Here Comes the Clown

by Dom Joly

  I was not to be put off. About six months later I was filming an experimental pilot for what would eventually end up as my fake chat show, This Is Dom Joly, on BBC Three. This pilot was shot for Channel 4 and was far stranger and more experimental than the watered-down version that eventually crawled out and died on the BBC ‘Yoof’ channel. I called it Dead Air, and the show started with me coming on stage singing the song ‘Sympathy’, an old classic by the band Rare Bird. Halfway through the first verse a fake light crashed down from the roof and knocked me unconscious. The rest of the pilot was my hosting a chat show with a profusely bleeding head and clearly very concussed. It was no holds barred and, thinking back, should have been the way forward.

  I needed a band to play live on the show. There was no discussion. I rang Robert Smith and asked him whether The Cure might play. He agreed. Hurrah! We were back on course for a beautiful friendship.

  The filming went pretty well. I had the gorgeous Melanie Blatt from All Saints and the equally gorgeous and funny Ronni Ancona on as guests. Nobody really seemed to know what was going on, and to say that the show was not fully formed would be an understatement, but The Cure played us out and everything was good in the world. As I was winding down in the green room, Robert Smith knocked on the door and asked me whether I’d like to go for a drink. He’d come up from the south coast where he lived and was up for a bit of a night out. I told everyone I could see that I was off for a drink with Robert Smith and we then headed out into Carnaby Street where we had been filming. There was a pub on the corner, and we went in and downed quite a few drinks or ten. Soon, however, it was closing time, but Robert Smith wanted to carry on.

  ‘Where shall we go?’ enquired the Gothfather. Robert Smith was asking me where to go?

  I racked my brains for a cool suggestion but eventually all I could come up with was a feeble: ‘Well, we could go back to my place?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Robert Smith, ‘my guy will take us there. Where is it?’

  ‘Notting Hill Gate,’ I replied.

  We clambered into his car and the same chauffeur as he’d had the last time stared at me with trepidation. I smiled at him and gave him my address. Off we sped through the darkened streets of London again, just me, Robert Smith and the driver who hated me, in our tinted rock ‘n’ roll limousine.

  If somebody had told me this would happen when I was a teenage Robert Smith lookalike, I’d have laughed in their faces. I’d been to see The Cure at Wembley Arena on the Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me tour. I had great tickets . . . not. We were in the very back row of the whole arena. I was so pissed off. I wandered around the place bumping into other Goths and drinking way too much cider and black. I later read an article in NME in which Robert Smith said he’d wandered around the arena himself before the gig and nobody had recognised him. ‘I saw at least twelve people who looked more like me than me,’ he told the magazine wryly.

  And now here I was in the back of his limo taking him back to my flat for a drink, and I’d just played Wembley Arena myself. Things were pretty good. Then I remembered that my flat was full of photographs of me looking just like Robert Smith. I panicked. This was going to be like when Alan Partridge went back to his fan’s house and there was a room just full of Partridge photos. The limo stopped in my road and I jumped out very quickly, much to the anger of the driver who assumed I was going for the ‘double’. I rushed up my stairs ahead of Smith and entered the flat, ripping down evidence of my Goth past as fast as I could. I managed to get rid of the worst examples, and soon Robert Smith and I were in my sitting room listening to Babybird’s sublime album There’s Something Going On and getting rather drunk.

  All went well for a while until I got so smashed that I thought it would be a good idea to secretly film Robert Smith in my sitting room, as otherwise nobody would believe me. In my drunken state ‘secret filming’ meant getting my video camera and holding it by my knee and pointing it at Robert Smith while I carried on chatting nonsense. He noticed it immediately and I could see him staring at it for quite a while before he finally asked me why I was filming him? I was too embarrassed to reply and just dropped the camera and carried on like nothing had ever happened.

  We kept on drinking until finally, at around four in the morning, I had a surreal transition from ‘Oh my God, Robert Smith is in my sitting room,’ to ‘Oh my God, is Robert Smith going to go home or is he going to stay the night? I’ve got to be at work tomorrow morning early.’ Eventually he left at about five in the morning and I passed out on the sofa. Life was getting really, really odd. I might have dreamed the whole thing except that I have a photo of him in my kitchen.

