Open Wide Magazine Interview
April 2005
How did you get first get into comedy?
I started writing sketches for a topical show called 'Newsrevue' at the Canal Cafe Theatre on West London. Later one of the actors told me that the first sketch I had accepted was rubbish but that they'd put it in the show as they'd wanted to get new writers involved. The sketch was about Ronald Reagan.
Who were your influences? Who made you think 'I can do this'?
I used to watch Eddie Murphy's 'Delirious' a lot, and tapes of his Saturday Live sketches. I know that's not a very cool reference to cite, but there was something about the unspoken relationship between him and his audience which seemed special. He had charisma, I guess you'd say, but there is also something democratic in the vibe between black comics and black audiences, which reminded me of the punk bands I'd loved like The Clash. I was working as an interior decorator and we used to listen to Eddie Murphy's stand-up over and over.
Do you remember your first live gig? How did it go?
I remember I shat blood before my first gig which I still sometimes do if it's my first gig for a while. That was a surprising entry into showbusiness. Not a lot of blood but a little bit. Bright pink it was. That was a smoker at The Canal Cafe Theatre. A smoker is a show just for cast and crew.
My first open spot was Absolute Cabaret above a pub called the North Star in Finchley. For the first twenty or so gigs I did, the pattern was one good one, one utter, DNA-scouring death, one good one, one death. If I'd ever had two deaths on the trot I think I might have packed it in.
The first paid gig I did was in a room above a pub somewhere Stoke Newington. Just as I was walking in I remember a strange occurrence. A very old man sitting at a table, said to me 'Now wait just a cotton picking moment. Hold on just a cotton-picking moment...' . I kind of liked that because I thought it was symbolic of something or other, or that I was crossing a threshold and he was warning me. But I didn't wait because I was so excited to be crossing a threshold enough to merit a warning. I was leaving tedious stick-in the-muds behind. (Of course I was rushing to meet them in fact, wasn't I?) I felt it was like the bit in Stardust when the shopkeeper hands David Essex a heavy guitar across the counter and, as he passes it over, asks him 'Do you think you can handle it?' 'Yeah', says David Essex doing that grin he does, 'Yeah I can handle it'.
I loved the level of honesty and philosophical self-deprecation of your earlier style of comedy. Was performing the material at the time a form of therapy?
Yes, it was. To connect with an audience when talking about loneliness and despair makes you feel less lonely and desperate. And when you're depressed then just putting any shape or perspective at all on that gloop and gloom is constructive. The start of a way out.
I'm sure you've answered hundreds of questions about your time as one half of 'Newman and Baddiel', which led comedy to be dubbed 'the new rock 'n' roll'. Given your re-invention, how do feel when you look back on those years now?
There were lots of other people rocking out in their comedy. Sean Hughes had his foot on the monitor before me, which makes me Buzz Aldrin, getting my foot there second. And the Outlaw comics in the USA, the vile Kinison and the blessed Hicks were rockers too.
After the break-up of your comedy partnership with David Baddiel you dropped off the radar for while; what did you get up to?
Yes, but this is a radar you have to pay money to beep on. It won't pick up just any old submarine, tug-boat or rift-valley. You gots to pay. One thing I've learnt is how very few articles appear in the mainstream corporate media spontaneously. They are placed there by PR companies. During the period in which I wasn't on the radar I was still gigging intensively and still writing lots of new material. But there was just one thing which I wasn't doing anymore. I wasn't doing paying anyone to do publicity. Therefore it appeared that I'd dropped out. But I hadn't and that's why it's cool that more mags and zines like Open Wide can side-step the flim and the flam.
Here's another example of what I mean. There was never a 'buzz' or a 'groundswell' about The Hives or The Strokes, but there was a top-dollar corporate-funded PR campaign whose press releases probably used the phrases ' buzz' and 'groundswell' , and there was an IPC-owned music media - the NME, that shameless jezebel - whose function was to provide consumers.
And it's not just in showbiz that the pay-to-register-on-the-radar PFI is operating. The same is true to a surprising extent with news as well. When researching the world of 'issues management' or corporate PR for The Fountain At the Centre of the World I was struck by how many stories on the news-wires hav.e their source in PR companies representing countries (eg. Israel, Saudi Arabia, Burma, Argentina during the dictatorship) or corporations or industry-lobby groups such as the Global Climate Coalition which received funding from Exxon and General Motors and VW and was keen to deny that catastrophic climate change is happening and that it is happening because of burning fossil fuels.
Mixing comedy and politics has always been an effective way of getting a message across, and as a fan of your previous work I was quite surprised when you started incorporating intelligent political observations into your comedy. Has politics always been part of your life? Why did you introduce it into your act?
Politics has always been a part of my life. I was very politically active as a student on a community level and I was very intereseted in Latin American poltics. El Salvador, Nicaragua and Chile. Then came the miners strike and despite the Coal Not Dole tin I rattled, the people lost and big business won and that hit a whole generation betwen the eyes and everyone was stunned and walking around in a daze until Reclaim The Streets and the roads protests, Poll Tax Riots and Criminal Justice Bill snapped everyone back to focus.
There's never a single linear path in development (or decay). For me the re-politicization came about through reading a John Pilger article about the Liverpool Dockers' lockout, finding a copy of the Noam Chomsky documentary 'Manufacturing Consent' in a little independent shop (now, guess what, shut down to make way for a yuppie furniture showroom).
Aside from comedy you've written three novels. Am I right in understanding that literature was your first love? If so, how did this come about?
