Australia’s Coldest 100 returns this Saturday with world class musical shonk that only Australia can produce.
Just look at this list of artists that you’ll never see on the same list or even in the same sentence.
Don Lane, Kyle Sandilands, Liza Minnelli, Ben Fordham, James Reyne, Samuel L Jackson, Barry Crocker, The Muzak Corporation, Wickety Wak, Lorrae Desmond, Frankie J Holden, Wilbur Wilde, Barry Crocker, Dean Martin, Victorian Police Cadets Skipping Team and the Big Brother cast of 2001 for just a start.
As well as wonderful regional jingles that remind you that major hubs of industry such as Toowoomba and Tasmania are still there.
The Coldest 100 knows the intersection of corporate thinking and opportunistic musicians…
After all, any dingbat can put together a list of good songs. It take a certain kind of goose like Andrew Sholl to put together 100 songs of Australian musical flotsam for 7 years in a row now.
The Coldest 100 is songs about Australia, sometimes they just don’t work out that well…
Andrew Sholl
It will all be going down from 9am Saturday 22nd January on Twitter @Ozkitsch Andrew Sholl shows no sign of modifying his musical taste.
If this music irks you, you’re probably on the wrong website. But if you have that clip of Don Lane singing the theme from Hawaii 5-0, let us know so Andrew can put it in next year.
Nastassja Bassi (Jacqueline Amidy) who I haven’t seen for more than 30 years drops into Maynard International Studios to deconstruct and celebrate her time with the Castanet Club 1985 -1990.
Jacqueline Amidy in NY 2004
The Castanet Club was more than theatrical, it was cinematic.
Natassja Bassi (Jacqueline Amidy)
For those fancy pants people who like to read, here is a heavily edited transcript of our conversation.
Maynard: One day you’re in your lounge room and you turn around and there’s someone you haven’t seen for 34 years standing at the door. Jacquie. Good to see you.
Jacqueline: How long has it been?
Maynard: 36 years ago. Since I’ve seen you.
Jacqueline: I was born about then. So I don’t know how that works.
Maynard: You are in Maynard International Studios. I’ve the same nervousness with you that I had with when Warren Coleman came over to the studios as well.
Jacqueline: Well, I’m real.
Maynard: Is there something you could point out to people?
Jacqueline: The hell? I’m not sure what to make of this I’m looking at, is that a signed Kylie single? There’s a photo of you and Kylie underneath at the Double Bay hotel. Is that the one that Michael died at? I blame you.
Jacqueline: I like your speakers. Very seventies speakers. So I’m sitting on the seventies lounge. I actually think I’ve sat on this lounge somewhere else. In my past. I’m really loving it. I’m going to use the word juxtaposition of seventies, sixties and fifties.
Maynard: Cross-generational carpets here as well. I’ve only, just recently got the CDs into order. They’re all actually in decades etc.
Jacqueline: I don’t think I have seen CDs for a long time.
Maynard: When I say CDs, people say, what?
Jacqueline: I’ve got a CD player in my 2004 Mercedes Compressor, black, black interior, two door, sexy. I do like cars in the last year I’ve had five cars.
Maynard: You strike me as being a station wagon woman.
Jacqueline: I love a station wagon. That’s what upsets me so much about the coupe. I can’t drive along and pick things up from the side of the road. I like freebies.
Maynard: I’ve got you here because we’ve have the Castanet Club exhibition come up. We’re talking about the Castanet Club time. I was just doing crazy dancing up the back.
Jacqueline: Everybody in the Castanet Club was extremely complex.
Maynard: Is there a great stage memory? Of course, Wuthering Heights was almost a signature piece for you.
Jacqueline: Thinking about it, my role was show stopper. I did all the show-stopping songs, Devil Gate Drive etc. I was in the second coming of the Castanet Club. We really put it together as a theatre show. We got a real director.
Maynard: That’d be Neil Armfield.
Jacqueline: We were in a theatre and a very cool theatre. Belvoir Street was at that stage, I think THE theatre.
Maynard: Yeah.
Jacqueline: An RSL club band in a theatre.
Maynard: That was one of the great things about the Castanet Club. We could do shows at an RSL, and we could go and do a theatre season at the Playhouse or at Belvoir Street and we could make it work.
Jacqueline: Do you remember when we did the tour of the Western suburbs RSL clubs?
Maynard: We did three or four. Way out west? We were driving for two hours.
Jacqueline: I do remember going to Rooty Hill RSL because I did work out that way. I drove past it daily, and every day, every day I had the same memory. Everybody going, who the hell is this band? I remember walking in and they just looked at us like who, the frick are these people?
Maynard: You aren’t thinking about Tweed Heads RSL?
Jacqueline: I think we were very successful there. That was very different. But we did have the people from the old people’s home, who spent the whole time with their fingers in their ears, looking very pained, especially when I sang Wuthering Heights. I do remember that that was a very strange season.