  I did have some great moments with Robert (he’s my mate, I can call him Robert, can’t I?). There was the time when my BBC Three chat show had wrapped (he played on it twice), and they kept the audience in and The Cure called me out so that Robert could say thank you and dedicate ‘Lullaby’ to me. He played a version that brought me to tears. I could have died fairly happy.

  Then he was up for a ‘legend’ thing at the Q Awards and he invited me along. I was very nervous, and got seriously drunk and pissed off Edith Bowman, who gate-crashed our table. I didn’t care, though, because I sat next to the legendary video director Tim Pope and chatted to Tricky, who was decidedly not tricky. The last time I saw Robert was at an incredible Cure Greatest Hits show in Islington. I got very drunk at the after-show party and think I was very rude to Chris Martin while I was trying to tell him how much I liked Coldplay. Robert seems to bring that out in me.

  It’s the weird thing about being famous – it’s a bit like being a dad. You know that certain tiny people call you ‘Dad’ and you answer to this moniker but, deep down, you wonder whom they are really talking to. You can’t be ‘Dad’; you’re the same nervous, stupid idiot that you were when you were sixteen, or at least you feel that way. Being famous is sort of the same thing. After a while, you accept that some people see you in that light, but you can never quite believe you actually are on the inside. There is a constant sense of being a fraud. This often leads you to behave badly because you’re uncomfortable playing the role of ‘celeb’. The moment you are comfortable with being famous is the moment you become Ronnie Corbett as opposed to Ronnie Barker (or vice versa).

  You don’t stop being a dribbling fan the moment you end up on the telly. When I was living in Notting Hill Gate, my nearest supermarket was a Tesco Metro that was often more like an episode of Stella Street. On an average day you could spot Chris Evans, Nick Cave, Jason Donovan, Damon Albarn . . .

  One day, however, I had a five-star spot. There, in my local Tesco Metro, looking at the yoghurts, was Mick Jones from The Clash, the quintessential Notting Hill band. Having little else to do, I decided to follow Mick Jones and see what he got up to. In my mind I suppose I imagined he might bump into some fellow musos, jam under the Westway, buy some ‘erb and head back to some cool pad to chill.

  As it was, I followed him out of Tesco Metro, keeping what I thought was a safe distance. If I’m honest, Mr Jones cut a slightly shabby figure – pallid skin, bad teeth, losing some hair and wearing a long, dirty coat – but this was the guitarist from The Clash for Christ’s sake! I followed him all the way up the Portobello Road. He stopped at a greengrocer’s and I watched him through the window as he bought some carrots. He exited, carried on, and I followed him until he disappeared into an Oxfam shop. I entered the shop and pretended to browse as I observed what he was up to. He was standing by a revolving rack of old paperbacks, mainly the works of Wilbur Smith. He rotated the books with little enthusiasm and looked around several times before shuffling out of the store and on down Notting Hill Gate. By now I was bored of following the ex-lead guitarist of the greatest punk band ever. I was expecting a slightly more exciting stalk. He’d let me down.

