How did Andrew come to write the musical?

It begins with his own journey into men’s work in 1995, aged 21. Then there’s a high school musical, an inspired moment and the first song hits him driving.

Andrew writes:

“A story has a hundred possible beginnings. For me, this one starts in 1995 when I was walking through Warwick shopping centre and saw a book sale. I picked up a book called King Warrior Magician Lover. It quite literally changed my life.

“The book spoke to me. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette wrote about father hunger, the loss of rites of passage and four powerful archetypes in the masculine unconscious. I was set alight by the words.

“After reading the book, I heard about a retreat called Future Warrior which explored the four archetypes and I got myself along, full o’ beans. I was 21 and by far the youngest bloke in the room. I noticed on the first day that there were men who’d been before – some of them several times – and they were back. I remember thinking, ‘It obviously doesn’t work.’ An example of my arrogance and naivety at the time.

“When I arrived at the retreat, a big bloke named Tony took my bags and sleeping gear and said, ‘Go out to the fire. There are some blokes already out there. But now – and for the rest of the weekend – you can’t talk about sport, where you live, what car you drive or what you do for a living.’ It was pretty quiet out by that fire.

“I was a bit of a handful at that retreat and it would actually take a year in Tony’s men’s group afterwards – with other good men who’d attended retreats – to really get me on the path.

“The most powerful thing that hit me between the book, the retreats and the group was the complete loss of community-facilitated rites of passage.

“In the past, all over the world – and still in some places today – they knew that a boy didn’t just become a man all by himself in the gradual passage of time. He had to be MADE. He had to be TAUGHT. He had to be … INITIATED.

“How did we lose this?

“There are various ideas about why (the industrial revolution, etc) but I was more interested in the effects and in how we might bring it back.

“When you consider that the first stage of rites of passage is separation (and that’s true pretty much all over the world in cultures that developed their own rituals independent of each other), it’s not surprising that so many teenagers disconnect and disengage from their parents and all but their peers. I’m suggesting they’re crying out for a ritual separation.

“Another critical stage of rites of passage is the initiation itself – usually a carefully developed set of trials and ordeals, some of which even put the youth’s life on the line. The young male must learn that he is mortal – not invincible as he previously thought. He must be taught this in a deeply ritualised way so that he gets it, deep in his psyche.

“In the absence of ritualised ordeal, what do the youth do?

“They try to initiate themselves.

“Fights, binge drinking, fast driving, drag racing, train surfing, high risk theft, diving into dams, even suicide – all of these things can be understood as attempts at self-initiation.

“In a tribe, the initiation is facilitated by experienced Elders, themselves many times initiated.

“But in most of these modern attempts, the closest thing to an Elder is a slightly older teenager, often egging the younger boys on.

“In some tribal initiations, thirty boys would be taken away and two or three might never come home. Nowadays, we regard some of their methods as barbaric. And yet, if you count suicide, drugs, car accidents, imprisonment, victims of assault and lives lived in quiet desperation … I reckon we lose more than one in ten.

“So … I was about 23 or 24 years old. I’d been to a couple of Future Warrior retreats, I’d been dragging my mates into it as much as I could (attempting to run my own short camps with them in the bush, exploring manhood [and mostly pissing them off, I think]), I was reading Robert Bly and Sam Keen … I felt sure that all of Australia should be talking about it.

“But how? How could I get the nation talking?

“Somewhere between ’96 and ’98, I went to Duncraig SHS with one of my oldest mates, Elliot, to see a musical called Pippin, directed by our old drama teacher from Carine High, Sheree Marshall.

“Right in the middle of the musical – as they were singing and dancing, bopping along with lyrics about why Charlemagne was constantly at war – it suddenly struck me that a musical was the answer.

“I should point out that, at this stage, I did not sing, write songs or play an instrument. Still, the Top 30 seems to be filled with such people so it’s worth a shot, ey?

“I decided to write a musical about rites of passage in Australia. It would be called What A Man’s Gotta Do. All I needed now was … Well, songs and a musical and stuff.

