TOMÁS FORD

Feeling Dirty

Perth’s premier electro-pop showman Tomás Ford wanted to be a goth. The Adelaide-born entertainer is about to unleash An Audience With Tomás Ford - 12 slices of twisted, messed up strange disco otherwise known as his sophomore “accidental concept” album. The crowd-surfing showman chats with ANNABEL MACLEAN about the record, the Rockingham club scene, touring with Birds Of Tokyo and being assaulted.

There is a mixture of concern, utter repulsion, anxiety and excitement spread across the naïve faces of those who have never seen Tomás Ford perform before. It’s a rarity in his home-base Perth where his high energy, adrenaline-fuelled; crazy ‘what the fuck was that’ show has astounded many a venue around town over the last eight years. There is glitter, crazy outfits, outrageous dance moves, cords and disco equipment strung across stage and, of course, what he’s known for – a fair dose of closer encounters with his audience.
It is Ford’s experiences with his audience over the years which sparked his concept record An Audience With Tomás Ford, due to take over Amplifier this Friday night supported by the likes of Sydney’s 8bit star Simo Soo, Boys Boys Boys!, destructive rockers Injured Ninja and a bunch more – not to mention accompanied by a splash of drag and a few comedians. Six years in the making, the first generation of songs on the record came together through a show Ford did back in the mid-noughties called Tomás Ford Vs. The Audience. “I just wanted to write about the relationship that I was having with my audience because even with the last batch of songs, the show had evolved into this confrontational, bizarre thing,” he says of the record’s evolvement.
“So I generated this batch of songs which was just about what was happening in the space, there were no little narratives taking people’s minds in other directions or anything. That show was really intense and then I got really intense and dark and wrote some more songs which were more industrial because I thought I wanted to be a goth for a while (laughs).”
But, that sub-culture didn’t work out too well for Ford. “Goths aren’t really into the things that I enjoy with audiences,” he says. “A gothic crowd would just want to stand around and stand back and that’s just boring for me.” Although there are some darker themes scattered throughout the record, Ford says he had to force himself to write positively. “Because I had to reflect on the nature of the live show a lot, a lot of it [the music of the record] was quite negative - some of the bad things that happened. I ended up having to have to really force myself to write about the awesome things because it is actually awesome to be me and get to do all this awesome shit.”
Tracks Bash Myself and I Feel Dirty showcase Ford’s inner battle with his career choice, both coming from this place of “ergggh, yuck I feel horrible.”
“I Feel Dirty is just that feeling of – I used to play shows at The Castle. It was a shithole. It was like worse than the [old] Hydey but I love both those places. I didn’t have a driver’s license at that point and I would catch public transport home from shows. I’d finish the show at midnight and have to run to the train covered in make up and glitter and all kinds of shit and it was just about that feeling of ‘this feels disgusting, I feel so gross’ but it’s also super empowering like ‘I can do this despite the fact it is kind of revolting and that all these bogans look like they’re about to glass me’.”
Newcastle is another place Ford has felt like he was going to be glassed mid-performance. “It’s like Bunbury to the max,” he says of Newcastle. “There was just this one show I played on the Birds Of Tokyo [The Wild Eyed Boy] tour at the Panthers which is their big RSL and I thought I was going to die – it was like dudes who wanted to kill you as the audience.” Ford has been physically assaulted twice when playing alongside punk bands. “I would put my music there as a provokatory act and so you expect to get a little bit of punch in the head but when you’re on stage, you’ve got the adrenaline going, it doesn’t really matter. You just roll with it.
“Someone punched me really hard in the face once and I was just so high on adrenaline for the rest of the show, it was fantastic. Now, I will tend to kind of manage it by approaching the biggest, toughest, scariest meanest looking dude in the crowd early on in the show and play around with him and at first he’ll generally be like ‘oh this is really fucked up, I hate this’ but generally people I fuck around with come around to realise that I’m not going to do anything particularly bad to them most of the time.”
Luckily Ford hasn’t been punched in the head down in Rockingham where he grew up, in fact, his view of Rockingham is slightly more uplifting than his 2001 tune A Night Out In Rockingham. “The club scene is amazing!,” he says of Rockingham. “When I used to go, there were two joints. There was Liquids which is like a two level nightmare dance club that cost someone a lot of money in the ‘90s and just looks horrible and then there’s Vibe. That’s where you go if you get kicked out of Liquids and you’re too drunk to pick up anywhere else. The music used to be crossed between AC/DC and commercial trance bullshit.”
There’s only one thing to expect this Friday night – pure, mad entertainment.