  A couple of years later and I was upstairs at The Electric, a poncey drinking hole in the Portobello Road. Through Harry Enfield, I had befriended the bassist of The Clash, Paul Simonon (a truly
lovely man) and his now ex-wife, Trish. That night I bumped into Trish and she told me that she was at a private party upstairs, and that I should come on up. I walked in to find a curious group watching a Chelsea game on television. There was Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream, Paul Simonon, Trish, Sadie Frost, a man who was introduced to me as Stephen Fry’s boyfriend and a girl who introduced herself as, ‘Hi, I’m Kate.’ It was Kate Moss. I tried to look relaxed, as though my normal night out was hanging out in a Grazia cover story. Kate Moss was busy lusting after ‘The Special One’, José Mourinho, and I was busy pretending that I had the remotest interest in football. After half an hour of this, the party moved on. Everybody dived into cabs and I jumped in too, despite Sadie Frost glowering at me in a ‘you don’t belong here’ sort of way. The taxis stopped at a familiar place on Holland Park Avenue. In fact, right next door to my old family home. When I’d lived there, the author P. D. James had been my neighbour. Now, there was clearly a new celebrity on the block and it looked like we were about to go late-night drinking in his pad. The front door opened and there stood . . . Mick Jones. I couldn’t believe it, the night was just getting better and better. I’d popped out for a pint and I was now in a rock ’n’ roll lock-in with half of The Clash and Kate Moss. I wanted to tell someone about what was going on but thought it might be a tad uncool to use the house phone. After about half an hour Mick Jones and I ended up chatting. He seemed to know who I was and was very chatty. Suddenly out of the blue, just as I was relaxing, he hit me square between the eyes: ‘Why did you follow me all the way from Tesco Metro in Portobello to my home a couple of years ago?’

  The room went quiet and everyone turned to hear my answer. I was mortified. To my horror Mick Jones continued: ‘I spotted you and thought you was gonna do a hidden camera thing on me. I tried to hide in a charity shop . . .’

  I wanted to die right there and then. My powers of speech deserted me. I had nowhere to go. I had broken the tricky, unspoken rules of celebrity/civilian interaction and Sadie Frost knew it. She was now staring at me with utter contempt. I can’t really remember much more, it was all too hideous. I spent the next half an hour waiting for my moment to escape. It came when Stephen Fry’s boyfriend appeared to get angry about something and started stripping down to his Y-fronts. Like all great queens, from Marie Antoinette onwards, Kate Moss had a sycophantic entourage who fought for the scraps of her attention like rabid dogs. One of them had angered the man in Y-fronts. I wish I could explain more, but I honestly have no idea what was going on, both because it was crazy and because I was now dangerously off my face. Whatever, everyone turned to watch the Y-fronts man and I took my moment and slipped out of the front door and headed home, slightly less keen to tell everyone about my night out.

  And then there was Michael Winner. Now, to clarify, Michael Winner was never one of my heroes, although I did share his love of La Mamounia Hotel in Marrakesh and stayed there several times when he was in residence. He would always take an entire corner of the pool and wallow in the shallows, barking orders at staff like some perma-tanned walrus. He was pretty loathsome but somehow I was rather fond of him and his fuck-you attitude to the world. But this story is not about Michael Winner, it’s about his neighbour.

  As I was filming a fake video diary for my BBC Three chat show I decided that a good running joke would be that Michael Winner was my celebrity neighbour. We proposed the idea to him and he was very up for it. He would, however, only film the segment at his own rather splendid mansion in Melbury Road in Holland Park (since bought by Robbie Williams after Winner’s demise). We told him that this would be fine but we would need to film from his neighbour’s garden as that would technically be my house.

  ‘That’s fine, Jimmy will be fine about that. Goodbye,’ said Winner grandiosely before hanging up.

  So we turned up on the appointed day to film the sequences. I was looking forward to poking around Winner’s house but it was not to be. We were told by his assistant to set up in the garden next door and he would be along soon. This we did and we waited and waited for Winner to come down, but he didn’t show and we started to get a little bored. Suddenly a man wandered down to say hello. He introduced himself as Binky and said that he worked in the house whose garden we were in.

  ‘I look after stuff for Jimmy,’ he said.

  ‘Who is Jimmy?’ I asked.

  ‘Jimmy? Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin? Do you want to look round the house?’

  Suddenly nobody was interested in waiting for Michael Winner, and we all followed Binky into the mansion behind us. I asked Binky if Jimmy was about and was told that no, he had a bad back and was off seeing his chiropractor. You couldn’t make it up. I assumed that this was what happened when you lumbered about stage carrying two-headed twelve-string guitars. Binky showed us an amazing dining room with a large round table designed as an enormous Ouija board. It appeared that Jimmy still dabbled with dark forces from time to time. My favourite part of the house was in the basement, where Jimmy’s climate-controlled guitar room was situated. Binky told us that he used to be a guitar roadie and that his main job now was to make sure that any of the multitude of guitars was tuned and ready to go at any time of day or night when his master beckoned. I loved the image of Page reclining on a set of devil horns and shouting: ‘Binky, bring me my ’72 Stratocaster . . .’

