I was quite diligent at first, as a stand-up comic. I took it very seriously and worked very, very hard on it. Sitting on fucking night buses with a cassette Walkman, playing my own set over and over—learning it by rote—as well as spending hours educating myself further about Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce. Even though I’m almost congenitally self-obsessed and solipsistic—in the same way that Allen is—I always wanted my stuff to have a spiritual and political agenda.
When I was working with Karl, I’d met these people doing this kind of political sketch-show troupe thing called Article 19.
utterly post-modern and bizarre. They did daft things with puppets, homemade props and silly, childish songs. Their work changed the course of English comedy and initially confused and angered a generation of schoolchildren until we dramatically U-turned and became their devoted disciples in time for Episode Two.
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One of them was called John Rogers, a writer of satirical songs, who now researches material for me, in the hope of making my forthcoming stand-up shows a bit more politically valid than their immediate pre de ces sors. A wonderful, erudite man, he sits there, patiently tolerating my rants about socialism and revolution—topics that he himself is very well informed upon, never embarrassing me, just diligently pointing out the numerous errors, inconsistencies and lies like a tutor for arrogant spastics.
As soon as I met John, I imagined that I’d know him for the rest of my life, and probably go on yachting holidays with him in my fifties. He’d still be married to Haidi—the lovely Australian wife, with whom he has two obscenely beautiful sons—and I’d be there with some seventeen-year- old dolly-bird. Of course I’d be all bloated by then, like Michael Winner, but perhaps with braids in my hair and gold teeth, wearing a moo-moo (I think that’s what they’re called—either way, one of them things you wear when you’re fat).
In London—as I suppose in all major cities—there are all these people slogging away at the arts: writing things, performing for nothing, taking B.Tech courses, just trying their best to get somewhere in show business. And the further down the line you get, the more you realize there’s often very little logic separating people who are actually making money, from those slogging themselves to death in some destitute pit of bedsit boredom. I consolidated my position in the latter group by moving in with Mark and Andy, a couple of chancers from South London.
The flat was above a branch of Barclay’s Bank, just south of Tower Bridge. Mark Pinheiro was a beautiful black lad, who’d been orphaned young; all daft and full of dreams he was, his ambitions and astonishing awareness of pop culture perpetually 195
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at war with his love of sleep. Andy Dobson was a brilliantly gifted electronic musician—a great big ginger cupboard of a man, always sat poised above his various Moog keyboards, battering out tunes. The two of them had one of those relationships which is like a traumatic heterosexual marriage. They were constantly bawling and screeching at each other, and would sometimes have ridiculous fights that never amounted to anything: once Andy came running up to Mark with this kitchen knife that was still in the container with egg whisks, ladles and spoons, like a murderous pastry chef. Along with John Rogers, Andy and Mark became like a second surrogate family to me, the same as when I’d moved in with those Italia Conti lost boys Jimmy and Justin when I was sixteen. Oddly, that fl at was just around the corner—which showed how much progress I’d made up the property ladder. This time, though, I was at least going in with a bit more status. John Rogers had a day job in a language school—one of those ones in the West End, on Oxford Street, where the students indiscriminately distribute leafl ets saying
“learn En glish.” I asked him if he could sort me out an interview and it turned out—luckily for me—that they take pretty much anyone.
It’s a job that could be done by a tape recorder. They give you this book to read out—“Janet opened her umbrella,” that sort of stuff—and it’s like a script: you’re not supposed to deviate from it by one word. The students have got the same book, and they have to repeat it back after you.
I approach jobs where there’s no chance of getting either sex or applause at the end of it with a mixture of reluctance and resentment. This language-school job fulfilled at least the fi rst of my conditions for productive employment.
The first time they actually left me in a room with the students and this book, I thought, “There are no adults here—how 196
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are they gonna make sure I do what I’m supposed to?” Th at feeling of “I can’t believe people are actually going to let me do this”
has preceded many of my most gleefully decadent interludes.
The whole affair was utterly ridiculous. I started reading the book, but as I did so, I was just scanning the room bedazzled by the selection of glorious females over whom I’d been granted authority.
It took maybe two weeks before I realized my classroom was a sexy library from which I could borrow lovely women from all around the world: Italian, Brazilian, Japanese; I brought back these two Polish women once and Mark Pinheiro said, “They look like them girls in Schindler’s List that put blood on their cheeks to avoid being executed.” I liked them.
There were male students in the class as well; they didn’t get as much attention from me, but they joined me and the girls when we went to Soho Square to smoke draw instead of learning a language that I already knew. It was alright that job, really.
I think it was about eight pounds an hour. And the shifts would vary, but it was roughly eight hours a day, five days a week.
I was working hard at practicing my stand-up in the evenings.
And after a handful of five-minute sets I got to the final of the Hackney Empire’s New Act of the Year competition.
This was really important to my career. The first round of the competition you just do in a pub in front of about thirty people, but the final is in front of an audience of two thousand. I was really committed to making the best of this opportunity; I went to the Hackney Empire in advance, to walk around on the stage and get used to it.
