Simpsons star Harry Shearer coming to the Adelaide Cabaret Festival

THE Simpsons funnyman Harry Shearer and singer-songwriter Judith Owen share a marriage forged in music and mirth — and now they’re coming to Adelaide for the Cabaret Festival.

EMBARGO SA WEEKEND 2 April 2016: Harry Shearer and Judith Owen. Picture: Alessia Laudoni

• Adelaide Cabaret Festival full lineup revealed in the Sunday Mail on April 3

WHEN The Simpsons’ man of a thousand voices, Harry Shearer, met singer-songwriter Judith Owen, it was literally a scene straight out of his classic rock mockumentary film This is Spinal Tap.

US comedy actor Shearer’s faux-British heavy metal band had reformed for a 1992 album and tour and checked into a London hotel where Welsh-born folk-jazz musician Owen happened to be playing … for an indifferent, brunch-time crowd in the buffet room.

It was love at first sight — and sound — for the unlikely couple, who will bring their unique marriage of music and mirth to this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival in a new show called This Infernal Racket.

“Tap was doing the Break Like The Wind tour, 26 cities in America and then finishing up in London, doing two nights at the Royal Albert Hall — I know it sounds hard to believe, but it’s true,’’ says Shearer, who plays the parody band’s hirsute bass player, Derek Smalls.

Instead of its usual accommodation in central Piccadilly, Spinal Tap’s manager suggested they stay at a new hotel in Chelsea Harbour, about 15 minutes west of London, to save money “because we had lost our tour sponsor’’.

“It was a subsidiary of the Hilton chain and they were trying to make it a rock’n’roll hotel. They were, in her words, ‘giving the rooms away’ so we went: ‘OK’.’’

Shearer, who is best known for providing the voices of characters including Mr Burns, Smithers, Ned Flanders and Principal Skinner on animated TV series The Simpsons for the past 27 years, was in his full Spinal Tap guise.

“I had, for the tour, got hair extensions because I didn’t want to be worried about what my wig was doing while I was sweating on stage each night, and I’d grown my facial hair so I looked like Derek Smalls whether I was on stage or off,’’ he says.

“We walk into the lobby and wait for the roadie to check us in. Christopher (Guest, aka Spinal Tap guitarist Nigel Tufnel) and I and one of our elves from Stonehenge hear this music coming from the brunch room … and it wasn’t brunch music; anything but.

Harry Shearer and Judith Owen. Picture: Alessia Laudoni

“Christopher recalls that as we turned, my eyes bugged out like in an old-style cartoon, and it was Judith.’’

Owen had been playing regularly at the famous Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London when a fellow musician offered her the chance to fill in for a regular gig at the hotel.

“It makes me laugh to this day when I think about it,’’ Owen says. “I’d only just been asked 30 minutes before this marvellous moment in my life — by an American couple — whether I knew anything from Cats, which is one of the worst things anybody has ever, ever asked me because I was playing my own music.

“Then I heard this rapturous applause from behind me, I turned around and it was actually Christopher Guest and a little person, Danny (Woodburn, of Seinfeld fame) — a Stonehenge elf — and Harry with the whole facial accoutrements of Derek Smalls.

“They are my comedic heroes, because I’ve always been a huge fan of comedy and also I love that film so much, so I immediately knew who they were. I just thought: This is the most surreal moment of my life.

“I didn’t think I’d end up singing backup on stage with them one day in the future as some surly-looking rock chick.’’

Nor did Owen, whose new album Somebody’s Child is out May 6, realise that was only the beginning of what would become the biggest adventure of her life. “I was a very broke and young musician in London, doing the usual four-hour marathon piano-playing gigs to stay alive. This was a two-week gig that this woman had lied to me about and said it was a great, new kind of jazz bar. It was anything but — it was brunch, it was a shithole.

“They were trying to sell it as being a rock’n’roll club. Prince had stayed there, which was fab, then Guns N’ Roses came in and I actually was playing a song when Axl Rose was asked by one of the waiters whether he wanted another drink … and Axl kicked off and picked up a chair and threw it into the glass mirrors behind the bar.

“By the time the guys walked in as Spinal Tap, I was almost ready for the most bizarre thing in the world.’’

Shearer, now 72, and Owen, 25 years his junior, had just one date in London before Shearer had to return home to work in New York. “I flew her over, we spent a week there and that was it,’’ he says of her decision to move to the US. The couple married the following year.

Monty Burns and his love-struck lackey Mr Smithers are both voiced by the talented Harry Shearer.

Shearer has a deep passion for music and it was his former piano teacher who introduced him to acting as a child growing up in Los Angeles. “She quit being a piano teacher — I like to think — under my influence. Because she had a daughter who was in show business, she resurfaced as a showbiz agent and called my parents and said ‘Do you mind if I try to get Harry some work?’ It was as implausible as Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy.’’

Some months later, the agent rang back with an audition for Shearer to appear on comedian Jack Benny’s top-rating radio show, which later migrated to TV. “I was a very good reader ... so I got the job and that opened the door to an eight-year career as a child actor,’’ he says.