Maynard: We did win over a lot of fans there.
Jacqueline: It’s was kind of coals to Newcastle. Sorry to use that word.
Maynard: What was your favourite gig? Did you have one? Was it at one of the festivals?
Jacqueline: That would’ve been Perth. That festival was my favourite because it was the first time I drank alcohol. That was the outside one? We were playing at the University.
Maynard: A big deal was made of the fact that you were having a drink for the first time.
Jacqueline: I was on the piss mate. I was only on the piss because we were playing in a quadrangle and they kept telling us that it was a Shakespearian theatre, but in fact it was just a quadrangle of the University. Well, it was so packed. It was so packed. They were hanging off the rafters. Backstage wasn’t really a green room, it had nothing.
They only had beer and champagne and no water and nothing else that I could drink. I’m the singer in the band and I’m just going, “can we just get like a mineral water or something?” They couldn’t can’t get from the stage to the bar. There were so many people at that gig. There’s pink champagne though.
Maynard: So you thought pink champagne, what harm can that do?
Jacqueline: I started drinking it, and instantly I fell in love with it, and I got drunk. Then we were going to a party which was the Festival party. I think Glen was driving. We got to the party.The funniest thing of the party was, at that time, Kate Ceberano and I, people always got us mixed up.
People would think when we went out in those festivals, people would always think I was Kate Ceberano. I don’t know why, cause I don’t have tits and I’m all skinny. She had huge tits, huge everything. I wasn’t huge at all, but we were both kind of dark and swarthy I suppose. People thought she was me.
I do remember meeting her because she was a good Christian woman.
Maynard: Scientologist.
Jacqueline: Same thing.
Maynard: Don’t say that to a Catholic, that’ll start a fight.
Jacqueline: I am a Catholic. Anyway, I remember meeting her and we were kind of, “it’s you”, we started a conversation now I was trashed and this was my first time I had alcohol. I told Kate “I’m going to the toilet, stay here”. Well, I went to the toilet. I realised that when you get drunk things shift, so I’m sitting on the toilet and it was all swirling around my head.
Then I came back and she’d gone. I’m thinking what happened? That was my first experience with alcohol.
Maynard:I’m sure Kate Ceberano remembers that night.
Jacqueline: I’m sure she does. There were some incredible times. There were many, like when we’re at Belvoir Street, one of the first shows I ever played. They started the show without me. I’m out talking to somebody and they start Devil Gate Drive and I’m still at the bar.
I got to the stage, I ran to the front of the stage. Onto my knees and slid to the front of the stage and grabbed the microphone.
Who would start the show without the singer? That was great, but the most incredible time I ever had oh, which was at Balmain RSL Club.
Maynard: A great venue, a big cavernous venue with a huge stage, plenty of room for all the Castanets.
Jacqueline:It was around the corner from the Bijou . Where Betty Blockbuster had been. That’s where Reg Livermore did that big show.
That theatre was one of the first theatres closed down because of the people who’d moved when it was gentrified. They moved in and they made them close the theatre down.
And it was just around the corner from the RSL, which was a fabulous venue. I loved playing Balmain, but I remember one night and nobody will remember this, but I had a transcendental experience on stage, truly.
Maynard: You always were quite spiritual about your singing in the first place. So it doesn’t surprise me that you had this transcendental experience. What song were you singing and was it a particular part of the song? What happened?
Jacqueline: (long pause and intake of breath…) I’m a very serious singer. I take what I do very seriously. When I sing, I always put everything into a song. That was a beautiful thing about the Castanet Club, though there was this crazy shit happening. I mean, you know, I was this diva up the front, and behind me, people were pulling their pants down and running around like fucking idiots.
I remember this night and I think maybe it was Work Song.
Maynard: Work Song, which is on the album.
Jacqueline: I was in the middle of the stage and they were packed to the rafters. When we played, it’s really hard to explain what a Castanet Club audience was like, because the Castanet club audience was the show. We were the ancillary to the audience.
I remember this night we were playing Work Song and I really deeply got into it. It used every part of my range, I was like the biggest show off diva.
It was incredibly taxing to sing this song and a really hard song to sing. I always wanted to sing it at the absolute max. Every time I wanted to do it better and to show off a little bit more. So I remember I would do a lot.
On the stage it was always very quiet at the start. Then it built as a song and as the sax solo built, everybody went fricken crazy on the stage.
I can remember I closed my eyes and I know it sounds weird, and I wasn’t on drugs or drinking, but I left my body. This really happened. I think it a rarely, rarely happens in anyone’s life, but I actually left my body.
I’m floating outside my body looking down at us on stage because I think I was singing so beautifully that night. I’d gotten myself to another level of singing and I moved out of my body.
I’m sitting there, I’m watching, I mean, oh my God! Oh my God! I’m having this experience. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. I was probably hyperventilating.
