Booky Wook 2: This Time It's Personal

by Russell Brand

  “When?”

  “In February.”

  “February? The existence of Februaries has never been categorically proven – I’ll do it!” Of course when February comes, as February must, I regret my blithe agreement and sneak off behind my vegetarianism.

  My excitement on learning that Nik and I had secured the NMEs duly ripened into horror as the day drew near – it became an ordeal. The room would be chock-a-block with alcoholics and alcohol and eccentricity and egos, and everyone would be trying so hard to be so cool that our common humanity would be as relevant to the assembly as a recipe for a damn good moussaka. On an inexplicable whim the editor of New Musical Express (the magazine behind the ceremony), the boyish Conor McNicholas, decided the set should resemble the inside of Dr Who’s Tardis. So at one end of this flat, dank booze hall was a sci-fi set that to me seemed non sequitous and pointless and looked like it wanted the attendees to love it. The nerdy set that would be providing my backdrop made me more nervous. Staring at it with impending dread, I reflected. Life is not a postcard of life, life is essential and about detail, minutiae and trivia. Tiny anxious pangs, heartburn and stubbed toes. “There’s something in my eye. My mouth tastes funny. Have I chipped my tooth?” Titchy, Prufrock facts. Not a broad sweep of a Rothko brush, but pop art dots, like Liechtenstein’s.

  As was my custom at that time I was with Sharon (cockney boxer, Babs Windsor laugh, Kathy Burke warmth), my stylist, Nicola (flirty young mum, everyone’s nan, lickable skin, loves indiscriminately), who does my make-up, and Matt (same twerp from Chapter 1). It was necessary then as now to ensconce myself in familiarity, estuary accents, working-class values, because after all, it’s all just a bit of a fuckin’ laugh, all this, innit? You don’t wanna take life too seriously. If you don’t laugh you’ll fuckin’ cry. I need that kind of attitude around me as I approach the stage, because within it’s all Mozart’s Requiem for Death and livid Francis Bacon pinks. I lay charred birds at Tiresias’s feet as I stare down at the beast. I need ritual. Theatre was born of ritual, religion was born of ritual. If I should die think only this of me, “I thought it would be funny.”

  The yips, the condition that afflicts darts players and golfers, is the inability to let go of the dart or to take the final putt. Darts players before throwing the dart see a line leading from the tip of their arrow to the treble twenty or the bullseye. (As a child I always thought of the bullseye as more important, as it’s got a better name. When I discovered treble twenty’s superiority I thought, “The dog out of Oliver is not called treble twenty, it’s called Bullseye.” It’s a good name and an evocative image, the eye of the bull. Treble twenty is just arithmetic.) The perfect visualisation of that line sometimes makes it difficult for them to relinquish the dart and I understand that. It’s acknowledging the point at which you interface with reality. Most sports are reactive, interactive, a giddy blur of controlled chaos like football or boxing, you against a swirl of oppositional energy. But the dartboard is never going to come hurtling towards you and slap you round the chops, so unless you seduce it, unless you part the thighs of the oche and make that move, nothing’s going to happen. Ritual is necessary to cope with that obligation.

  At the time of the NMEs I began to accumulate the people, the things and ideas that I need to succeed. Sometimes I have cause to reflect, as I walk out in front of 5,000 people or host a big event, “Fucking hell, it is still just me in a toilet,” the same as it was the first time I went on to a stage at Grays Comprehensive School to chubbily inhabit Fat Sam in Bugsy Malone. Then as now, my bowel having loosened, my heart palpitates faster until eventually my mind moves into alignment and focus.

  Now I’ve conducted that ceremony in thousands of toilets to ever-growing numbers of people, but ultimately it’s for the same purpose of motivating myself into a position where I can legitimately ask things to go well because I’m in tune with something higher.

  Often when I’m nervous before a show people will say, “Why are you worried? What’s the worst that can happen?” The reason I’m nervous is that I think something unlikely, implausible but utterly awful will happen. The sort of thing that happens to me quite often. Sufficiently often for me to accept the necessity of rigorous preparation. Something, in fact, like this.

  It was a good script that me and Matt knocked up, funny, with good jokes. The New York band the Strokes were there: “Oh, my nan had a stroke, I think that’s what killed her – what was Julian Casablancas thinking? She was ninety years old! And she was a lesbian!” Actually my nan did have a stroke and it was that that killed her. She wasn’t a lesbian though.

