Darryn Lyons, with Andrew Law and Ben McCleay

Welcome to No Gods, No Mayors, the podcast where we will talk about every mayor in order eventually.

I am Riley.

I am the mayor of this episode.

I'm, of course, joined by my deputy mayors, Maddie and November.

Hello.

And two visiting adjunct mayors.

It is, of course, Andrew and Ben from Bunta Vista.

Andrew and Ben, how are you doing?

Good.

Say it on three, Ben.

One, two, three.

Good.

Yeah.

We're doing like a sister city like twinning program with a sister podcast of us is Bunta Vista.

Our adjunct mayorship is falling apart.

I'm trying to get a friendship arch built between...

our podcast and the little Australian neighborhood of our podcast.

What a gigantic arch that would have to be.

Raising the Australian flag over City Hall.

I'm coming out wearing the hat with the corks.

No gods, no mayors is the Bunta Vista of podcasting.

That's true.

That is 100% true.

Many people are saying, no, we are coming at you with, look, all of our episodes have been two parters about like the same mayor.

We're doing a bit of a different thing where we're going to do two mayors and two mayors today and then like a fun one in the bonus next week where Andrew and I are going to, you know, we're bringing back a little, a little something that some of you may have remembered from a couple of years ago.

A deep cut.

A deep cut, but with a mayoral, a municipal twist.

Would you say you're cutting to the bone?

I would say we are cutting the municipal budget to the bone.

And by the bone, we are finding

a reboot of something that we used to have a lot of fun doing, but we're not doing breakfast update until then.

That's right.

However, however.

We were saying, like, when I was talking to Andrew and Ben about this, I was like, all right, I think we should do Luke Smith because of Boatwatch, right?

And then also, Darren Lyons is just too fun.

However, and I think, Andrew, you may have expected this.

I started doing the research on Darren Lyons, the former mayor of Geelong.

Is it Geelong?

It is.

It is.

Oh, okay.

So I was thinking Geelong just from the Wikipedia page.

And there was a whole like Jelaine Maxwell situation going on there.

Or I wasn't really unsure about the sequence of sounds I needed to make there.

So thank you for getting that out of the way.

Geelong Maxwell is my newest plane.

That's not bad.

I mean, the cost of doing that as a joke is that you are identifying yourself on your own social media as like a sex trafficker.

But like what happened is I like started delving into Darren and I just couldn't stop.

You saw one photo of Darren Lyon who said, okay.

He's the full hour.

Yeah, he cuts a very striking figure.

Very.

Like, is it better to see what he looks like as a jump scare to the end of this or to prep his show?

Should I look him up right now?

I'll go up now because the listener will have seen him because he's going a picture of his head is going to be the episode on it.

Because I would have had to have edited a trailer out of this.

Okay, so have you all looked up Darren Lyons?

It's Darren with a Y.

Oh, Darren with a Y, Australian style.

This is a man with some interesting abdominal muscles.

He looks like one of Bowser's children from Mario 3 for the Nintendo.

That's what I'm saying.

Yeah.

He's a very pixelated man.

He is a series of shapes.

That's true.

He would go really well.

Like, you know those, you know, those teach you how to draw books where they start you off with a series of geometric shapes?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Easy tutorial on this guy.

I'd struggle with the hair, maybe, when he had the kind of mohawk situation.

Yeah, he looks like Mohawk thing going.

You know, you can like run.

It's like a fun thing you used to do when you were like a teenager is like run something through Google Translate through a bunch of languages and back into English and see what you get.

It's like if you took an English guy and translated him into Australian and and then back into English so many times that you lost the threat.

He's wearing a lot of jackets in these photos that look to have been kind of upholstered onto him.

He's certainly Australia's swaggiest mayor.

That's true.

The swag is bad, to be clear.

I love Australian roadside attractions where you just pull over and it's like, yeah, this is Australia's swaggiest mayor.

And you take a couple of photos.

There's one of him with, there's like a bent over gold statue of a nude woman.

And he's going to get into that statue okay okay then i'll just leave it then wonderful so i'm gonna start this right i'm gonna start at the end right

we're getting formally interesting in our fifth episode yeah like like a mob movie it's like we're all like rise and fall stuff you know it's like barry linden we're mementoing his his rise to power so it's about basically it's this is ultimately about The Geelong boy who was ducks of his school twice.

Was wass?

In Australia, instead of head boy, they call it ducks.

He was what of his where?

They call it ducks instead of head boy.

What's head boy?

That sounds way worse, doesn't it?

If you're the, if you're the best little boy in school, this is normal, then they give you a special badge and a title.

This is.

Sorry, I grew up in a completely non-hierarchical society called the United States of America, and we have things like

head boy?

What's that?

Yeah, head boy, head girl.

Listen,

if you go to school in Britain in the right kind of like public school, you are constantly,

walking around in an outfit designed by an eccentric 15th century paedophile and you're being awarded weird little titles like this.

And I guess some of this has trickled down to Australia.

So thank you, colonialism.

Well, and this guy also chose a series of those outfits for himself going forward through the rest of his life.

15th century Gelene Maxwell.

Yeah.

But what he did, what Darren Lyons managed to do was he tapped into the vein of swag gems running under Geelong.

Yeah, there's been a lot of unethical mining practices about those.

It's like, oh, he's an artisanal swag gem miner.

And then

Gina Reinhardt's new business card.

And so

basically, he discovered the swag gems under Geelong, and he spent his career just trying to become swaggy enough to be able to tap into them and uplift his community.

Unfortunately, due to the same kind of conspiracy that's taking down America's Darren Lyons, the swaggiest mayor of America, that's coming from the top of government and also the press and also everyone else.

And also his own actions.

He is being prevented, a conspiracy of his own actions.

He is being prevented from truly bringing swag to Australia.

And I think that's very sad.

So I'm going to start at the end.

Exte long mayor, Darren Lyons, aka Mr.

Paparazzi,

selling off wild celebrity art collection.

When we say art collection, is this paparazzi related?

Are these photos?

So what it is, is he became famous for being a paparazzo in Britain.

He moved to Britain to become a paparazzo.

We're going to go through that in a little moment in a moment.

Got super, like, got the kind of rich where you don't know if he's rich or just incredibly fucking levered up.

Right.

Like he just has a huge amount of borrowing.

Might have been a bit of both at different times.

I think that's probably right.

And then amassed an art collection that mostly consisted of paintings and sculptures of naked women that he tried to display at every opportunity.

Oh, the good art.

Like the phrase you've just used is what art is.

Art is like sculptures and paintings of nude women.

That's

a good for naked ladies.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, that's what you got to do when you look like rock and roll Ray Winstone.

Just like the fly between Ray Winston and Guy Fieri.

Yeah.

Riley, if we are starting at the end,

can I I read you a little bit from this article from The Age, which is like kind of the

main masthead of Melbourne from this article titled The Rise and Fall of Darren Lyons.

Paparazzo, Entrepreneur, Mayor.

Just the three ages of man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The Sphinx's riddle.

This is at the point where Eric Adams' style, the government has intervened to shut him down.

Swag, too powerful.

So they found him on a rainy day

and where he's coming out to give comment on the fact that the man is coming in to shut him down.

Quote, the man himself, so often full of bluster, looked weathered by the storm.

Somehow somber in purple denim and a light blue suit jacket adorned with daisies.

Immaculate.

Wonderful.

Standing at his home, the one with the crystal chandelier on the veranda, with the massive gilded mirror by the front door, with the white plaster bust of Lions holding two cameras, he admitted this was a dark day for him.

