As a child, Adam Ouston would drift off into strange reveries, or “moods” as his parents called them. He’d run a bath, rig up his little blue boom box, press play on his tape of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and listen to it on repeat, submerged, entranced by the music, the story, the theatrics, and the eerie voice-over of horror film star Vincent Price … Darkness falls across the land/The midnight hour is close at hand …
“It’s camp you know,” Ouston says cheerfully when we meet at a popular North Hobart cafe. “And I’ve always really gravitated towards camp as a punk movement, if you like. I think there is a really strong element of rebellion and an expression of dissatisfaction through camp and high fashion in the everyday that has just as much potency as punk.”
Adam Ouston, aka Costume: ”I’ve always really gravitated towards camp as a punk movement.”
Ouston, 41, is a halo of levity among the cafe’s more quietly dressed patrons. His shirt is candy-striped pink and white. His tan leather shoes pop with neon-pink laces. His horse-motif socks are a clash of orange and violet. The outfit is tame compared to the ensembles he wears as his alter ego, Costume, a deep-voiced, electro-pop crooner whom one critic described as a mix of German counter-tenor Klaus Nomi, Marilyn Manson, and Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner. I see shades of Robert Smith, Boy George, Morrissey, and the Human League’s Phil Oakey too, an '80s melange funnelled into a style that is Ouston’s own.
“I often say to people, 'there’s a reason the '80s have stuck around and '90s grunge has not',” Ouston says.
In Hobart, where the weather can dictate a practical approach, he stands out just a little with his bold choices, especially as he’s 195cm tall. But then, Hobart has bred its share of eccentrics. A stylistic bowerbird, Ouston also gleaned from the visual treasure chests of film director F. W. Murnau, photographer Serge Lutens, and designer Alexander McQueen before unleashing Costume on to the public stage at Hobart’s winter festival Dark Mofo last year. On the strength of that debut, he launches a national tour next week, accompanied by violinist Natalya Bing, who performed with him at Dark Mofo. Expect extravagant costume changes as they present new work as well as songs from Ouston’s alternately haunting and thumpingly danceable debut album, Pan, which was the first to be commissioned by Dark Mofo.
If you missed him at last year’s festival, the music videos on his website – costyoume.co – will give you an idea. Shot in Iceland and Tasmania, they show Ouston’s taste for the weirdly flamboyant. In one he’s a green creature with a glittering spine, scrambling along the windswept bluffs of Hope Beach, on the South Arm near Hobart. In another, he plays twin roles: a dandy in a fedora, posturing in a flowing pink cape and knee-high boots of pink lacquer who is lured into a spooky mansion by a panda-eyed and pale-faced enchanter.
Fellow Hobartian, author Robert Dessaix, appears in two of the videos, Bang Bang and Feeling, looking devilishly striking. Ouston wrote his PhD on Dessaix’s travel writing, and his honours thesis on Marcel Proust. He jokes that he has a thing for gay literature. Ouston is married, not gay, and has never been able to fit the straight male mould. Glamour is his creative form of dissent, a means of resisting gender norms and exploring masculinity beyond its stifling stereotypes.
“I want to wear make-up and I want to dress flamboyantly,” he says, “but I want it to be an expression of maleness. I don’t want to be trying to pass as a woman. I don’t want to be pretending to be anything I’m not.”
The idea for Costume had been brewing for some time, but it took a chance meeting with Dark Mofo creative director Leigh Carmichael for the character to fully emerge. Ouston was working at Fuller’s Bookshop in Hobart when Carmichael walked in.
“I bailed him up in the classics section, and not to pitch him this idea I had or anything like that,” Ouston says. “In going to Dark Mofos … I had seen that they obviously knew some pretty wonderful costume designers, and so all I wanted was if he could put me in touch with one of them, because I knew the look I wanted, I just wanted someone to collaborate with … and he said, ‘oh yeah, tell me more’.”
Carmichael recommended a costume designer, Michelle Boyde, and asked Ouston to send him a formal pitch.
“He said, ‘I think we can help you out’. And I said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know we were having that conversation’.”
”I want to wear make-up and I want to dress flamboyantly, but I want it to be an expression of maleness,” says Adam Ouston, pictured in a costume designed by Michelle Boyde. Credit:Chris Clinton
Within 18 months, Costume hit the stage at Hobart’s Odeon Theatre to a packed house. The gig coincided with the release of Pan, which Ouston had recorded at Reykjavik’s famed Greenhouse Studios, where the likes of Bjork, Sigur Ros, Kanye West, and Anohni (formerly known as Antony, lead singer of Antony and the Johnsons) have produced albums. Ouston had set his sights on the studio as every time he discovered a sound he loved, it would inevitably lead back to Greenhouse.
“What I really liked about it was they took really weird and clearly digitally manufactured sounds and made them sound organic,” he says.
Pan was written and composed on a small island on one side of the world and recorded on another on the opposite side.
”I spent a lot of time by myself, in nature,” says Adam Ouston.Credit:Adam de Ville
“Being in a small community, on a small island, with a similar population, there are glaring similarities,” Ouston says, “a sense of ownership, of what it means to be Icelandic, what it means to be Tasmanian, which can be parochial, but can also be defining.”
Ouston’s not originally from Hobart. He moved down from Brisbane almost 20 years ago, when most young Tasmanians were bolting for the mainland. These days, the traffic is in the opposite direction. Growing up in Brisbane, he was temperamentally unsuited to the sporty, outdoors lifestyle, and the machismo of his Catholic boys’ school in Ipswich. He was a curious child, with eclectic musical taste. His mother introduced him to Kate Bush, Peter Allen and Barbra Streisand, which he relished as much as Michael Jackson, with a particular fondness for Streisand’s Yentl soundtrack and her Barry Gibb collaboration, Guilty. And what’s not to like? When Ouston was 14, the family moved to a farm in Ripley, near Ipswich, which helped him cope with the challenges of school.
“I spent a lot of time by myself, in nature, and I just cultivated an internal life at that important time. I did my best to fit in at school when I had to, and then I got to go home and go back into the world that was more real to me.”
When his parents moved to Hobart, Ouston stayed put in Brisbane, and found himself increasingly isolated. Alone and without the support of family or friends, he began to suffer anxiety and panic attacks.
“I never experienced anything like it before,” he says, “so it made me question everything.”
One Christmas, he visited his parents and sister in Hobart and found, at last, an environment where he felt inspired and at peace.
“I just thought, 'what a beautiful place',” he says. “There was an atmosphere and a gentleness that I just needed. You know how things come to you at the right time, like books and music, and I think places are works of art in themselves, and they seek you out, and they present themselves to you. I met a few people down here, and these were people who wrote, and wrote songs, and went for walks in the wilderness, and I thought, 'these are my people'. And then I was like, 'Oh, this is what people mean by home’.”
He can’t imagine living anywhere else.
Performing to an audience without the imprimatur of Dark Mofo is taking Costume to the next level, but Ouston isn’t concerned about how he’ll be received on the mainland.
“I’m still taking that attitude of, it is what it is. I really enjoy doing it and I hope that joy comes across and people can leave their everyday lives at the door and just have fun with us, or just be taken out of themselves for a while. That’s the idea of any art, to take you out of yourself, or to take you down further into yourself, and release you from the gravity of the everyday.”
Costume’s Dream Palace Tour is at The Toff, Melbourne, on Sunday, March 1, and the Factory Theatre, Sydney, on Friday, March 27.
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