Past Love

Tommy Bradson's sold-out 2011 Melbourne Fringe show, Pirate Rhapsody, Mermaid Requiem, netted the Sydney native the festival's award for Best Cabaret, as well as a whole raft of Green Room nominations. He returns to the Fringe this year, show-casing his extraordinary lyrical and idiosyncratic brand of cabaret, with The Men My Mother Loved. Bradson's shows challenge and entrance, just as Fringe shows should.

The concept of The Men My Mother Loved seems simple. “I wrote it for my actual mother,” Bradson says, “and the show is sort of loosely based on her, and also on the great music that I listened to as a kid. As a child of the early '80s, my parents were really into Aussie rock'n'roll; they were into AC/DC, the Skyhooks, Cold Chisel and bands like that. It's kind of the first music I knew and it affected me in ways I didn't really think of until much later in life.”

His influences are super eclectic, from Hans Christian Anderson to stand-up comedy. Musician-poets like Nick Cave, Paul Kelly and Tom Waits have had a big influence, particularly on this show. “I have always approached [my shows] from a place of poetry. That's where something will start for me, even before I have any links or ideas of how a song will be structured. I feel like a lot of these guys are the same, or at least they finish with a product that has great literature to it.”

Bradson's shows are known for their ballsy lyricism, grotesque beauty and their trash-glam aesthetic. But The Men My Mother Loved, he says, presents something different. “This is a much nicer show than I have ever done before. I'm not fooling around as much. It's from a son to his mum; there's not a lot of violence or craziness,” he laughs. “I look at photos of myself as a kid and it just looks like a nicer time. There's no sort of foggy haze over the photos, but everything looks kind of happy and easy.”

And he is loath to let historical accuracy deaden a decent yarn. “My father is still around, much to the fiction of the show. There's potential for some new truths, I guess. I like leaving a lot to the imagination.”

Coming up to Fringe time, Bradson's a case-study in what you should look out for within the packed program. He's a skilled artist, intelligent, emotive, audience-focused, and he takes risks. All that doesn't make it any easier to sum up his ultimate goal though: “To remind us of our follies and to not be blind-sided by that which doesn't really matter in the end. That's kind of how I spiritually approach all these things. But a lot of the time I am just wearing knickers and swearing at people,” he laughs. “So maybe it's somewhere in the middle.”

It might be his process of “puzzling together” that produces such enthralling theatrical poetry. Talking about his mermaid character who sang of irreconcilable loss, in Pirate Requiem, he says, “that was really just me talking – only I was wearing a coconut bikini, a fish tail and talking in a strange voice. Whether people know that or not, is not important, but somehow it really works in the end. It's a strange, unfinished puzzle.”