The Bedroom Philosopher

Wed 5th May, 2010 in Features

The Melbourne International Comedy Festival remains among the city’s greatest annual spectacles, beloved by committed locals, returning visitors and side-splitting comedians alike. This year, Justin Heazelwood – better known as The Bedroom Philosopher – reflects proudly upon an impressive sold-out season, shows quickly added to accommodate building audiences. The successful run bodes especially well for Hazelwood’s latest offering, an album titled Songs From The 86 Tram, based on the hit show of the same name. When he reflects upon the past month, however, it becomes clear that even comedy can very much prove serious business.

“It was an exercise in discipline and personal development,” he admits of the stage show. “It’s such an insane set up. Imagine in music, booking yourself twenty gigs in a row in the same town, six nights a week for three and a half weeks. It’d never happen. In comedy, this is the norm. For someone who sings twelve songs a night, plus screams like a junkie and uses pretty much every key in his vocal registry, this is incredibly grueling.”

It’s this commitment that Heazelwood has undertaken in the portrayal of his vision: the comedian assuming twelve separate personas, providing playful insight into the quirks, the characters, and the familiar experiences of Melbourne’s infamous 86 tram.

“It’s the cultural lifeblood of the city. It’s a philosophical museum of broken dreams, glorious heartache and swearing,” he explains. “It’s the oblong railed masterpiece on a one way ticket to oddsville. It’s a mutant diorama of crestfallen vixens and defiant jesters all broody and guarded, playing a minor chord cocktail on their pocket radios,”

Impassioned whimsy aside, those familiar to the tram itself are likely to find Heazelwood’s portrayal endearing in its honesty. The show’s characters are modelled closely upon those who typically frequent the route each day. Its a brief dissection of those you’re likely to encounter – from love-struck bogans to middle-aged mums, from idealised indie scenesters to sexy tram inspectors, Heazelwood has that and more covered.

The show’s success has been a long time coming. Songs From The 86 Tram initially debuted in 2009, faring well until Heazelwood was forced out of action with a broken humerus – an irony that I’m certain is not lost on a comedian such as himself. The Bedroom Philosopher, without an arm for his trusty guitar, was almost relegated to just that.

“It was very depressing. I was single at the time, so I didn’t even have a doting girlfriend to coo and prod me,” he remembers. “I used my time by catching up on some DVD series. I watched the entire first series of – wait for it – Gossip Girl. C’mon! It’s a pretty well written series about rich New York kids and their problems! When you’ve just showered in a garbage bag and ate your third velish soup of the day this is the kind of glamor you crave.”

Far from the world of flavor-of-the-month television, however, Heazelwood is able locate a personality important in shaping the musical component of his act. “When I was thirteen I came home and turned on the TV and saw Beck’s Loser for the first time. That changed my life. I was obsessed with it and with him It was coolest most ramshackle groove I’d ever heard.”

Furthermore, Heazelwood’s family were just as important in shaping The Bedroom Philosopher as we know him today. “My Nan’s raucous, rambunctious, ‘giggly couple of beers’ nature really set a precedent for the importance of joking about in my life,” the comedian muses. “I laughed a lot as a kid, despite a lot of heartache and disappointments. It was always there to fall back on. Us Heazlewood’s are sensitive creatures, but we’re also pretty eccentric and okay with being silly.”

Heazelwood’s trip down memory lane soon turns into a commentary on his craft. Again, it seems, there’s more to being funny than meets the eye. “Most comedians take life really fucking seriously. I guess it’s about tasting the Buddhist style highs and lows. You can’t know the giddy heights of humor without knowing the bowels of sadness,” he declares. “You’re constructing something: taking meanings and putting them together. You have to get your hands dirty, like a kid smearing clay together to make something. If comedy is tragedy plus time, then I guess you have to know tragedy, and be prepared to get your hands in and mess it about.”

And the Tasmanian-born, Melbourne-based comic knows as well as anyone just how messy life can get, grappling with his fair share of tragedies and personal battles. “My Mum had schizophrenia, so I have a pretty unique view of the world, and an extremely high tolerance for the weird and strange side of being human,” he cites. “In the Songs From The 86 Tram stage show it was very important to me to include a mentally ill character and do it with some intelligence and empathy,”

“I’m annoyed how lame this country is at talking about mental illness. I mean, when I was depressed a couple of years ago and on anti-depressants, very few people wanted to know a thing about it. Despite the fact that heaps of young people are on them. I also get annoyed at mainstream media’s constant removal of anything remotely weird or strange, which I guess is why I’ve made a lot of my career about exploring and celebrating the dark and the twisted and the sad and the eccentric,” Heazelwood reveals. “It’s there and it makes us who we are and there’s no point sweeping it all under the carpet or in the too hard basket.”

It’s an approach that audiences have embraced wholeheartedly since the return of Songs From The 86 Tram, and future acclaim beckons as the album begins to hit store shelves. But what’s next for the Bedroom Philosopher? “Suburb domination. Get on Spicks And Specks. Pay off credit card. Turn 30. Yoga. Go vego. Become cliché,” he offers, for starters.

“I have thought about writing a bunch of songs that are just me and guitar, in a kind of bid to get back to songwriting simplicity. The last couple of albums have been about satisfying a frustrated music brain, but that is getting pretty well satisfied, and there is something cool about voice and guitar. Music’s getting so damn busy these days. Everyone’s packing protocols and twenty-four tracks of freaking horns and strings.”

And for the rest of us?

“Oh, you know… more of the same. Completely ignoring the devastating warning sent by scientists about overpopulation and global warming in favour of criminals getting stabbed in jails and sportsmen’s model girlfriends getting their tits out,” he casually laments. “Seriously, we could be knee deep in water and the politicians would be delaying environmental policy talks for another six months… as an objective member of the human race, I am so disappointed by our behaviour that I’m not all that convinced that we’ll survive or that we deserve to. There better be an afterlife or I’ll be pissed.”

Songs From The 86 Tram out now through Nan & Pop Records / Shock.