Paul McDermott is a staple in Australian entertainment. The comedian, musician, and TV personality has made several appearances in the Aussie spotlight throughout his career, including Good News Week, The Project, and the Festival of Voices. Paul is also an accomplished visual artist and has written a number of books, including his most recent project.
In this exclusive interview, Paul talks about his current book, life in Naarm/Melbourne as an aspiring artist and the writing process.
Thanks for letting me interview you. How have you been?
Hello Patrick, I’ve been well. I hope you’re well too. This year, and the last few years, have been trials in many ways and I am unsure whether I have coped with them, or just survived them. But, generally speaking, OK.
Can you tell us a bit about the book you’re currently working on?
I have a number of ideas I’m fleshing out, but I’m easily distracted. I’m about 90,000 words into a story and have reached a point where I’m wondering if I should have begun writing it at all.
What’s your writing process like?
It varies a lot because a few different disciplines (songs, poems, novels, musicals, articles etc.) are involved, and I’m vastly inconsistent… and easily distracted.
Over the last few years, I’ve been writing songs and material for stand-up comedy shows. I’m also working on a novel, and fleshing out a few shorter ideas.
I find writing songs, normal song songs* almost therapeutic. Comedy songs are a different beast as they require a specific reaction from the audience—specifically they require the audience to laugh, or at least be humoured. Comedy material, spoken word and songs, just circles about in my skull. Sometimes it’s an usually bizarre thought, something tangential, or a weird angle that presents itself and requires some investigation. A lot of that ‘writing’ also evolves on stage as different situations and different audiences force me to respond in different ways. Performance-based writing is always shifting, it alters, changes dynamic is lost, is of the moment—and as most of my live performances deal with contemporary issues, as they change, the material changes.
For music and comedy, the writing aspect is enjoyable because the text becomes a series of small puzzles to solve. The limitations of a song create that framework of constraint—the scan of a line, the rhyme, the shaping of a sentence to conform to a melody. Once you have a valid idea down, the editing process is to sculpt it or to be a bit more precise, to hone it. Comedy writing fills a similar space to me. Is the payoff worth the journey? In live performance my comedy is pretty aggressive and savage. Of the written work in these shows only the musical pieces are set in stone. The spoken word pieces are very loose… not tightly scripted, they allow me to ad-lib, to drift off and interact with the audience.
The other writing takes more grit, more dedication, and a lot more concentration. None of which come naturally to me.
What are some difficulties you encounter/ed when writing?
Reluctance, distraction, lack of desire, boredom, ennui—which is just French for boredom.
Every emotion runs through me over the course of writing a piece. The longer the process, the more difficult it is for me to stay focused. I like the beginning of an idea when it first explodes in my head. Often that’s the best iteration of it, as it’s unmarred by reality.
At the moment the real difficulty is finding a space. My desk is so cluttered I have taken to writing on the couch. This is not good for writing, attention spans, or my back!
Do you have any writers or artists that were a major influence on your overall creative output?
Hundreds probably. In all forms of the arts. Too many to name. They come from all continents and go back centuries. Some are obscure and some are well known. Of late, I’ve found social media to be a place where outstanding and interesting artists are appearing—and disappearing—constantly.
There’s a lot of creative people here in Melbourne. Do you have any advice you can give to students or aspiring creatives?
Melbourne was the first city I lived in after moving out of Canberra with the comedy group, DAAS—which I was part of in the 1980/90s. It was precisely for Melbourne’s reputation as a creative centre that we, as a group, chose to move there.
There was a great energy in every field of the arts in Melbourne and a great diversity of artists—musicians, visual artists, performance artists, sculptors, poets, painters, writers, dress-makers, set designers, early digital artists—the list is endless. Some were insanely poor others monstrously wealthy, and everyone experienced hardships.
But, the Melbourne I knew in the 80s and 90s is dramatically different from the one we currently inhabit. I went to Art School after the Whitlam government’s education reforms—so I wasn’t charged for my education and I was eligible for government assistance. It wasn’t much, a good deal less than the dole at the time, but it saved my life, and for four years that’s how I lived.
The cost of living is much, much higher now, the cost of education and the schemes to pay it back can be crippling, housing and rents are unaffordable; all these financial concerns force you to make decisions I didn’t have to face.
There is also a desire within institutions, an imposition imposed on the students of most/all campuses that your higher education must make you fit for something or to teach you skills to get you into the workforce. When I went to Art School the idea of teaching was unconstrained by this “purpose” and so was vastly different. Our tutors used to remind us daily of the fact that most of us would fail, that within 2-3 years three-fourths of us would find jobs that had nothing to do with what we studied, and that being an artist was a singular and difficult path. The underlying suggestion was that most of us would die penniless having created not so much as a ripple, but the attraction was to follow your own thoughts your whole life.