By the time the night of the actual final arrived though—with my mum, my dad and loads of my mates there (Karl Th eobald,
who I hadn’t seen for months, left me a good-luck card with a picture of Tony Hancock at the stage door)—a few complications 197
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had arisen. Two Danish girls had moved in with me, Mark and Andy in Bermondsey. Mark liked one of them—Zenia. When my friends like a girl, sometimes it makes me fancy them a bit; their interest seems like an endorsement. “She is beautiful,” I find myself thinking. Now that I’m not so insanely selfish, I force that feeling into my stomach and leave it there to fester into a tumor. But when I was younger I flew into action like a sexy, disloyal cobra. Zenia and I had a relationship, which must’ve been annoying for Mark, although he did end up seeing the other girl so, in a way, I’m a bit like Cilla Black, a manipulative saucy Cilla Black.* Once I weed in her bath so that it seemed like a fountain; she swore she’d get revenge, but I hubristically claimed that I was too brilliant to be tricked; whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. Or they just get them to drink a big hearty glug of girl wee instead of the water to which they’re ac-climatized of a morning. It was like drinking a cloud, I didn’t mind it.
It was while I was with Zenia that I met Amanda Alguero Alejos, and began what was to be one of the most signifi cant, romantic and destructive relationships of my soppy life. Th e
teachers at Callan language school used to go out for drinks on Friday night, in order to exploitatively work their way through the students (at least, that was why I went). Amanda—this beautiful Spanish girl—was there one night, and the first thing she ever said to me was “Hmmm, you’re a good-looking boy—come to the toilet for kisses.” I got a bit obsessed by her, not least because she was a very intense person, and we argued a lot.
<
br /> * Cilla Black was a former coatroom girl at the famous Liverpool Cavern Club and yet another “fifth Beatle.” She was a chanteuse in the ’60s and did a few Burt Bacharach covers; then in the ’80s she hosted a Saturday evening prime time game show, Blind Date, where, as the title suggests, couples were sent on dates. It was based on innuendo and incredible good will.
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She came to that Hackney Empire final, looking really gorgeous. At that point I—ever the gentleman—said, “I think you should probably know I’ve got a girlfriend,” and she just smacked me right in the face. We spent the whole night in Arthur Smith’s dressing room, drinking and getting off with each other, while he was onstage emceeing the show. By the time it got to my turn, I was properly slaughtered.
I didn’t come anywhere in the competition (well, I was fourth, but that’s not even in the medals, is it?). However the Time Out comedy critic Malcolm Hay wrote this really lovely review of the whole night, mostly about me, saying, “He’s from Essex, and he could be the real deal.” There were a lot of industry people and managers there as well, one of whom—Nigel Klarfeld from Bound and Gagged—signed me up, and became my first agent.
He’s a funny feller, Nigel. Very near-sighted—he can’t see anyone who’s more than a yard away from him. He had a dog called Harvey—one of them whose skin is all wrinkled up, so they look like their face has been pulled forward. I would eventually part company with Nigel in a characteristically dignifi ed fashion—hurling a glass of water at him, shouting “Fuck you, Nigel” and walking off out of his life forever. But for the moment, signing this deal was a huge step forward, and I felt like I was finally starting to get somewhere.
Shortly after the Hackney Empire final, I wanted to go to Spain with Amanda, so I asked the people at the language school if I could have a fortnight off. When they said, “No, you’re supposed to be working,” I just went anyway. On my return my employers were curious as to where I’d been and the truthful answer—“the holiday upon which you expressly for-bade me to go”—was likely to cause me all manner of bother which I couldn’t be expected to tolerate. If you have to do some lying, you may as well commit to it. Hitler said, “Th e bigger
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the lie the more people will believe it.” I’m not holding Hitler up as a role model, the man was a filthy swine, but as I stood in the suspicious glare of my boss I thought, “What would Hitler do?” He’d probably have had her killed; she was a lesbian. Plus she was shouting and pointing and I don’t think he’d have stood for that. Then I remembered Hitler’s lie theory. “Sorry I’ve been away, I know it looks bad, and probably you think I went on that holiday that I requested and was denied. But the truth is, and you better hold onto your hat ’cos this is a belter, I’ve got AIDS.” Silence. “Yep. You heard me correctly, I’m standing here, looking you right in the eye and telling you that I’ve got AIDS. Now it’s over to you in the studio, to see how you’re going to cope with this big, stupid, atrocious lie.” My boss was speechless. The good thing about my evil lie was that it was so terrible that no one would ever tell such a lie. Th at’s
why the lie worked.
Luckily, I was starting to get more and more stand-up work at this point, so I was able to leave that job before they either got up the courage to sack me, or I had to start faking symptoms. V
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I went up to Edinburgh in 2000. Me, Mark Felgate and Shappi Khorsandi—both of whom had finished above me at the Hackney Empire final—put on a three-hander doing twenty minutes each.
I was still being quite disciplined at that time. I actually had some material—about twenty minutes of quite good, pseudo-Bill Hicks– type stuff about care in the community. But I suppose the most notable thing about that show was the children I put in it.