In my extremely, like, my swagged up McMansion in the background, filled with art about how cool I am, being like, I am fucked, I will never recover from this.

Although a polarizing figure, Lions enjoyed considerable popularity in this place.

For every person on the street this week who said the man had, quote, treated the office of mayor with no respect, there were countless others who bellowed his catchphrase, giddy up, from moving cars, and who spoke proudly of his efforts.

There was no acknowledgement of any error or embarrassment or blame on his part.

Indeed, he believes he played no role whatsoever in the downfall of the council.

And he's right, of course.

Yes, how could he possibly be?

They just couldn't, they couldn't approach his swag.

I love that he has a catchphrase.

You so seldom run into a mayoral catchphrase.

He knew how to do it.

You know?

Speaking of swag, Lyons was clearly obsessed with the heraldry of office.

He was smitten with the pageantry and prestige, but never the protocol.

Even his regalia got him into trouble.

Recently, to his own beer festival, he wore a t-shirt with a naked Madonna above the words, gas, grass, or ass, nobody rides for free.

He also got into trouble over his official wardrobe.

He loved the ostentatious ceremonial chains and mayoral robes, blue with a white fur trim, to the point that a new code of conduct had to be created to formalize when and where the garments should be worn and stored.

Please stop wearing your like ermine robe to the driver's.

Did you say mayoral chains?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a thing.

It's like a Commonwealth thing.

Again, very, very British.

In the afterlife, you wear the mayoral chains you forged in life.

I understand.

No, you get like a big, very swaggy necklace with like a coat of arms on it.

Okay, okay.

Speaking of that necklace, Lyons was even injured two years ago while wearing them for a publicity photo.

The black stallion he was riding got spooked and then bolted along the beach whereupon the five kilograms of mayoral chains almost knocked him unconscious.

Dying of blunt force swag trauma is by some margin one of the more auspicious deaths.

Dying very symbolically.

Wouldn't it be so awesome to get killed by like a metaphor?

If that's what took you out, it would be so awesome.

This is like some shit that would happen to like a Roman emperor that Suetonius didn't like.

It's like, yeah, he forged this gigantic metal collar that then like bludgeoned him to death because he was also a shitty horseman.

So

this is who we're dealing with here.

And that's like the second most recent thing about him that Andrew has read.

The most recent news about Darren Lyons is that

he's leaving Australia to never come back.

He is selling off all his property.

He's selling off his like, you know, naked woman art collection.

Just a bunch of like nude bronzes out on the lawn of this place.

I mean, you're not exaggerating so much.

Naked bronzes guy is a really specific type of guy as well.

It's always bronzes for some reason.

So speaking from Italy, Lyons said he was in the process of decluttering his life and appreciated his opportunities after the death, appreciating his opportunities after the deaths of both of his parents.

The Lions collection of 247 pieces will be auctioned September 24th.

Quote, you only have so many walls and so many homes.

I would rather that other people have the opportunity to enjoy what I enjoyed.

So wise.

That's really one of the wisest things I've ever heard is you only have so many walls.

And that's true, you know?

I would rather other people have the opportunity to enjoy what I've enjoyed collecting all my life instead of having pieces in crates or storage.

There are some Mr.

Paparazzi originals, paintings by Lions, of abstract cameras with dollar signs on them,

as well as a throne, the twin of which was purchased by Michael Jackson.

Are they like psychically linked?

Is this a like?

Well, maybe after Michael Jackson died, maybe like he became a kind of his spirit began inhabiting Darren Lyons.

Retreating into my inner sanctum to sit on the Michael Jackson throne and commune with him.

I'm just picturing like that Michael has his in his house.

He's got his in Neverland and Darren's got his in fucking Geelong or wherever.

And like they're they're all fine and everything, except every now and then Lyons is already sitting in his when MJ goes to sit in his and then MJ sits down and goes, ooh, ooh, oh,

oh, I feel really gross all of a sudden.

Oh.

So saying why he won't come back, he says, look at the state of the federal government and the state government.

Australia is in a worse place as I've ever seen it financially and politically, and I do not want to come back.

Now, he doesn't mean, wow, there sure are a lot of wildfires and the climate of xenophobia is very high.

It's more like

the Labor government has been overspending.

Albo is letting in every refugee under the sun.

And we're doing too much woke stuff and not letting an entrepreneur like me make my mark.

That's basically right, right?

What year is this piece from, Riley?

This is from 2024.

Okay.

This is from last month.

Because I would have thought if this was like 12 to 24 months old, that maybe he would have been whinging about dictator Dan Andrews in Victoria.

He does not care for the Victorian government.

I can imagine he doesn't.

He says, I used to chase Michael Jackson and his pet chimp around London, running after him day and night around the club.

Then I bought this throne to feel closer to him in the long run.

I bought a sort of Jeff Coons Cerebro to locate him.

The throne brought back a lot of memories for me.

It was very bling.

It was very me.

And I had it in in the London headquarters of Big Pictures, but now I'm putting it up for sale.

Uh-huh.

How much does he want for this

throne?

I do.

I don't know.

We'd have to ask Gibsons how much it's sold for.

That's a level of research that we're sort of like, you know, not going to do.

Spending.

$7 to $10 million to accidentally do a seance with Michael Jackson.

I'm going to ruin the seance by only asking him, did you have a smaller throne for Bubbles?

Is Bubbles there with you right now?

Can we speak to Bubbles?

So basically, that's like, that's where he is.

And by the way, if you want to know why he's in Italy,

some of the other recent news about Darren Lyons is that he's just sold a lot of UK property, allegedly to pay a tax bill.

I fucking crispened potato snacks.

There's as soon as you said, I've never seen Australia in like a worse financial state.

That is a, that's a getting out ahead of the tax man ass statement, if ever I have heard one.

And if you're doing that, right, there's two places you can go pretty much.

You can go to Russia and hang out with like Stephen Seagull, or you can go to Italy and, or like Hungary, I guess.

Italy has a flat tax for foreigners.

So if you are going to be a tax exile, Italy is a great place to go.

Imagine what kind of suits he'll be buying in Italy.

Just neat Neapolitan tailors just like on their knees renting the process.

Weeping.

Guy who only knows Italians through Italian Americans and is like, well, I like spray-pacing furniture gold and these guys like spray-painting furniture gold.

So

the head.

So basically, that's where he is now.

He's liquidating.

He's running away to Italy.

He's doing the end of

the Dark Knight Risers is what he's doing.

You're going to see Darren Lyons at like a cafe on a piazza and you're going to raise the little espresso cup at him, you know?

Yeah, and his friend from the Liberal Party that like got him into politics is going to be there raising an espresso cup.

Pretending to not see him, yeah.

By the way, for listeners who aren't familiar with Australia, the Liberal Party is Australia's Conservative Party.

Well, yeah, it's upside down down there.

Yeah.

Well, kind of both of them are our Conservative Party.

Our Labour Party is the same as your Labour Party.

In fact, your Labour Party has copied our Labour Party's immigration policies.

It's very cool.

They stole the turning the boats back thing from us.

Nice.

You're welcome.

He sounds so proud.

So basically, Darren Lyons was a paparazzi for most of his life.

It was a famous paparazzi.

He's Mr.

Paparazzi.

Except for when he was

doing war photography in Bosnia.

Wow.

I mean, that doesn't sound like it could be exploitative at all.

Like,

this guy who is other, like, whose only other job has been like in this career that you'd have to be a huge piece of shit to even do, let alone be successful at, is going to like photograph some of the most most vulnerable people in the world.

