Learn the art of preparation from a professional performer.

Commical – Episode title: Learn the art of preparation from a professional performer

Published 29/04/2020 on Chasing Albert website, spotify and apple podcasts.

Marie 00:00
Imposter syndrome, how content affects performance, and how to read a room. I discuss these topics and more with the delightful and talented Denis Carnahan. He's a brilliant satirist, award-winning musician, and he has decades of experience in live entertainment. And you certainly don't need to be a musician to learn something from his performance tips. He has loads. Welcome to Commical. Oprah, Steve Jobs, Andrew Denton, and, to me, these guys are masters of communication. The rest of us — well, mainly you, because I'm a pro — fumble our way through. Commical examines this funny little thing called communication that can either tear us down or make us all. Join me. I'm an amateur comedian and a communication expert. Join me and listen, learn, and laugh through the experiences of my very talented guests.

Marie 00:53
Denis, you're a multi-talented, multi-award-winning professional musician with over 25 years of experience in live entertainment and 18 years in the TV industry. Now, if you're listening and you're a rugby league fan, then you probably know Denis for Rugby League the Musical, and cricket fans might know him for Cricket the Musical. But I know him from a MasterCard marketing campaign that we worked on together, and I'm thrilled that he's joining us today. Welcome, Denis. How are you, legend?

Guest 01:21
I'm very well. Yeah, I'm very flattered — legend and all that sort of stuff. I should point out you're creating a bio that's about five years old. It's more like 30 years, good lord. In fact, it's over 30 years of live music and 20 years doing music for TV. A quarter of a century.

Marie 01:38
Wow, that's huge. That is absolutely huge. How long have you been doing Rugby League the Musical?

Guest 01:46
In various forms, I guess, kind of since 2008 — probably 2009. It started off when I was doing music for TV shows and music for advertising, and I was working at Channel Nine doing music for a couple of TV shows there. I was asked to do a theme song for The Footy Show in 2006, and it was meant to be an earnest song about footy. So I did that. Previously, I would have personally taken the piss out of anyone doing an earnest song about rugby league, because that's an absurd thing to do an earnest song about, even though I absolutely love it. So I did this song and was actually quite pleased with it, because I didn't think it was trite and clichéd. It felt good and it felt appropriate. So much so that the NRL got me to play at the semi-finals and kind of used it as the theme for the finals that year. Yeah, I released it as a single, but it was, like I said, an earnest song. But I met the people from The Footy Show, and I've had some silly ideas in my life, and I suggested some songs to Matty Johns for Reg Reagan. So I wrote some songs for him, and it kind of kept bubbling along and kept me associated with The Footy Show. I ended up, in 2009, appointed as the music director of The Footy Show, but then got boned four weeks later. Long and miserable story. I won't discuss that. There'll be far better people than me boned off that show, so I'm quite proud of it. But that's when I took some time off. Curiously, because at that point I was writing for one of the TV shows, right? I was writing for Australia's Next Top Model. I'd done about four or five years of that.

Marie 03:35
What?

Guest 03:37
So I was doing all that, but within three days of getting boned from The Footy Show — and being pretty unhappy about it — life as a musician, as a creative anywhere, is difficult, trying to get income out of it. So when you get boned off a big job which you put a lot of planning into, it's pretty miserable. But then I got a royalty cheque from Australia's Next Top Model — several years' worth from overseas, thankfully. APRA — not the insurance one, the Australasian Performing Right Association — they collect money. So if the TV show you do music for gets broadcast in, for instance, Singapore, Canada, the USA, Sweden, Scandinavia, South Africa, they collect the royalties for that. It takes some time, but I got this cheque that was like three times the amount that The Footy Show was going to pay me for the whole year, and it came from out of the blue and I had no idea it was coming. So I thought, well, this is a sign: take a year off. Throw in that Mum had passed away — it was a dreadful year. Break-up of a long-term relationship, got boned off this job, Mum passed away, all happening at once. I took some time out. And that's — you asked a simple question. I've just raved at you. Sorry. This is terrible communication.

Marie 04:54
It's a light comedy show and we're discussing some deep, deep matters, but that's okay because it all leads back to Rugby League the Musical, right?

