Rewind 1988

Sun Herald

Sunday August 14, 2005

Interview Katrina O'Brien

Busking and performing live took guts, plus the ability to dodge the odd ashtray, says the former Doug Anthony Allstars entertainer and Strictly Dancing host.

I love this photograph. It was taken the second time we went to the Edinburgh festival, when I was about 26, and we spent a few days here in Paris, doing a bit of busking.

We picked up the Adelaide Fringe award with the Doug Anthony Allstars in 1986 and thought we'd take on the world next, so we went over to the Edinburgh Fringe a year later. Richard [Fidler, at bottom] booked the Pleasance theatre for the final week but we arrived a couple of weeks early and didn't have anything organised. We thought if we needed money, we'd bring out the guitar case.

We were just so gung-ho and brazen. When you're busking, you have to grab people and shake the apathy out of them to give you money. We went to where the buskers went and put out a sign saying: "Can you put us up?" We got three invitations and I vaguely knew of a Scottish fella so I gave him a call and he put us up.

The first two weeks we didn't have a venue but a group from France dropped out at the 12 o'clock spot in the Pleasance cabaret room so we went there and basically performed to the lighting crew. But by the end of that week, we had sold-out shows.

We went over there with no expectations so, consequently, everything was a bonus and it seemed to work out exceedingly well. At that stage in Australia, we hadn't done any TV - the stations were all a bit scared even though we were from Canberra and quite well-behaved. But the first year we were in Edinburgh, we got on Friday Night Live, hosted by Ben Elton, in front of 10 million plus people. I don't think I realised how special it was until after we left.

We became a fixture at the festival bar, which made theatre into a blood sport. It was primarily a Scots crowd and it had two levels and a Kafkaesque feel - you could see waves of heads above you. They were just packed in. If they didn't like you, they would tear you apart. You only had a few seconds to prove yourself and, thankfully, they liked us. But one night, there was a group of Irish people sitting up on the second level. They were being horrible to the other acts and started talking through ours so I jumped up on the balcony, hung off the rail and grabbed a beer and threw it in someone's face. People started throwing things and someone picked up a glass ashtray and flung it at Tim's [Ferguson, middle] head and missed by a couple of inches. After that, I thought maybe we should stop.

I still see Timmy and Rich but we haven't talked about the Allstars for a long time. People tended to cast us in various lights - fascists, idealistic, destructive. Those titles were lovely but I never felt we were any of those things. We were just expressing what we wanted to express. To go from art school to traipsing across Europe with a guitar case and a couple of mates - they were great times.

Fast forward

After hosting Good News Week, I didn't do anything in the public eye for two or three years. I started [satirical pop band] GUD with Cameron Bruce and Mick Moriarty three-and-a-half years ago and in many ways it's like moving back to the Allstars. There is a wonderful camaraderie on stage when it works well. The Scree, the short film I wrote and directed during those two years off, got picked up for a couple of festivals and this year it won the Flickerfest International Short Film Festival in Sydney. We're doing a tour of Australia with GUD so there's more travel coming up and there's also Strictly Dancing. It's such a fun show but I've got to stay off dance floors now because people expect too much from me.