page_title: Paul McDermott
section_title: Doug Anthony All Stars
hierarchical_section_title: Paul McDermott / Career / Doug Anthony All Stars
caption_attribution_description: English: Comedian and singer Paul McDermott on stage with the Doug Anthony All Stars in April 1994.
context_page_description: Paul Anthony Michael McDermott is an Australian comedian, actor, writer, director, singer, artist and television personality. As a comedian, he is best known both for Good News Week and for his role as a member of the musical comedy group the Doug Anthony All Stars, which disbanded in 1994 but reformed in 2014; he has also performed individually and as a part of GUD. He has frequently appeared at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and taken part in its two major televised productions, the Comedy Festival Gala and the Great Debate. He has also hosted two other ABC programs and briefly featured on Triple J as a morning radio presenter between 1996 and 1997. He hosted Good News Week until 2012, and has since pursued his painting career, and given a series of concerts featuring self-penned songs of a more serious nature.
  McDermott is a published author, having released several books both in collaboration with the Doug Anthony All Stars and individually. He has written as a columnist for a number of Australian newspapers and a selection of his columns have been compiled into a book, The Forgetting of Wisdom.
context_section_description: McDermott began busking in 1985, which he says equipped him with useful experience and the ability to cope with most situations when he later started performing in clubs.  He joined a group called Gigantic Fly which performed at a new Canberra club called Cafe Boom Boom.  It was here that he got to know Tim Ferguson and Richard Fidler of the musical comedy group the Doug Anthony All Stars (DAAS). McDermott was asked to join the group when the third member, Robert Piper, left due to other commitments.  His primary reason for joining, he says, was monetary: "I'd been stealing canvas from the bins around the art school."  Initially busking and performing live in clubs, with McDermott writing the majority of their material and songs, DAAS achieved success at the 1986 Adelaide Fringe Festival and subsequently travelled to Britain for the Edinburgh Fringe festival, where they were nominated for the Perrier Award. They toured both nationally and internationally, appearing on British television and playing at the opening of the Barcelona Olympics.  After initially struggling to gain success in Australia, in 1989 DAAS was picked up to perform on the ABC show The Big Gig, on which they became a popular feature.  They appeared frequently on the show until 1991, when the group premiered their own series on the ABC, DAAS Kapital, which ran for two seasons.  McDermott says that he liked performing with DAAS because it allowed him to bring together a range of his interests—he got to write, perform, sing, create costumes and paint backdrops.
  The group split up in 1995 after a final farewell tour of Australia.  Rumours of a falling out among the trio persisted for many years, but all three maintained that they had parted on good terms and that it had simply been time to move on, as they had wanted to pursue careers in different directions. Ferguson has since revealed that the break-up was in large part due to his being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1995.  In the two years following the break-up of DAAS, McDermott wrote two film scripts and the stage show MOSH!.  He says that he was not particularly interested in returning to comedy, which he came to regard as an "aberration, something that had been good to do for eight years but now it was over," until in 1996 he was recruited as host of the satirical news-based quiz show Good News Week.
  In 2014, McDermott and Tim Ferguson reunited to tour Australia as the Doug Anthony All Stars, with frequent collaborator Paul Livingston (also known as "Flacco") replacing Richard Fidler as guitarist due to Fidler's radio commitments.
caption: McDermott performing with the Doug Anthony All Stars in 1994.
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