The trains were going by and we were in this room. Those rooms are always lit by a single bare bulb, hanging there like a neon fissure lighting the ghastly anal cavity of a room.
I do have cause to question what it’s all about, those nights where I exhaust myself with it, where I just keep excavating more and more energy – you’d think it’d be enough, you’ve seen the concert, you’ve ejaculated a few times – I go home and still there’s more, it takes such a lot to lull me off to sleep.
That is again, I suppose, my unwillingness to relinquish the seamier side of life, in spite of achieving a modicum of fame, an attachment remains for the illicit and the intoxicating. I sometimes think, you’ve got this nice house, imagine if you had a lovely girlfriend. I don’t know how to utilise things properly. Again Morrissey has a view. “When you want to live, How do you start? Where do you go? Who do you need to know?” WOohh Oooh Oh, WOoohOhho.
†
Human Yoghurt
At the end of 2006 we made my first stand-up DVD, Russell Brand Live, at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire off the back of Edinburgh. My ascent from the depths was so rapid in retrospect that my memory has been bamboozled by the bends. Typically an event of that nature would be a real milestone, but actually the night of the record for me will go down as the point where my perpetually heightening hair finally reached a tipping point. It became bloody ridiculous, evidentially the extraordinary grooming of my vertical barnet had become an outlet for my addiction, as the incremental upward creep had got completely out of control like a game of “one potato, two potato” played by a pair of fiercely competitive simpletons.
Here, have a look at it. In fact look at this illustration which charts its growth over a six-month period.
I knew it was out of control, it was like when your parents show you Seventies wedding pictures – “What were you wearing – the lapels!? Look at your hair!” Except it was happening the next morning.
The Shepherd’s Bush Empire is a thousand-seater room and I’d only played a venue that size for the run at Edinburgh, which was just four gigs. This would be the first time I’d headlined a big gig in London. Everything was new. As an aficionado of comedy and a social shipwreck, comedy videos were hugely significant to my childhood and adolescence – Billy Connolly, the Mary Whitehouse Experience, Lenny Henry, Eddie Izzard, Ben Elton; all were consumed and studied. David Baddiel is astonished at my ability to recall incredibly obscure bits from his set, but the reason I can is because I was a lonely little nit and those videos were my friends. So making my debut DVD was hugely significant. Not as significant as my hair, obviously, but still important. The material in Shame, which was the name of the tour from which the DVD was derived, was largely about humiliation and embarrassment and titled after a catchphrase of my nan’s (Do nans have catchphrases? Of course they do). Throughout my life she would look at me forlornly, shake her head and say, “Shame, innit?” Not to me, but about me. Although superficially this may appear to be a casual condemnation of my being, I liked it. I also dissected many of the ridiculous tabloid articles and kiss and tells that had dishonestly chronicled my adventures in the public eye.
Now that my radio days, unlike my salad days (I am vegetarian) are over, I miss what I then took for granted – weekly contact with my audience and the opportunity to parry and redress the propaganda war that the tabloids inaugurated the day I dared to dive into the mainstream. The most obvious indication of this transition was the transfer of me, Matt and Trev’s rickety ol’ three men on a wireless 6 Music shambles to Europe’s most powerful radio levia-than, BBC Radio 2.
My Lady Macbeth-style ambition was a useful tool in slashing our way through the crusty old monarchy of red tape and, retrospectively, justifiable caution that stood in our path. As soon as we began on 6 Music I said, “Well, this is all well and good but don’t you think you should get on and kill Duncan (Wogan)?” Poor bloody Macbeth. Going from “I’m not sure, I quite like him really” to “Oh no! What have I done? There’s blood everywhere – here love, can you wash this out?” in a matter of days. Just to keep the fellatio flowing – I’d’ve stayed as a thane – whatever that is. It’s a damn good argument for steering clear of marriage.
I was badgering people, mostly Radio 2’s controller Lesley Douglas, beloved Lesley, a gorgeous matriarch, a warm woman who kept me beneath her petticoats like a pasty protégé, let me hang from her apron strings from the moment she first met me. She has nurtured, nourished and indulged me as any good woman should. Short of actually breastfeeding me I can’t see what more she could have done to hasten my development. Let me tell you I’ve been breastfed as an adult and it’s better – breast milk is wasted on babies – they’ve got nothing to compare it to, the ungrateful little berks. I knew a woman once, married she was, who’d pop over from time to time and share her infant’s creamy revenue with me, like I was a naughty jackdaw pinching creamy gold-top while it chilled on the doorstep. It was delicious – more savoury than traditional moo-cow milk – which before you condemn me is in itself a bloody odd thing to drink, and certainly the sexual element meant it was the snack you could eat between meals without ruining your sexual appetite. I felt not a flicker of guilt for this kinky act of cuckolding and tot-robbing as it were all such fun – she sprayed it everywhere – it was my own private foam party. But for one occasion of what I came to know as “dairy decadence” when the yummy mummy informed me that she’d eschewed feeding her child in order to register a surplus for this cheeky visit. Then I thought, “Is this moral? Can you ever justify stealing food from the mouth of a baby just to spice up yer sex life?” It turns out I could; after all, as I would’ve told the nipper had he had the facility for language – there’s no point crying over spilt milk. Anyway he wouldn’t have wanted to lap it up after where she’d been squirting it.
