Their Career Was "One Unexpected Tangent After Another"

David Collins is all laughs from the moment he bings into the conference call — “Jesus Christ, hello? How laborious, my god, it’s like, that was like Australian Idol, you know — ‘And...the... winner... is... you… dialled... six... seven... oh my god.” Another bing indicates Shane Dundas has entered the call — the duo are currently calling in from separate cities, which is how they roll most of the time, with Dundas growing up in Canberra and Collins in Sydney, where they both ended up meeting each other in an acting course. Since then, they’ve performed all over the world (including for the Queen) for just about 25 years, and thanks to their soaring popularity online, they’ve managed to visit countries they’ve never been to before and perform to sell-out crowds. “It’s so cool to be able to go to a place like Poland for the first time and have sell-out shows just because of YouTube,” Collins says. “When our stuff first appeared on the ‘Tube we went, ‘Oh no, someone’s putting our stuff on the ‘Tube!’, but it was a good thing! It was only seven-minute bits, and people were seeing it and coming to our shows. It’s a great thing!”

"What was he doing when he was kneeling in front of Shane? Mummy, it looked like he was going to suck his cock!”

Their current show, KiDSHoW!, was inspired after working on the set of Sesame Street some time ago and subsequently making an actual kids show from that. They stress on their ticketing site and in the lobby before each show that KiDSHoW! is not for kids, yet it still doesn’t stop them from getting in. “We have [had kids in the audience] that we know of, twice, because they were in the front row,” Collins explains. “That we don’t know of, I don’t know, because we have made a very successful kids’ television show, which this show was grown from, so twice we’ve had kids, and they’re told … every step along the way, it’s not a kids show, it’s not for kids, but the parents are just like, ‘my kid can handle it’, that’s what they say, right Shano? Yeah, my child will be fine.” How do the kids and parents react? “I look down when I’m having the drug-induced thing… and the kids are just loving it; they’re wide-eyed, they’ve got a smile from ear-to-ear, and then I look at the parents and they’re looking so worried about the conversation they’re going to have to have with their kids and the questions that’ll come up — ‘What was he doing when he was kneeling in front of Shane? Mummy, it looked like he was going to suck his cock!’”

Of course, it wouldn’t be an Umbilical Brothers show without the spectacle that is their uncanny ability to produce wonderfully realistic sound effects with their vocal cords. It would seem that a lot of thought and practice goes into developing the sounds for each show, but that’s not entirely how it works. Dundas clarifies, “The sounds are just tools, like the mime or the slapstick; they’re tools to realise ideas — what are we gonna do, what’s gonna happen, who’s going to die if they have to,” he chuckles, “and then we’ll add the noises, and the noises don’t have to be completely accurate because you have a visualisation of it and the audience’s brains do the rest of the work, they fill it in. I can be a bit slack with some of the noises and they can do the rest of the work for me, it’s fine. David’s physicality is great, he can physicalise just about anything which creates just enough of the picture for the audience’s imagination to work with.”

The duo are also known for their exceptional ad-libbing abilities, and while KiDSHoW! follows a more play-like narrative, they always leave a few scenes open to improvisation. “All of our shows are kind of elastic. We can ad-lib as long as we know where we’re going, and we have enough experience to be able to get back on track. This show is more of a play than any of our other shows, so there are probably less places to do it because it’s so fast and so complex … but there has to be [a place for it] because we love it, and the audience enjoys watching us having fun.”

It’s been an illustrious campaign for the guys over the decades, and they still consider themselves baffled by what they’ve achieved. “There was never a plan, everything was either a joke or an accident; we were initially taking the piss in acting classes and movement classes and mime classes... it was just one unexpected tangent after another.”