Eddie Perfect Articles/Reviews

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http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117...-17001,00.html

Comedian booed off Alice stage

September 26, 2005


<DIV id=storyBody>SONGWRITER-comedian Eddie Perfect was "pretty much" booed off stage when he sang Some of My Best Friends are Aboriginal in the Territory, he said yesterday.

He said after singing the song at the Araluen Arts Centre at Alice Springs "there was just absolute silence - people mumbling to each other".

But Perfect refused to drop the number from his show.

"When you're a performer, you want people to like you and when they don't, you have to make a choice between what you believe in and your need for affirmation," he said.

The Melbourne-based singer said he told NT audiences: "Sorry to ruin your night by making you think - here are some more dick jokes."

Perfect performed at the Araluen and Darwin Entertainment Centre in May.

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http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/e...982231715.html

Eddie's perfect world

By Greg Burchall
September 24, 2005





Adding some fizz: Musical comedian Eddie Perfect has tuned his comic compositions into the consumer mindset.
Photo: Erin Slattery



Related

• Drink Pepsi, Bitch!

TERSE and telling as always, George S. Kaufman, the bellwether of Broadway's well-written play of the 1930s and '40s, once defined satire as a thing that "closes on Saturday night".

In an Eddie Perfect world, people would go to comedy not only to laugh, but to be challenged with ideas, leave their comfort zone and get the deeper joke.

At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year, Perfect got accosted by a Scottish woman who lambasted him for sending up hippies and vegetarians in one of his songs. She pressed a vegan pamphlet upon him.

"I told her that I actually am a vegan. She just didn't compute — what, just because I was making fun of vegetarians, then that must mean that I'm a meat-eater? It was very weird. But what really freaked me out was this woman was standing there with a Pepsi in her hand."

Consumerism, materialism and globalisation are the main targets of this energetic cabaret commentator. His award-winning solo shows ( Angry Eddie, Transcending Anger Towards Something More Marketable) and collaborations ( The Big Con, Cliff Hanger: Catch a Falling Star) have always been about combining fun with fury.

"People have a mildly disguised disgust for music comedy and some people just don't understand satire, which makes things very difficult," he says. "It means either the songs don't make any sense or they think I'm just some right-wing nut job."
What Perfect's new show, Drink Pepsi, Bitch!, now on at the Malthouse, is attitude and built-in trouble. Although the soft-drink brand featured in the title has not responded in a heavy-handed corporate way, it has led to a retitling (to Drink Eddie, Bitch!) of the show at the forthcoming season at the Sydney Opera House, a venue with a conflicting sponsorship deal.

But it's all just a jumping-off point for a frantic riff on slick marketing and "scary, consumer-driven distractions" that Perfect believes encourages people to do "the opposite thing to thinking".

"For me, it's not so much funny as terrifying," he growls, then laughs unconvincingly.

There's the new washing powder campaign, which began in Turkey and Pakistan and promotes Dirt as a character — "I wanted to imagine the marketing meeting where someone came up with that idea" — and broadsides on shopping at Ikea with your girlfriend, the corporate entertainment style of Cirque de Soleil, Ray Martin's "journalism" and an evangelical Christian support group for "ex-gays".

Not the sort of content that would endear him to big biz; something he discovered when he fronted up to accept his place in the top 10 of "the best and brightest 100 Australians" survey, as selected by The Bulletin and Microsoft.

"I was very naive going into that," he says. "What they were talking about was the smartest and most creative ways to make money. It was five days before the federal election and Jamie Packer used his speech to endorse the Howard and Costello Government. He praised Frank Lowy for how Westfield revolutionised the way consumers spent their money. I thought, 'has he ever been in one of those places?' They're the most depressing places in the world. They're so exploitative; they take the basic idea of a community centre — the village square — but replace human interaction with spending."

When he's not being angry or depressed or insulting hippies, Perfect concentrates on making his shows as fast and funny as possible. A big part of that is the musical content and, although he hasn't had a formal lesson since age six, it's the rapport with Ben Hendry, Dustin McLean and Vincenzo Ruberto that has shaped the show's content.

"I listen to a broad range of music. I let it swirl around in my head and let it come out when it's appropriate," he says. "I shared the same apartment with the musicians in Edinburgh. It was hard work all the time … but we decided to have fun. We broke through some serious drinking barriers. It's actually quite a shock going back to just living with my girlfriend."

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http://www.bordermail.com.au/newsflo...age_id=1097821

Exorcism thats laughable
By JOHN CONROY
lEddie Perfect takes a break on the Border yesterday. Picture: DAVID THORPE






WHEN Eddie Perfect came on stage on Tuesday night for his first show of the comedy festival at Wodongas Butter Factory Theatre, few knew what to expect.