Guest 05:02
Bring the narrative arc back to Rugby League the Musical. Because I took a year off and started doing stuff that was fun, and one of those things was just writing songs about rugby league, and particularly about the personalities involved at that point.

Marie 05:16
Denis, at that point were you a comedian, or was this the beginning of that career?

Guest 05:23
There was no intent to be a comedian. None whatsoever. I was making good money out of doing music for TV shows. The industry changed a bit, and I just, like I said, started doing stuff that was fun. Took some time to heal, had money in the bank, so I just played. And people enjoyed them. It made people laugh. And that, for me, was a little throwback, because when I started playing music — when I started playing guitar — one of the first ways I practised performing was busking in Canberra, just going into Civic and busking at public service lunch hour. There were a lot of people there who were much better at guitar than me and had much prettier voices. So rather than just play songs, I tried to ham it up a bit and put on little costumes. When I played a song by The Who, I'd put on a big fake nose, and I'd have a homemade cardboard amplifier which I'd smash at the end of the song. I'd play Faith by George Michael, put on a leather jacket, and do silly moves with my hips. I also played a Bay City Rollers song and quickly put on some tartan. Just silly things like that. And because public servants in Canberra are so bored, they loved it. One day a woman came up to me — and this was really quite moving — and said, 'You made me laugh today.' And I said, 'Yeah?' And she said, 'My husband died two years ago. I haven't actually laughed since. Thank you.' Oh, God. And that, you know, that was 1980-something, and it really stuck with me. So I've always tried to include that in my performance — trying to make people happy. My idea, I kind of would have liked to have been Bono, but at the same time that's not me. I'm not that intense, and I like giving people a bit of joy, a bit of a laugh. I'm a class clown. And that one woman has really stuck with me. So that's, I guess, what ended up sending me this way.

Marie 07:25
Now, of course, in your show you do make people laugh, and sometimes it's at the expense of a rugby league character or player. And I know that you use humour to tackle some thorny topics and events that come up throughout just about every NRL season that has ever existed, sometimes even when the subject is in the room. Can you tell us a story about how a moment like that played out and the conversation you had after the show?

Guest 07:59
There's been quite a few of those. There've been a couple of times where I've played at a function and someone's been there about whom I've had a song, and I've actually chosen against playing it because I feel like it's entrapment. Whereas if they come to my show, I think they're game. Probably my favourite one was Peter Beattie, who came to the show. I think he's still on the rugby league commission. At the time, he was the chairman of the rugby league commission, and he made so many gaffes, made just so many foot-in-mouth comments, and he was great fun for me. Because he had no idea he was coming, I was told he was coming — funnily enough — and I was nervous. A: how's he going to take it? And B: this is a former premier. How disrespectful can I be? It's my job. Part of the problem with Rugby League the Musical is that people come along expecting an actual stage musical, like Annie. It ain't that. It's a collection of comic songs, and I do little impersonations. So it's just on the edge of music theatre, but it's much more like a one-man variety show. So I dress up as him because he's such an easy look to get, and I overdo it. I have huge fake teeth and I drool a lot, and it's kind of a cross between him and Les Patterson. That's what I present to them — very full of himself. I heard him, I left the stage and met him, and we took hands — the two Peter Beatties. This is obviously before the apocalypse, when you were allowed to shake hands. We met, and it was great fun, because in one of his first interviews after becoming commissioner he was interviewed by Phil Gould on Channel Nine. He was asked a question and he avoided it, then gave this huge, wheezy Muttley laugh. So that became part of his shtick in my show. I went and met him — good-looking rooster — shook hands with him, and then he threw his head back laughing, so I threw my head back laughing. So we're standing there laughing wheezily at each other, and his wife was sitting there, didn't know where to look, and was just packing herself laughing, shaking with laughter. And I said, 'Oh, look at this poor dear here. She's a good sort, but she's looking at all these good-looking roosters in the room and doesn't know where to look.' It was a heap of fun. He took it really well. I heard someone at intermission ask him, 'You know, are you okay with that? He kind of just ripped you up.' And he said — and this gave me great flattery — 'When someone does it that well, you just sit and enjoy it. There's no point getting upset by it. Just sit and enjoy it.' That was a lot of fun.

