MICHAEL Winslow can’t help but make mischief.
Whether mimicking the flight attendant call button on planes or fobbing off telephone sales calls by turning into a kitten, his collection of more than 10,000 sounds is a bottomless bag of tricks into which he can dip.
A household name through his starring role in the Police Academy films, cartoon and TV series, the 64-year-old is looking forward to his Australian visit, performing a night of sound-fuelled standup in Yarraville.
He hopes to have enough time to track down his avian doppelganger, the lyrebird.
“I think I like the sound of these lyrebirds. I’m going to teach them to beat-box.”
Speaking from his San Francisco home, Winslow floats seamlessly from kitten to old-school telephone, an ocean breeze to electric typewriter, tossing in an admirable deadpan “G’day mate”.
He discovered his elastic vocal talents while still young, turning down the sound as Westerns came on television and creating all the dialogue and effects, from gunslinger drawls to rattlesnakes.
“You get to a point where there are all these horses and you’re doing the horses and then they ride through the water; it can get quite out of hand,” he says.
“I don’t know how or why this happened. I was never really conscious about it. It has just been something I have done since I was a kid. It’s a great amount of fun – the thing now is to try to use it for good rather than evil.”
Winslow concedes this is easier said than done. While his vocal talents seem unusual, he believes we all have a lot more potential for producing sounds than we realise.
“We all have this great skill to make all sorts of sounds, and if you hear kids they are often mimicking what they hear, but as we grow older a lot of people simply don’t use it.”
It’s never too late for old dogs to learn new tricks, he insists. Whereas some people travel for new sights or tastes, Winslow finds he is drawn to places to collect new sounds.
The music fan has kept up with new styles and can effortlessly recreate the sounds of today’s charts, but keeps a place in his heart for the classics.
“The tour will be like a highlights package – I’ve got a lot of new stuff. But there will be a lot of music and I hope all the Led Zeppelin fans get along.”
Michael Winslow – The Man With 10,000 Voices is at the Yarraville Club this Friday night.
Winslow will be supported by Lawrence Mooney and MC Matthew Hardy.
Tickets: yarravillelive.com or 9689 6033.