Before Perfect even entered, a heavily voiced narrator had fed the suspicion the show was going to have a message.

And it did the talented musician and singer used a mix of stand-up and cabaret to espouse the views of the “hippie-feral” left into which he was unwillingly lured for “love” some years ago.

Broadsides were thrown at all manner of hypocrisy and decadence, yet, thankfully, the show doesnt delve into humourless political diatribe.

Perfect denounces the bleakness of modern consumerism within hilarious musical exorcisms and smart, sharp stand-up comedy.

Songs such as Some of My Best Friends are Aboriginal and Ray Martin in Banda Aceh had the audience in stitches and the re-enactment of a marketing executive meeting was memorable.

The show provides some fascinating insights, but the real treats are the songs.

This is not any old comedian attempting to sing, Perfect has ability and backed by a quality three-piece ensemble, and with lyrics laced with gags, this is the sort of comedy experience you may rarely have the opportunity to see.

Perfects show is on today at 6pm and 9pm, and Saturday at 7.30pm, for tickets call (02) 6021 7433.

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http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/e...359884734.html

Better known for his caustic pessimism, comic-muso Eddie Perfect is bucking his image by looking up. By John Bailey.

He's the cabaret king with a "healthy dislike" for cabaret. He worries that emerging performers "have hope". And his favourite thing is "wrongness". But for 28-year-old comedian, musician and singer Eddie Perfect, things might just be looking up.

Up is the title of the show Perfect has written for the second-year students at the VCA's music theatre department.

The director of Up, head of music theatre Martin Crofts, describes it as a musical riff on "depression, bullying, sexual identity and all those things that kids are dealing with in the playground or in the classroom", with "up" here connoting a range of meanings: looking up, growing up, and even stuffing up.

So how did Australia's angriest Eddie, the man responsible for songs like John Howard's Bitches, Where's My Flatscreen TV, Bitch? and Gay People Shouldn't Get Married, end up writing such a positive show?

Perfect has made a name for himself with cabaret shows that take a lyrical scythe to anything and anyone foolish enough to lift their head in his sights. Onstage, his innocent and cherubic visage gives way to a furious energy, spitting out venomous rhymes like Dean Martin possessed by Satan. "Stop being so damn September 10!" runs the chorus of one song; "Poor little middle class me ..." laments another. But it's not enough to revel in the bleaker aspects of human existence, he says.

"I love darkness, it's something that I find funny and freeing. I think if you can sit in an audience and someone on stage is able to talk or sing about stuff that you never felt comfortable expressing in your everyday life, or even if it goes a little bit further than you wanted it to, then it's kind of cathartic. We all think these thoughts, you know."

Is there anywhere he wouldn't dare take an audience? "I don't know. There are lots of places I don't go because I don't know how to make them funny or interesting. I don't think there's a song about abortion on the cards, that's for sure. I can't think of how I could make that funny. And I don't hold a set opinion on it, which makes it hard."

Perfect trained as a performer at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), and upon graduation immediately landed a role in Nick Enright's A Poor Student, the final work penned by the playwright before his death. During his own days as a student, Perfect had been mentored by Enright and so the experience of landing a role in his last play offered a "strange but nice connection, to go straight off into those circumstances and with those people".


From there, Perfect started a long period of writing and playing piano for other people's cabaret shows, which he says helped develop a sense of what works and what doesn't. He eventually launched an experiment building on these experiences: Welcome to the Inside of Ed's Head, which Perfect calls "a bloody weird night in the theatre". The one-off evening saw 25 performers with whom he'd collaborated delivering a tune he'd written for them, Perfect providing musical accompaniment. It was a logical step since, as a solo performer, Perfect was still "very nervous ... I couldn't bear to sing my own songs at that point". Ed's Head was an unexpected success, and paved the way for Perfect's first solo show.

The only real difference between Ed's Head and its successor, Angry Eddie, was that the latter saw Perfect as the vehicle for his own material. And it was a runaway hit. Angry Eddie scored the Green Room award for best original music as well as the best newcomer and Golden Gibbo awards at the 2004 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. The Age dubbed Eddie a cross between comedian, jazz singer, rocker and Quentin Tarantino. Around the same time, Perfect was performing in Malthouse Theatre's Babes in the Woods alongside comedian Max Gillies, and the two struck up a creative partnership that resulted in the biting political satire of The Big Con. Perfect's most recent solo work, provocatively titled Drink Pepsi, Bitch! toured to great acclaim.