Maynard: I’m suggesting medically perhaps it was a minor oxygen deprivation going on.
Jacqueline: Of course, I know that NOW. In retrospect it was, but at that time it was transcendental. Then I came back into my body….
I remember opening my eyes and I’m thinking “what the F did anybody see that?” And you all had your pants down and were running around like crazy people around me. Nobody even fucking noticed that I was out of my body and floating around.
I was in another time zone and you’re all doing your own shit and going about knocking things over and bumming each other or whatever you were doing, it was crazy. That was a moment of knowing I’m truly alone on this stage. Really like, look at me with these bunch of idiots. I’m truly alone on this stage.
Maynard: Another thing you did in the band, you, were one of the main bass players.
Jacqueline: Well, I was the funky ass bass player Maynard. Let’s get that correct.
Maynard: What songs were you laying down the funk to?
Jacqueline: Every song I played mate. I love the bass. I’ve said to my students over the many years, if you want to be sexy, you play the bass.
Maynard: Because you’d have the evening gown and you’d be playing the bass. The fez too.
Jacqueline: Castanets is why I started playing bass. Did I ever tell you how I joined the Castanet Club.
Maynard: No.
Jacqueline: Well, I was a special guest, so I used to come along as special guest with my piano player, Vince. We would come and do my version of many songs, jazz songs and that’s where I started Wuthering Heights with him. Whenever we played, it went off.
So you guys, when you were going to the Edinburgh Festival in 1984, who is your bass player? Pete
Maynard:Pete Mahony, otherwise known as Mr Urstwhile.
Jacqueline: Urstwhile had decided he wasn’t going to go. He decided he wasn’t going to be in the Castanet Club anymore.
He left the band momentarily. You guys contacted me. And you said, because I played guitar because I’d been a singer around town and I played guitar quite well, They asked if I played bass? I said, ah, okay, Yes, I can play bass. I mean, it’s just a four string guitar after all….
Maynard: Which for anybody in the entertainment game, that is exactly the answer you always give. Can you juggle and ride a unicycle? Sure! Because you get more work that way.
Jacqueline: So they said, we’ll find you a bass so you can learn all the songs. They found me a bass from Bart Fox.
Maynard: Bass player with Musical Flags and first Castanet Club bass player.
Jacqueline: He had a bass and they gave me his bass. Now I knew nothing about the bass electric guitar at that stage. And I did not realise that the action of a bass electric guitar shouldn’t be five inches from the neck. It was an impossible guitar to play, but I didn’t know.
So I’ll learnt the whole Castanet Club repertoire on this unplayable bass. I must’ve had muscle fingers because I don’t know how I did it. So I learnt the whole repertoire and I went in and they said, “oh, Pete’s changed his mind. He’s going to go”. So I was ousted, but when you came back, he left and then, because I think I’d been such a hit at the club and you wanted to get a female singer in permanently.
I think Glenn approached me and Angela approached me and I asked if I’d want to join. And I did join. So I actually became the bass player.
Maynard: Wearing a full evening dress and playing the bass. It’s not look you see very often outside of a Bryan Ferry clip.
Jacqueline: Thank you. Well, my costumes were made by a friend of mine, John Parks.
I had a costumier.
Maynard: The rest of us just went into second hand places.
Jacqueline: I lived in pyjamas, I only wore pyjamas. I think at that stage in my life, like all of us, we all wore secondhand clothes, but we decided that Nastassja Bassi should be sexy and slinky and gorgeous.
We had long conversations about how I would look. It was like Madonna, but not. I don’t know if anybody noticed it, but you obviously did. I wore the pillbox hat, the fez hats, the square pillbox hat.
Maynard: Everyone had their own different style. Yours was certainly there.
Jacqueline: I got every bit of la’me from every second hand shop in Newcastle I could find. John went on to lecture at Edith Cowan, Western Australia. He’s still an artist, still does work.
Maynard: That’s the thing with the Castanet Club that has been pointed out. A lot of people are still working as artists even now.
You’ve got a great singing career. You’re working on a PhD. You’ve had some really interesting success in Germany.
Jacqueline: I went to art school. The thing about the Castanet Club, I think it was that perfect apex of the underbelly of Newcastle. We had the theatre and the music and we knew so many people from art school was Jodi and me and Therese and Michael.
It was a perfect fusion of the incredible and exciting things that happened in Newcastle.
Maynard: That group of people would use words like “signifier”, I only found out what that meant last week.
Jacqueline: I’m using that in my PhD, actually. I did film at university. I don’t know if you remember. I used to make all the super eight films for the Castanet Club.
Maynard: Did you do The Last Milkshake In Town?
Jacqueline: The very first film we made. I’ve got a couple of people to help me because I was in it. We used to start every show with a super eight film.
Maynard: That’s right. It would have us all jumbling up the letters of Castanet Club or running around. Remember the one where we’re all diving off the blocks at Merewether Baths?
