Uncovering the Essence of Humphries

UNCOVERINGTHE ESSENCE OF HUMPHRIES It's not certain if he found them under his bed, as priceless artefacts are supposed to be found, but Melbourne's Rabbi John Levi can claim the credit for uncovering a cache of the earliest known recordings by Barry Humphries, Australia's finest post war comic talent . Not that he will though . Unlike his more famous participant in the Melbourne Univer sity 'Dada' group of the early 1950s, the good rabbi keeps a low public profile these days, having forsaken the grim, satirical, anarchic and often cruel cavortings of his surreal soulmates for a life of service and no small amount of reflection. · For more than forty years, Levi thoughtfully preserved a number of one-off discs, which he recently handed over, at Humphries urging, to the specialist Melbourne independent Raven Records label for rehabilitation and eventual public issue as part of the Moonee Ponds Muse series of CDs. Among the highlights of this exhumed treasure trove is a short 'Memorial Paper' reading called Cinderella, at the end of which the young Humphries, three years or more before the 1955 debut performance of Edna Everage, rails angrily against the 'perversions' of men disguised as women. They should, he warned, 'be watched with care'. Harsh, affronting and almost seditious, even in the nineties, it is impossible to imagine the monologues, sketches, improvisations and discordant musical meanderings on the discs being accepted or even understood by anyone outside a close circle of co-conspirators in the early fifties. 'Nearly all our sketches of the period,' Barry recalls, 'describe people exchanging identities, going mad or degenerating into a kind of baleful infantilism.' Right: Barry Humphries as Edna Everage Centre: Edna Everage, 1955, Opposite page below: First known photograph of Edna Everage, 1957-58 All of which was part and parcel of customised Dadaism as Humphries conceived it. Today he declares, with some perverse pride : 'The first manifestations of neo Dada humour in Australia-thirty years after the performances of its progenitors in Zurich, Paris and Berlin-took place , imp robably, at Melbourne Grammar School in the late forties . A small, subversive group of schoolboys, including J.C.B. Perry, R. Nathan, R.R.C. Maclellan, JS . Levi and J.B. Humphries became fervent students of the lives and speculations of Schwitters, Tzara, Marinetti and Salvador Dali's coprophilic Memoirs .' So fervent that Humphries and his cronies published their own Dada Manifesto in 1952, among which were the declarations : 'We are incapable of treating seriously any subject whatsoever, let alone DADAism . DADA proclaims that there is no relation between thought and expression!! DADA is terrible; it stinks, it feels no pity for the defeats of the intellect or for the high cost of living. DADA is working with all its might to introduce the idiot and the cretin everywhere . And it, itself, is tending to become more and more idiotic.' Along with his unfashionably long hair, his stunts on Melbourne trains (mock assaults on blind cripples, the consumption of Heinz Russian Salad in the guise of recent regurgitation), his almost intimidating art collages, and his propensity for random street theatre, these DADA proclamations helped build an extraordinary aura around this gifted, if precocious, upper class youth. One critic, Graeme Hughes, breathlessly wrote of him: 'Rumours began to circulate ... He was reputed to live in a darkened incense-filled room, and to drink creme de menthe out of his shoe. He had been seen wearing six-toes gloves on his feet in public transport . He was the reputed possessor of rare recordings by Schoenberg and an original Charles Condor. It was even said that he was engaged upon the composition of an opera based on Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and that he had purchased, at great expense, the complete works of the Marquis de Sade, bound in human skin.' While the rumours grew, Humphries was at work in a rudimentary studio, making Wubbo (an infantile corruption of the word 'rubbish') recordings, such as An Interview With T.S. Elliot,Tid and the Psychiatrist,India Today and The Cruelty Rhymes (based on a bent Edwardian poem). These pieces were pressed up on heavy, brittle 78 rpm shellac discs, in quantities not exceeding five, and distributed to the DADA participants . Only two of these discs survive today, thanks to Rabbi Levi. Humphries' fascination with recordings had emerged during childhood. 'I grew up in the acetate generation and I always had a gramophone or some kind', he explains. 'Sometimes our Dada group went down to the seaside suburb of St. Kilda to Luna Park, a large and tawdry fairground which was entered through a huge neon mouth . Between rides on the Big Dipper and mysterious River Caves, amongst the shrieks of plummeting roller coasters and the smell of sparks and fairy floss, we also recorded our subversive improvisations in a tiny recording booth next to the Giggle Palace. The wafer-thin black five-inch discs we made were crude and fragile, though one miraculously still survives. 