Cool.

Every single career change of his has fit perfectly into that category.

If you go to darrenlions.com, that's all wise on Darren and Lyons.

If you go to darrenlions.com, there are some photos of his life up the top.

And I have to say, the first photo in this little collage of him in

full like

photographer mode.

Oh, is this the one with the long jacket?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

With a long lens as well.

It's a nice camera, actually.

This is a much nicer look than where he kind of settled over time, you know.

Maybe he could go back to that.

That to the bottom right where he's got like shredded stuff on his head.

Yeah, he started out as a kind of like goth photographer, which,

yeah, I don't know.

It's a better aesthetic, I guess.

I'm seeing the mayoral chain here.

Yeah, there you go, Maddie.

So we're going to get to the mayoral robes and chain.

I want to start with his life.

So Darren Lyons, before he was Mr.

Paparazzi, before he was the mayor of Geelong, before he was on Australia's least popular weight loss program, Excess Baggage.

Oh, my Lord.

Darren Lyons was born in Geelong in 1965 to...

quite, or as he sells it, strict Baptist parents.

This is from a 2004 article in The Age when Australian media takes a closer interest in Darren Lyons, the person, because he's established himself as a celebrity at this point in the UK.

That is a celebrity paparazzo.

So when they, when it started with the BBC, as it so often does, when the BBC wanted to talk about paparazzi stuff, they would get Darren Lyons on and he's super flamboyant and he's good TV.

So they would keep getting him on and keep getting him on until eventually they turned this ridiculous person.

into enough of a celebrity that he could waltz into politic kind of without trying.

I wonder.

wonder.

It's weird how that keeps happening.

I was about to say that's the last time that ever happened in any country.

I feel like a celebrity paparazzo has to be one of the most sold your soul to the devil professions it's possible to have, right?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Just like what I learned about swagginess and business success from like taking upskirt photos of women getting out of cars in front of like Tiger Tiger.

Cool.

So the funny thing is, he had a WordPress site that he maintained for five posts last year that is basically clearly ghostwritten versions of that article.

Incredible.

I mean, listen, let she who remembers to update her WordPress site cast the first stone.

But like.

So he got a job at News of the World of phone hacking fame.

Uh-huh.

After having, after, again, this is all stuff he claims.

This is stuff he says in his autobiography, stuff he says to like friendly reporters interviewing him, that he like dressed flamboyantly and like wished Rupert Murdoch a good morning in the lift and said, I'm here to get a job with your organization.

And then apparently they just gave him the job when he walked in.

God knows what the actual story is there.

That's clearly.

I saw that referenced as like, as a chance, opportune meeting with Rupert Murdoch, right?

And I kept looking for stuff about this, like where, where these things were referencing that from.

And the story seems to be rooted in Lions

had been in London less than a day when he landed a job at News of the World after Rupert Murdoch famously wished him good luck in the lift.

So he's in the elevator and he said, hey, I'm here for a job interview.

And he's like, oh, good luck.

And that's

it.

Sort of suggests the existence of a kind of like Australian cosa nostra there, which I really, I hope isn't the case, you know?

They probably, they called the cozy nosy or something.

Sorry, guys, that was mean.

It was mean to Australia.

That's very undignified, okay?

I'm sorry.

He moved from News of the World to the Daily Mail, where he was sent to Bosnia Bosnia to cover the war.

That's really funny, by the way, to be like, this guy who's only good for paparazzi stuff, where can we get rid of him to?

Send him to fucking Bosnia.

Do you think he was popular in the office when they made that decision?

Yeah, wait, let's send the guy who dresses in all of this like eye-catching sniper fire shots.

Yeah, th there was a betting pool in that office about how quickly he would get hit with an RPG.

How big do you think the lapels on his press vest were?

Let's send the human like hot cherry to Sarajevo.

He says,

but then

he said being mayor of Geelong was an even tougher gig than being a war photographer in Bosnia.

Quote, I went from full metal jacket to full silk jacket.

Incredible.

Doesn't even make any sense.

It's not a jacket you wear.

A fully silk jacketed bullets.

Yeah,

he went to the war wearing a full metal jacket to protect himself

guy who understands the concept of a like a knight and guy who has heard the title full metal jacket

he's gone full ned kelly into bosnia which i mean kind of scants yeah yeah

he's close as the demand for paparazzi style photography grew lions began dabbling in freelance work at weekends again like working but with the context of like news of the world and stuff he's like probably i don't know if he's dabbling yeah and and again, to do this shit, it has to be profoundly unethical, right?

Because you're doing it in a way that is like deeply invasive of people's privacy, but never too much.

Like, there's a reason why all of these guys never got any photos of like Prince Andrew with his arm around a 15-year-old, right?

Yeah.

But still managed to kill Princess Diana.

Well, we're going to get to that.

Oh, yeah.

Did he fucking kill Princess Diana?

So he

andrew might have been going.

Either he or someone from his company were at the scene

of a dying princess Diana, and they

but because he is a paragon of virtue, they remain in his private collection, never to be sold.

Oh, the fucking grizzly man excuse.

Yeah, sure.

Oh, no, it's too terrible.

I can't show you this.

Listen, you must never look at this.

That's my Werner Hurst.

Australian Werner Herzog.

Oh, God, it'd be like a dog hunt of a time if you looked at this.

Sorry, guys.

No, it's beautiful.

I didn't even know it was you speaking.

I thought Shane Werner Herzog was here.

You thought it was Morning Herzeg?

That's right.

Oh, you thought it was Herzo?

Sorry, sorry, I broke.

Stop.

You didn't come on this podcast just

to talk about it.

Just to be abused, yeah.

My culture is not a costume.

Yeah.

shane warner herzog

shane warren endorsed uh darren lyons to be mayor oh they're cut from the same cloth they're the same type of guy same very nice cloth silly burner hero with a why somehow

ben

would um would shane warn read to you r.ip uh would shane warne read to you as a conservative voter i don't think he knew what was happening on outside his own life i think he was completely apolitical.

And a lot of stuff going on, you know?

Yeah, but

they make you vote in Australia.

They put the guns.

Oh, yeah.

I forgot you have to.

They put the gun to your head and they say, fuck and pull the lever.

Shane Warren's just sitting there trying to remember the numbers for ranked choice voting and collapses from panic.

They hold the bunning snag against your temple and they make you go to the polls, right?

That's right.

Well, we kind of have the opposite effect, right?

Where like

when you have non-compulsory voting,

then all the people who aren't interested just don't vote and that entire spectrum is removed.

But over here, you get people who all have to vote, but have absolutely no interest.

So those people will generally take on, like, they just get their political beliefs by osmosis.

They just go, oh, this is who my parents have always voted for.

You know, like, it's, it, yeah, the same way as like the football team you support or the brand of locally produced car you would buy that we used to have.

But yeah, like, I think people would just acquire their who they vote for.

So I don't know if Shane Warren would have been like, I got a lot of money, so I'm voting for the guys who say less taxes.

You know what I mean?

My personal belief is that he would vote for the Liberal Party because he would sort of have the idea in his head that because he earns a lot of money, he would be better looked after under liberal.

But I bet if you asked him point blank of being like, are gay people okay?

Should we help refugees?

He'd be like, oh, yeah, no, yeah, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah we should have because he thinks of him thought of himself as a good person i think in his heart definitely a leftist

so so in 1992 darren lyons in london founds big pictures what goes on to be a sort of very large paparazzi agency with his wife uh with his then wife and he was of course a complete fucking freak to work for.