  Jokes of that calibre kept the room entertained, and one must always remember to play to the millions of TV viewers in addition to those present. Even if the musicians are chatting among themselves and wheezing merry pepper up their hooters, the people at home are probably watching politely. I was already mates with the impeccably English and mindlessly attractive Carl Barât, formerly of the Libertines and at that time with Dirty Pretty Things, so I wasn’t totally adrift socially. What’s more, I had spent the previous ten years taking enough drugs to put most of those present into nappies, so I could connect on that level. I was no stranger, either, to live acts of reckless self-destruction, so was unperturbed when the lead singer of the band Cribs sharded himself up, real horrorshow, on a table full of glasses he’d Iggy Popped himself on to. I was prepared for almost anything. Including being dubbed a cunt by a saint.

  When Bob Geldof calls you a cunt, speaking from experience, it is difficult because Bob Geldof comes with cultural baggage, mostly favourable. We’re all aware of Bob Geldof and all the wonderful things he’s done. Bob Geldof had been ever present in my own life as a benevolent, indignant narrator of the story of the possibility for positive change. So as he strolled to the pulpit, beckoned by Bono on VT, in my mind a different film played.

  Cut to – 1984 Wembley Stadium, Bob Geldof louchely bounds with stern purpose on to the stage; at home in Grays, Essex, the nine-year-old Russell Brand sits in the square-eyed danger zone staring lovingly at the hobo-knight. “When I grow up I’d like to be just like brave Sir Bob,” he thinks. “Give me the fookin’ money NOW,” growls his on-screen hero. What a wonderful man. Having saved the world, Bob, by now canonised, settles down and has three beautiful daughters with names that many condemn as indulgent but that young Russell thinks are original and poetic. “You leave him be,” he chides his friends. “That man saved the world.” When Bob’s wife Paula Yates tragically dies after the death of her new partner, Michael Hutchence, the teenage Russell notes with teary eyes that Bob took on the daughter the doomed lovers had subsequently borne. “Truly he is the lamb of God.”

  “And here he is,” thinks contemporary Russell as wise Sir Bob mounts the stage. “At last I can meet this great man and tell him of his influence and of the hope he’s given me over the years.” As his hero passes, Russell scarcely dares to touch his hand but obediently gives him his deserved reward for NME’s kindest, nicest man of the year.

  “Russell Brand, what a cunt.”

  Oh. That’s not very nice. Perhaps my mind is broken. I look to Matt in the wings, whose face confirms two things: yes, that actually happened, and yes, your mind is broken. But it is not a mind entirely without merits. Earlier in the day while finalising the script, by which I mean writing it, for nothing is ever written until it absolutely cannot be avoided, I said to Matt that I was worried about Bob Geldof.

  “Why? What for? He’ll be alright,” said Matt.

  “I’ve just got a feeling that he could be confrontational,” I said. It was not entirely a male version of women’s intuition – my fear was ignited by provocative elements of our script. When me and Matt write scripts our minds depart, our better judgement takes a hike and our combined rudeness struts in with a hard-on and drizzles out what it considers to be funny but is actually offensive – usually to someone important. It did it at the NMEs (Bob Geldof ), it did it at the Brits (the Queen)
and it did it at the MTV VMA awards (George W. Bush). I’ll tell you how we erred at these subsequent events in good time, but for now here’s my forensic analysis of what may’ve got up Bob’s nose.

  I called him “Sir Bobby Gandalph”.

  I threw to a VT of his close friend Bono with the line, “Here’s Bono, live from a satellite orbiting his own ego.” Maybe that antagonised him.

  And finally there was this link to bring him to the stage: “The winner of Best DVD is Bob Geldof. My best DVD is Big Natural Tits 10, in a welcome return to form after the lazy and derivative Big Natural Tits 8 and 9. Of course we ain’t really captured the glory days of Big Natural Tits 1 and 2 – don’t be ridiculous – but all this is academic because the Big Natural Tits series has been overlooked. Again. Here’s Sir Bobby Gandalph!”

  The moment.

  At our script meeting I reasoned with Matty Morgs thusly – “That Gandalf stuff and all this rhubarb about boobs will antagonise him” (although they really are spectacular films), but Matt said, “No, he won’t say nothing, he’ll be flattered.”