Jacqueline: Recently, when the documentary for the Castanet exhibition Glen Dormand was saying to me, he thinks that the band was very theatrical. I said, actually, I believe that the Castanet Club was cinematic because I think we were all influenced by the Saturday afternoon movies we watched.
Maynard: We all had our own movie going on in our heads.
Jacqueline: It definitely did. It was the Busby Berkeley kind of “let’s put on a show”, Judy Garland and that was the thing. I mean, it was. Let’s put on a show, you know, it did come across perhaps as musical, but I think more than anything, we were cinematic. We viewed ourselves in a cinematic way. We’d started every half with the super eight film. I did an animation where we all went to the moon. So I had all the little characters and we got into the rocket and I did it in stop motion.
I did it in the fireplace at Dulwich Hill, Bowling Man went to the moon. I did that stuff.
I’ve gone on and done my own thing. Cabaret shows by myself with piano players. And I ended up in Berlin in the late eighties.
Maynard ; Just like the Hoff
Jacqueline: Just like the Hoff. They kept saying to me, you got to come to Berlin. They’ll really get you in Berlin. They’ll love you.
Maynard: There is something incredibly Weimar Republic about you. Here’s your cabaret, but I will kill you.
Jacqueline: Thank you for that. Ah, yeah. Very Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Wile, I was a bit obsessed with German cabaret when I was a kid.
I didn’t have any idea what they were saying, but I just loved the emotion of it. Weimar cabaret.
Maynard: By the way, if you are watching the movie Cabaret, stop the movie after Money Makes The World Go Around. The movie’s over after that, because you don’t want to get to “tomorrow belongs to us”. It gets sad after Money Makes The World Go Around, you might be tempted to watch more of the film. Don’t.
Jacqueline: In the little brief clip I saw from the documentary on the Castanet Club, Stephen makes the comment that we were Punk. But we were Weimar Cabaret. Which is what we were in that kind of strange post Whitlam Liberal government era, which was shit when they were bringing fees back in for education, all that stuff.
Maynard: We were concerned with the fact that we’d be killed in a nuclear war, which makes Global Warming a bit lame in some ways.
Jacqueline: Yeah. This was an industrial city. So every day you’d go out and you’d cough up a bucket load of coal. You’d hang out, you’re washing in Newcastle and you knew where the breeze was blowing from depending on what colour the washing was when you brought it in.
Maynard: In some ways the environment in Newcastle has got better.
Jacqueline: Yeah, it definitely has. And there’s that constant hum from Kooragang Island that I hear.
Maynard: I love it when the guy leans on the boat horn at three in the morning. What the hell are you doing? Do you need to wake up everyone in Newcastle?
Jacqueline: We moved to Sydney. I think that changed all our lives.
Maynard: It did. It certainly changed my life for the better forever. I remember how we used to rehearse on a regular basis. A number of times a week in Redfern.
Jacqueline: Because we were on a retainer. We would go there every day and it was like a job. Every day we’d work out bits and we’d sit around drinking coffee.
Maynard: Out of that came a lot of great things. And also we were attempting to earn for each other $250 a week, which you were able to live on then in Sydney.
Jacqueline: It was a retainer and we were a cooperative and I’ve been in lots of cooperative things since. That idea that we are all equal. She says, did you see me rolling my eyes? All equal in the eyes of God. Did you see me rolling my eyes? That way we could actually pay ourselves a living wage as performers as we rehearsed in Redfern.
Maynard: Our gigs at the Harold Park Hotel were was a great time. There was just so many of us crammed on stage there. Audiences often looked very surprised as when we were going off, doing a number like Work Song or when an Angela and Glen Keenan would do their dancing.
They would take up the whole stage with their great forties dancing. There’s just moments where they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Believe you me listener. It was amazing to be part of a group that can do that to an audience.
Jacqueline: This was what I found. Like somebody like Stephen, who I worked with post Castanets, I’m still on a stage with a guy doing the same shit he’s been doing for 30 years. But it doesn’t really matter because I find him mesmerising. Next to brilliance, as far as I’m concerned, Warren and Stephen are genius. I think the essence of the second coming of the Castanet Club, the one that I was a part of, Stephen and Warren, were this kind of genius force in the middle, because they were freaky, freaky as.
Maynard: Please people have a look at the Castanet Club documentary teaser, and the full length version that is going to be online in coming months. The thing that made me smile the most, cause I’d never seen it, was the photo of Warren Coleman with his Academy Award. I knew he’d won one and I saw him with it and I couldn’t stop smiling. So happy for him. That was my favourite part of the whole documentary.
Jacqueline: How proud of are we Warren? I think it was the youngest person ever taken into NIDA. His comedy was inside out. It was critical thinking, it was sideways, it was roundabout. Blew my fucking head off. Do you remember that Warren grew up thinking he was an alien?
