Brendan Maclean is a lot of things to a lot of people.
He’s a singer, a dancer, a songwriter, a Twitter legend, and, apparently, musical theatre’s arch-nemesis – which is rather unfortunate, given he’s talking to the BRAG only a few hours before he’s due to attend the Australian premiere of Aladdin.
“I hate musical theatre,” he says with a laugh. “It’s weird ‘cause I can dance and act and sing and stuff, but I don’t like the combination. At all. I just find it really painfully false – the singing style as well. I hate the idea that everyone tries to sound the same way. I mean, I did two years of a commercial cabaret show [Velvet]… which was like, me and Marcia Hines doing disco. And we did 300 shows, and it was pretty painful. I gave it a shot. Nobody can say I didn’t give it a shot.” He laughs. “I’m sorry musical theatre, you’re not for me.”
Nonetheless, it’s a testament to Maclean’s seemingly boundless creative energies that despite his dislike for the genre, he’s already got a few ideas for potential stage shows brewing.
He is, evidently, the kind of creator who exudes projects: he is endlessly writing, producing content at a speed that would make any other artist’s head spin.
“I’ve kind of got a couple of ideas that I want to hang my hat on,” Maclean says of his musical theatre plans, secretively. “Maybe I will turn to musical theatre when I give up on trying to get triple j to play me. I’ll just go down that avenue. I can write it and Marcia Hines can just play everyone.”
Maclean stresses that any story he writes for the theatre would be set in Australia. Even despite the widespread awkwardness Australians have when it comes to writing about other Australians, Maclean seems determined to break the ‘Strayan story stigma. “We get so cringey,” he says. “When’s the last time a place was said in a song as a lyric – an Australian suburb? You have to go back to people like Paul Kelly and The Whitlams. In pop especially, they still sing about being in America, or being in California. But what’s it like to live in Footscray or Marrickville? Why not write about that?”
Nonetheless, despite any musical theatre plans that may or may not be brewing away in Maclean’s head, fans need not worry – it’s unlikely that he’s going to be slinking away to the world of thespians anytime soon. His most recent EP, the ARIA chart-climbing Funbang1, is in many ways his most successful record yet – a turn of events that took even Maclean by surprise. “Funbang did better than I thought it was going to, for sure,” he says. “I didn’t expect it to chart like it did. We just thought it might blip in the iTunes chart for a second. But it kicked some butt, and now we get to tour it.”
Its chart performance might have come out of the blue for the musician, but Maclean is singularly unconcerned with the connotations that the dreaded ‘pop’ word tends to have, and he is open about his desire to make a radio-friendly record. “I knew what I wanted to do with this record, for sure – I knew I wanted to make a pop record and just see if I could get some festival gigs. It was pretty calculated. It’s not to say that I don’t like the music – but this is why I’m doing the tour so differently … I’m picking all these beautiful theatres and taking the songs back to where I wrote them.”
Indeed, location is already proving key when it comes to Maclean’s tour – he’s going to play Giant Dwarf when he heads our way, rather than one of Sydney’s staple touring venues, and during his time in Melbourne specifically chose locations hosting that rarest of beasts – a real piano. “[I like] actual instruments, so I’ll be using that rather than a fucking digi-keyboard for once,” Maclean says, his voice dripping with audible glee. “I’m doing a song cycle, which is really interesting – it’s kind of an absolute fraud of me to do it, because usually that’s a classical music thing.
“But I’m kind of making a pop music song cycle,” he goes on. “So I don’t talk inbetween like six of the songs – it’s in two halves – and the audience don’t clap. You just get six songs, wham right in your face. But through that I’ll explore a couple of covers, and my pop songs and the Rufus Wainwright stuff I love. People were like, ‘Why don’t you do a big show, with like, backing tracks and dancers?’ and I was like, ‘I don’t really want to do that forever’.”
Bastardisation of classical forms is in many ways the key to Maclean’s style – his music is about ruffling up the hair of established structures, simultaneously sullying and slotting into genres, all while singing ear-wormy songs with debauched titles like ‘Hugs Not Drugs (Or Both)’. It’s one of the many ways in which he invests pop sounds with true power, and for Maclean, music is about transforming the lived experience into sound.
“If you don’t sound like you, why are you singing?” he muses. “I don’t know where the pleasure would come from. That’s why I sing. Like, playing the piano and singing is something I can do by myself and it makes me so happy every day and it never gets boring. That’s why I do it.”
Brendan Maclean performs at Giant Dwarf on Tuesday August 30.