  “He won’t be flattered, Matt, he’ll be incensed.”

  I presumed his response would be “There’s only one big natural tit here” – then, turning to point at me, “that prick”. As it transpired, Sir Bob was much more linguistically efficient.

  As my gung-ho writing partner and I discussed the likelihood of a tit-for-tat reprisal from Sir Bob, an incredible thing happened. Occasionally as a comic, a line will appear as if in a dream, perfect, celestial, fully formed. The line I’m about to recite emerged from the mists of my troubled mind like Excalibur. Matt was still busily assuring me that the world’s most notoriously outspoken man would tolerate my childish teasing like a big soppy ol’ sheepdog when I, suddenly St Paul, all smug with epiphany, said, “If he does coat me off I shall simply reply: “No wonder Bob Geldof ’s such an expert on famine. He’s been dining out on ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ for thirty years.” Matt has never been one to dole out praise profligately; he responded to my burbled boasts about Kate Moss with the immortal “Her? She’s a bit thin, ain’t she?” – but now he was suitably awed.

  “Fucking hell, that’s brilliant.”

  “I know, my son,” I said all holy. “Shall we put it into his intro?”

  “No. That’d be overkill. But it’s nice to know it’s there if you need it. It’s security – like Clint Eastwood’s Magnum.”

  “Russell Brand, what a cunt.” It felt like the nice man from Live Aid, the man who’d single-handedly saved Africa, had speared me through the decades. I felt like a bullied nine-year-old, hurt and defenceless. Well, you may’ve fed the world but you just broke my heart, Geldof. I was eviscerated, up there. I stood at the side of the stage, white and silent with no recourse. Except I had that line.

  But Bob Geldof is a hero, revered by millions, the perfect apotheosis of modern philanthropy, a great father, a rebel who stayed true and kept on sticking it to the man even after he made it. Who took his fame and money and power and did something truly worthwhile. There’s no way I can hit back at Bob Geldof. Can I? He did just call me a cunt. On the telly. In front of my mum. What a quandary! My personal pride has been attacked, but by a great man. He has shot me down like a hangdog gunslinger riding a young pretender out of town. Except, I do have that line.

  I don’t know what to do. Bob’s over at the pulpit giving his speech and I’m welded to the spot, still trapped in the moment where his curse pierced my flesh. I look over. I can’t hear what he’s saying, only my mind ticking. “Shall I say that line?” it asks. I can’t see the audience, only the glare and Bob’s great past and my mum at home on her sofa with her cat holding a mug, stung. Maybe she’s crying. I don’t know what to do. I’m up there alone, my first big gig and an international human rights campaigner has just dug me out. Do I fight back? Can I use the line?

  Then I remember Matt. He’s in the wings. Slowly, so slowly the audience and Bob don’t notice, I turn my head. There’s Matt, and like me he’s motionless. He looks proper pissed off. We lock eyes. Me and Matt are mates. We’ve been through some capers. I’ve dragged him through brothels and made him score me smack. We’ve been in gruesome threesomes and nasty rows. Across the floor and through the silence Matt hears the wordless question.

  “Shall I, mate?”

  Slowly and with no trace of doubt Matt nods.

  I turn. Take aim. And fire.

  Now it’s Sir Bob’s turn to reel with stinging shame, the philanthropic Goliath felled by a wise guy slingshot. I don’t get too many opportunities in life to look cool. But in this moment I was an assassin. Now the rest of the show should be a doddle. There is, however, a further challenge. Shaun Ryder, the legendary front man and doomed genius who fronted the Happy Mondays, had been up to collect an award and was a bit “the worse for wear”.

  He was as “worse for wear as a newt”. He was “worse for weared” out of his fucking mind. I admire Shaun, he is the Queen Mother of junkies, but later in the script we had a reference to him, which was funny but, after seeing him looking a bit vulnerable, was now inappropriate and defunct. I don’t get a kick from upsetting people or joking about people who are vulnerable – there have been famous occasions where I’ve had lapses, but they were mistakes and I urge you to stay tuned for the justification. After an emotionally exhausting night, with which I was coping, with the end just in sight I stood at the podium relieved it was almost over, when I noticed the offending joke on the teleprompter.

  “NOOOoooo! Shaun Ryder is the punchline of the final joke!”

  I ran over to the side of the stage.