Maynard: Yes, and he ended up playing one on stage.
Jacqueline: He was obsessed with the NASA stuff. He was a NASA expert. I think I remember him saying that he believed that the aliens would come and pick him up one day and that they just popped him with those people who were pretending to be his parents. If you start the Warren Coleman story there, then you get it.
Maynard: If we could finish off with a song, would you like me to play Wuthering Heights? or Work Song? The 24 bit remastered version?
Jacqueline: God play them both. They’re both pretty interesting works. Wuthering Heights, didn’t go on the album and it’s something that still, I don’t understand.
Maynard: The reason is that you could only fit 47 minutes on the vinyl album.
Jacqueline: There were political reasons why it didn’t go on the album. I mean, why would you have somebody doing a cover of Wuthering Heights, and an awesome cover and not put it on the album? When you put other stuff on the album.
Maynard: Me doing the Broadway medley?
Jacqueline: Why do you make an album? You make an album as memorabilia. You make an album as merchandise, or you make an album to do something with. I truly believe that if we put Wuthering Heights on that album, it would have taken the Castanet Club somewhere else. I think it would have been a single, it was great. I listened to it when you put it up the other day, of course, I haven’t heard me sing that. I haven’t heard that. So to hear my voice as a 22 year old kid singing that song in that voice, I blew myself away and I thought, that is fucking awesome. It’s a quintessential version of a song that was already a quintessential.
How could you make it better? It was way too fast. It’s super fast. It’s like, we’re just rushing to get to the end. Work Song was the same, but I listened to it. It’s the poignancy of things that we did.
It’s the poignancy of somebody like Johnny singing those, saddest guys on earth songs that were so heart tugging and gorgeous. How could you not fall in love with it?
It was a beautiful reflection of where we grew up, at the time we grew up, with the culture we grew up with. And to put Wuthering Heights in there, it was incredible to sing. I’m a huge Kate Bush fan. I mean, she changed the world.
The acrobatics of that song are so incredible because nobody had ever heard anybody sing like Kate Bush. There were a few pretenders that came along after that, but it was one of the few times that a record label actually said to a female singer, fuck, you could do whatever you want.
That’s what happens when you say to a female singer of that calibre that you can do whatever you want. So she was signed in as a 17 year old, and that was her first single, you know, I grew up listening to jazz and stuff, but as a singer, there’s nobody like Kate Bush and that changed my life. To then go on and sing it and to be inside that vocal, to be inside the story, to be inside of that female vocal, I never heard anybody sing like that.
Maynard: Let’s have a listen to you using that. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you and to find out what was going on and what has gone on.
Jacqueline: I did a lot of stuff in Germany, I still go to Germany. I’m there a lot, except for COVID. I hate COVID shit.
Maynard: What’s your favourite German phrase?
Jacqueline: Quickly, quickly in your head. It’s East German. I said “cheers big ears”. All my friends laughed, and this guy said, “quickly, quickly in your head’ (in German).
Maynard: Please follow Jacqueline, wherever you can have a look at her Bandcamp, have a look at her Soundcloud.
Jacqueline: Thanks Maynard. It’s really lovely seeing you. Thank you for inviting me over. Why haven’t we been seeing each other more?
The Castanet Club 1985
Maynard: Well, we are on the opening day of the Castanet Club exhibit at the Newcastle Museum, and I’ve been having a really good look around here. We’ve got over 900 photos on three screens. We’ve got every different iteration of the Castanet Club represented, and there are even vinyl, 12 inch albums for sale.
We have Jacqueline. What do you reckon? What’s it like seeing yourself as large as life on the screen there on the stage again?
Jacqueline: I never realised my resolution was so low. I thought I was high resolution, but obviously I’m wrong. The pixel count on that is low.
Maynard: You had the luminous halter neck top on. That was quite a good idea for a sweaty show.
Jacqueline: Really? I had shit hot body didn’t I. But I was 12 at the time. Skin tight as well. I was zipped into them and zipped out of them.
Maynard: As part of the exhibition there’s a recreation of a share house in Cooks Hill, which includes gaffer tape on the sofa and an eighties television with standard resolution, which is currently playing 104 Bull Street, Cooks Hill, the controversial track off Johnny Goodman’s album.
Anything you’ve seen here that you’d forgotten about? I mean, there’s a lot of photos I actually took on the photo walls there, that I’d forgotten I’d taken.
Jacqueline: It’s nice to see the back of the Castanet Club album blown up. I forgot that description of my character. That’s interesting.
Maynard: And nothing’s changed. “Likes to stay up late. Sings like a dream”.
Jacqueline: There you go.
Jane Adam & Jacqueline Amidy film Lance Norton & Maynard for The Last Milkshake in Town, 1983. Newcommon Street, Newcastle.