'Privately recorded for the amusement of a small group of undergraduates, all these early tracks were never intended to be heard by anyone beyond the Dada group. Moreover, the purpose of recording the sketches was never to preserve them for conjectural prosperity. Committing this ephemeral material to gramophone records was conceived as a joke in itself; like putting a picture frame around a bus ticket. The act of 'making' a record of such mock-misanthropic and hermetic elements which could be listened to in a suburban lounge heightened the gesture, and the resurrection of these tirades and cacophonies on a compact disc in the nineties only adds to the joke.' The joke can most definitely wear thin for the uninitiated. Only one track on the 'Dada Tapes' portion of the anthology CDs was taken from the fragile Luna Park discus (the rest are from the sturdier studio acetates). Titled A FairlyPainful Listen, Humphries admits that, while it drives almost everyone else to the precipice of madness, 'I can't help laughing at it. You can barely hear it, but I love the anarchic energy of the piece. It reminds me of my younger self.' Like so many of.Humphries' high school and university pursuits, he lost interest in scouring junk shops for the art and music of Weimar Germany and of Krenek and Kurt Weill's jazz-inspired modernism. Dadaist John Perry had been the catalyst for the early recording exercises; Humphries was more interested in the stage, where his success was escalating. It wasn't until 1958, when Barry had created and moderately established Edna Everage and Sandy Stone, that it occurred to him to record commercially. 'Ward Leopold had made a twelve-inch record album called Here's Hooey, a spoof on Australian commercial radio', he recalls. 'He was, I suppose, Australia's Stan Freberg and I was very impressed because I knew of Freberg and Tom Lehrer and I thought they were very funny. They appealed to an extremely rarified middle-class audience and it never occurred to me that I could record like they did. I was encouraged by Clifford Hocking, who later brought Lehrer to Australia, by Peter O'Shaughnessy who'd done a recording of The Sentimental Bloke, and Peter and Ruth Mann, who had a kind of cottage recording studio in their lounge.' It was for the Manns' small Score label that Humphries recorded a seven-inch extended play record in 1958 and another in 1959-the highly sought-after Wild Life in Suburbia Vols. 1 and 2. Here Edna was finally presented electronically, in the primitive but sublime sketch The Migrant Hostess. This had originally been written and performed by Barry with Noel Ferrier as The Olympic Hostess in a 1956 Melbourne Theatre Company revue, Tram Stop Ten and dealt with Edna's magnanimous gesture of opening her house at 36 Humouresque Street, Moonee Barry Humphries as one of his now-forgotten 60s characters, Big Sonia, Ponds, to billet-seeking visiting Olympic competitors from 'appropriate' countries. as seen on ABC TV It is a testament to Edna's stratum of superstardom that, come the century's end, her fame will have spanned two Olympics on Australia soil. 'Yes, it is almost an Olympic feat', Humphries proudly boasts. 'I imagine that the 2000 Olympics should be a richer source of satire for Edna than the 1956 Olympics and I imagine that she will take full advantage of that.' Indeed Humphries, and his array of alter-egos-Everage, Stone, Debbie Thwaites, Buster Thompson, Barry McKenzie, Nipper Dixon, Colin Cartwright and Sir Les Patterson-have always taken full advantage of recording studios. A soon as he arrived in London he began recording his first full-length album for Score Records, the exceedingly rare (until reissued on the two Raven CDs) Sandy Agonistes, which sported a jacket illustration by Sidney Nolan. The title track, Humphries relates, 'was written and recorded in the basement of 2a Pembridge Gardens, Notting Hill Gate, in the winter of 1960. I had borrowed a tape recorder from a friend and discovered that it was possible, at the touch of a button, to superimpose one performance over another, giving an eerie translucent effect. One does not have to listen too carefully to hear the rumble of the big red double-deckers outside the basement window.' Within the almost 21 minutes of the title track is everything that makes Humphries' observations of the country that enchants and terrifies him in equal proportion, so arresting, delivered as a mesmerising recitation which Julian Jebb once described as 'anthropological: it is as if the listener has been present at the construction and decay of a mythical society'.

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