Marie 10:54
And he took it really well.

Guest 10:59
He did. And he did a bit of promo for the show as well, which is even better.

Marie 11:04
What a legend. Now, have you used humour to tackle conflict or defuse a situation in your own professional life? And how did that go down?

Guest 11:14
Oh boy. I can't think of any big particular instances, but I have certainly tried to. This is how I stopped myself getting beaten up at school — by trying to make people laugh. And if that required self-deprecation, I'd do it. Whatever it took. I was a very small, weedy and annoying child, and I did annoy a lot of people. So I used it there to try and make the angry bully stand down and laugh. In professional life, the closest I've come is pulling out a line in a conflict situation where someone was having a go at me — a boss was having a go at me. I'd worked three nights where I'd been in the studio till after three o'clock in the morning, back in at nine, and we weren't getting paid overtime because the studio was doing it tough and we'd voluntarily said that was okay. On the third day, I came in at ten. I'd gotten home at four o'clock and I had an 11 o'clock session, so I came in an hour late. The boss looked at his watch and then looked at me, and I hadn't had much sleep for three nights. I said, 'If you just look at your watch and then look at me...' And he said, 'Well, you know, you were meant to be starting at nine.' I said, 'You understand I've been working overtime for the last three nights. I've been leaving here at three o'clock in the morning. I don't have to be here.' He said, 'Well, you know, you are supposed to start at nine.' And I looked at him and said, 'That reveals a level of hypocrisy I have hitherto suspected in you, but never called you on.' Which was trying to be funny, trying to be a smartarse, and trying to be literary all at the same time. He looked at me, and I could see him go... His wife, who was the manager, came out and said, 'What's going on?' She'd heard the conversation, and I said, 'I've been here till three o'clock the last three nights.' And she said, 'Go home.' She made him do my session and said, 'You go home.' Gave me 50 bucks cash and said, 'Just go home. Go spend this on a movie. Don't come back till next Monday.'

Marie 13:22
Did you end up losing that job too after that?

Guest 13:26
No, I didn't. I kept it. I ended up leaving about three months later.

Marie 13:30
Okay. In that scenario, it worked for you at work. Do you think funny people get taken seriously in non-funny situations?

Guest 13:42
I think you have to have a different persona. And I have various aspects to my working life. In the music-for-TV stuff, it's fine to have a sense of humour, but you've got to be delivering. There is some crossover where I have serious parts of my job, and if people know the comic parts of my job, they might not take me quite as seriously, or they might have a little bit of distrust — like, 'You're this pantomime clown. What are you doing, doing this serious piece of music here?' The only thing you can do in that, as with all things in life, is just do it. And if the work you do isn't good enough and you're judged — 'it's not good because you're a comedian' — well, that's just stupid. If the work is good enough, it doesn't matter where it comes from.

Marie 14:33
Absolutely. I agree with that. And when it comes to preparing your material — I mean, you obviously write your own content and you perform your own content. You're a one-man show in both regards. What's more important, do you think, the performance itself or the content that you write?

Guest 14:50
I think one begets the other. It's very hard to perform if you don't have faith in the content. If I think the content is rubbish, I can't sell it. I'm not a salesman in that way. So in a sense, the writing is the prep for the performance, and you have to be well prepped. It's also where the performance comes from. To me, the writing is the joy — well, actually no, a lot of people say this — the writing is a loathsome, painful struggle. But when you get it, it is the biggest joy. When you're trying to get something across and you get that moment... My biggest song in Australia is That's in Queensland, about State of Origin selection policies. I'd been sitting on that idea for about 18 months and couldn't quite work out how to execute it. No matter what I thought of, lyrically it got clumsy to express it. I wrote the lyrics out thinking I had all sorts of fancy ideas about how I was going to deliver it, express it, perform it. But it ended up that really simple film clip — the really 8-bit, '90s-style film clip with the cards, the players coming in and the map coming up — it was a very simple mnemonic and it just made it work. I thought the idea was fun. I wasn't sure if it was going to translate, because the song itself is a bit music hall, and that was going to be a bit of a challenge to rugby league fans who either want to hear some pub rock — because that's what rugby league should be — or dance club music. It's got to be one of those two. So to put it in music hall was quite wrong. I got a friend of mine to record the backing as well. So I was in the chorus, and this friend of mine, who's done a lot of comedy and kids' TV music and a lot of music for music theatre, he just got it. He did the back-ups — the 'That's in Queensland' — and the two of us in the choir. When I first heard him singing it, when I first put it together, the first time anyone actually heard the song, it went from the change of the question over the piano to suddenly the big chorus coming in. I was just screaming with laughter. I was sweating, pouring out tears. He really made it work. And I listened to it over and over again going, 'This is... I'm finding this too funny. No one else is going to find this funny. This is right in my tickle, my sense of humour. I don't know if it's going to work.' So I didn't actually think it was going to work. I thought maybe there's a small audience on a certain rugby league comedy show called Fire Up. I thought they'd get it, but that'd be about it. So with that performance, when I'm doing that song, it's the faith in how that works that helps me perform it. It helps me sell it because I know how strong it is and I know how it works. So as far as performance and writing — there's got to be both, and they work into each other.