They were rough little kids, aged between five and ten, from the surrounding estates. They were always playing with matches and spitting at people, and they stole stuff from the production office. I still have this letter from the Gilded Balloon (which was the venue that had put me on). Sadly I couldn’t find it in time to include it in this book, but this is the rough gist of what it said:
“Dear Mr. Brand, I am writing to complain about the children you’ve got working for you. Firstly, to have children working for you in any capacity is against employment law. Secondly, these particular ones are very badly behaved.”
I liked the fact that they were naughty, though. I used to have them onstage and say, “I’ve just got a natural rapport with children,” and then they’d put a sign on my back saying “Wanker.”
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Sadly, after receiving that letter I had to tell ’em that they were sacked—it’s not easy to sack a child. When I broke the sad news they just said, “If we can’t work for you no more, we’ll just go back to stealing.” They’re probably old enough to earn their money killing people now.
That year at Edinburgh I also had a part in a play by Trevor Lock, who would later work with me on my 6 Music and Radio 2 shows. A good play that was, by old Trev. It was called Th ere’s
Something You Should Know; he played a character who died but didn’t know and turned into this kind of earth-bound angel, and I was his best friend watching him go all religious and spiritual.
I was womanizing a lot already at that time—Amanda having fucked off back to live in Spain, leaving me to wallow in a pit of my own debauchery—and then Trevor Lock and his wife Sem, who was from Peru, bought me a copy of that book Women On Top, by Nancy Friday. It’s a collection of women talking about their sexual fantasies—proper rude they are. It turns out some of them want to fuck dogs, which made me think “Crikey, the sauce of it all.” So I rampaged through Edinburgh having a fantastic time, and getting some great, sexualized reviews in the pro cess. People compared me to Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights and said things like, “Brand, who has star of the future tattooed beneath his Calvin Kleins.”
Some people from MTV came to see me perform up in Edinburgh, and asked me to audition for them when I got back to London. Getting that job would provoke possibly the clearest ever demonstration of my astonishing capacity (and it’s even astonishing to me) to descend in the blink of a proverbial eye from enormous, obsequious gratitude, into indiff erence, cruelty and pompous aff ectation.
I was incredibly thankful that I wasn’t going to have to sign on any more, and could shrug off the indignity of standing in 202
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dole queues, knowing that in every encounter with a clerk they’re trying to withdraw your benefits. Particularly if they know you’re in the entertainment industry—you can see their sneering cynicism with regard to your career: “Oh, like you’re ever going to make money from show business.” I experienced that in Grays job center when I was sixteen, then subsequently in Bermondsey, Kentish Town and Finsbury Park: an odyssey of social insecurity.
Apart from the odd bit of acting, this was my first regular work on telly. And when MTV gave me a contract to make ninety shows I thought, “That’s it—what a relief, I’ve made it,”
and went from “Oh, that’s ever so kind of you” to “Where’s my fucking taxi?” in about ten seconds.
It was the delightful Andy Milligan who gave me my first break—he was a skinheaded lad from Newcastle who looked a bit like Tom Thug, a character from a short-lived Southern Viz rip- off , Oink! When I cast my mind back across the porridge-colored mindscape, one of the best moments of my life was arriving at MTV after I’d done the pilot for our new show, and seeing loads of people gathered round a TV set, really laughing. I thought “what’s going on there?” and peered through the crowd to see they were watching the tape of me.
The idea for the show which ended up being called Dancefl oor Chart was a very simple one. Me going up to people in nightclubs and talking rubbish to them when they were off their heads on p
ills. Sample dialogue:
RUSSELL: You know Postman Pat and his black-and-white cat?
LAD: Yeah.
RUSSELL: How do we know it’s his cat?
LAD: Well . . . we just do.
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RUSSELL: Can he prove it though?
LAD: It is his cat. It says at the beginning. In the song.
RUSSELL: Can we trust them though?
LAD: Look, it is his cat . . . Why would they . . . ? (Th e lad
tapers off into a drugged confusion.)
RUSSELL: They can’t prove it. There are no papers.
LAD: (As if realizing the CIA killed JFK) Yeah, you’re right.
It’s probably not his cat.
That was the format of the show. The lad was high on ecstasy, but I was by now quite the connoisseur of opiates and crack. “Don’t you think it’s out of order taking the piss out of them pilled-up people in clubs?” people would sometimes inquire. “I was on crack and heroin,” I’d reply. “I didn’t even know I was in a club.”
Then, late as usual, I met the second comic genius that was to blight my life. Matt Morgan. He was just an intern there when I met him. He came from Dartford, which is just the other side of the river from Grays. He had a similar background to mine, as well as sharing my taste in comedy. The first conversation we had was on a plane flying to Ireland. I had these giant African snails with me (even though it was the time of foot-and-mouth, so you weren’t even supposed to have apples on planes, let alone snails).
I said, “Look at my new pets, they’re great—what shall we call them?” He said “Wiggins,” which is a name in a Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch about a headmaster who sexually abuses boys. Then we talked a bit about Cook, and Chris Morris’s Brass Eye, which we both really loved, because it’s so clever and dangerous and acute, and I immediately recognized him as a kindred spirit.
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 17