Offbeat cabaret duo Frisky and Mannish discuss their singular act and their love of pop
Tourists aren't sure what to make of cabaret duo Frisky and Mannish, as they totter along London's South Bank towards the stage where they've been booked to perform. Frisky (real name Laura Corcoran) wears a vivid red wig; Mannish (Matthew Jones) has an oversize yellow zipper on the back of a school uniform-ish suit. A man with a camera thinks about taking a snap of the 26-year-olds, before turning back to get a good angle on Big Ben and the London Eye.
They're not for everybody, acknowledge Corcoran and Jones (let's call them that). "The first thing I heard at a gig recently," says Jones, "was a guy in the front row saying, 'You can't be serious?'" Yet their act has been the toast of the Edinburgh festival fringe for the past two years. A new show, currently previewing on the South Bank, will be on at the festival next month.
If tourists aren't sure what to make of the pair, then neither, perhaps, are promoters. On the playbill outside today's venue, their act is described as "popmusicy-seriocomic-mashparodic-infotainment". Let me try: Frisky and Mannish (the stage names plucked from Byron) take apart and reassemble pop songs. Quite expertly. In the past, the Pussycat Dolls' "Beep" has been reworked as a music-hall number. Kate Nash and Kate Bush have been seamlessly melded. "Eef-cliffe, it's me, Kaffy?" In the new show, says Corcoran, "we discover that the Bee Gees might have written Rihanna's 'Rude Boy'..."
The duo met at university, cast together in an am-dram Guys and Dolls. After graduating, "we shouted, 'We've arrived, world!' And the world said, 'Sorry, who are you again?'" There followed unsatisfying jobs, Corcoran in a call centre and Jones in a library, before, hungover one morning, trying to amuse flatmates, they sang "Papa Don't Preach" as if it were an aria. An act was born.
In 2009, their hit fringe show got an unexpected thumbs-up from the mocked Kate Nash, who turned up as a spectator. This year, if they are to have a famous audience member, it had probably better not be Cheryl Cole. "She gets a bit of a rough ride. We sort of Adele-ify her."
"We have a genuine love for pop music," says Corcoran. "But part of the reason we love it is because it's so completely ridiculous." Actually, that's the hard part, says Jones. "It can be a real challenge making most pop music funnier than it already is."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/jul/03/frisky-mannish-interview-edinburgh-cabaret
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