Lip-synchronicity

Never Surrender fake the worst songs in history
to create the best show in town

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

There was recently an ugly, spittle-flecked catfight between Sir Elton John and Lady Madonna Ciccone, where he'd accused her of lip-syncing at her shows. In his opinion, no decent entertainer would stoop to that.

Newsflash, Elton: lip-syncers can entertain - and how! If you caught Never Surrender's Greatest Adventure at last summer's Fringe Festival, you'll likely agree that it was a highlight of the fest. The rock showmanship of Van Halen meets the precision fakery of Milli Vanilli meets the narrative complexity of Scooby-Doo, all for a mere six bucks!

Never Surrender, the self-described "greatest lip-sync band in the world," are Mike Patterson, Tim Rabnett and Ryan Wilner, a trio of Montreal stand-up comics with bonus TV résumés (Wilner was the heartthrob Roger on YTV's Radio Active, Patterson is Mr. Gross on YTV's Edible Incredibles, Rabnett has had his own CTV special). For the theatrical Greatest Adventure, in which even dialogue is lip-synced, they're assisted by their fourth Beatle Scott Faulconbridge, also a comic, who's headlined Vegas.

What began as a goof-off at ComedyWorks' Monday-night open mic evolved into a Just For Laughs spot tackling Montreal klassix (April Wine and of course Corey Hart). But they realized that the '80s had so much more crappy FM pop to offer - Laura Brannigan, Journey, that bombastic Bowie/Mercury duet - and Never Surrender, the concept, had so many more laffs and hijinx to give.

With a spot at the upcoming Montreal GBLT International Theatre Festival, Wilner and Patterson met for a late breakfast with the Mirror and chatted - in their real voices.

Mirror: So when did you make the quantum evolutionary leap from doing just the songs, lip-sync karaoke, to a theatrical thing with characters, storyline and so on?

Mike Paterson: One day I called Ryan and said, "We should do the Fringe," and he's like, "Yeah, I'm there!" So I called the Fringe and they said, "Drop in your application - the deadline is today." I'm like, "Holy crap!"

Ryan Wilner: We didn't feel we could do an hour of just music. We wanted to do something a bit more special, that would really keep people going - to push ourselves.

MP: At first we were toying with the idea of taking nothing but movie clips and making that into the play. But that would have taken like, five years.

M: So you just made up Never Surrender's Greatest Adventure -

MP: We said there had to be a ghost in it.

M: - by the end of the day?

MP: No, we had eight months.

M: So how much did you give them in the application?

MP: We said we're a lip-sync band, we'll be the biggest thing you'll ever see and we'll totally rock your festival - which we did.

RW: It was definitely a 15-dollar show. I wanted it to be worth more than people paid for it, and that was easily a 15-dollar show.

M: It's a solid, self-contained idea - the lip-sync band. But when you start fooling with that idea, you see where it could go. Give me a bit of the creative evolution of Never Surrender's Greatest Adventure.

MP: Ryan's working at the office - he doesn't understand what it's like to sit at home all day and just drink - so Tim and I talked about it a lot, then we'd go to Ryan and he'd come back with gags. We knew there needed to be a ghost -

M: Not a ghost, a g-g-g-ghost.

MP: Yeah! And there had to be a reveal. The idea was, any plot we made had to have holes, so that you're able to follow along until the plot takes you somewhere else and you realize there's no plot at all.

RW: These guys came to me with a script that I was blown away with, this Scooby-Doo-type adventure that really worked well with our lip-syncing. Something that moved really fast - entertainment, entertainment, entertainment.

Bar mitzvahs, bikinis and a glowing
Japanese seal

M: What's up with Never Surrender Bikini Squad?

MP: It's not a T&A thing, it's about how hot your heart is and what kind of superpowers women have. And some of the Bikini Squad members are men! It's just this idea that you're out there doing something positive, as opposed to negative, with your life.

M: Bikinis are positive.

MP: Oh, yeah! The Bikini Squad can do anything! Say you haven't done your taxes -

RW: You get your own Surrender Sense.

MP: That's the superpower you have, so you're super good at doing taxes.

RW: One girl's really good at recovering lighters.

MP: One girl can make a tray of delicious 7-Up appear - on call. My Surrender Sense is, I can make a Japanese seal made of light named Okotikamo come out. Tim's is, he can talk to me through mind-meld. He did that in the play.

RW: The thing about the Bikini Squad is, we wanted to make it PG. Because we see this as good fun for everybody. Of course adults appreciate the music a bit more, but we screened our DVD in front of kids and they just loved it because it's fun and wacky. We want the audience to feel like they're kids again.

MP: We said the F-word twice in Never Surrender's Greatest Adventure, and we gotta edit that out - and maybe the gay undertones.

M: Ah, yeah, I wanted to get to that, the diversity of potential crowds you could play to. You're playing the GLBT Theatre Festival in November, and you've already played CFCF's Telethon of the Stars, the Fringe and, very prominently announced on your Web site, Jason Katz's bar mitzvah.

MP: He's in the Bikini Squad now. He became a man, and became a Bikini Squad member immediately after becoming a man. But yeah, there's a lot of people who enjoy it.

RW: The gay crowd has a big history of lip-syncing, which we didn't actually know about.

MP: I was talking to that guy Brent, the drag piper, and he's like, "Yeah, we do this all the time. I do all kinds of lip-syncing." So there's the suit-and-tie events, the big gay market, young girls - I'm sure they, uh, love it a lot - and uh, guys. Usually, after a show, Ryan is surrounded by young girls and I'm surrounded by fat men. I get the "Dude, dude, that was so cool - I'm so wasted!"

RW: We could actually demolish the gay crowds. I think we're going to have an absolute blast at this festival.

Making a spectacle of themselves

M: I gotta salute you guys, you're soldiers because I'd guess you have to sit there and listen to Corey Hart and Journey and so on over and over and over and over and over. I'd guess that at a certain point, you either go completely mad or start to realize, hey, there's something kinda good in this song.

MP: There's definitely a formula. Ryan picks a lot of the songs, and when he picked Michael Bolton's "How Can We Be Lovers?" I was like, "No way, I'm not gonna do it." But I really love that song now.

RW: There are certain things that we look for in music that would be good for Never Surrender. Of course it has to have that eclectic '80s thing going on, but in the end it's a comedic thing and we gotta have those punches. A lot of these songs get applause and laughter right as they start - "Aw, that song!" - but that's not good enough. We need them to be able to enjoy the next two minutes of the song.

MP: The jumpkicking is also very important. We're all about jumpkicks. There are a lot of bands out there who might be better than we are musically, but they just don't kick enough.

RW: For research, I brought Tim to an Aerosmith concert, so he could see that Perry dude in action. He would split his legs and bend back, and he had his shirt off of course, and he's playing his guitar like he literally has his penis in it, and the girls are going apeshit - and that's where I envision Never Surrender going. I see it as Broadway. Back to the Fringe, I wanted it to have a Broadway feel. Obviously it's a low-budget thing, but I wanted it to have an element of show, of Broadway appeal. A big, big show. The ultimate Never Surrender show would have fireworks, lights, smoke -

M: Confetti cannons!

RW: Nuts! It would be nuts! And it's gonna happen. It will.

At Station C on Saturday, Nov. 6, 10:15 p.m., $18

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