He said, this is quoted from his autobiography.

I'm a very loving guy, but I can be difficult to work for.

When I visit, the staff have to mentally prepare themselves.

Anyone who hasn't met me has to be given a briefing before I get there and warned not to take anything personally.

Some people don't, just don't get me.

And in fact, sometimes I don't even understand myself.

Yeah, this is the same briefing we give out before you do a podcast with me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is, oh, this carried on into his mayoral time, where later in the autobiography, he says he made council staff so intimidated that they had to be like physically relocated him, relocated away from him to different parts of the building they put motherfuckers in witness protection to just get him away from this

i think if you're saying out loud that you're like giving briefings to all of your staff members about like the kinds of bullshit they can expect from you wouldn't it be more like efficient to just not do that to not be a prick yeah like like i feel like it would be a good cost-cutting measure you wouldn't have to have anybody write the policies you don't have to have the regular rounds of training it's the one slide deck that's just like, this guy is a cunt.

And then you just like show that, you know?

It's Australia.

So you have to say sit cunt or dog cunt so they know what you mean.

Yeah, this guy's a sit cunt brackets negative.

No, no, dog cunt.

He's a dog cunt.

He's a dog cunt, and he comes around here and does dog acts.

So,

for example, so he said, I'm the first to admit that my Razmataz and in-your-face style has not been to everyone's liking.

Your Razmataz too tough.

Your swag too different.

You can't cast your Razmataz as sinister.

He really is our spiritual Eric Adams, isn't he?

Yeah.

Is Razmataz admissible in an employment tribunal?

It's a protected characteristic, having too much Razmataz.

Having someone have to come in and explain how we're quantifying Razmataz for legal purposes.

Eric Adams, expert witness.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

The mayor has too much zippity-doo-dah to be let go at this point.

So, but also, right, as a result of the paparazzi business, right, as I've mentioned earlier, he makes himself a talking head who shows up on the BBC.

You can kind of get on the BBC just by being weird and like answering your phone once they have your number.

It's wild.

And he's obsessed with attention.

Who among us?

This is a period where the BBC is trying to become more like of what they think the people are, but the BBC are very cynical about what people want.

And so they make a four-part documentary about him called Mr.

Paparazzi that cements his fame forever.

Again, thank you, BBC.

I don't think without any of this, I don't think he would have ever had a political career and he wouldn't have been able to do half the shit that he did to people.

So thank you, BBC.

Yeah, they would have left him in Bosnia.

He'd still be there now.

And also, we also know a bunch of stuff about the inner workings of big pictures because he sued his mayoral, because basically when he was running for mayor of Geelong in 2013, his opponents in the race made an ad saying, Darren Lyons is unfit to be mayor.

He will not be a good mayor.

You shouldn't vote for him.

Yeah, I mean, demonstrably true.

He sued for defamation.

I don't know if you can do that.

Did he win?

He absolutely did not win.

Of course he didn't.

People frequently do in Australia.

But basically, the claim he made was, you shouldn't say I'd be a bad mayor while running against me for mayor.

It hurt my feelings.

That's what an election is, I'm pretty certain.

It would be funnier if he won and then after he was married, I had to return the money.

So, um, between two, so the court documents say between 2007, before going to administration and 2012, because the financial crisis just crushed him, Big Pictures was successfully sued by Sienna Miller.

It was investigated by the police several times, such as for its practice of jumping on a car while getting photos of its occupants it was successfully sued by lily allen for harassment successfully sued by hugh grant and elizabeth hurley successfully sued by jk rowling i have some conflicting feelings here like if the most annoying most predatory man in australia wants to car surf on top of jk rowling

i i don't know i don't know how i feel about that I really don't.

It says photographers engaged by big pictures were implicated in the death of Princess Diana.

The plaintiff was also so affected by illegal drugs and alcohol that he was unable to act as CEO of Big Pictures.

Yeah, just kind of like

fucked and like drunk and telling people to go out and like crowbar the sunroof open so you can get a lens in the back of the car.

In or about 2012, the plaintiff resigned as CEO of Big Pictures and Big Pictures went into administration with liquidation and then owing substantial sums to employees and creditors.

I mean, it's like a paparazzi agency.

It doesn't really have any assets, right?

So.

Well, it has its pictures, which an unrelated company believed to be owned by Darren Lyons then bid on and purchase.

Uh-huh.

Okay, sure.

So basically, in suing for defamation, all of that stuff was made public.

Of course, it didn't affect the chances because he's the comedy candidate.

He described himself as the comedy candidate.

And so people were like, oh, Geelong's fucked anyway, right?

Because Geelong is a place where...

It's not like there were good mayors up until Darren Lyons, right?

Well, there's never been a good mayor.

That's kind of the thesis of the podcast we're doing.

But there were a lot of, you might say, gray-suited men who were in, whose main concern, and again, I'll turn to our Australian colleagues here, whose main concern in Geelong was like, damn, this place is fucked.

We should manage its decline.

Yeah,

what's Geelong's vibe?

Like, as someone who's never been?

It's Melbourne's New Jersey.

Okay.

Okay.

So the tomatoes are great?

What are you saying?

Hold on.

I just need to go back to the comedy candidate thing for one second, Riley, and to say,

let's put the responsibility where it lies and read the full quote.

Quote, as I have learned from my time in the UK, every election needs a comedy candidate.

Oh, God.

And also, as I've seen from Tony Abbott's example, the electorate respects a man with great abs.

Jesus, that's great.

That's funny.

That's very funny.

So basic, but more on the campaign later, right?

So this is what it was like in Big Pictures.

He basically comes back to Australia and like after Big Pictures goes to administration.

And this is, again, an article from the Sydney Morning Herald on his entry into Australian politics.

The London-based celebrity photographer is threatening to drive his Lamborghini Diablo into town to help Victorian opposition leader Robert Doyle win the next state election.

A regular on the London party scene, Lyons built a business and a fortune chasing celebrities, but in the process becoming a celebrity of sorts of his own with houses in England, Barbados, Australia, and an entourage of rock stars, Soapy Starlits, and models.

Lyons remains at heart a conservative who cannot quite shake the feeling that Victoria is not thriving under a Labor government.

And this is this guy, Robert Doyle, the Victorian opposition leader at the time, is the one who's like, No, you need to become yourself a politician.

Who's saying, There's no doubt that he's a PR genius, and there's a lot of noise going on at election time.

You need fresh ways of looking at things, striking ways of telling your story, and that's what he's good at, and that's why I want his expertise.

Tongues are wagging in Port Ferry earlier this year when the photographer drove his Lamborghini into the quiet coastal town to visit his former boss, wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, Sorry girls, I only date models.

Mr.

Vinson, editor of the Geelong advertiser for 12 years, has maintained a friendship with Lions despite the geographical distance.

Just like kind of like local news, like most irritating man in state enters town.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Annoying man spotted.

Lions' father, who still lives in Geelong, wishes his workaholic son, yes, workahol, if he's addicted to workahol, would scale back his go-go-go lifestyle.

Sometimes I wish he'd get enough of it and slow down a bit, but it doesn't seem to have happened yet.

So anyway, this is his at this time.

Also, he's no longer a paparazzo.

He has a media career.

He was one of the dragons on Australian Dragon's Den, which was cancelled after one season due to the unpopularity of the dragons.

Oh, so just on the dragon's den thing,

just for your, I think Ben is the only person who will know who I'm talking about here.