After 30 minutes of technical issues on both sides Rob Darby finally get’s me on the phone. Cranky but always ready to talk with Rob Darby about a wide ranging group of issues.
None of which we solve. But I did bring the correct size soapbox.
Viva Bob Vegas is the first live tour in six years for legendary Australian (very) funnyman Bob Downe. Relax as Bob takes Maynard on a tour of his career and his favourite moments from his latest show.
Touring now to Brisbane, Brunswick Heads, Sydney & Melbourne.
Bob Downe commando rolling under stage curtain. Not having a “senior moment”.
I spend most of my days answering DMs on Facebook. I feel like a teacher doing marking.
Bob Downe
Bob Downe & Maynard Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade 2006
The best way to get your hair done is to take it to your Hairdresser and leave it there overnight.
Bob Downe (hair enthusiast)
Bob has retired this song. But clearly the people of Canberra have not witnessed a performer of his calibre before.
I’m a perfect bitch. But I don’t have perfect pitch.
Bob Downe (singer)
Bob Downe on Maynard’s Foxtel show in 1996.
Sydney Mardi Gras parade 2006 with Bob Downe as Parade Marshall
I’ve got someone very exciting, very showbiz on the line. You probably first bumped into them when he was a member of the Globos in 1982. Perhaps you saw him at Edinburgh festival in 1988. When he first played the Edinburgh festival fringe, which he played 12 of through to 2002, he released his greatest hits album in 1996.
His jazzy album in 1997, hosted the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade on TV. The Bob Downe show on Foxtel in 2000 many, many appearances on Good News Week singing along with Paul. He’s now brought Las Vegas to New South Wales. Whether Las Vegas wants to be here or not, with Viva Bob Vegas. People it’s coming to Brunswick heads, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, please welcome the Prince of Polyester, the Viscount of valour, that Nabob of nylon, Mr Bob Downe.
Oh my God. How do you follow an intro like that, man?
And that’s not all you’ve done. That’s just a snapshot.
That’s right. It doesn’t even take in my crochet classes or my crazy whisk drive that I always do with mum. How do I do it? How do I keep it up?
Particularly with this show, you’ve got a punishing schedule all the way up and down the east coast of Australia, how do you travel? You just still go via Ansett. When I can. And sometimes I send myself by FedEx, but I’ve just ordered online a human sized drone. I think that’s going to be the easiest way to get around. Big enough to ride on. It’ll be like the chairlift at the Easter show.
This is no cheapo show. This isn’t just you with a cassette tape. How big is the cast?
I’ve got a four piece band. We’ve got two beautiful burlesque dancer girls, and I’ve got a special guest entertainer in Brunswick heads and Sydney. It’s the lovely Shauna Jensen, who I’m sure you know, and in Melbourne, it’s the beautiful Pastel Vesper.
Will you both be singing the Ballad of John and Yoko together?
I think we should. I really do think we should. So this shows Viva Bob Vegas. I figured if we can’t go to Vegas, I’m going to bring Vegas to you.
It’s like a recreation and a tribute to the late-night lounge shows that used to happen in Vegas after the main room shows. There would be these wild lounge shows with people like Louis Prima and Francis Faye, and they had showtimes like one, three and five AM. You can imagine how loosey goosey and crazy those shows were.
That’s what I’m recreating. It’s very naughty with great jazz, great pop.
Are you going to have an Elvis impersonator or will you be an Elvis impersonator?
I am the Elvis impersonator. I’ll be telling my Las Vegas stories. I’ve played Vegas quite a few times and I’ve been there a lot. There’s a lot of funny stories to tell.
And you are known for your outfits too. Your outfits have always been completely Las Vegas. My favourite outfit of yours, which we might not see this time was the one you used to open a show with in the early nineties. That was your Xanadu Cape. And it wasn’t gathered. It was just basically a triangle that was stapled on your back.
That was my Xanadu space suit it was beautiful, but it was in a very thin cheap fabric that left nothing to the imagination.
And what costume is your favourite from this show?
My gold lamè, track suit. Made by the brilliant Maude Boat who created the foamy wigs for Priscilla. It’s a black trim gold lamè track suit.
Sydney listeners to Planet Maynard are disappointed because all those shows are sold out already. Is that correct?
All sold out, but we’re coming back. Keep checking in. At Bobdowne.com or on the Bob Downe Facebook page. We’re going to do return seasons in November and December.
You’re often at your best when you work against what people would expect you to do. I saw you doing a bit of Sexy MF by Prince once, and that was just fantastic. What’s an unexpected number from Bob Downe this time?
A little selection from Hamilton the musical. I think you’ll be quite pleased. Oh, I can rap baby. I can rap. I can rap with the best of them.
There’s one photo from the show where you look like you’re having a senior moment. You’re lying on the ground. It looks like you can’t get up.
It’s after I’ve done my commando roll under the slowly dropping curtain.
