Culture

Dead Cat Bounce blog: life on the road

August 20, 2010
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Demian Fox (foreground), drummer for comedy rock group Dead Cat Bounce. "When you make music your mistress, you spend a lot of time with her unattractive friend, the road"

When I was 16, I saw a photo of Mick Jagger’s tour suitcase from his years on the road with the Stones. All it contained was a couple of party shirts, some battered jeans and a pair of sunglasses. I remember thinking it was the coolest thing in the world. It summed up rock n' roll to me—the road, the lack of responsibility, the transient, hedonistic lifestyle. I wanted to live like that. It turns out that comedy rock n' roll is a little different. In February I packed my own tour suitcase and hit the road, hoping to live out the promise of that photo and all my teenage rock fantasies. Mine holds a very squashed electric drum kit and one pair of leopard print pants. I’ve dragged it up and down stairs, onto planes, trains, boats and cars, across cities and muddy fields, packed and unpacked it every day, slept with it, on it and (once) in it. I’ve been pissed on by a possum that lived above a stage in rural Australia, been heckled with a megaphone, mooned onstage by a midget, crashed the Chippendales’ stage in collar and cuffs, competed for an audience with—and lost to—a pig race, been drowned out by a road rally while playing on the roof of a cinema, and been booked to perform at a food festival, a trad music festival and a Freemasons’ temple. Right now I’m in Edinburgh, the biggest and most insane arts festival in the world, where we are performing our comedy rock show about 40 times in a month, competing with 2500 other shows a day—a surprising percentage of which, every year, always seem to be hip-hop Shakespeare. It’s pretty hard to exaggerate the scale of the festival here. You can opt out and sleep until it’s time to perform every day or you can dive into it, which can be as intense as being at Glastonbury for a month. So far it’s going pretty well. We’re performing every day at 9.45pm in the warmest room in the world. Putting on the leopard print pants every day is like climbing into a disgusting wetsuit. Our first review was five stars, which is great, but while it called Jim, our singer, a “tall, young, sexy Mick Jagger,” it said I was “indescribable” which is clearly lazy journalism. A review of the show in the venue next door mentioned how loud we were, though, which is a result. I think the Stones’ experience of the road was probably pretty different. The people we meet aren’t in bands, they’re people who wear bread shoes and drink sunscreen onstage, or stick audiences’ pubes to their face, or sing the Grease medley through an Optimus Prime voice-changer helmet. These people are my contemporaries, my associates. We meet on either side of the world, one or other of us jet-lagged, wearing the same clothes from the same suitcase, and talk very seriously about our acts: where best to source horse head masks, where cheapest to print 10ft naked pictures, what accent a tampon should talk in. We have carved out the weirdest of niches for ourselves, and as long as we don’t stop for too long and get a chance to think about what the hell we’re doing with our lives, it all seems to make perfect sense. Visit deadcatbounce.ie for more information on upcoming shows. Demian will send another dispatch from the Fringe next week, and Prospect's Mary Fitzgerald reports from Edinburgh on the state of live comedy in the new issue of Prospect, published on Thursday, 26th August.