But

among the pieces of shit that were like the

rich people on that season of Dragon's Den, the other one who has a linked Wikipedia profile is Serena Russo.

Oh, great.

Fucking awesome.

Yeah, one of the biggest pieces of shit in the country who has become extremely rich through running

job service provider agencies, which basically work in tandem with the government's welfare agencies.

And rather than like...

just give welfare to people instead they have this this intermediary rent-seeking industry mostly just this this one woman more than it is anyone else.

You know, I have a massive amount of respect for Australia after hearing that because every other season of Dragons Dan or Shark Tank or whatever it is, it's only populated by humongous pieces of shit.

But only you were smart enough to throw rocks at them until they went away.

The absolute worst of the cunts.

So

this is, he was on Dragons and

Australia, canceled after one season.

He was a housemate on UK Celebrity Big Brother.

Really pushing the definition of celebrity at this point.

Yeah, well, it's also, and it's hard to tell at this point, right?

Like how much of his wealth is real and how much is not.

But the fact that after the great financial crisis, he lost all his polo horses, his Kensington house, his yacht.

But he's like, oh, I bought the yacht to better get pictures of celebrities on other yachts.

So he was a yacht chasing paparazzo with his own paparazzi yacht.

Can I just pause on Big Brother for a second?

Yes, of course.

So this was, I believe this was the first time that people ever saw his

his whole fake abs situation unveiled, right?

His eight pack.

He got it, but then kept it on lock for a while?

Like he was just like walking around the house knowing that he had it.

Waiting for the like soft reveal.

Ben, I saw an article from this year.

He still got it.

Wow.

I mean, that's commitment, you know?

And you can't get those things out.

Yeah, and he's like, and I have to keep going in and getting maintenance done.

This is from

the Daily Mail, right?

It goes so high.

So, yeah, Ben, this article is from July of this year.

The entrepreneur gained notoriety in the UK after revealing a set of perfectly chiseled and completely fake abdominal muscles while appearing on Celebrity Big Brother.

Lions58 confirmed the Silicon 6 pack was still present and correct as he stripped off his shirt for an Instagram video in July.

This is our favorite type of Daily Mail article.

Somebody did a post online.

So

when he got it out on the show, the then pink-haired housemate confided in co-star Paddy Doherty and bared his torso in the bedroom to reveal the transformation.

Talking about the procedure, Lyons said, I had contouring done to my body.

I had to get really fit and lose a fair bit of weight.

You know how he looks super fit in those pictures?

Contouring, like an ordnance survey map.

He continues to describe it by saying, It takes away all the fat around it and actually lets your natural abs be there.

Basically, it's the male version of a boob job.

And that's not how a boob job works.

Reveals the boobs beneath.

A boob job is not made by chiseling away more teeth.

Also, the other thing is, like, we know that's not true because in 2018,

he says to an article in Daily Mail Australia, quote, my problem is that all the fat keeps pushing the abs out.

I'm looking more like a ninja turtle these days than a ripped Spartan specimen.

Ninja Turtle, very similar to Bowser's child.

Yeah, I will say, yeah, like it's just, I think so much of the Bowser's child thing for me is his sort of carapace.

Like, it's, it's, you know, he's like clearly like gained some weight since he got them put in, and they're so clearly sitting at the top of his, over his stomach.

Those are not his abs.

No, no, no, not at all.

This man is not being contoured.

Just got him slapped in there.

Yeah, he's got a sheet of plastic.

He's got like an ice cube tray under his skin.

Yeah, he has paid the maintenance on that until 2024.

God bless him.

I don't know if you guys have ever seen photos of,

oh, shit, what's his first name?

He's the other big hot dog eating champion, Kobayashi.

Joey Chestnut.

No, not Joey Chestnut.

The other one.

Kobayashi.

There's a third one?

Kobayashi.

Oh, you're saying what's Kobayashi's first name?

Takuru Kobayashi, the godfather of compassive eating.

So when he's popped his shirt off after he has a full stomach, because he's like insanely ripped, but he has a giant fucking belly because it's full of goddamn hot dogs he has this body type he has the fake abs body type it looks insane he's got the carapace the body type you can only get by competitively eating hot dogs yeah just google big belly kobayashi go to deviant art see what comes up yeah okay i don't respect myself uh

i can't believe

oh no oh no don't google that do not google that doesn't really relate to the uh the guy that you're talking about us all so i'm gonna bring us back i'm bringing us back so i'm gone actually i'm

i i wish i wish i wish you could to be honest i'm i'm feeling troubled here me november on a sort of oubliette of of

the the woman from dragon mate

okay come on and he was his last foray into being a tv star uh was he was the first and One of the only contestants on the Australian weight loss reality show XS Package.

Nobody watched it.

And it was moved to a digital channel before the first season was even over.

And when quizzed on why it failed, focus groups overwhelmingly said they hated the contestants.

That's a pretty.

Next to Lions was Kevin Federline,

the former host of the show The Biggest Loser from the Six.

That's grim to be.

Kevin Federline, like Britney Spears' five-minute husband?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Like to be an American in Australia doing a weight loss reality show is some real like that's the same shit that happened to Lydia Tarr.

AFL champion Robert DiPiedromenico, singer Christine Anu, actor Gabby Milgate and Darren Lyons.

Uh-huh.

He was in the Big Brother house with Jedwood, by the way.

Oh, that's a fun picture to see them interacting.

Those three haircuts.

Jedwood and

John Burkow's wife, Sally Burkow.

I don't, I looked this up.

I don't.

Baffling.

Baffling.

Wow.

So this is all of, this is his world, right?

It's, it's, it's all this like celebrity reality TV nonsense until like he's sort of shepherded into politics by this guy, right, who he sort of consults for.

After excess baggage is done, he's like, okay, that's it.

I'm not going to do reality TV anymore.

So

were you saying he's shepherded in by Robert Doyle or by the guy from the Geelong advertiser?

Robert Doyle, it seems.

Okay, because just to bolster what you were saying, Maddie, about the podcast's thesis, the opening sentence of Robert Doyle's Wikipedia page is, Robert Bennett Doyle is an Australian politician who was the 103rd Lord Mayor of Australia, elected on the 30th of November 2008, until he resigned February 2018 amidst allegations of sexual harassment.

Every mayor.

Every mayor.

He looks like a kind of melting ham.

Like, also, Darren Lyons at this point is ruthlessly unpopular.

He's not liked, right?

His, like, anything he does at this point sort of flops, and he's not like a real celebrity.

So, how he, so, how he gets elected is that the city of Geelong is like it's a small city of 180,000 people.

Uh, it used to be a like

manufacturing center, and then it just gets like abandoned.

All the companies it is Trenton, New Jersey.

Okay, sure.

Effectively, Geelong makes the world takes world takes, yeah.

Yeah, like that's it's again, it's is turning to our Australian friends here.

Is that basically right?

Like it's a place that is in decline from economic neglect, and its previous local administrations were just like, well, I guess we'll cut the budget again.

And you can get a really good chicken parmesan there.

I know fuck all about Geelong.

That's too far south.

for my blood.

I don't know anything about what's happening down there.

Yeah, my main conception of it is, and the reason I said, you know, New Jersey of Melbourne, is that,

yeah, Melbourne's got Geelong, which is kind of the second biggest city in the state that's an hour out from the city kind of thing, in the same way that Sydney's got like Wollongong.

Is that where I'm thinking of, Ben?

Yeah, I think so.

Sydney's got Wollongong.

It's like an hour, you know, an hour away, next biggest city in the state.

It's a Mario and Luigi situation.