Marie 18:06
Do you sense-check your material? So, for example, when you had the idea for that song, did you run it by anybody, or did you just believe in it so much that you ran with it anyway and trusted your own instincts?

Guest 18:19
I have sense-checked some things, and I've actually found this a lot in professional life — and it's going to sound really egotistical and like seeking my own counsel kind of madness — but I find when I'm doing something, there's no one else who knows more about the topic than me. When I'm doing an actual song, I know where the song's come from. I know exactly about the incident. I research incidents really well. When I did that song, I had hours, days, weeks of research going through it. So I make myself covered well. What I've learned from performing — from playing a lot of corporate functions and playing live in my own theatre shows, I've played a few cruise ships as well — is that when I'm playing my own show, I get to be the censor. I get to choose what's there and what's not. There's a funny thing where people have paid for tickets. I want to give them my absolute best. They're paying for a ticket to see me do this show. I want to give them what I think is the best of it. But if I'm playing at a corporate function, I have a role to fit into within that function. So I need to make sure that what I'm doing doesn't compromise the people that are paying me. I have had it happen a couple of times where I've played songs that I shouldn't have. Well, I've had it happen on two occasions, and they were both a week apart. I wish I was there — really bad. What I've learned is, if I have to ask the question, the answer is always no. And that's my self-censoring. If I'm uncertain about this, the answer is no. Go with plan B.

Marie 19:51
Because how do you, for example — you said that if you're doing a corporate event and you have to make sure you're keeping them happy and not using any content that they won't approve of — but at the end of the day, you also have to entertain or educate or inform their audience. So how do you develop an instinct for what that audience wants or will accept?

Guest 20:17
That's just by time and mistakes, right? Practice, practice, practice. And also the biggest thing is reading the room. The biggest thing is knowing who's in the room. For both of those occasions that I screwed up, it was at the end. This was in 2016. I'd had an exceptionally bad year. I'd had a large national tour organised with a big promoter that had pulled out a couple of weeks before it was due to go. It wasn't advertised. It wasn't promoted. People thought it would just sell because it's a funny concept. And it was a good, very solid show. It was a funny show. People who see it absolutely love it, but if you haven't seen it, you don't know what it is. The name is misleading. You think it's going to be Todd McKenney shit-canning a game that he hates, or it's going to be Fatty Vautin singing out of tune and wobbling his head. It's neither of those things. So unless you've seen it, when you see the show you see why Rugby League the Musical works as the title, but until then it doesn't. There was a question there... So I had this tour cancelled and I was in a bad place, and I hadn't performed because I hadn't done the tour. A lot of the songs in the show, I work with film clips, because the film clips explain the gags. They're like the straight man. I try and play the straight man; the film clips are the funny man. So I'm singing earnestly about a certain thing, and the film clip is making a mockery of what I'm singing about. The film clips are generally footage of people talking or things happening in rugby league. I was spending time at these functions thinking, 'I know if I make this film clip a little bit more up to date, people will find it funnier.' So I was out in the back room literally editing my video, because then I took it up to the mixing desk, gave it to the video guy, he pressed play, and I started singing. In doing that, I hadn't gauged the room. In both places, while I was out of the room, they were talking about some very sombre things. In 2016, a couple of kids died in country rugby league — just bad accidents on the field — and it was the wrong time to play the songs that I played. I didn't know it because I wasn't in the room. When I did the soundcheck beforehand, I played through the songs I was going to play, and the staff who were there were killing themselves laughing. They were going, 'This is fantastic. This is great. This is beautiful.' So that was the review I got, and they all said, 'No, go for it.' But over the course of the night it had changed. So when I started up, it wasn't that the song I sang was bad, it was just that the people there had taken a bruising. It was the same year that country rugby league was told they were going to be disbanded and become part of New South Wales Rugby League, so they'd lost a country voice on the panel kind of thing. The City-Country game was cancelled. So it was the wrong night. I had plenty of material which would have been a whole lot better, and probably the earnest song would have been the best place to start — to say, you know, this is what it's all about. This is what being a footy fan actually going to the game is all about. I think that would have galvanised the crowd. That would have allowed me then to play a couple of cheeky songs, to play That's in Queensland. It would have been much better.

