TISM tour: Performatively evasive Australian bands embark on national tour in August

It’s 20 minutes to showtime, and it’s organised chaos backstage at the opening night of Adelaide’s Beer & BBQ Festival. Though this scene unfolding has nothing to do with brews or brisket.

Ron Hitler-Barassi is attempting to navigate his way through a doorway. A tall man as is, the three large silver spikes pointing skyward from the top of his head aren’t helping. People try to navigate him through, to keep both his balance and headwear intact, but he gives up. Or perhaps he just opts for a more entertaining solution.

Getting down on all fours, he crawls through the doorway to howls of laughter from everyone waiting in the next room, including the other six TISM members (or not) and a clutch of Adelaide media, microphones poised at the ready.

Ah, the price of anonymity.

Tonight’s not all beer and vittles at Adelaide venue The Drive. It’s also the first date of a national tour by the band Hitler-Barassi has fronted for more than 40 years, This Is Serious Mum, aka TISM.

Or TSIM, according to the press release for their first national tour in 30 years, the TSIM No Mistakes Tour.

Across five decades, seven albums (plus one of almost two hours of complete silence), multiple singles and EPs – in a career punctuated by break-ups, hiatuses and member changes – TISM has earned national infamy, acclaim and enduring curiosity.

From day one, they have hidden their true identities behind masks, while performing alternative agit-pop-rock-dance songs and poetic diatribes of withering, hilarious, profane, profound and sometimes completely gross satire.

At the core has always been Hitler-Barassi, fellow vocalist Humphrey B. Flaubert, keyboardist Eugene de la Hot-Croix Bun and bass player Jock Cheese, with the current line-up rounded out by members who have inherited characters – hence, they are Jon St. Peenis II, Les Miserables II and Vladimir Lenin-McCartney II.

Together, they have created an impenetrable, unapologetic, unaccountable conceit. Once the masks are on, they become characters who can effectively do as they please because, by design, they remain answerable to no one.

Including journalists.

Sitting down with Hitler-Barassi and Flaubert ahead of the show, they breezily deflect or ignore interview questions, or pivot to hitherto unknown tangents. Or just plain lie.

I ask what their next run of shows might look like, given the grand scale of the recent Wankers of the World Unite show at Melbourne venue PICA, which at one point featured three versions of TISM, playing different songs on three different stages.

“Obviously, all of the members of TISM have since been replaced,” says Flaubert.

“All three bands failed in our opinion,” adds Hitler-Barassi.

“You could interpret this as the end of TISM, because it was a mistake to begin.”

Humphrey B. Flaubert

Tonight the band are wearing the same costumes from PICA, but that’s the only aspect that remains the same for this show, says Hitler-Barassi. For the rest of the TSIM No Mistakes Tour, they will be “changing it up” – with inspiration from Countdown favourite The Ted Mulry Gang and their 1975 hit about picking up a hitchhiker, Jump in My Car.

“There’s so much intellectualising about Ted Mulry,” muses Hitler-Barassi.

“It’s a nice twist at the end there because the narrative changes; he’s led on by his sexual desires for the girl, but then the fact that she lives too far away – automatically all these sexual heteronormative actions are undercut by the fact that he can’t afford the petrol. It’s a criticism of cisgendered hetero male normativity. I think that’s what Ted’s trying to tell us.”

“Ted was prescient,” says Flaubert. “He obviously understood the implications of the oil embargo, which was happening around that time. It’s come back again, everything’s cyclical, and even sexual harassment is off the table when the price of petrol is too high.”

It was 1983 when a bunch of twenty-somethings first donned black balaclavas for the debut gig of This Is Serious Mum. Called the Get F—ed Concert, it was also billed as their farewell show.

The masks stayed on and the band began playing regularly around Melbourne, developing a cult following. In 1986, they released their debut 7-inch single (with all four sides of the packaging deliberately glued shut), Defecate On My Face, a New Order-styled dance ditty about Adolf Hitler’s purported coprophilia fetish with partner Eva Braun.

If TISM had ever entertained any ideas of ditching the balaclavas while also keeping their day jobs, releasing a single with lyrics quoting Hitler as saying “C’mon Eva, send it on down/bend over Braun and give me a brown” would have put paid to that.

As catchy and comical as it was outright crass, Defecate became an underground hit and remains a fan favourite.