  “Matt, fucking hell! We can’t write another joke. We’ll have to change the name for this to work.”

  Jesus Christ. The joke is this: Jo Whiley is a woman who insists on breastfeeding her children. (That’s the set-up.) Curiously she considers all homeless people her children. (That’s the introduction of a comical idea.) Earlier today security had to physically prevent her from putting her booby in Shaun Ryder’s mouth. (Punchline.) A bit daft, yes, but as an intro to the lovely Jo Whiley, who’s about to walk on, it works. Or did till Shaun Ryder turned up all drunk and in need of compassion. For this joke to work we have to replace his name, we have to find someone. Somewhere in this room. Who we don’t mind offending. Who looks like they might be homeless … Bob Geldof.

  It was a tough night but an educational one that gave me experience that would prove invaluable in the coming years. I learned never to say anything controversial at awards ceremonies ever again.

  Under any circumstances.

  Unless I was absolutely certain that it was funny.

  †

  Chapter 3

  Big Brother’s Big Risk

  Blundersome TV producer and cohort Gareth Roy does a very good impression of my orgasm, having once overheard me dispensing with some effluvia with a couple of young people lit only by the tangerine sea of twinkling LA street lanterns, that make the Hollywood Hills so desirable a residence, and the unnecessary front room gas fire, which also drenched the contorted nude forms in naughty orange. His interpretation sounds a bit like Fred Flintstone launching into his “Yabba-dabba-doo” catchphrase then having a stroke half-way through it – “Yabaa-dadArR$%@!@*ahhhhhh- OOooh”. Wilma is hysterical: “Barney, call an ambulance – made of dinosaur bones. We need a historically inaccurate solution to this comically Neanderthal problem.”

  Whilst Gareth may mock my rather fanciful sex celebrations, considering them no doubt to be over-blown Cristiano Ronaldo-style tricks, the women involved seem to like them. And why not? I myself like nothing more than a great big operatic bit of showboating from my partners when it comes to a climax, so why wouldn’t they be the same? I think it must be rather unrewarding for a woman if at the climax of the act some nervous nelly of an Englishman like Gareth drizzles out a teaspoon of cock-porridge without a whimper, perhaps palming over a clammy docket bearing the words “Many thanks, miss, I’ve just don
e a cum.” Give me the razzamatazz of my Russell Brand, brass band orgasmo-spectaculars any day, any day, any day.

  Before I ejaculate I’m a fervid, febrile mass of sexual energy. I’ll do anything, I’m demonically sexy. After I cum I’m a guilty little berk in a sweaty tank top. “Good heavens, Mother, what have I done?” I wonder why the chemical change is so dramatic?

  Using what I’ve gleaned about evolutionary psychology from Richard Dawkins and the Flintstones, the post-ejaculatory crash is to prevent Fred roaring off out of the cave the second he’s spunked up, smashing that dimwit Barney in the throat and popping something messy up Betty’s loincloth. God that sentence turned me on. I’m going to have to go on a course that addresses the growing problem of w-ank-imation.

  I do at least give my squandered ejaculant a dignified mourning. Picture the funeral of ten million sperm, a congregation of grief-drunk mourners yelping and shrieking, sticking their fingers up their arses – a sepulchral carnival, a festival of mournography.

  I am sentimentally attached to my fluids in an “Every sperm is sacred”, Catholic, Pythonesque fashion (Pythons themselves loathe that adjective, so apologies, dear heroes). Perhaps it’s my age, but each kinky cell seems like an opportunity for life. There are church posters that bear the hyperbolic inscription “You’re one in twenty million” – each one of us is a lottery winner before we subdivide, the product of the fastest, strongest sperm. And that applies to proper little weeds like myself, not just Jesse Owens or Michael Flatley. Whether the sperm riverdanced out of the testes or crawled out on its belly, we’re all champions.

  I cherish and exalt these moments of sexual bliss, because but for them my life would be an unpunctuated scroll of unremarkable sludge. I’m not given to fist-pumping displays of triumph in my daytime activities – even when they may be warranted – so these nocturnal displays are prized.

  When I was informed that I’d got the job hosting Big Brother’s Big Mouth – which changed my life and rescued me from the post-rehab routine of brittle bike rides and underpaid stand-up – I did not cleave the sky like Jimi Hendrix or Thor, I said simply, “That’s good. Thanks.”