Yeah.

Because you're a Philadelphia.

Sure.

I'm learning a couple of things about Geelong from the Wikipedia page.

My body as a machine that turns Wikipedia articles into podcasts.

First of all, the real thing about this that I like is that Geelong as a name means land, which is what a beautiful, profound thing to be like, yeah, it's the city by the land.

That's where the stuff is.

That's like, that's like Canada is just the village.

Yeah.

Right.

Which is the same thing.

It's like, you know, European like colonialists being like, all right, what do you call this place?

They're like, I don't know, the village.

And they're like, okay, the village.

Inhabitants of Geelong were often called geelongites or pivotonians deriving from the city's nickname of the pivot what

the pivot of what uh referencing the city's role as a shipping and rail hub so basically when after he was a mayor reuters visited his visited his home said where lyons said he believes his punch shop for flair is just what the city needed quote and pivotonians go nuts with that shit it's going to pivot if you want at the end of the day if you want to sell wilson tennis balls who would you want to have doing it roger Federer.

If you want to sell a restaurant, you want Gordon Ramsey.

I see the mayor's role as a marketing tool, and the people of Geelong mostly love it as a marketing tool.

And that's like what he did, right?

He ran a campaign that was like basic, like was like him just doing like stunts, essentially, like flying planes with banners over the city, stuff like this.

Business interests really didn't want him to be elected because they were like, this guy is going to fuck up the good situation that we have because he's too stupid to be mayor.

And they were right.

You know, shout out to Shadowy Cabal of Business Interests.

They were not libeling him.

For example, fruit and vegetable tycoon Frank Costa, who is also the president of the Aussie Rules Football Club that is as synonymous with Geelong as the Yankees are with New York.

This is some Reuters, hinted that if the wrong candidate won, the state government might step in, sack the council, and place it into administration, and that he would not be voting for Terrett Lyon.

I love this, the idea of like a grocery tycoon being willing to do like an auto golpe, you know?

Yeah.

So he beats the incumbent incumbent ken jarvis uh who again is like someone who's managing the decline of geelong largely gray suitman yeah great

john normalton yeah john normalton because he's he's you know he's like because yeah it's it's ken jarvis is like revote for me i will responsibly manage the decline of this place versus darren lyons is like who wants to have fun who wants to fall off of a horse with me right riley did you um did you find his much maligned campaign video uh oh do you mean um the one where he portrays everyone everyone living in geelong as zombies and he rides in on a horse and then uh saves them all as a wizard yeah he like blu blasts a staff into the ground like gandalf and turns geelong into like a fun happening place he it's a beer commercial basically he does like a sexist 90s beer commercial for geelong he turns everybody in geelong into a mailbox which would 100 win you votes like just to be clear everybody's voting for a beer commercial you know so uh how was he as mayor though this is from an academic paper I read on Darren Lyons being weird as a mayor.

Yeah, from the Institute of Advanced Mayor Studies, with which we're doing academic collaboration.

We operate

by a grant from them.

In his first seven months, Lyons claimed $9,000 Australian dollars worth of expenses for stays in hotels, accessories for his electronic devices.

fountain pen refills and chauffeur-driven cars.

Listen, that's serious business.

He was cooking with that one.

Accessories for his...

Was was he buying like phone cases?

Yeah.

Yeah.

This would have been like, what year was this?

2013, 14.

So plausibly still the kind of like belt holster for your flip phone years.

Yeah.

Like, or like a sort of black, like a bandolier for a blackberry.

If any man on earth has ever owned a kind of cross-draw shoulder holster for his phone, like a 70s detective.

I believe it would be this man.

So this is also what he does is he

a recreates the historical crest of geelong which contains now two lions on it and begins pumping out mayor branded gear he never takes off the ceremonial robes as you mentioned earlier andrew atelier mayor fantastic and he always wore the five kilogram gold chain and medallion the new crest for the city he billed rate payers for his mayor darren lyons signature stamp special engraving for the mayoral pen, and designed a range of mayoral merchandise, including dressing gowns, towels, luggage, shirts, caps, vests, flags, banners, and stationery.

There was even a mayoral lollipop.

I would love to own any item of this.

Mayoral lollipop.

If you're a Pivotonian, we need Darren Lyon swag.

What shape was the lollipop?

It was a normal lollipop.

I looked into this.

It was a normal lollipop with his face on it.

That's not normal.

On the rapper or on the lollipop?

On the lollipop itself.

Also,

he tried to be photographed as a celebrity throughout the mayoral term, including one controversial image of him wearing full mayoral regalia laying at the feet of his much younger fiancée, who was clad only in pages of the Geelong advertiser in Kling Film.

I have just found this image by pure serendipity, and I'm going to throw it into the Twister group chat right now because it's really quite something.

Oh,

my lord.

This is such a bummer to look at.

The thing that they made him do as a result of this this is my favorite thing.

They locked his robes in City Hall and they made him sign them in and out like a cop's gun.

What are you going to use them for?

Oh my God.

I can't believe I'm going to get a negligent robe discharge right now for this.

The CEO of the council had to write to the other councillors to say that the mayoral chain was transferred out of City Hall to a locked safe in his office so that, like, uh Darren had to go through him to get his chain.

What's the fucking point of being the mayor if you can't wear the robe and chain all the time?

Like he's clearly not a good guy, but this is he's not

fucking dweebs about this.

Yeah, yeah.

He wears the crown every day, right?

I assume.

Yes.

Please let me read you this paragraph.

Oh, guys, go ahead.

I don't know if you, if you missed this writing, this is immediately after he gets injured by the chain falling off a horse.

The mayor's ropes have also been chewed on by a dingo.

No, we need Australians to say that.

I swear to God, that's what it says.

A dingo.

A dingo chewed

his ropes.

Maybe that's when he wanted to be like, oh, I've lost.

I signed the robes out.

I'm afraid I've lost them.

They were eaten by a dingo.

And then he gets to be like, guess I won't be signing the ropes back

off the horse because the dingos were chasing him.

off by the rope.

Where the fuck would he be where there were also dingos?

There are very few places in the country you could go.

Hey, sorry.

The last Tasman tiger ate my robe.

I don't know what happened to it.

However, his critics after he became mayor quickly switched their views with businessman Frank Costa, who is behind the campaign against Lions, saying, actually, Lions is doing a great job.

He's getting publicity for Geelong and putting it it on the map.

He's like one of those Never Trumper guys.

Actually, he's pretty good now that he's in power.

Yeah.

Give Darren Lyons a chance.

For citing Lyons' nearly million Twitter followers who receive daily updates on the doings of Geelong.

None of them, of course, were fake.

So front pages around the world greeted news of his electoral success.

Geelong no longer views itself as a dying manufacturing city.

It's being rebranded as a 21st-century smart city.

Now there are free parking signs painted in pink and yellow in the city center on weekends, and flowers being placed in planter boxes.

Lyon says, We're engaging with the youth and the elderly, people actually getting an answer on social media.

The amount of requests we're getting is unprecedented.

We're focusing on Geelong for the next century.

And there's no doubt it's going to be a rocky 18 months, but we have to be a smart city.

I want a central park, a place for kids to play while their mothers go shopping.

Yeah, it was impressive that he was able to say all of this while like sort of batting a large bird away from his robes.

The Yara Street Pier is absolutely key to getting cruise ships in.

You have a 50-year-old plan for jobs and growth.

The only way I can leverage possibly 1,500 jobs lost at Alcoa, Shell, and Ford is an easy transfer for that kind of worker into hospitality and services.