Well, you’re giving all to the people. I’ve got your singles of I Will Survive & Yeh, Yeh.
The act has never gone out of style. I was retro to begin with.
You were doing wonderful trips around the Harbour, doing a bit of a burlesque show in the Harbour there. How did they go?
It’s was going fabulously until the bloody pandemic. All of my P&O comedy cruises, suspended.
That’s why I’m on tour with this show. Cause you know, a girl’s got to work.
How did you handle the pandemic? Did you go out and hide in Murwillumbah with your Mum? Or did you put on your white lab coat from the Ponds Institute and find a cure?
Neither of those, I lived in a cave just on the Harbour cliffs. It’s amazing how much natural harbour frontage is left actually. Especially when you actually get in a tinny and have a look for somewhere to live.
On Facebook there’s a great great photo when you were the marshal at the Mardi Gras parade. I was interviewing you for one of my videos. Someone has pointed out, interestingly enough, I’ve never noticed this in the photo, but there there’s a railway station behind us and it’s Museum station.
But your head’s just at an angle blocking it off. So you’ve got, it looks like it actually says Cum Station in the background. To which I replied. Yes, very disappointed. It’s actually a building.
That does remind one of the early days of Mardi Gras. I’ve got lots of stories about early Mardi Gras days. It’s quite naughty. This show’s quite naughty. Don’t bring the kids.
a few people here asking some questions. I’ll just go through these up. These are people from the internet and we know how rude they are. Yeah. Oh, well look, lay it on me, baby. I’m used to it.
You wouldn’t believe what fun those comedy cruises are. We really miss them because there’s always you plus another five or six comedians and you’re out for three days and it’s yeah. So much fun. Right? There’s that interesting mix. When you get comedians together, they’ve worked hard in front of an audience for a number of years and there’s sort of a dark humour that comes out, isn’t it?
Yeah, very much.
Jenny Carruthers from Facebook writes, can you please do another duet with Gina Riley and wants to know when you’re going to be hosting the new version of Blankety Blanks?
I want to do everything that she’s mentioned and more, I’d love to do a Blankety Blanks. God, that would be fun. And you could be on, you’d be great.
I don’t know if I’m more of a Marty Rhone or an Ugly Dave Gray kind of guy.
Oh, I think you’re more Marty Rhone than Ugly Dave Gray.
I think that’s a compliment.
Evan Steer writes from Hong Kong. He says that he once had a chat with you at Mardi Gras and found you totally charming. That’s the word that keeps on coming up Bob, charming.
The one that keeps coming up at the moment is that I’m a national treasure. I’m a bit nervous about that because doesn’t that mean somebody needs to dig me up.
Or in a glass case at the Australian museum next to the thylacine.
Peter Young from Orange writes. What is your take on the significance of Australia by Good News to the people of Australia? Is it the gay games?
Dreadful Village People style song, Australia, Australia, that song is hideous.
Hideous. I’ll never sing it again. It’s like Copacabana. I’ll never sing it again. Some songs. People love them, but Oh my goodness.
But look, I like to do good songs rather than the songs that, yeah. Nah, I won’t be doing that one again. As much as I enjoyed doing the gay games, opening ceremony, that’s been retired.
What is one of the newer ones that you might be putting in the list?
Oh, I’m, I’m throwing in all the Vegas classics, Dankeshein, Volare, Sway, Hello Dolly, songs from the Wizard of Oz, Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head, Candyman there’s 20 songs in the show with a four-piece band.
So that’s you and six people touring up and down the East coast of Australia.
Absolutely. So I really want people to come and see us this week at Brunswick heads picture house, and it’s I’m on this Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. And you’d better book because tickets are going fast. We’re already sold out in Sydney.
What’s it like doing Matinee shows?
It’s amazing. You wouldn’t believe we did a Matinee in Brisbane and it was just like an evening show. Everybody was just so up for it. See, people are so pleased to be back in a theatre. It doesn’t matter what time you’re on. They’re so excited to be back in a theatre to have a laugh.
Has their behaviour changed any because they’re so used to sitting in front of the TV?
They’re so excited that they forget how much they love live performance. Everybody’s full of this incredible communal energy, that they had forgotten was part of going to a show.
You are well known for your haircare products, a question from Justine, she wants to know what is the secret of your hair care products? How does your hair always look so good?
Well, what you do is you go to the hairdresser and you leave it overnight and you come back the next day and there’s something about it. It just becomes perfect.
Do you ever have a hairdo malfunction?
If your hair catches part of the set as you make your entrance, it’s never good losing your hair as you make your entrance.
I remember doing a very deep bow once and I got up and my hair was on the floor. So no more deep bowels.
Do you remember what your very first song was that you did Mr. Bob Downe? The first song I ever did was strangers in the night. I made the backing on a Casio directly into the back of the stereo and recorded onto a Chrome cassette.