Advice? The world is in a moment of unprecedented change. We’re experiencing the most extraordinary advancements in science, medicine, communication, AI and global understanding. Unfortunately, it’s accompanied by an almost fanatical rise in the most basic and ugly aspects of human nature. All these new worlds are rich and fertile places for the artistic imagination. These constantly shifting dynamics need artists and art to reflect, comment, chronicle and react to what’s happening. Great art has always reflected society, exposed its faults and, if not offered solutions, then at least been a balm for a troubled mind or heart.
New technology offers many opportunities. As with other, older forms of media, these come with their own boundaries, gatekeepers, successes and failures. There are those who will thrive and those who’ll tire of feeding the beast and, it’s a numbers’ game. Only a few get through. And if you’re not chasing corrupted ideas of fortune or fame, chances are you might be at peace.
I loathe giving advice, it puts me in a position where I don’t feel comfortable. Even something considered can sound trite, formulaic, or clichéd but simply put: Believe in what’s in your head. Then get what’s in your head and get it out.
My sibling, Melissa mentioned you were writing a book. I remember one time we were in Kinokuniya and she said you published a children’s book called Ghostbear a couple years ago. It sounded really cool, but sad. How did the idea come about?
I was invited to create an exhibition of my work for the Adelaide Fringe in 2013. I was reluctant at first. It felt like an overwhelming task. I had bits and pieces of paintings and drawings all over the place, but nothing complete.
In the end I decided to do it, but I had an ambitious agenda and five enormous rooms to fill in a gutted-out shopping mall in Adelaide’s city centre. Each space was to have a different theme. The primary work was a group of paintings entitled The Dark Garden. Some of the paintings in The Dark Garden were very large works, but I hadn’t been painting regularly and needed to do something off-the-cuff, without any pressure, to start the day. Something to warm me up and to get my hand in. I began painting a small polar bear, roughly without reference, although I adhered to a subset of themes present in The Dark Garden (limited palette, animals, environmental concerns, darkness, etc.).
As I was painting the little bear I thought about two incidents that concerned me, that I couldn’t resolve and, I felt, illustrated a dark aspect of our nature.
The first occurred in the Arctic around 2006-2008 when a scientist aboard a research vessel observed a mature Polar bear on an ice floe miles and miles from any hunting or breeding grounds. The bear was emaciated and close to death and the scientist wondered if failing sea populations, warming waters and other human factors contributed to the poor creature’s situation. The image I saw at the time was glaring and frightening, and visually reinforced the concept (continually disputed even now) of a climate emergency.
However, conservative papers and their agenda’d columnists attacked the information discrediting the scientist and suggesting Climate Change was a hoax. They claimed the photo was doctored. They claimed the scientist was a fraud seeking to benefit from government grants. It was an audacious act that lasted years and became a template to discredit other scientists and ecologists.
Since then similar situations, in a multitude of environments, with a wide variety of animals, insects and sea life have happened across the planet. The pattern has repeated. It was another warning ignored.
The second incident was the death of Knut, a much-loved Polar bear cub in Berlin Zoo. Knut had become a global phenomenon, spawning a lucrative merchandise industry, lifting the numbers, filling the coffers and enhancing the profile of the Berlin Zoo, Knut attained celebrity status attracting a global audience. At the age of four years Knut died unexpectedly, still in captivity.
So, those two incidents were circling in my mind when I started painting. As I painted I also wondered about loss, spirituality, the connection between a cub and its mother, displaced animals, and if an animal had a soul (a selfish human conceit) what would happen to the soul of that animal, a Ghostbear, was lost and couldn’t find its way home?
You also wrote The Girl Who Swallowed Bees, narrated by Hugo Weaving in the short film adaption, and in 2015 you released Fragments of the Hole. There seems to be a melancholic… philosophical element to your creative works. Would you agree with this? Where do your stories come from?… Are they a way to express yourself? Are they inspired by experiences in your childhood?
He was very generous and kind to give us his time. His reading was perfect. It’s an amazing experience to give words to someone and hear them back with nuance, and with a depth of emotion and understanding you never thought possible.
Fragments of the Hole, The Scree, The Girl who Swallowed Bees, Ghostbear and The Dark Garden are allegorical and/or fable-istic. In that way they follow the form of fairy tales, but with more contemporary concerns. Those pieces, books and films, deal with depression, isolation, climate change, suicide—so yes, both melancholic and philosophical. The first fairy tales I read when I was young were very dark and I found this appealing, and it has always flavoured some aspects of my writing.
Ideas are everywhere. They’re ceaseless. The problem with ideas is that it takes time to pursue them. And, generally speaking, it takes even longer, a real investment of time, to allow them to exist beyond yourself.
That’s always the hope; to allow something born in your head to have a life of its own.
By Patrick Lyne
Header image supplied