Much of their hooky rock-pop canon since has found inspiration closer to home though, lampooning Australian cultural stereotypes and icons, both highbrow and low, to withering, expletive-laden effect. Songs such as Whatareya? (“yob or wanker?“), Yob (“If it’s different, punch/If it’s lager, lunch/If it moves, root/If it quacks, shoot”) and I Might Be a C— but I’m not a F—ing C— (enough said) delight fans, and ensure the masks stay on.

Not that fans are keen on any public outing of TISM members. It’s like an unwritten contract between the band and their fans to keep the mystique alive as much as possible. For the truly curious, it’s not too hard to find the core members’ true identities. One has a very active “other” musical career that’s in plain sight.

But once the masks go on, reality is a concept that both TISM and their fans prefer to ignore. Would you tell your five year-old that Santa is really Barry the bank teller?

I try to bring the conversation back to the show, and ask about the costumes’ creations; one of Humphrey’s angular, exaggerated shoulders occasionally threatens to take out my left cheek when he turns in his seat.

What is this, I ask, giving his shoulder a tap. It feels like a coat hanger.

“Oh that? Well, that’s my mortgage,” Flaubert replies, a benign smile lighting up the visible slivers of his masked face.

With the costumes now established as embodiments of the fiscal debts of each TISM member, Hitler-Barassi runs with it, pointing to his three head spikes as he explains each one in turn.

“Private school for the oldest kid, private school for the second kid, private school for the youngest kid,’ he says. “These are symbolic of our financial obligations. It’s what’s happening in our hearts where we get stabbed by the three financial ghosts, like Dickens.”

Hopefully, recent years have eased the hip-pocket burdens. Since resurrecting the band in 2022, ending a 19-year hiatus, TISM has been on a roll. They released their seventh album, Death to Art, in 2024, adding to a long-player catalogue that began with their 1988 debut, the double-album Great Truckin’ Songs of the Renaissance, and includes 1995’s ARIA award-winning Machiavelli and the Four Seasons, which featured their biggest hits, Greg! The Stop Sign!! and (He’ll Never Be An) Ol’ Man River.

That’s the other key to why, through hiatuses and passing decades, the music of TISM endures. For all the lyrical witticisms and elaborate stage shows, they also know how to write a banging pop song. I’m Interested in Apathy is pop perfection, while Greg! earned a place in the National Film and Sound Archive.

Tonight, I’ll hear most of these as TISM/TSIM kick off the No Mistakes Tour. So, why TSIM?

“These days you just can’t get proofreaders,” says Flaubert, as he segues to a discussion on former AC Milan football coach Nereo Rocco. Obviously.

“I also feel that it’s our way of kind of channelling Rocco,” he says.

“A journalist said to Rocco, ‘May the best team win’, and Rocco said, ‘I hope not’. And that’s pretty much TISM’s philosophy. We’re just hoping there’ll be no mistakes, and the likelihood of that is very low because the first time we played a note in public was the beginning of the mistakes.

“So, you could interpret this as the end of TISM, because it was a mistake to begin.”

Well, that would be a shame, I say, seeing as you’ve got at least eight shows to go on the tour.

“Jo, could you put in some references to Proust and Chekov?” asks Hitler-Barassi.

In keeping with the No Mistakes Tour theme, the crew all wear T-shirts declaring “There is no I in TISM” as they corral the band – including Hitler-Barassi on all fours – into the room for a final pre-show interview.

The media are asked to direct all questions to a TISM member who, they are told, speaks only Italian.

“You ask the questions and we’ll translate,” says Hitler-Barassi helpfully.

A further seven minutes of inanity ensues, and it’s showtime. Within seconds of the band arriving onstage and launching into I Drive a Truck, Hitler-Barassi has leapt into the audience, still singing. It’s like watching locusts descend on a stalk of wheat. Within seconds, his first, second and third private school kids’ fees have vanished.

Flaubert also ventures into the crowd as he sings, returning just with his silver head mask, his spiky headpiece also souvenired.

Back-up dancer Les Miserables II takes his chances repeatedly in the handsy crowd, coming back each time wearing less than before. By the end of the main set, he’s down to his undies and an emergency black balaclava, which TISM roadies always have at the ready.

Hitler-Barassi finishes the show with his pants around his ankles, shuffling offstage like a toddler with a filled nappy that had succumbed to gravity. The crowd files out, some singing Greg! as they cross the footbridge over the River Torrens. And all is well in the TISM/TSIM world.

TISM/TSIM resume their No Mistakes national tour in August at the Darwin Festival before playing at Perth, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. tismworld.com/tour