Oh, I must congratulate you on being one of the few people I know that are following Mari Wilson on Facebook.
Mari Wilson. Yeah. See she was doing that sixties, fifties thing. The same time that we started doing the Globos and the same time that Paul Rubens was doing Peewee, that kind of fifties, sixties, mid century, retro entertainment all happened spontaneously around the world. People need to realise this was before the internet. This was all just happening locally. That’s what was so interesting about working back then.
The range of songs you do, just looking at Starman, David Bowie. Your version is very special.
You have many interviews to do. How has your media circus been this time?
It’s been, well, “Bob’s back” and I’m like, I’d never went away, but they all think I’m back. This is the first time I’ve toured a new show on terra firma for six years since Bob Sweat and Tears. Can you believe that?
Do you answer DMs on Facebook?
I certainly do. It’s exhausting. I spend most of my days there, I feel like a teacher doing marking. It’s a bit of a similar feeling.
Have you been filming this or are you going to do a live stream of this?
I’d love to, I’d love to, but because we’re doing return seasons and everything, we might hold off for a while, but I’d love to. It’s time for a live Bob Downe video. It really is.
Those Hazy Crazy Days of Summer was that from a movie?
No, it’s a pop single written and released by Nat King Cole. One of his pop hits from the early sixties. I love that early sixties, pre Beatles period. I think it’s so interesting.
People sing along at home. There’s a lot of people who like to sing along with you at home.
That’s what I love. That’s what I want people to do at my show.
Bunga Bunga 67 surprises the world with a vision of hope, whimsy and frippery. Just what you need in these trying times.
They could have used Kim Beazley as a battering ram.
Tim Ferguson (insurrectionist)
Learn where Kyneton is, experience the bass guitars of war and get yourself a decent super hero psychologist.
Tim takes a journey to 1990s Canberra in his Tim Tunnel, Maynard defenestrates himself via the 1960s and they both answer the percussion based question that has split the Nation in two.
When the world is forming a band, Australia usually plays the triangle.
Tim Ferguson (geopolitical strategist)
Madd Club crew Maynard, Miss Kate & Action Ant
Having strangers stick money into my underpants makes me feel cheap and expensive at the same time.
Tim Ferguson (failed stripteuse)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8UP9bupjFU&t=8s
Felipe Rose original Village People member talks DISCO
It’s Bunga Bunga 66! You know what that means? Tim Ferguson and Maynard are two thirds of the way to the Devil’s number while still being only one third in reality.
This show Tim & Maynard take you on a 30 minute adventure that has bears, baths and bugger all to do with reality. Tim’s been to Adelaide and Maynard has never been to me. Your Crankmail is answered but very little else.
Tim Ferguson & Maynard attempt serious
Travel in time to explore the lesbian protest “rule of four”, find out what is boring Tim this week and have a look in Maynard’s Bug Out Bag.
What do Daryl Somers and Shintaro have in common? Nothing, but they are both good at hiding and are both hot topics for discussion in Bunga Bunga 66.
Mari Wilson, Miss Beehive influences Maynard fashion
Bunga Bunga 65 finds Tim Ferguson and Maynard hard at work making Australia a better place by making sure they don’t get caught.
A pithy Bunga Bunga 65 finds Tim in a mood to tell off ABC legal while Maynard is puzzled at the amount of Barry Crocker records he seems to own.
They also answer the big questions about Tim’s burlesque career, Adelaide, Goth subculture, and what to wear to an insurrection.
Tim Ferguson & Maynard looking serious
If I was going to invade Parliament House, I’d dress like Bananas In Pyjamas
Tim Ferguson (insurrectionist)
Victorian listeners will no doubt be especially excited about Tim’s public address to the people of Melbourne. In which he fingers some COVID malfeasance on the part of alleged hipsters.
Bunga Bunga 63 brings the joy of film, music and maritime safety right up your astral plane.
Tim Ferguson and Maynard hold aloft their disappointing splendour of sound. This time it’s serious film critic vs comedy and Tim takes it personally. Maynard ponders that Whitney might have saved the Titanic.
So as usual Bunga Bunga leaves a mess.
There is no cure for a grumpy cat, except to put them in a leadership position.
Tim Ferguson (shares a space with Kitler)
Batman warns of the “deadly daily danger” that is all around us
Maynard & Tim singing along with Bunga Bunga 63
Aaron Thoughty2 hates bathos and Tim takes it personally.
Bunga Bunga 62 ponders the imposing amount of Crankmail that was slipped under the front door this week.
Tim Ferguson & Maynard soothe a troubled nation using the well known therapeutic tools of cocaine, cats & Canberra.
We argue over dancing, and laugh at a well known Australian capital city. We give important tips on professional presentations, including the appropriate use of the word “lick”.
Kitler in his Wolf’s Lair
This is the show that finally may have discovered what Tim’s alt right feline Kitler is doing late at night.
