intellectual humour has no place in the mainstream (no matter how you dress it up or distract attention away from its very existence).

The fact that TISM made it into this particular soiree at all is still an incredible achievement, even if it has led to a somewhat strange situation where TISM became extremely well-known yet even more widely misunderstood than they were before, as a whole generation came to know them as ‘that band in masks that take pot shots at people and sing about drugs’ — essentially a novelty act — thus missing the band’s whole point almost entirely (assuming that there is a point). So, even though they’re now widely known, to this writer’s mind they remain one of the most underrated bands in Australian history, just because so much of their brilliance went through to the nation’s keeper (and don’t forget we haven’t even broached the subjects of their often insane, mind-bending live productions).

But, fittingly, we should let TISM themselves have the final word. In the June 1995 issue of Rolling Stone (two months after their scathing two-and-a-half-star review of Machiavelli...), the magazine effectively allowed TISM a right of reply (and fair play to them) in that they gave them a full page to write whatever they liked, TISM still at this stage largely eschewing traditional interviews. Titled Top Ten TISM: A Tragicomedy In One Act, the piece was in the form of a play featuring TISM’s frontmen (and major creative fonts) Humphrey B Flaubert and Ron Hitler-Barassi, who were discussing the band’s unexpected successes, and it contained the following tracts of wisdom:

“Humphrey: OK, OK, we’ve got a top-10 album. It’s not that bad. Our avant-garde façade has been ripped away to reveal we are the same as the very faceless, facile, mainstream, bland, pop garbage we’ve spent our whole careers hypocritically attacking – so? [Flaubert is clearly not convinced by his own argument.] That just means we’re like all alternative bands, ‘cept we got more than 15 cough-mixture junkies listening to us…

“Look, we’re still the darlings of the underground. Look, look. Let me read the reviews:

‘Consistently inspired musical content’ – Beat, Melbourne

‘This is the recording that Australia had to have’ – db Magazine, Adelaide

‘A masterpiece of derision and the ridiculous, against all odds and better judgment’ – On The Street, Sydney

“See, Ron. We’ve still got street cred. Here, pass me a needle and spoon. I’ll show you. Those reviews are proof we’re a credible underground alternative artistic force, pursuing our creativity with the highest of aesthetic motives. Why, those mags must be credible street-level organs of the avant garde, Ron – no one reads ‘em, for Christ’s sake… We are top 10 now, but we’ll soon be back churning out the confronting horse shit to pinheads who read Beckett. See – no-one will get this joke. We can’t be that mainstream…

“You win!! You win!! You’re right. The Rolling Stone review of Machiavelli And The Four Seasons has wrecked our career. Everything was going so well – 10 years in the underground, and then the Stone said: ‘bland throwaway boogie… a passable account of wit and a container-load full of obviousness’. Oh, it’s destroyed us. [Humphrey despairingly gasps out the rest]. ‘Grievously slick and funky to a point beyond satire’. Mocking us as ‘fearless iconoclasts’ who wear masks. Oh, God… Oh, God… But it was even worse than the critical pasting: the very next day we hit the charts! One bad review in Rolling Stone, and everyone loves us! [Humphrey hysterically sobs]. Two-and-a-half stars and the record stores are besieged. Just like Offspring – the Stone calls ‘em a ‘good average band’ and they sell 5 million! Is there no end to the power of this magazine? To destroy years of carefully managed artistically pure obscurity! To propel us into the top ten like this! Why couldn’t they give us four stars, like they gave You Am I, and leave us the credible but commercially unsuccessful artists we so crave to be?”

Touché, TISM, touché.

Track list

1. (He'll Never Be An) Ol' Man River
2. All Homeboys Are Dickheads
3. Garbage
4. Lose Your Delusion II
5. !UOY Sevol Natas
6. What Nationality Is Les Murray?
7. Greg! The Stop Sign!!
8. Play Mistral For Me
9. How Do I Love Thee?
10. Jung Talent Time
11. Aussiemandias
12. Give Up For Australia
13. Philip Glass's Arse (hidden track)

Further viewing

Watch Anton from The Brian Jonestown Massacre show barely concealed delight whilst hosting Rage at how TISM offended Flea with …Ol’ Man River.

Gold! Gold!! Gold!!! VHS compilation from 1998 containing much material from around TISM’s Machiavelli era.