The gongs all here

This month sees the inaugural Irish Musical Comedy Awards at the Laughter Lounge, with the event taking its cue from the UK version, which has served as a launching pad for the likes of Frisky and Mannish, Jay Foreman and Irish act Abandoman. The success of Flight Of The Conchords and Tim Minchin, not to mention homegrown performers like Dead Cat Bounce, David O’Doherty and The Rubberbandits, has proven that there is a huge appetite for this particular style of humour.

The Irish wing of this movement, of course, also includes The Camembert Quartet, familiar to many as the house band on The Late Late Show. The group’s frontman Clint Velour, aka Paddy Cullivan, will be one of the judges for the Irish Musical Comedy Awards, which will feature performances from a dozen finalists, drawn from the video entries on the event’s Facebook page. To top it all off, there will be performances on the night from Cullivan and the aforementioned Rubberbandits.
Paddy, who played solo shows recently in London and New York, notes that musical comedy has enjoyed a massive surge in popularity in recent times.
“It’s huge,” he acknowledges. “The Camembert Quartet put out two albums in 2002 and 2004 – that’s how we met Ryan Tubridy and got The Late Late Show gig. Those albums were full of musical comedy, especially ‘Boybands Are Cunts’, which I’m revising for the tenth anniversary. I’ll be performing that at the Laughter Lounge. There is a musical comedy tradition in Ireland; Dermot Morgan would have done ‘Thank You Very Much Mr. Eastwood’ in the ’80s, and before that you had Rosaleen Linehan and so on.
“But musical comedy has always been a kind of side note all over the world, because stand-up was looked at as being the pure version of what comedy is. Then, strangely enough, people like Victoria Wood came along in the ’70s, and if you think of The Beatles, they would do at least one comedy number per album. Rock ‘n’ roll always had people like Ian Dury and Frank Zappa, and humour was definitely a component in what they did. But it was never accepted in comedy circles – there was always this kind of snobbery about it. But I think since Tim Minchin came along and blew it out of the water, musical comedy has come to the fore in a big way.”
For Cullivan, an important aspect of musical comedy is that the grooves have to be equally as spot-on as the humour.
“What I didn’t like was the anti-folk movement in America,” he says. “That was all about, you know, ‘I’m kind of shit at my instrument, but here’s a funny lyric about my cat.’ Of course on the other side of it, they’ve always had really brilliant people like Crazy Al Yankovic. Also, Howard Stern would play a lot of musical comedy on his show, like ‘Strangers On My Flight’ – a version of ‘Strangers In The Night,’ but about 9/11. Red Peters is the guy who puts a lot of stuff together for him.”
With regard to the Irish Musical Comedy Awards itself, the singer is impressed with the eclecticism on offer.
“There’s 12 finalists and there’s good variety,” he enthuses. “There’s an act from Republic Of Telly, another act doing folk music, and the harpist Ursula Burns is amazing. In one of her videos, people ask her for heavy rock stuff and she says, ‘It’s a fucking harp.’ There’s some rap in the line-up as well – the variety is huge.”
How did Cullivan himself end up performing musical comedy?
“We formed The Camembert Quartet in 2002 and we’d play covers of Led Zep songs,” he recalls, “but because we had jazz players in the group, we’d Latino-ise the tunes and jazz them up. I always wondered what Frank Sinatra thought of Sid Vicious covering ‘My Way’ and making shit of it, so what we did was record a version of ‘Anarchy In The UK’, but we did it in a Frank Sinatra-style. That’s how we met Ryan Tubridy – he fucking loved it.
“On The Late Late Show, we’re the house band, although we did let our comedy slip through a bit recently when Ryan Giggs’ lover was on, and we played ‘It’s A Family Affair’ instrumentally. We do sneak the odd one through!”
There was a similar piece of musical mischief on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon before Christmas, when house band The Roots played Fishbone’s ‘Lyin’ Ass Bitch’ as Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann made her entrance. Surprisingly, perhaps, Cullivan wasn’t too impressed with the stunt.
“My kind of humour isn’t down that road,” he shrugs. “That was bullshit anyway. The problem with liberal politics is that it assumes that right-wing people are stupid, and it calls them names. Unfortunately when you do that, you lose the argument, because you’re not being the liberal, inclusive person – you’re actually saying that one-half of your society are morons.”
Well, to us, The Roots’ manoeuvre seemed like a pretty funny piece of musical naughtiness, so perhaps we’ll have to agree to differ on that one. To wrap up, I ask Paddy for some of his favourite Late Late Show experiences.
“Playing with Sinéad O’Connor,” he responds. “It was amazing working with her, and she’s actually a very funny woman and great fun. We rehearsed the song about nine times and then did it that night, and she was great to work with. On a previous show, she did a version of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ and she changed the lyrics. After that we said that if Camembert do another album, we must get Sinéad to guest on it, because she loves what we do. Anyway, we did that tune on about five minutes’ notice, and she liked it. So when she came back she said she really wanted to use the band, which was great.
“We backed Peter Kay as well – he was on one time and did ‘Amarillo’. He basically started singing songs right in the middle of the interview and we just had to back him – it was insane. We also did ‘I Useta Lover’ by The Saw Doctors with him and various other things.
“Another time, Michael Fassbender came up and sang ‘Twist And Shout’ – that was an impromptu thing as well. I’d meet Michael every year at the IFTAS. We were at a party after the show one time and we had a huge sing-song. We’re both huge Michael McDonald fans, so I would start singing ‘What A Fool Believes’ to him and he would start singing back at me. We always do it with the Michael McDonald voice, which is bizarre. We went to a party one night, and we were singing all night, so when he was on the show we said, ‘Feck it, we’ll do ‘Twist And Shout’. It was cool.”