Marie 23:39
Because you kind of would have won their trust and built that rapport early on, and then you would have had that permission to kind of push the boundary a little bit. How do you — or what advice would you give someone now — how would you tell them to prepare or to start thinking about reading the room before they present or perform?

Guest 24:01
Get there early. Just talk to as many people as you can. Say hi, how are you going, where are you from? Just talk as much as you can to individuals. But then, playing to a room like that as a speaker or performer, you're going to be put on a spanky little table up the front or somewhere that has a good view. Just keep your eyes open. Watch for review. Watch how the room is. See what the room does. I played maybe two and a half or three hours into the function. There was a lot of data I could have gathered in that time. I could have prepared for that very easily. I could have changed what I was doing very easily to accommodate that room. And I just didn't.

Marie 24:40
That's a really valuable lesson. What about before you get there? What do you do before you get to the room to kind of understand the audience and where they might be?

Guest 24:54
I get as much briefing about the event as possible from whoever's engaged me. And I talk to the person who's engaged me to make sure that they have a clear idea of what I do and what they want me to do. It's all about communication and just being as straight as possible with all this.

Marie 25:19
Yeah, and feeling, I guess, comfortable to ask questions if you're not quite sure about who's in the room or what the mood might be — asking the right questions to try and find some of those answers.

Guest 25:30
Yeah, there's that. There's getting a list of well-known guests, which helps. But I think, again, asking questions... you need to know your material well enough that you don't need to ask the questions. Because, like I said, I know more about it than they do. I know more about my material. I've performed it for over a decade. I know what songs work in what audiences. The tragedy of all this is that the thing I love most is having a hostile audience and winning them over. I used to play a lot of sportsmen's lunches, and the whole function of them is for people to get there, have a reasonable feed, free grog, get on the grog, and talk to their mates. And there are a few funny footy players telling funny stories, and they're generally pretty bawdy and politically inappropriate — probably a dying sort of thing, to be honest. But I used to love getting up there and hearing people go, 'We've got a singer now coming on from Rugby League the Musical,' and them going, 'You're kidding. We have to stop drinking and talking for some bloody long-haired musician? What the hell? Who is this clown?' And then turning that audience and having them say afterwards, 'That was fantastic. That was hilarious.' And what it seemed like, even though I was taking the piss out of rugby league, I actually do love the game and I don't have any interest in bringing it down. My interest is all about making fun of it, making light of it, and understanding what it is to be a rugby league fan whose team keeps losing and losing, and the angst and the pain of that, and the pain of refereeing decisions going against you, even though you're completely biased, the pain of a season being torn apart by a certain player's injury. I know all that. I've felt all that. And the old cliché was that comedy is tragedy plus time. So I understand that and can put it into music, and they get it. But they don't know that until they've heard it. For me, that's the most satisfying part.

Marie 27:30
And so finally, my last question for you. You've been doing this for many, many years, but do you still get nervous before performing live?

Guest 27:46
Not really.

Marie 27:46
Do you remember what point you stopped, or did you just never feel nervous?

