‘This experimental music event challenges the composers, performers and audience in equal measure. Canberrans Emma Kelly, Paul Heslin, Chloe Hobbs and Ben Drury have been commissioned to create new short works. BUT! the compositions must fit on an A5 piece of paper. WHAT’S MORE! They’ll be performed by a group of untrained volunteer vocalists who will only see their scores a few minutes before performing.

By ‘basking in their limitations’, the composers will no doubt serve up bizarre, wonderful, and refreshing new works. Their ideas and creative processes will be illuminated via a quick-fire Q&A.’

This was the program copy for Reuben Ingall’s You Are Here festival work, at which I got to be one of untrained volunteer vocalists. The results were chaotic, super-fun, and often sublimely lovely. 

This is of course just the latest in the never-ending string of creative projects by the beautiful Reuben Ingall, who’s insane breadth of excellent artworks was recently broken down here. Also special shout-outs to my fellow choir-members who, when pressed upon to come up with a name for our group, settled on the most obvious misreading of the event title. I’ll never forget my time as a member of Bunch Of Ass.

This is me on holiday. The run is done.

I went to Fringe prepared to be a lonely isolated cog in a huge machine. I feel very silly about that now. Of course Melbourne Fringe is just a rag-tag bunch of overworked wonderful people, just like any other arts festival. Being in the Fringe hub made me feel supported and surrounded by friends, and I was humbled by how many of the staff members made time to come and see my show considering how busy they all were.

I was super lucky to have solid crowds from the first night (by which I mean I was super lucky to have Adelaide Rief as my producer, she promoted the shit out of the show) and I was thrilled to see those numbers track up to almost full rooms by the last couple nights. The crowds in questions were generous, warm and proactive in engaging with what the show is. I got a very flattering review of the opening night, and the thing I’d been most afraid of- turning around 7 nights of the show- became the fun part. I realised that I’ve been working this show on and off for 2 years now, and it’s a solid show. It’s doing the thing I want it to do solidly.

It feels so solid in fact that I’d be mad not to make plans for some more runs. Which I will do. After a bit more time outdoors.

Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve actually brought Bomb Collar to Melbourne once before.

A bit less than a year ago I came and did a an alternate, 20-minute version of the show at The Village in Edinburgh Gardens. It was an extra-comedic spin on the story based around just three of the eight songs. I plugged the Last Singer into a completely different, time-travel-based plot and used the whole thing as an excuse to improve my spontaneous crowd work. That version of Bomb Collar has been somewhat sequelised in my recent twitter posts. I think most sequels would work better in tweet form.

Two shows at the Village. Four in Canberra. One In Newcastle. One in Manila. Two in Wellington. By the end of next week I’ll have nearly doubled that again. That’s the sure part.

Of course I hope that this is the best run yet. That the character pops and stays with you. That it’s clean in the right ways and complicated in the right ways. Maybe most of all that you like the songs.

All of the bodies

Shot Into The Ocean

All Of My Family Are There

I’m Made Of Tears

I’m Made Of Water

I Could Have Been Born

Anywhere

Tear Down The Ceiling That Holds Back The Sea

Let It Rain Down On Me

Let It Rain Down On Me

Come Back

Please

Rain Down On Me

Rain Down On Me

The best way to influence to future is to try to predict it. Everything you predict will be wrong and therefore eliminated from the possibilities of what the future can be.

Last night my producer and I were finalizing the Melbourne Fringe version of the Last Pop Singer’s costume. The Bomb Collar itself does a lot of heavy lifting visuals-wise, but on it’s own doth not a future-guy make. It’s been an ongoing process of juggling the character traits- he’s from a burnt-out future, he’s an entertainer, he’s from the Deep Sea, he’s coming apart at the seams, he’s playing for The Troops. Previous versions of the costume have veered harder in the direction of warped ‘national-dress’ but this time we’re zooming in on ‘post-apocalyptic pop-star’. Which involves judging what clothing items available today might persist 90 years from now. We’ve made our judgments, rendering them definitively wrong in the process.

It’s been a similar approach with the music. I made a conscious decision that music in this future has eroded to it’s bare-bones, reduced to cut-price version of it’s most essential elements. But what are those elements? I made a selfish call that they would be overwrought pop melodies and Suicide-esque synth presets. My platonic dream of the musical future, which now thanks to me will never be the one that comes to pass.