On the Benny show, Shearer met and worked with perhaps the most iconic of all voice artists, Mel Blanc, famous for his work as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird, among other characters, on the classic Warner Brothers cartoons.

Oddly, Shearer says there was “absolutely no linear connection” between his Mel Blanc relationship and his cartoon voice work.

The Simpsons’ creator, Matt Groening, knew of Shearer’s skill at character voices from his radio program (now webcast) Le Show, which has been airing since 1983. “Matt was a fan of my radio show, which I still do, and he knew that I did characters. So they called me when they were starting this up and twisted my arm into doing it.’’ Shearer’s most recently reported pay per episode was $300,000.

Both Shearer and Owen have now also been immortalised as animated characters on The Simpsons — he as a member of Spinal Tap in the 1992 episode The Otto Show and she with a fleeting cameo in 2001’s The Blunder Years.

After filming the pilot episode for Leave it to Beaver, Shearer’s parents decided against him leaving school to be part of a fulltime TV series, although he continued to act until he was 15 and went to university, where he majored in political science “and my minor was in Russian’’.

That interest in politics has remained at the forefront of Shearer’s work as a satirist, particularly on his albums like Songs of the Bushmen and Greed and Fear. “It’s been a way of my dealing with my issues and my anger over the political situations which seem to bedevil us, to turn it into something funny.’’

Singer-songwriter Judith Owen in a cameo on The Simpsons.

Owen had a very different path to success. She originally lied to Shearer about her battles with depression, but is now very open about it.

“I have been the Olympiad of depression, as has my whole family,’’ says Owen, who began songwriting at the age of 15 after her mother committed suicide. “That was exactly the time that I started to write songs for real. It was the catalyst for everything. My family are Welsh, a very melancholy bunch of people. We’d moved to London because my father was an opera singer at Covent Garden ... he was there for 35 years. Music was the language, it was everything in our house. My sister and my lives were very much about going to the opera ... it was like a second home really.

“Downstairs in the dressing rooms I’d be meeting Pavarotti and Domingo and all these amazing people ... it was remarkable and it was the most important thing in my life because in my home life — although it didn’t get so terrible until I was 13 — my mother was not a well person.

“Nobody talked about it then ... but she had clinical depression all of her life. So there was a darkness and a sadness at home and it made the music even more important to us as a family, because that was the light, that was the joy.’’

When she was about four, her parents thought Judith would become a concert pianist because she could mimic her sister playing Debussy, but she had other plans.

“I’d always wanted to be an actress — that was my thing. But when my mother died, absolutely everything changed, life stopped, and music became the only place where I ever felt safe and alive and where I could express myself.’’

When she finally went to study drama at Trent Park in London, part of the course required Owen to play a song — her first public performance of something she had written. At first, she thought the following silence was a sign of failure — until she saw her classmates were so deeply moved that some were even crying.

“The teacher said to me: ‘Why are you studying acting?’ and I had no real answer. That was the first time I realised that what I did perhaps could touch other people.’’

Owen’s music follows the tradition of 1970s singer-songwriters who dominated radio during her childhood; people like Carole King, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne.

“The last record I did (Ebb & Flow) was a love letter to the music of Laurel Canyon,’’ she says of the Hollywood Hills neighbourhood which was home to many of those troubadours. Some of the key session musicians who played on those 1970s albums have now recorded and toured with Owen, in particular drummer Russ Kunkel, bassist Lee Sklar and guitarist Waddy Wachtel.

“As a kid, I’d be in the car singing along — because my dad loved him — to James Taylor. I loved his sound and I loved songs like Fire and Rain, which were about the hardest, deepest things in the world and yet were wrapped up in these beautiful melodies and arrangements,’’ she says. “Of course I was listening to the rhythm section, the musicians that I would end up working with in years to come. Things like that are very, very special to me.’’

Owen is a great believer in serendipity.

Judith Owen. Picture: Alessia Laudoni

“When Harry was a child star, he was in Abbott and Costello Go To Mars. My mother loved Abbott and Costello Go To Mars, and she saw my future husband in it ... even though she died long before we met.’’

After abandoning piano as a child, Shearer picked up the bass as an instrument he could play by ear. “He’s the most brilliant and funny man who loves music more than anything else — and I daresay I’m a musician who loves humour and needs to laugh a lot. In that way, it’s a really good relationship that we have,’’ Owen says.

This Infernal Racket will feature original songs by both artists, as well as radical reinterpretations of some classic heavy rock songs — including the odd Spinal Tap number.

“The premise of the title is that both of us have a lot of noise going on in our heads, of very different varieties,’’ Shearer says.

“What we have in common is that one of the ways we deal with that racket is by transforming it into music, songs. Mine are satirical, hers are emotional and witty, so we basically are exploring those differences and commonalities in musical expression.’’

This Infernal Racket is at the Dunstan Playhouse, June 16-17, for the Adelaide Cabaret Festival.