FRISKY & MANNISH’S POP CENTRELINK

Hip Hooray For Cabaret

Frisky & Mannish’s Pop Centrelink takes over The Spiegeltent from February 5-18. Bookings can be made via fringeworld.com.au.

Cabaret superstars Frisky & Mannish, aka Laura Corcoran and Matthew Jones, have just woken up to a grey London morning when X-Press calls, and it’s obvious that the dynamic duo can’t wait to get back down to sunny WA with their new show Frisky & Mannish’s Pop Centrelink.
“Loved it, loved it, loved it! It was so good,” Jones enthuses when asked how he and Frisky found their first visit to Perth in 2011. One of the headline acts of the inaugural Fringe World festival, Frisky & Mannish received rave reviews last time they were in town, so they’re keen to come back and see if they can wow audiences once more.
“Fringe World is definitely our favourite Australian event that we’ve done,” Jones continues. “Luckily we were blessed with a great venue – a Spiegeltent always makes a show more special. Because it was the first Fringe World everyone was excited and the audiences were so into it. More so than Edinburgh Fringe, which is huge. Edinburgh Fringe has been going for so long that people leave Edinburgh to avoid it because it’s such a big beast. But in Perth we felt a happiness and excitement from the locals.”
Opting to spend January away from the stage, Corcoran and Jones have been working on new material and can’t wait to get back into the spotlight.
Jones explains, “January for us is a writing month; we’re hardly doing any gigs at all. Our first major gig in 2012 is Perth, which is really exciting for you and for us, hopefully! We’re really trying to broaden our media presence because last year was a big big big year for touring and upping the scale of our live show. It was our third live show and we’ve been shlepping around the UK over the last few years and now we’re looking into seeing what else we can do, like podcasts, radio and maybe some TV.”
“As much as we’d love to say ‘right we’ll start at 10am and work ’til 6pm and it will be lovely’ we can spend the first three hours looking into our cup of tea going ‘yeah…Did you see the last episode of East Enders?’,” Corcoran laughs when asked about their not-so-disciplined writing process.
“If the mojo isn’t there, if the ideas aren’t flowing there’s not a lot we can do. We have to ride the waves of our own creativity. As soon as we possibly can we put it in front of an audience to see what they think of it before we start making too many decisions all on our own. How things sound in your lounge room with a cup of tea and some biscuits is quite different from how things can sound in a big rowdy drunken comedy club.”
Luckily for Perth audiences ideas flowed thick and fast when Corcoran and Jones were writing Frisky & Mannish’s Pop Centrelink…
“We’ve been working on something we’re very excited about, which is a spoof on what is apparently the biggest song of 2011 in Australia – the Gotye/Kimbra collaboration. We saw the video and decided we had to do something on it because it’s so musically cool, so we decided to uncool it and now we have.
“As the title suggests we’re keen to help everybody with gameful employment in the world of pop,” Corcoran says of the show. “We’ve been educating people about pop for a very long time but we decided it was time to put that theory into practice so we will be analyzing people’s skill sets. People must be prepared for some analysis – we need to see what Perth has got. We’ll look at different career paths into the industry and things you should avoid along the way.”

_EMMA BERGMEIER