Alex Cameron at Lido / Monday, 20.11.2017

Alex says: “When you talk about Alex Cameron and Roy Molloy you’re talking about the online cowboys in the Wild West days of the World Wide Web. For those who haven’t logged on, Roy Molloy is my good friend and business partner, he plays saxophone with me and also owns 50% of our entertainment business The Crawfish. That’s one half of it, and if you want to know what we’re really about, what’s really at the elbow of the whole scenario, just look at all the things you wish you’d done differently. All the things you stopped yourself from doing on account of the fear of failure, or rejection. Weigh that up against your ambitions.

Think about your work ethic. We’re reclaiming failure as an act of progress. An act of learning. Something to celebrate. People have short memories like that. Short enough to forget what happened even two generations ago. Scared to acknowledge that we’ve made some bad calls and we’re likely to again. Pushed the wrong buttons. Forgot to carry the one. Take a look around, I see class wars between educated critics and reality television life gurus. I see bronzed Californians preaching inaction through tightly edited frames. I see Americanized satire falling short from its killer blow. It’s not enough.

Me n Roy got into show business young. To be the best. To have the truest sounding words. The kind of words that confess and redeem in the same breath. True things of beauty; ugly and naked just lingering there to be heard. We play with words. Turn em inside out. That’s some good song writing. You wanna get online and check out the impact we’ve had in Australia that’s your call. We’ve played on the country’s biggest stages, hell, the first time I ever sang in public was to a sold out Sydney Opera House. That’s if you don’t count Karaoke, which I am also very good at. My song is Billy Idol’s ‘White Wedding.’

I was trained by 85-year-old Jewish Entertainer Steve Ostrow. Look him up, Steve is a sexual revolutionist, he founded the Continental baths in Manhattan in 1968. A confident, bisexual and classically trained opera singer, Steve had me focused on vocal delivery, “let them hear the lyrics, that’s your only job.” Steve took me into another dimension. Here was a guy, operating at a time when bigotry was a matter of societal standard, and he had the vision to use words and entertainment to bolster the strength of his community.

I’ll be frank — some of my stories got some low themes and some low tragic figures. Not tragic figures like Hamlet (I ain’t no Willy Shakespeare), but modern tragics. I got sex addicts, internet addicts, love tragics. I got villains, cheats, violent guys flooded with hormones and false bravado. They’re all in there. Good stories need em. Need villains. Some of these characters do and say things that I never would. Shameful things. But that’s what villains do. And so we present to you tales of failure and self destruction. The ever-flowing undercurrent of sadness. This is focused story telling. It’s Phone-Noire. It’s a collection of four-minute stories written to provide you with insight into the inner workings of failed ambitions.”