Does he do any of this?

Of course not.

Are there any,

do cruises go to Melbourne?

Okay, that's another thing we're going to have to talk about is his whole thing for getting cruise ships to stop at the pier because that's another crazy wacky scheme.

But what I tried and tried and tried and tried tried to find: did Darren Lyons actually do anything as mayor of Geelong?

Like Rob Ford did some stuff as mayor of Toronto.

It was bad stuff what he did, but he did do things.

Even Barris did like two things.

It appears to me that there is either he did not do anything major, or there's just no documentation of it that anything that Darren Lyons did other than just trying to constantly generate publicity for Geelong by doing crazy stuff.

Yeah.

Even Rudy Giuliani gave all those Wall Street guys a new kind of cancer.

Right.

So at the start of 2014, Lyons admitted, okay, the city's being hit by a tsunami of job losses because like these companies are closing down and moving jobs away.

It's one of the worst kinds of tsunami apart from the other one.

The city was in debt, facing budget cuts, and unemployment had seriously spiked.

What he only seems to have done, though, is just hired friends from the Liberal Party into like special commissioner for special situations like positions locally.

He did swear at a lot of his staff, though, which is memorably described here in a Daily Mail article, which quotes him as saying, fuck me, I'm the mayor.

I don't need to be meeting

with someone.

There's that.

There's the, I'm the, fuck me, I'm the mayor.

There's the.

Wait, can we just clarify?

Just, are we saying, fuck me, I'm the mayor, or fuck me, I'm the mayor.

Fuck me.

He's like, kiss me, I'm Irish.

I believe it was exasperation.

Every time I open an article, I find another detail two paragraphs down.

A council manager is also alleged to have taken to a chemical shed with an axe after a pregnant worker asked for some ventilation.

Ventilation, I'll give you fucking ventilation, the manager said, before attacking the shed walls with the axe.

Yeah, so that council employee then, of course, had to like go off work for quite a while.

I mean, that's the kind of quality of like staffing, right?

Like Guillong Council.

Yeah, that's mayoring.

Now, that's some mayoring.

You should make that person the mayor.

Yeah.

What, the axe mayor?

Yeah, the axe mayor.

Yeah, they could do the gimmick with the axe.

Like, I'm going to axe the problem.

Hey, you know, come on, you can axe me a question.

You know, the axe may.

The axe mayor is my favorite Tammany Hall guy.

Yeah.

So he also, but basically he just said, I'm going to do stuff that's going to make Geelong.

Like he's basically tried to turn Geelong into himself.

I'm going to do things that are going to make Geelong so flamboyant and unavoidable that people are just going to pay attention to it.

And here we are.

His plan, as far as I could tell, was to make Geelong itself a celebrity so it could go on big.

Well, basically, he wanted to do that with a floating Christmas tree that he said would be visible, that was going to be so big that it could be seen from outer space.

Bashing into the cruise ships, I guess.

Floating like on water or like hovering?

Are we getting like some sort of hovering Christmas tree technology?

So he said he would use his personal fame and contacts to bring big name acts such as, and then he pauses for a second while trying to think of a name, Robbie Williams, to Geelong.

Did he succeed in drawing?

Of course not.

He also suggested that Prince William and Catherine Middleton might take up an offer to visit Geelong, despite previously boasting he was still in possession of the photos of his dying mother.

I was trying to find some more about

the dango situation.

And in the course of Googling this, I find that he lost

a lawsuit with HMRC, the tax authorities in the UK, where he had to pay them like a million pounds in back taxes.

1.2 million, to be exact.

Thanks to his dog, who was proven to be like resident in the UK when he was claiming he wasn't.

So bad luck with canines all round.

I will say that.

So he also wanted to establish a fast catamaran service between Geelong and Bernie, build an ice castle-style cruise ship pier.

And the pier is fun because it's like, okay, he basically, it seems as though he, there was a boutique cruise line called Porta Scale Cruises, and he used to like pose with a letter of intent for them saying, if you build a cruise ship here, we will dock in Geelong.

And he posed with this person, Rosalia Ryan.

the agricultural journalist who quote liked ships.

Cool.

Ms.

Ryan had signed the letter of intent and used the job title, General Ms.

Altru from Reuters, General Manager, Oceania.

But according to Portiscale Cruises, she has never been a paid employee of the company and had no authority to sign documents on his book.

Tremendous.

They had a kind of managerial stowaway.

I mean, I'm going to see to like find my fortune, but instead you just break into the cruise ship company's offices and like find yourself a desk.

The mayor also talked up a $320 million sustainable farm, which nosedived, an Icy icy pole factory.

I don't know what that is, and a number of other job creation industries, which failed to come about.

So yeah, like I say, he only ever like promoted the city.

He didn't sort of do anything.

It's an ice pop, really.

It's a kind of ice pop.

Okay, there we go.

So we already spoke about the

ad.

We already spoke about him being thrown off of a horse.

The one detail we didn't talk about, and this is like where really problems start cropping up for him, was the Madonna t-shirt incident was that he was,

he wore this like t-shirt with a naked Madonna he loves art of naked women his paint his house all of his houses are full of art of naked women who among us he loves art yeah yeah yeah art yes art art is paintings of naked women yeah yeah yeah as we've established he go and he interview he and he keeps like exhibiting it and people keep saying hey this seems kind of exploitative and kind of sexist that most of your art collection is pictures of naked women and and so on.

And you know, so he wears this t-shirt to October, an Oktoberfest gathering, which his own private company put on, which he also wore with his mayor's robes, too.

You can't get him out of the robes.

Like, dingoes couldn't get him out of the robes.

If you make me take these off, you're just going to see another naked woman.

Getting my abs sculpted into the silhouette of the like mud flap woman.

Lions felt his Geelong gallery could benefit from an insight into his personal life, and he loaned the institution 32 works of art from his own collection for their Lion's View exhibition.

Speaking to the Geelong advertiser, he said, yes, there are some controversial pieces, but I love the female form and I don't think it's controversial at all.

It's been painted since Adam and Eve.

That's so cool to see me wearing nudie shirts around and then just being like, are you saying you don't think women are beautiful?

Is that what you're saying to me?

The female form has been painted since Adam and Eve?

Is he making the contention that the first painting was Adam painting Eve or that the first painting was of Adam and Eve?

It was Adam painting Adam and Eve.

That's why I only wear a shirt with a nude painting of a buffalo from a cave wall because it was the first thing that was painted.

So it's art.

The earlier, the more appropriate.

Hey, put some pants on that buffalo.

Also, I just want to talk very quickly.

I was looking at photos of him in the Madonna shirt about his haircut.

And earlier we called it a mohawk, but it is something different and new.

It looks like he's grown out his front bangs very, very long and has just flipped them over and backwards over the rest of his hair.

And I just, I just want to note that.

It's like a reverse Chelsea.

I think what happened is he may have started thinning.

Yes, I think that's it's clearly it's like one of those haircuts where you look at this and you're like, where is your hair actually coming from?

It's a como va faux hawk,

I think is how I would describe it.

Like a

faux.

A faux.

Com over Vafauhawk faux is like the name of a

protagonist in a poorly translated action.

I was going to say it's like a Fueled by Ramen band from 2007.

Proco Aram, Como Vafauhawk.

We don't know if it's thinnick.

Legally, legally, it would be very funny to get sued by a guy who's being pursued for a million pound tax bill for saying that he's bald.

Sorry, Italian lawyers are outside my house.

I should go see what this is about.

