the cheese brothers

"Let's say you're down on your luck. Let's say your dame just up and left you. You walk the streets, you hit some skanky bar. You're taking it pretty hard but you hit the booze even harder. Yeah, that's it. Get fried on the booze. That'll get her back. Through a sea of vodka shots and low-life you see written in chalk on a blackboard:

TONIGHT - THE CHEESE BROTHERS!

You may not care about the CHEESE BROTHERS, but godammit they care about you... They hit the stage. One sings like an angel, the other drives a piano like a Sherman Tank into your brain. These boys swing and every song is about you. Maybe that makes it worse. All around you people are smiling. Some of them haven't felt this good in years. Strangers are grinning at each other and realise this is why they are alive. They vow to be more like the CHEESE BROTHERS in their general approach to life from that day onward. They go home happy and when people ask 'em why, they say 'Without a doubt, it was those CHEESE BROTHERS.' Maybe you feel it too and you go home happy, or maybe you don't. Maybe you choose to live in CHEESELAND, or maybe you shoot yourself in the head. It's your call..."

In 1999, Darren Casey and I began 'mucking around' with old cabaret songs. We had a history of catching up at Comedy Festival functions, drinking a fair bit and ending up in a corner making each other laugh. It was pointless attempting to reproduce this in the cold light of day, so we thought we could at least meet and play music.

Tragic cabaret was the mental fun park in which we played. We loved the corny, old-style sentiments expressed in Fly Me To The Moon, I Left My Heart In San Francisco and Sunny Side of The Street. During this period of experimentation we created The Cheese Brothers.

We imagined Darren Cheese (the pianist) and his younger brother Paul (the singer) as homeless, tragic troubadours seeking love and fame and finding neither. It was an absurd(ist) show, expecting the audience to actually enjoy a kind of co-dependent fraternal savagery rarely explored in comedy and song. It was great fun when it was flying, very difficult when it wasn't.

But, surely, that was the challenge - to always make it fly...

After a few guest spots at The Gershwin Room at The Esplanade Hotel in Melbourne, Darren and I created The Cheese Brothers show. It began with an honest attempt to entertain the audience, spiralling into ritual humiliation and one-upmanship, and culminating in a desperate latin medley comprising Copacabana, Quando, Quando, Quando and I Go To Rio.

We performed it during the Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2001, The Melbourne Fringe Festival 2001, on tour to Alice Springs (with thanks to our friend, comedian Fiona O'Loughlin) and Darwin, returning to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2002. Paul Cheese and his big brother Daz called it quits after that.

The show was nominated for the 'Best Cabaret Show' category in the 2001 Green Room Awards, and I was named 'Best Cabaret Artiste'. That was nice.

A big supporter of my working with Darren was Dave Taranto (unfortunately he died before The Cheese Brothers appeared). Those who didn't know Dave would call him a 'guru of Melbourne comedy'. Those who knew Dave knew how much he hated the label 'guru of Melbourne comedy'. He held a fair bit of sway though, through his radio show The Cheese Shop (no connection) and his work running The Cheese Shop Live at The Prince Patrick Hotel in Collingwood.

When Dave died I thought about my life and decided if I was going to do comic stuff, I needed to be as true to what I wanted to say as possible... to be as authentic in my sense of what's funny as I could be, which is why The Cheese Brothers was infused with tragedy, absurdity and pathos... as well as gags.

Click here to go to The Taranto Show and find out more about Dave Taranto.

all photographs of the evil, pathetic, sensitive, incredibly talented but hugely misunderstood Cheese Brothers on this page were taken by James Penlidis

paul mccarthy 2008-10