Cameron James starts his music party on Ben Lee-backed Boys Night

These days it's very different. Just how different became apparent for the Newcastle-raised comedian after attending four bucks parties with his 30-something friends over a 12-month period.

"I just watched them [the bucks parties] become progressively tamer as they went on," James laughs.

"I was at a mate's bucks in Newcastle and at 11pm someone just put a movie on on Netflix and everyone was sitting down watching a movie. I remember thinking, we talked up how wild this was going to be."

James and his mates' more reserved method for partying served as the inspiration for his first official single, Boys Night.

Filmed inside James' old stomping ground, the Lass O'Gowrie Hotel by Newcastle's Nick Sullivan (Hermitude, Luca Brasi), the hilarious video clip is a frighteningly accurate depiction of "boys night" partying for married men aged between "35 and 42" where conversations revolve around true-crime documentaries, tax minimisation and explanations of cryptocurrency.

"I'm trying to speak to guys like us and shine a light on a very real issue that's happening," he jokes. "We just want to be home. We don't want to be out partying anymore."

Boys Night might be firmly tongue-in-cheek, but James is taking the song's release very seriously.

As a teenager at the former St Francis Xavier student dreamed of becoming a professional musician and he fronted the Newcastle indie bands The Fictions and Montana Fire in the mid-2000s.

However, as his stand-up comedy career began to take-off, music took a back seat. That was until he was urged by Cigarettes Will Kill You and Catch My Disease hit-maker, Ben Lee, to combine comedy and music.

The pair met in 2020 when Lee and his wife Ione Skye hosted their Weirder Together variety night at Sydney's Giant Dwarf Theatre, which included Wolfmother's Andrew Stockdale and Josh Pyke on the bill.

James and Lee became fast friends.

"We text a lot and have a similar sense of humour and we like the same type of music," James says.

"He's been pushing me for two years to put my own songs out. He's saying I should put an album out and tour on the back of these songs and tour music venues.

"I've always tried to be a bit hesitant about it and stay in my own lane as a comedian."

Boys Night has been released through Lee and Skye's Weirder Together label and was produced by ARIA Award-nominee Joyride.

The song is among eight tracks that will feature in James' latest musical comedy show, Mixtape.

"Musical comedy can bomb harder than straight stand-up, because if the song isn't catchy enough or not good enough, people are just listening to a bad song for three minutes," he says.

"I come from a music and band background, so I really care about making the songs sound good. I want it to be the kind of thing that could come up on shuffle on Spotify and you would just enjoy it, even out of context."

James is performing his Mixtape show at fringe and comedy festivals around Australia before finishing the tour at the Newcastle Conservatorium, a venue he never imagined playing.

"I'm totally going to sully the reputation of the Newcastle Conservatorium of Music," he says. "I have one song about drinking too much and a song about my penis size, so it's going to be an interesting decline for that place."

Cameron James' Boys Night is out now. You can catch his Mixtape show at the Newcastle Conservatorium on July 6.