Use Your Delusion

Everybody with even the vaguest clue about recent Australian music history knows about TISM – This Is Serious Mum to the pedants – the subversive bunch of masked reprobates who cut a swath through alternative culture in the mid-'90s with their acerbic approach to just about everything and a complete willingness to take pot shots at even the most sacred of cows. But only people present during their early years in the thriving Melbourne scene of the late-'80s know how truly subversive and entertaining this band really was in their prime; following them back then was like being a member of some fervent cult, where the highbrow and lowbrow existed in perfect harmony and literally anything could happen at any given juncture.

Of course, having split up twice in the media and then not really disappearing, when TISM pulled up stumps in roughly late-2004 – that being the year of their final release and performances – they did so with virtually no fanfare. Their anonymity meant that they could literally just disappear from the face of the earth. Then in 2007 a country band called ROOT! started playing around the traps in Melbourne and it soon became common knowledge that their frontman DC Root (Damian Cowell to the taxman) was indeed the former creative lynchpin of TISM – he who operated under the pseudonym Humphrey B Flaubert. A short while later in 2010, after two albums, that band in turn morphed into The DC3, whose opening gambit was releasing a single called I Was The Guy In TISM. So far, so strange.

Now, after having dropped their debut album The Future Sound Of Nostalgia last year, The DC3 are heading up to Brisbane to participate in the BIGSOUND Live showcase. It's put to Cowell that, having conquered the highs of the music industry behind a mask with TISM – who in their commercial prime won an ARIA, had a Gold-certified album, were ubiquitous on the radio and played every festival in the country – that starting out at the bottom of the food chain again at an industry showcase must seem faintly ridiculous...

“Absolutely, faintly ridiculous is probably a great way to describe it – in fact it's probably an over-arching term my entire post-TISM career,” he laughs. “Drawing a line at appearing at BIGSOUND seems a little arbitrary, because the whole thing is faintly ridiculous. We'll do a gig and then we'll go home and go to bed feeling reasonably good about yourself, and you wake up the next morning and you still feel on a bit of a high, and then usually sometime late the next day on the Facebook someone will post some photos, and you see yourself and the wind goes out of the balloon almost immediately – that's when the phrase 'faintly ridiculous' comes into play. The whole thing is basically about suspension of disbelief – I close my eyes and try to keep those photographs from appearing in my consciousness, because if I listened to that voice I'd totally give up.”

Yet Cowell, like a sucker for punishment, just keeps coming back for more. Is it the creative side of his ventures which keeps him interested?

“I always say it's like a Tattslotto pick – from the moment you have an idea, right through the working on that idea, probably right up until the moment when that idea is actually delivered, you have this unlimited widescreen potential,” he posits. “It's possible, it is physically possible, that this idea – whether it be a song or an album or a joke or a witty aside, whatever it happens to be, big or small – this could possibly be adopted by thousands of people out there; it is physically possible for me to be as popular as Kimbra!

“That's what drives you – you get sort of carried away, and it's obviously total self-delusion, but it's quite intoxicating. It's certainly not a process where I mentally convince myself to return once more to the grindstone and churn out another one, it's actually this fire of inspiration I get, and whilst I'm doing it it's fantastic fun. When you're piecing together something like that – and when the band plays it after the first couple of times when it's sounding shithouse and suddenly it turns a corner and becomes a piece of vision fully-realised – that's a great feeling. It's heaps better than playing fucking basketball on a Tuesday night, or whatever else I'd be doing if I was not doing this. So yeah, it's the creativity.

“With the gigs you can sometimes get that too, but I think the other guys in the band enjoy gigs more than I do – for me gigs are this huge rote-learning memory experience. I'm in this kind of tunnel where I basically have twelve-thousand words to remember in order, it's like performing in a play or something. Because we just play so sporadically it's quite an undertaking to get to that point where I can get up and deliver a seamless performance – to do that I have no idea of what's going on around me. People will say, 'Did you see that girl who showed her tits in the front row?' and I'm like, 'No! When?' It's one of the downsides unfortunately. And I feel like I've got one-hundred percent responsibility on my shoulders, whereas in my previous guise I was able to hide a lot more – not just behind a mask but with all of the other shit that was going on.

“So it's just that creative thrill, and to return to the motif of our discussion here I'm aware that it's faintly ridiculous – it's like a bloke who keeps falling in love every three weeks with a new girl. But I suppose it keeps me from hanging myself.”

The sudden change from ROOT! to The DC3 (using predominantly the same band) seemed strange at the time, but to DC it was pretty much a homecoming of sorts.

“I suppose The DC3 should have been the band that I started after TISM really,” he muses. “ROOT! was maybe a necessary stepping stone, because I didn't have the guts... I felt that I needed to pick a genre and hide in that genre a bit. I didn't have much confidence, that voice and those photos of me onstage at my age were strong in my mind before we'd even played a gig. Obviously at that stage I didn't have any idea how it would be accepted – it was quite possible that I would just get booed by a whole bunch of TISM fans who somehow thought I was being a traitor to the anonymity of it all. So I didn't have the courage to come back out and not only do it without some sort of artifice – the cowboy hats and all that was slightly artifice – but also in a musical sense to come back out and play music that sounds quite a bit like TISM, which The DC3 sort of was, especially the electronic feel of the first album. So ROOT! was kind of a nice way to put my toe in the water to see what happened. And the great thing about being monumentally unpopular is that you can make career suicidal decisions any time you want, because there's no career to suicide.”

And the decision to announce the change by releasing I Was The Guy In TISM?

“That was to end the chapter,” DC shrugs. “Every time a marketing opportunity of some description came up, or we were engaging with people who ran a festival or something, it was constantly brought up: 'Do you refer to yourself as being formerly in TISM?' I started out with this intention of never mentioning it and not referring to it in any way, but it would get referred to anyway – even though I hadn't initiated it, word gets out – and then you start to feel somehow ridiculous and pathetic trying to deny it. My manager suggested doing some kind of a statement or an interview where you talk about the fact that you were in TISM, and then you'll feel like you don't have to talk about it again, so instead of that I did a song.

“And then of course immediately from there I take absolute license by not referring to TISM in any way other than in the title, so it doesn't help or tell you anything about my life in TISM – you're worse off after hearing the song really. It was really for me. At the end of the day not many people really give a fuck, so who cares? So now I just feel a bit more comfortable – while I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about TISM or demystifying TISM or spilling the beans, I can at least talk about it normally. I owed that to myself.”