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TISM.
TISM; a band wrapped in an enigma and coated in satire. Often accused of being nothing more than a one joke musical parody, TISM are much more: an amalgam of biting social commentary underpinned by relentless pop hooks with a stage show second to none. Sure, they can be puerile, they can be confrontational, but they can never be accused of being run-of-the-mill.
Trying to get the real TISM is like peeling an onion. Faced with a reputation of being loose-cannon interviewees and being more interested in the process than the result this little interviewer was a tad apprehensive but was made to feel most welcome by an extremely genial Humphrey B Flaubert. Humphrey was just enjoying his usual laid-back Friday at the Department of Sanitation, "It's suitably lowkey here but you got to do something when you're highly jaded with your chosen field of rock. Unfortunately I can't be classified as a member of either Generation X or Y bother; I'm too old. A baby boomer, the war generation."
Aged Flaubert might be, but one of the constants of their career has been the use of technology to support the music as well as provide more than just another gig. The DVD components of 'The White Albun' comprise one live 'Save our TISM Telethon' from Melbourne's HiFi Bar and a collection of video clips, interviews and dodgy home movies running the gamut of their near 20 year career. Some might say that this is a natural extension of their multi-media and faceted approach.
"Yeah, maybe there is that element but the thing about us is that we're not really autonomous. We always operate within the world of rock. Because the world of rock is particularly crap, conservative, humorless and without a single original idea in its history, we have always come across as so different; but as far the world of film is concerned, the visual medium, I think we could be exposed for the charlatans that we are," Flaubert muses. "Humour and talent has been mixed before and it could spell the end of the career if we are to be judged using the same criteria as film."
The 'Save our TISM Telethon' highlights the frenetic and fun white-knuckle ride that is TISM live. A heady mix of aggression, sweetness, light, theatre, dance and pure pop sensibility that ensures fans keep returning to the fold even after several years between shows.
"There's the stupid answer and the straight answer to that statement masquerading as a question," Flaubert chuckles. "I won't bother with the stupid because we've been doing that for 15 years. Seriously, we think we say stuff that nobody else says. We feel that we have a responsibility to be ten times better than anybody else in the live context. We wasted a lot of our youthful years standing there uncomfortably shuffling our feet in some dingy little muckhole of a pub while some band played worse than their record. We know that people come along to our gigs and they don't chat among themselves, they rarely go to the bar because they don't want to take their eyes off us in case they miss something. There's no hidden agenda with TISM and people can rely on us to say exactly what we think, behave how we want to, and people like that dependability."
What people have missed is the whistles and bells commonly associated with a TISM show or as the press calls it, the extra bits - debating competitions, sculpture and paintings, bouncy castles to name a few.
"Adelaide has had the raw prawn as far as TISM has been concerned. Because so few people turn up to our gigs compared with anywhere else, the budget for performing is not as high. There will be a focus on the new but it will be unlike anything people normally experience in that sense of TISM. I'm expecting people to be quite tired and depressed by the end. Not quite as artistic as Chekhov but still an emotional tour-de-force; I think that the Adelaide crowd will be quite looking forward to sliding under the doona after the show."
Song titles such as I Rooted A Girl Who Rooted A Boy..., 40 Years Then Death, I'll 'Ave Ya, Everyone Has Had More Sex Than Me and Death Death Death lend credence to the belief that TISM are deeply insensitive, sex starved, ex-private school bullyboys with a fascination for pub carpark antics.
"We just regurgitate what we know. Of course we've gone on record as saying that the only reason we've been in the band for so long is that girls still don't find us attractive. We still entertain the same pathetic hope that we started every tour off with: that this will be the one full of romance and dalliance. Girls out there, I know most of you don't like TISM but here's your opportunity to knock it on the head, come along and let us sign your naked breasts."
Not that TISM aren't equal opportunity lechers.
"I wouldn't want to turn away the pink dollar, as it were. I believe that we do have a strong gay appeal due to the underrated pop element of our music. I mean, we're greatly stereotyping the gay population in assuming that they all like pop and dance, but to continue along that road for a minute: not only is there colour, movement and choreography but a little bit of homo-eroticism in the dance moves."
TISM have been described as aggressive, as annoying smartarses and as a rock band with a pronounced sense of the absurd. All the cliches and labels ignore the fact that TISM write, and I quote from their own press release, "brilliantly pristine slices of bubblegum pop with smartarse clever clever shouting over the top."
"Writing well-crafted pop songs has pretty much been our ambition since inception," Flaubert replies. "We've always maintained that what we're about is writing Kylie-esque songs. There are some people who say that we have confrontational or slightly controversial and iconoclastic personae and therefore our music should reflect this. We really, really want those people to get fucked. We make this music because we like it; it's actually just as hard to do bubblegum as it is to do the most confronting piece of avant-garde noise imaginable."
He's now on a roll. "Whilst there is an element of marketing in TISM in that there is a construct, a package that you are paying money to see, we never feel guilty about the construct because we believe that we deliver, especially regards the live performances. If we never deliver an album full of catchy tunes then you can absolutely throw the javelin at us. We'll always maintain the rage as the crap is all around us, it never ever stops. The world of entertainment continually throws up more and more abhorrence and the fact that no one else is doing what we're doing never ceases to amaze us; but if things went well we would probably struggle to write another song.
"For example, I was disappointed with the Port-Brisbane Grand Final as it is just another in a long line of disappointments in the life and times of TISM. We were barracking for plane accidents, for freak storms so that one team would perish but it never happened so the world as expected continued and we are comfortable with our place in it."
Darien O'Reilly
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dB Magazine proudly present TISM at Heaven on Fri 5 Nov. Tix available @ dB Magazine.
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