“One day, I was driving, when some lyrics came to me. I started singing them … I’ve been reading this book about manhood / And it says a lot of things about boys / Pages and pages on the sorrows of parenting / Not so much about the joys …

“That was it. I was away.

“I wrote most of that song driving, singing the lyrics back to myself, making sure I remembered the melody, too. I called it (I’d Really) Father Not. I went to my friend Paul Kooperman – a songwriter, playwright, musician and drama teacher – and he showed me how to play it on guitar, what I was singing. Luckily, my sister and bro-in-law had bought me a guitar so I bloody went home and practiced.

“Father Not would go on to win state and national songwriting awards and – along with a couple of others that I also wrote driving, If I Can Trust These Men and The Wanking – earn me the Australian Songwriters Association’s prize for National Songwriter of the Year 2000. I was stunned.

“Songs started pouring out of me in the following months. Most of the songs that would make it into the musical in 2006 would be written in the first year.

“I recorded a four track EP somewhere around 1999 and called it What A Man’s Gotta Do. That EP includes Shame Song which is not recorded anywhere else. My business partner at the time, Katrina Bercov, organised a fantastic CD launch at Kulcha. I thought we were gonna sell ten thousand copies and producers would be beating down the door to make the show. I think we sold 300 copies over about five years.

“When I’d finished the first draft of the script and songs, I thought two hilariously misguided things: 1) That the songs would stop coming; 2) That the show was basically done and ready.

“The songs didn’t stop coming. The next year, I wrote It’s A PC 2001 New Millennium Romantic Arrangement, which is still one of the most popular songs I’ve ever written. And I would also later include it in the musical. We recorded an acoustic album of thirteen songs and PC was the title track. Again, Katrina organised an outstanding launch – this time at Werzel’s Comedy Lounge, Hyde Park Hotel.

“The show was a long way from finished. For years, Katrina and I would talk about putting the show on but I never really had a finished show and we could never quite make it happen.

“We would up our partnership in June, 2004. In 2005, I decided that – no matter what – I was going to stage the show in 2006 in some form or another.

“Around the time of making that decision, my great mate Gary Williams – at the time, the manager of the Sensitive New Age Cowpersons (among other things) – contacted me and said, ‘Do you wanna put yourself up for a Country Arts WA tour? They organise everything and they pay you and you just rock up and play.’ Sounded good to me. He said, ‘What kind of show would you do?’ I said, ‘Maybe I could do a solo version of the musical.’ So that’s what we pitched. And they went for it.

“In June 2006, I toured twelve towns around WA with the wonderful Country Arts, performing a two-act one-man version of the show. It included a Man Stand – manly items I bought in each town along the way – and the Manhood Survey – answers to which you can read on this site. The tour was a terrific success and a lot of fun.

“(I also performed a shortened version of the solo show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in April 2007. I didn’t like the one hour format and it didn’t go very well except that two wonderful London producers are talking about taking it to Edinburgh. We might do a twelve town tour of the UK that ends with a week at the Festival. More on that soon).

“As soon as I returned from the WA tour, I started auditioning people for the twelve characters of the full production – even though I hadn’t actually finished the script. I only finished the last version on the day of the cast’s first reading.

“I was truly blessed with the cast and crew of the show (you can read about them here).

“I also had the greatest time recording the soundtrack with some of WA’s best bands and musicians (33 singers and players in all!).

“The show hit The Rechabites Hall on September 16, 2006. It was panned in The West Australian – ‘this production is a shambles’ – but it sold out in two days and mostly the audience loved it. There were certainly plenty of problems with the production (all entirely my fault) and a more experienced person/people could do a lot more with it. People often ask if it will ever be restaged and I can only say: I bloody hope so.

“The one-man version of the show went to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and I’ve also performed one-off gigs at Nannup Musical Festival, on mine sites in the Pilbara and at The Potato Shed in Drysdale, Victoria.

“Gary Williams and I have put the show up for a national tour in 2012 and we’re waiting to hear if we’ve got the funding from Playing Australia. Fingers crossed.

“This is the story so far. Watch this space to see what happens next …”