Guest 27:50
I did. I actually had a really seminal moment in 2006 where I was playing in Canberra. It was the year I wrote the earnest song, and I can remember playing the earnest song about being a footy fan before the Raiders' last home game of that season. It was the last game for about six players who had played for the Raiders for a long time — combined, about 50 years. The coach was leaving that year as well. It was an emotional time. I got out and played three songs. So I played a song that only Canberra people would know, called the Song for Canberra, which was the TV theme from about 1981. It was just this really beautiful, cheesy country song about Canberra. It's so over the top, and I still love it. Did that...

Marie 28:33
Can anyone tell Denis's support?

Guest 28:38
Well, then I did the Raiders theme song and did this really nice sort of blues-rock version of it on one guitar. I had a mate there and we did it on two guitars. Then I played the earnest song, and as I finished playing the song, out came the Raiders. I felt my heart rate just rocket, and I realised I'm actually much more nervous watching the Raiders than I am playing in front of 22,000 people. Twenty-two thousand people — whatever. The Raiders playing the Storm... You've got to understand how much pressure. This was just before they went on to three grand finals in a row. Even though it brought in salary cap, the robots were out there, there were lasers — it was scary stuff. That made me nervous. Seeing some people didn't. I think a lot of that came from busking. I know now with my show, I get nervous about two days beforehand and I have a huge case of imposter syndrome.

Marie 29:35
Have you dealt with that in your show? It's a really big deal for a lot of artists. A lot of senior people in the corporate world or in the business world experience the same thing.

Guest 29:48
You just question, 'Why am I here? There's so many other people who can probably do this better than me.' It's complete insecurity, lack of faith. And I think — I've just taken it as a tool. It's a tool to check yourself. It's a tool to check your material. It's a tool to drive you, to make sure that you're fully prepared, that you don't want to be exposed. The whole idea of being a performer is that I know my weaknesses better than anyone else, and it's natural — well, I guess personality-type natural — to see your weaknesses in really stark bright lights, because you know about them, you battle with them, you try to get through them, and you tend to underplay your own strengths. I use that psychology, I use that drive to go through my prep. I use that drive to push me into rehearsal. I use that drive to make sure that I am 100 per cent ready, so that no one can see that weakness, so that no one can see that insecurity. I love Cooper Cronk — for those who aren't in New South Wales and Queensland, he's a former Queensland halfback, and he is the most spiritual man ever to play rugby league. He says, when you start falling into a hole, if you start looking at results, you're not going to get any better. You need to look at your process, and just look at your process and look at your process. Forget about results. For me, that's what I do. I take Cooper's thoughts on results, even though I dress up as him and take the piss out of him in the show, and I make sure my processes are right. So by the time I'm on stage, I am so process-driven I don't have space for nerves. I'm not just going through the motions — I'm going through the process. I'm performing. I know what I'm doing. I know why I'm there. I know what I have to get to. I know which part leads to which, how they get there. All that stuff is there and rock solid. And all that comes from preparation, and that preparation is driven by imposter syndrome.

Marie 31:45
That is an awesome insight, Denis. Look at that — awesome insight from the comedian himself and the musician. That's fantastic. Thanks for sharing. I've actually never thought of it like that. Please, go. Maybe I know I got something myself out of it, and I hope those listening got something out of it too, other than just a laugh. Thank you so much, Denis, for spending time with me. I really appreciate it. Are you self-isolated at the moment?

Guest 32:15
Kind of. Because I have another job as an audio engineering technician for live sport, I'm going to have to be going out and producing live sport and setting up equipment. So I've got a lot of alcohol wipes and a lot of alcohol sprays, because antibacterial wipes don't work, as if I've got a bacteria. So you need to be using isopropyl alcohol, which destroys it. Either that or... So that's what you've got to use. So I'm doing a lot of that and staying as isolated as I can in the meantime.

Marie 32:43
You're a legend. Well, there you go — comms and hygiene tips from Denis Carnahan. Thanks so much, Denis.

Guest 32:50
Thank you. Have a good one, mate.

Marie 32:54
And that's Commical for this week. If you'd like to join the show, suggest a topic, or ask me a question, hit me up on Instagram at mariedavoren or email me at comicalpodcast@gmail.com. Thanks so much for listening. See ya.