Declan Fay

Declan Fay is a comedy writer/director/podcaster. He recently co-created and co-wrote the scripted comedy Mockumentary musical podcast, CrossBread with Chris Ryan and Megan Washington. Follow Declan on Twitter here.

How did the idea of CrossBread pop into your brain?
I’ve always liked stories about peculiar insular little worlds, like the show I co-wrote on Comedy Central, Ronny Chieng: International Student, which is all about international students at an Australian University. 

For CrossBread, initially I had an idea about two siblings who were opera singers and suggested it to my friend Chris Ryan who is an opera singer, and he told me he had worked as an opera singer for twenty years and no one is interested in opera singers, in fact one of the quickest ways to get people to walk away from you at a party is to tell them you’re an opera singer. But he liked the idea about two musical siblings, and we started talking about growing up in a christian youth group, and the weird christian youth bands that would play at christian youth camps. The got an idea this group should be hip hop. So in the space of one conversation we got from opera singers to Christian Hip Hop. 

Were people on board with the idea at first? It sounds truly crazy.
Chris and I knew the music would have to be funny, but also great. In that way spinal tap songs are absurd, but also great metal songs. Or how The Lonely Island songs are all great, because we needed the audience to believe that this band could really take off. So we asked Megan Washington who is simply one of the best singer-songwriters in Australia or anywhere, really. And in the first five minutes of meeting her, she told us she had been in a Christian Youth group as a kid, and we all started comparing stories from this very odd part of all our lives, and were immediately laughing and that’s how we all ended up working on it together.

How did you structure the script? I assume it's like writing a movie script, but also very different because you can't rely on visual cues.
The very first draft I wrote like a TV script and our producer Tom Wright (who was John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman’s producer on The Bugle podcast when they first started), read it and said, so you realise that a listening audience can’t hear when camera zooms in, or a listen to a tracking shot. So we had to completely bend our minds to writing it for audio. But then it becomes very freeing because if you’re filming a tv show and need a death metal concert with a crowd of five thousand people, it’s incredibly difficult and expensive, and will also cause your production manager to have a heart attack, but for audio you just put a bunch of reverb on the microphone and then edit in the sound of five thousand people cheering and get in a guy who’s really good at screaming. In that way it was tremendously liberating.

What is podcasting like in Australia? Are fiction shows having a moment?
I feel like we’re in the moment before scripted shows have their moment. Or maybe Crossbread will help open the door for that moment. Right now there’s a lot of podcasts where people just talk into their Mac book (which is not a criticism because I’ve also done that kind of Podcast for over ten years, called the Sweetest Plum), and there’s a lot of True Crime (I had no idea how many crimes had been committed until I saw the iTunes charts), but not a huge amount of properly scripted fiction. I think one reasons is it’s very hard to do a larger scale scripted podcast properly, to write the scripts, to wrangle the right people to be in it, to record it, to produce it, to edit it. Without the help from the ABC, and our producer Tom, it would have been almost impossible. (If someone is reading this and screaming at their screen that they’ve made a great fictional podcast in Australia, I apologise in advance and please send me the link and I’ll post it for you by way of apology.)

What has influenced you in your writing? Other podcasts, TV, film, books?
We’ve always loved music documentaries, and the sheer absurdity of them. At school Chris and I were obsessed with the U2 Rattle and Hum documentary which is basically U2 just visiting different iconic black music sites like recording studios and churches and trying to connect themselves to the history of black music. During one song Bono even says, “Play the blues edge” and The Edge plays the single least blues solo in the history of music. He’s just playing a really high note on his guitar over and over through about five reverb pedals. Later in the film they get BB King to say, “You guys play the blues better than I do.” Then they all get on stage and BB king blows them off the stage. Even when I was 12, I thought something is very wrong with this. Then when we started working on the show, Megan showed us the Bros documentary, After The Screaming Stops, and it is utterly absurd. These two brothers two were the most famous band on the planet thirty years ago, who are trying to get it together for one comeback concert, and it’s kind of the most beautiful, sad, hilarious, most heartfelt things I’ve ever seen. 

What advice would you give to people hoping to start a fiction show? They're tough to sell, I know.
That’s a bloody good question. Tell the story only you can tell. And tell a story that you really want to tell. So even when the screen is blank on your laptop and you can’t think of something funny/dramatic to happen, you’ll keep coming back to it because you want to tell the story. It’s too hard to make something and not love the story you want to tell. Also try to find good people to work with, people that make you laugh and think, and that make you a better writer/performer/person. (That sounds like I’m giving a speech at a Christian youth group now, or a Ted talk.)

How did it feel when all of the episodes were released? When the series was over, I was sad. Were you?
We’d lived with it in our heads for over a year when it came out, so I was quite relieved when it came out. A few days after it was out I realised I’d never actually listened to it like someone would listen to it as a podcast, with headphones on. So I went for a walk and listened to it like a listener and just burst out laughing, because it suddenly existed on it’s own. Then I burst into tears. Just because it was such a long process and it finally existed in the world. (Okay now this really does sound like a speech at a christian youth group). 

What podcasts do you listen to?
Democracy-ish, Pod Save America, Reply All, Wind of Change, I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, Radiolab, Rivals, Dissect, Thought Spiral, Broken Record, Human/Ordinary, 1993 - The Greatest Season That Was.

Women in podcasting are constantly getting criticized for their voices. What is your relationship to yours? How would you describe it?
That’s shit house that women are picked on for their voices. It does feel like there is so much extra scrutiny on women in the media, what they wear, how they sound, what questions they ask, whereas a guy could roll out of bed and fart into a microphone and people think that’s okay. I’m okay with my voice, although it’s quite nasally and I know it annoys people (although a sound guy once told me it cuts through at a certain frequency that can be harsh on the ear), but I’ve often been criticised for my laugh. When I worked at a commercial radio station (the kind of station that plays Foo Fighters, followed by Red Hot Chili Peppers, followed by Foo Fighters) I was always being criticised for my laugh and told me it sounded fake on air, and that it hadn’t tested well with listeners (although they never quite explained exactly how they tested it with listeners, were people just locked in an room and forced to listen to my laugh for hours?). Then I started second guessing my own laugh, and thinking should I laugh here, or should I not laugh, and then I’d tell myself not to worry about it and in the very act of trying not to worry about it, I was worrying about it. Luckily I don’t work at that radio station anymore which is a win for everyone, because they don’t have to hear my laugh and I don’t have to listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.  

Are there any rules you think all podcasters should adhere to when creating a show?
Just make something you love. Take time to find your voice. And enjoy the process of finding your voice. And take time to find the show. And let the show reveal itself to you slowly (God now I sound like a new age therapist giving an astral travel workshop). Scripts are very rarely great straight away, you might write a whole draft and there might be one line that reveals what the show is for you, then go back and rewrite the whole thing based around that line. You can drive yourself a bit mad on structure and format if you think too much about, just start writing and it will gradually take shape. 

Are there too many podcasts?
No. Although it’s kind of annoying when the commercial radio stations throw together highlight packages of bits from their shows and then clutter up apple podcasts. It’s like if there’s a cool party, and then a bunch of rich kids show up making a lot of noise and being dicks, it kind of kills the vibe.  

Thanks, Declan!