Yeah, I've always since I can remember wanted to write. At college I spent three years writing a poem called the Poverty Of Oppression. I was being impatient and thought a poem would be a quicker shorter route to literary glory than a novel (how shameful). It boiled down to about twenty lines in the end. And my first ever performance was at a nightclub called 'Racks' reading out this poem to the sound of Moments In Love by the Art Of Noise and with slides of El Salvador's FMLN guerillas in the background. Cool!
What was the first book that captured your imagination?
My cousin Helen used to babysit for me when I was five or six. She told me that says when she'd stop reading the bed-time story I would always say: Tell me more! Tell me more!
I was thinking about that last night because, as always, I fell asleep in my glasses, reading light on and clutching a book ('I Married A Communist' by Phillip Roth). I always want to read just one more line and this is why I always fall asleep in the reading position, and wear my glasses mainly for sleeping!
Your latest novel, 'The Fountain At The Centre Of The World', was the subject of the BBC2 programme 'Scribbling'. The novel is epic and my favourite of last year. For those who haven't read the book, can you explain what it's about and how the idea for the story came to you?
The novel is about an adopted Englishman called Evan Hatch who needs bone marrow and so tracks the brother he has never met down to Mexico, only to find that Chano, his brother, is on the run for blowing up a water pipeline.
The programme showed the difficulties that come with writing a novel - writer's block, unravelling plots and of course the search for an agent and publisher. What kept you going when things were getting on top of you?
Well, first off just let me say I don't believe in writer's block. It usually just means you've got nothing to say. That said, there are obstacles and obstructions and tricky bits that you need to think about long and hard to get right. Unravelling plots was certainly one of them. I spent a year just building the story, stucturing the plot, but then when I got closer in, when I'd filled in the details, when the characters got more defined, I would have planned for them to do something which was 'out of character'. Other times I needed to find a plausible way of getting a character with no money from the UK to the USA, or suddenly remembered that a character had no knowledge of something.
How do you feel about the general state of UK literature? Do you read much contemporary fiction?
I think it's a golden age of fiction. There are so many great novels being written now. I just read 'Middlesex' by Jeffrey Eugenides, and he is the world's greatest living writer. (It took nine years to write but it's the best novel I've read for nine years.) John Berger's 'To The Wedding', Zadie Smith's 'White Teeth', Anne Tyler's 'Patchwork Planet ', Rose Tremain's 'Music & Silence' - these are all amazing novels.
Most writers I know have ideas stock-piled for novels; does this apply to you?
Oh wow, I wish I was like those writers you know. My head is a spent field, I feel all its nitrogen was taken away by The Fountain. There's not one single idea down in there. Not one beetroot stirring.
That's partly because I've been writing a stand-up show " From P45 To Ak 47 - How To Grow The Economy With The Use of War' and that has taken up the limited head space in my tiny mind. Especially as I've been researching mind-bending stuff about Peak Oil. I was working on a non-fiction political book called 'War and Peace 2' but that's been re-routed for now into a TV series proposal called The Good War Guide.
You've been called 'the finest political comedian of our generation' and you've also been compared to the late, great Bill Hicks. How do these two things sit with you?
As well-fitting trousers should.
As one of this country's leading political activists, how did you feel when George W. Bush was re-elected?
Well I'm not a leading activist. Not least because the social justice movement has no leaders. Also as a person, temperamentally and for reasons of cowardice I am always in the rearguard of any action. Not in the actual rearguard mind you, cos that might involve some guarding of the rear ie. conflict, so I'm just a little bit up from the rear. But way way back from the front. And in the middle in case we get attacked from the sides. Near the back in the middle between two fat blokes.
As for Bush getting elected (not re-elected, elected) it's his administration that will now have to re-introduce the draft, that will have to escalate the war on Iraq, that will face social rebellion at home as he tries to get the world's foremost debtor nation out of its fiscal black hole. It may mean that we see the back of these cultists for a while - if we live through this. Them and their nutty free market dogma. Then again these cultists may lock us in their Waco compound and the roof will come down on us too.
With John Howard and George W. Bush both re-elected, and Tony Blair sure to remain in power despite huge opposition to the Iraq war and the absence of WMD, they must feel that their 'war on terror' has been vindicated. Can you shed any light on how this can be and what went wrong?
Firstly, they don't feel that their war on terror has been vindicated because they know that they were never fighting a war on terror. As we know very well, they were looking for pretexts to fight a war against Iraq. In part this was because they knew that the US/UK sanctions regime was about to crumble and they had better get in and get control that oil to stop it falling into the wrong hands. As the Foreign Office said in the 1950s 'the Persian Gulf is a region of the world which without wishing to dominate ourslves, we cannot allow any other power to control' . and so we have to control it . 'Any other powers' includes the indigenous populations too, as the 1953 coup against the Iranians who nationalized BP shows pretty clearly. The US also needed non-Saudi Middle East military bases . They now are building 14 of the fuckers in Iraq. Full-time permamanent US military bases.
As for how they stay in power despite huge opposition...?
Never in history has there been a propaganda system as sophisticated and massive and detailed as the one which each and every one of us lives with each and every day. Goebbels dreamed of this, Stalin never came close.
As for Howard and Blair being re-elected, well, big business has moulded every political part into its image so there's no difference between any of them.
With a general election looming, who will you be supporting?
The self-respecting thing to do is not to vote at all. That said I may throw one the way of the Green Party even though their speakers are terrible apologists for capitalism sometimes.
And finally, can you tell us one thing about yourself that our readers may not know?
I don't have a telly.