So this is, and this is where he exhibits the life-size bronze statue of a woman bending over, wearing nothing but a pair of stilettos.

It's wonderful.

Yeah.

Anyway, so this is the kind of thing he does as mayor.

He has crazy schemes that go nowhere.

He's constantly self-promoting.

He's promoting his own businesses.

He's promoting his own art collection, even.

He is, and he's like being very, very cruel to employees.

Who are busy like axing up chemical sheds and stuff.

Yeah.

So

the Victorian government then basically has to step in and say, look, Lions in the Geelong Council are deeply dysfunctional.

Also, because Lions, I believe, was one of the first directly elected, he was a directly elected mayor, right?

So he wasn't a leader of the party that won, then picks its leader and makes it mayor.

Lions led by donkeys.

Yeah.

Thank you.

And they were like, okay, well, the mayor is not working with the council, and neither the mayor nor the council are working with staff.

This is incredibly dysfunctional.

Just the Victorian government putting them in the gat-along shirt.

Yeah.

A deep-seated culture of bullying and and harassment with staff complaints ignored, no long-term vision for the city, and a breakdown in the relationship between the mayor, counselors, and staff showed that council has to be suspended for several years.

And these claims of bullying and harassment were substantiated by a long report, which I've also looked at, which contains evidence of misbehavior by allegations in staff.

This report includes

the axe episode.

Sure.

The accident.

That's right.

Also, and also the sort of swearing at staff.

In another instance, it's also alleged that the mayor told a staff member that the staff member should get a job picking up dog shit and then later belittled the person at a public event and detailed allegations that Lions would like threaten local business, threatened a local business owner that he would quote, close the place down.

Imagine getting threatened by this guy.

Yeah, I'd be giggling too much.

I would just flip his hair over his eyes and run away.

So, but Lions,

after being fired as mayor, Lions does not exit the public eye.

It's like anti-democratic to just fire a a man merely for being terrible at his job.

He amassed a pretty big property empire in Geelong, including a number of pubs and nightclubs called the Elephant and Castle Hotel.

So oftentimes

pubs in Australia will be called the Something Hotel.

The Eureka Hotel, and both of those places, by the way, are now currently or have recently been under police investigation for being so shittily run.

Beautiful.

And like dangerous.

Home House Nightclub, which is named after a place in London.

Pizza with Attitude,

the Husbandro, and the Lions Gallery, and also

numerous event businesses such as Geelong Oktoberfest.

So the Lions Gallery is like, again, just, he's just trying to show and flog off his like, his art collection.

And, but what does he do in this time, right?

He blames everyone but himself, takes credit for even like local sports team victories, claimed his dismissal was party political, and then immediately ran as an independent in a national election and lost.

Beautiful.

He's now living in Italy, owes £1.2 million in the UK against the sale of multiple properties in 2012.

Yeah, because of the dog.

And

is also leasing all of his properties in Australia, including his Sydney pad, with quote, a number of stunning features.

This is from Daily Mail Australia as well, including a standalone see-through Perspex pink tub featuring artwork attached to the walls.

of a nude tattooed model wearing a wimple with a matching with a matching portrait nearby showing the same model fully clothed in a nun's habit.

Very quickly, the logo for pizzas with attitude is a slice of pizza with Darren Lyons' hair.

Incredible.

I never want to see.

I love to eat that.

Brace is very

strict division between us, though.

The newspapers reported that his much younger fiancé is single, and he is now living as a tax exile in Italy, apparently frantically flogging off all of his belongings.

I love the sort of like, where are they now montage at the end of a movie after like a criminal's downfall?

And it's like, as of 2024, Lions and his fiancé are no longer Instagram officials.

This is the like sort of framing device for the movie about him is we start in Italy with him like by Lake Coma, hurriedly trying to get rid of a bunch of naked bronzers.

It's like, I bet you're wondering how he got here.

And then it flashes to him in Bosnia with the shells going off and stuff.

So Ben and Andrew, how did I do encapsulating the life and times of Darren Lyons?

What a man.

The man, the myth, the legend, the very bad mayor.

He's just like such a classic Australian type of guy.

Not necessarily like becoming mayor, going insane.

We only have so many mayors to go around, but like

this style of

He's Gen X, right?

But like that sort of age of guy just being like, yeah, I'm kind of in your face.

And that in your face is wearing a brightly colored blazer and having a bad haircut.

And there's like a million of them.

It's so fucking weird.

I don't know why.

It's so pervasive.

So I want to thank both of you for

coming and talking with us today about this fascinating character.

And I think probably the first mayor on the show that most people will not have heard of outside of Australia.

The first off-the-grid mayor.

I would thank the dingo and that horse.

I love the thing the animal kingdom.

The dingo really made the episode fair.

Yeah, just I love the idea that he's being pursued by like HMRC, the Victorian government, and still that one dingo, which is tracking him towards Italy.

What, like, it follows?

No, it's like, or like that John Valiant book, The Tiger.

Yes.

Yeah, like, like the Bukowski

poem, Relentless is the Tarantula.

Relentless is the Dingo.

Something is working towards you, and I mean you, and nothing but you, and it's a dingo.

Yeah.

There was that one tiger in the, in the, in like the Siberian taiga that was like hunting people for years.

There's a whole book about it.

It's like that, but with a dingo.

Approaching Italy at walking pace.

Whatever walking pace or a dingo is.

It's loping after me.

So next week, of course, we are, because we like to do these, so far we've been doing these episodes in pairs.

And while there's not a second episode of Darren Lyons, we are going to be getting together this group of us again, to, as I hinted at earlier, rehash and 2020 era project of mine and Andrews, but with a municipal twist.

Possibly not that much of one.

I will be fully honest.

All I did was search the word mayor in the corpus of IMDb Bones.

But it's the one episode of Bones that has a mayor in it.

So

so do check that out.

He's going to get like one line, and we're going to have to spin an hour and a half out of it.

Someone says, Oh, that's the mayor, and then they just keep going with the rest of the episode.

He's driving away,

his one hand out the window waving.

Holy shit, I think that was the mayor.

Well, back to these bones,

bones.

Take this mayor to mayor storage,

the most hated mayor in America,

the guy the coconut rifle that assassinated the mayor of america

oh fuck

yeah so subscribe to the patreon for that yeah

all right um look andrew ben thank you again so much for coming and talking to us it's been a blast talking about Darren Lyons with you.

And I also must urge everybody listening, if you haven't, check out Bunta Vista, even if you don't live in Australia.

Our sister sising.

It's a show of global interest, I would say.

Yeah, and mostly about America.

So, for Americans, it's very easy to slot into it.

Do you live in Yazoo City?

Maybe you remember a billboard from a while ago.

If we fail to convert you with that enterprise, perhaps you'll be listening to this.

A lot of people need the two little pushes.

One, see the billboard, two, being reminded of the billboard by a podcast.

Nudge theory.

Yeah, that's what nudge theory is as far as I know.

You convinced me.

All right, all right.

Guys, thank you so much.

Thank you.

And also, listeners, don't forget, yes, there is a Patreon.

In addition to the part twos of every episode we've done before, there will also be a rehash of the Boney Island Whitefish for one episode only.

The Boney Island Mayor Fish.

Well, we will be the mayors of Boney Island.

Dead silence.

Absolutely.

Nothing.

Take that out.

Take that out.

Absolutely not.

Leave that in.

No.

All right.

All right.

All right.

All right.

All right.

See you on the bonus episode next week, and uh, catch you later.

Bye.

Bye, everyone.

Bye.

Bye.