  There were some letters on the chest in the hall addressed to James Page, and I couldn’t resist. One of my strangest souvenirs from the last fifteen years is Jimmy Page’s council tax bill. Years later, I was covering the Olympics in Beijing for the Independent and blagged my way into the closing ceremony after-show party, the place where Boris made his famous ping-pong/wiff-waff speech. It was a good blag as the other guests were David Beckham, Leona Lewis, Gordon Brown . . . and Jimmy Page. I chatted to Page and tried to apologise for stealing his council tax bill but his mind was still somewhere on top of a London bus, playing a guitar solo to an audience of billions, so he wasn’t very interested and I can’t say I blamed him.

  Back in London, when we finally exited the Page house Winner was waiting for us and in a very bad mood because we’d kept him waiting. I wrote about it in my Indy column and it began a long and rather enjoyable feud with the old rogue. If I had any spare time I’d always enjoy going into his Wikipedia page and adding extra films to his canon. My favourite one was:

  Trellis, a Polish art-house flick that Winner directed as a palate cleanser following the arduous Death Wish series (he insisted on directing all at once over a period of six days, with no breaks – four films in six days). Trellis was inspired both by Winner’s childhood as a Latvian coal miner and his inexplicable love of the sea. The film’s central storyline is based around three naked sailors who wrestle in olive oil for seven hours.

  Winner’s page was eventually locked and a very useful boredom-breaker facility sadly became off limits to me. The last time we met was on an edition of Celebrity Mastermind. Winner waltzed in, ignoring everyone in the green room, especially me. He then proceeded to crash and burn on the show, getting an embarrassingly awful score – one of the lowest ever. Most people would run and hide at this moment – Michael Winner took to the Daily Mail to announce that we were all stupid and, when it came to me, he had not forgotten our feud:

  One was a burly, lower-league version of Jonathan Ross called Dom Joly. He’d come to my house to film a minor sketch in my garden with me in it for his TV show once. He forgot his lines endlessly and then wrote, quite untruthfully, that I’d kept him waiting for half an hour.

  RIP Michael – hope the dinners are winners down there.

  Not content with these individual encounters with heroes, the bar was really raised when I found myself to be an unlikely guest at the GQ Man of the Year Awards. My friend Simon Kelner, then editor of both the Independent and i, was up for editor of the year or some such nonsense (all awards are nonsense unless you win one). Simon had got a table for the evening and invited some friends to join him. Weirdly he chos
e two ‘celeb’ friends who were both currently in the showbiz wilderness. The first was Alex James, the bassist from Blur. At the time, Damon Albarn had headed off with Gorillaz and other solo projects, leaving Alex and the rest of Blur a little high and dry. Alex had put on weight and grown a nervous-breakdown beard – I knew how he felt.

  The event was being held at the National Opera House in Covent Garden and I turned up pretty early, as I do for everything. Outside, there was a scary red carpet entrance with a wall of paparazzi shouting and jostling for photos of the great and good. I hadn’t done a TV show for three years and was seriously out of the loop. I hated red carpets at the best of times but this one was freaky. I stepped onto the carpet, showed my invite and kept walking with my head down. The cameras were deathly silent, not a click to be heard. It was like a bloody monastery. I kept walking faster and faster until I was in the relative safety of the lobby. I got into the lift and was joined by a group of three blonde women who were still heady from the excitement outside.

  ‘Wow . . .’ said blonde one.

  ‘That was crazy,’ said blonde two.

  ‘Can you imagine being a famous name and doing that walk and nobody taking your photo? It would kill you . . . So stressy . . . Nightmare . . .’

  I looked up to see if blonde three was taking the piss. She wasn’t. None of them had noticed me. They were just expressing the awful truth. I felt lower than low. I didn’t want to be here, didn’t want the ‘celebrity’ life. Having it then flick two fingers at you was even worse.