If I Reach The Farthest Bend

Your Song Can Pull Me Back Again

We’ll All Be Gone When Our Live End

But Songs Will Light Our Way Again

We Don’t Need Another Hero was the lead soundtrack single from 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. It was performed by the legendary Tina Turner, who also featured in the film as the inscrutable Aunty Entity. The music video has Turner performing the song in full costume as her character, which seems only appropriate as the song is doing something very unique and very great.

The zero version of Bomb Collar was a show I did in 2012 called The Last Prom (pictured above). It was a stage musical built around a band I was in at the time, also called The Last Prom. The band was cast as the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse and I played the Antichrist, who in this show was a teenage nerd attempting to stage the Apocalypse as a 80s-teen-movie-style prom night.

The Last Prom was presented in the strict format of a live set by a band. All of the storytelling, exposition and drama had to be delivered as either song performance or between-song-banter and crowd work. It was a bit of a creative straitjacket, the sort of thing I really like. Like a lot of my stuff it was a foolishly self-indulgent blend of my different pop culture obsessions. But it went well. The crowd Responded To What We Were Doing.

Bomb Collar has carried over the dramatic conceit of the Live Gig. Everything the audience experiences is encapsulated by the Last Pop Singer Alive performing to his Audience, who are a comically threadbare revolutionary army staging a haphazard push into the Deep Sea Colonies.

So why? Short answer is that 15 years of playing in rock bands has left me with deep, complex and conflicting feelings about the Live Gig as a thing. You do it for long enough and accepted facts of life like stages, support slots and sound checks become absurd constructs crying out for deconstruction. Even in the gigging bands I currently play with (Babyfreeze, The Missing Lincolns and the earnestcore cabaret act that evolved out of The Last Prom, now just known as PROM) I’m neurotically tugging at the edges of what it means to be on a stage delivering a set of songs to an audience. Theatre work like Bomb Collar allows me to interrogate the Gig in an even more aggressive and direct fashion, using fantastical genre trappings and conceits to smash certain metaphors into your face.

My hope is that the gig structure also provides a recognizable anchor for the audience and helps me get away with ladling all kinds of artistic and cultural reference points into the one show. At the very least it’s a rigorous format with some clear standards for success or failure. If that’s a particularly dorky way to talk about what bands do, well that gives you a very good indication of what to expect from the show.

All the good and bad types of pain

I won’t speak any lies, You’re only gonna speak my name

When we’re together.

So let’s Year 12 Business Studies this bad boy.

BOMB COLLAR S.W.O.T. ANALYSIS FOR POTENTIAL INVESTORS

Strengths- The show has been around the place, it’s pretty well-drilled and evolved. The story world is clear now, people get what’s going on and who the character is. I’ve learned how to stand still when I have to. I’m singing well these days. While I was doing the Fringe photo shoot with Adam the other day I finally worked out what kind of moving around I have to do in the final scene. I have an actual producer for this season who really knows what they’re doing. I have an incredible venue right in the Fringe Hub and it’s the exact right size (28 seats).

Weaknesses- I’ve never tested my modest, lo-fi sound and lighting rig across 7 nights. Reckon I’ll need to have a whole back-up rig made but I don’t know if Adam and Paul have time to make it also how do I repay them for all the free work they’ve done on this project for me. Promotional Avenues for sci-fi black comedy cabaret are proving a real challenge to find. One day I’m going to make something in just a single genre and medium. I promise. I haven’t 100% cracked the ultimate version of the costume yet.

Opportunities- I need to tweak the script so there’s versions of the thing that can play to tiny (sub-five people) audiences just in case that happpens. That’s fine, I’m actually excited for that, it’ll be good for me. That said I’ll gonna try to really DO the promotion and social media stuff this time. I have lots of help this time, I can do it. Whatever happens it’ll make the next thing easier. Man I’m looking forward to the couple of weeks in Melbourne, there’s some people up there I’d love to collaborate with while I’m there. No wait, bad Nick. Focus on this one thing, for once in your life.

Threats- That NZ Fringe performance got a bad review. People will see it, maybe it’ll come up ahead of the good reviews. Some of it was just the reviewers’ taste but more of it was that I didn’t meet the task of performing to a tiny crowd. CANNOT HAPPEN AGAIN. I LOVE TINY CROWDS. WILL ROCK THEIR LIVES WITH INTIMATE INTENSITY. I HOPE IT’S ALL TINY CROWDS, CAN’T WAIT. Also the same old threat that the total potential crowd for a sci-fi black comedy cabaret is limited, but look I refuse to admit that.

Don’t Let Your Blood Cool Down

I Need You All Gone Crazy

I Think You Understand

I Think You Want It Maybe

It’s Like A War In Heaven