His own performances, however, are a world away from Up. "When I wrote Up," he says, "I had no conception that I would ever write something like Angry Eddie or The Big Con or Drink Pepsi, Bitch! It would not have entered my mind, I was a completely different person."

The work was first conceived while he was a student at WAAPA, where, with a little fast-talking, Perfect managed to coax the head of his course into allowing him to produce a series of workshops developing the song cycle. With WAAPA's entire first-year class as his cast, Up became a collaborative process: "I had a few core songs and concepts and spoke to the students about this general idea of 'up', this directional notion about what it means to transcend where you've come from and move to another place, to not be stuck on the ground. And it's a really big issue for a lot of those students, because everyone travels from their home town to do this course in Western Australia, where they're very isolated, they have no family, and you have to build your own sense of community."


Working with the VCA students has seen Perfect reconnecting with his earlier self, while also realising the distance he has travelled. He notes wryly that the biggest challenge the students offer him is that "they have hope, which is ridiculous".

But this reaction caused him to recall his own student days, when "pessimistic" teachers suggested students give up immediately, to which his reaction was most often "who are these grumpy f---s?" Nowadays, he has come to realise that theatre, and musical theatre in particular, is a very insular world. Students, he says, believe "that the whole world thinks musicals are great. But the whole world doesn't give a shit about musicals."

Growing up in the comfortable bayside suburbs, in a creatively encouraging environment (his mother is an art teacher), the young Edmund Perfect was a long way from the acerbic songman who wrote Poor Little Middle Class Me. And while he maintains that the earlier, more hopeful Eddie is still somewhere inside the Perfect we've come to know, he holds no illusions about Up's significance and longevity. "To be honest ... I'm not worried about whether the piece succeeds or not. It'll have something to say to its audience, and some of the material's quite tricky and challenging. It's a nice, short one-hour piece and I think it'll do what it's supposed to do. It won't change the world."

A PERFECT LIFE

Name: Edmund (Eddie) Perfect.

1978: Born, Melbourne. Went to school at St Bede's, Mentone.

2001: Graduated from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) with a bachelor of arts.

2002: Cast in The Store Room's Australian premiere of Nick Enright's A Poor Student alongside industry veterans Rhys McConnochie and Beverley Dunn. Received a Green Room award for most innovative use of form, and a Fringe Festival award for best cabaret for Cliff Hanger: Catch a Falling Star.

2004: Appeared on ABC's Kath & Kim in a cameo as a co-worker of Kim's estranged husband, Brett (Peter Rowsthorn). Recorded John Howard's Bitches for compilation album Rock Against Howard.

2004: His solo debut, Angry Eddie, scooped the pool at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, snaring a Barry award for best newcomer as well as a Golden Gibbo award, given to the act whose willingness to push the boundaries would have endeared it to late comedian Lynda Gibson. He made The Bulletin's Smart 100 list for 2004, as No. 1 for entertainment.

2005: Sold out his season at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where The Scotsman described his singing voice as "a thing of raw beauty ... This Australian's sense of humour is so caustic it could strip paint."

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http://blogs.smh.com.au/sit/archives...ntom_of_t.html

Culture: Perfect match for phantom of the over

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If politicians could make it to the stage, as in Keating! the musical, it was inevitable that our retiree of the baggy green would get there, too. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you, Shane Warne the Musical.
The man responsible for this sporting artistry is Melbourne's Eddie Perfect. Well known for stirring controversy in song, having shared the stage with Max Gillies in a political spoof and now playing Alexander Downer in the Melbourne season of Keating!, Perfect is set to take his musical satire to the next level. He is developing SWM in a workshop as part of this year's Adelaide Cabaret Festival (which opens on June 8).
Although we strove to bring our readers a morsel of verse from the draft script, it was all very cloak and dagger at Cabaret Festival headquarters before the program launch last night. We can only hope this means the king of spin will be celebrated in salacious tributes, be it Text Me Baby One More Time or a duet modelled on Elton John's swelling Trust Me: "'Looking back it makes me shiver/ Don't be scared to kick the past/ Selling lovers down the river/ Nothing built for speed will last overnight."
While we can't reveal the details of the Warney musical, word is Casey Bennetto, the creator of Keating! and Company B's upcoming production Real Estate may well be involved. Perfect replaced Bennetto in the touring production of Keating! (the musical that lives on and on) and the two are collaborators and mates. Perfect will play Warne (note the striking resemblance) in the workshop and casting is under way to find a troupe for the June development.