I connect well with women who are maternal, because I’m well practised at that relationship due to the intensity of the bond with me mum. The only child of a single mum, I shall forever be contextualised by unending uteral warmth. Perhaps it is a mother’s role to be taken for granted; the first face you ever see, constant source of nutrition and love. And as you grow beyond warring with their imperfection as a truculent youth you discover the truth of what they have bequeathed. I was ever a devotee to Philip Larkin’s sulky ode “This Be The Verse”, which begins with the lines “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.” Now, though, as a man I see that my more admirable traits, my compassion, gentility and warmth, are all my mother’s inculcations. She who cannot pass a squirrel or a cat without imagining it a part of some Beatrix Potter world where a polite “hello” is a necessity. Often she’ll make an enquiry of an animal: “Are you alright?,” “What’s your name?” or, more bafflingly, “Is that your baby?” Clearly my mother requires no response but she instinctively acknowledges that me, you and the furry twerps that scuttle and yip are all just making our way through life. Humble symbols of something far greater, we all may just as well have a chat.
Lesley Douglas was incredibly tolerant of my behaviour at Radio 2. If you listen to old 6 Music podcasts, you will notice that all the competition winners that came into studio while we broadcast as a prize were female. This is because there was an additional aspect to the prize which could never be explicitly stated due to the BBC’s rigid policy prohibiting the misuse of the disabled lavvy. Radio 2 DJ and presumed future News of the World witch-hunt candidate Paul Gambaccini wrote that Lesley had a dangerous obsession with me; that I was like her pet and she was infatuated and he knew no good would come of it. Well, I think good did come of it; it was a fantastic radio show, and yes, the BBC was destroyed in the course of it but isn’t that a price worth paying for 20 or 30 relatively good podcasts and for a real hoot and a laugh?
At 6 Music, we were not “under the radar” because radar is probably a necessary part of the transmission process, but certainly we were beneath the coruscating magnifying eye of the British tabloids. The lens of their examination can combust you like a mid-August ant if you’re not heat resistant. My move to Radio 2 was heralded with this headline in the Daily Mail above an article written by Alison Boshoff:
My response to this was to give out Alison Boshoff ’s email address on-air, dubbing her “Nosh-off Bosh-off ” – a suggested colloquialism for hygiene-driven inter-orifice fellatio, and to ring the Daily Mail. T’were a prelude to the incident that was to bring the show national notoriety; the Mail failed to answer the phone and we were transferred to voicemail.
“What, the Daily Mail not answering their phone, what are they doing, driving immigrants out of the country with a sharpened stick?” I blurted. Answering machine messages became a feature of the show.
Steve Merchant articulated Nosh-off ’s point more charmingly when he came on as a guest early in the run – “This is disgusting! This is Radio 2! Most listeners can’t even turn off this filth when they want to – they have to hit the radio with their canes!”
We had great guests on those early Radio 2 shows. We had Courtney Love, David Walliams and Matt Lucas, and author and filmmaker Jon Ronson (who has made the shift to Hollywood with the adaptation of his book Men Who Stare at Goats) came on twice.
The element of which I was most proud was Noel Gallagher’s involvement. He’d turn up, week in week out, like a cousin – no cabs, no fee, no shit. Just a really famous rock star shambling in and being hilarious. In spite of all the Blur vs Oasis snarling and slick, sick epigrams, he’s an absolute treasure to be around, a docile sweetheart of a man who gives fine advice and has great integrity. What’s more, he’s a right bloody laugh and doesn’t take himself seriously – and many would argue that a sense of humour is the defining quality of an Englishman. Look at these funny bits between us on the show:
STUDIO. DAY.RUSSELLAw, that’s a nasty, nasty perspective, especially from an atheist.NOELI’m not an atheist!RUSSELLHold on, you said you don’t believe in God, Noel.NOELI don’t, that doesn’t make me an atheist.RUSSELLWell, I think it does.NOELDon’t label me, I don’t belong to any group.RUSSELLWell, you do. There’s Oasis for a start.
And …
STUDIO. DAY.RUSSELLAlright, Noel, how’s your missus?NOELD’ya know what she done today? She fixed our boiler that had broken, she fixed it.RUSSELLBloody hell, that’s emasculating, what were you doing, needlepoint?NOELShe actually made the point that, you know when you were doing impressions of her last night, you were making her sound like Lorraine Kelly, which did not go down well.RUSSELL
(in Scottish accent)“Oh it’s me, Sara, I’ll just fix the boiler. Noel, why don’t you just sit there and wash your little vagina.” That’s what it’s like in the Gallagher household.NOELDo not refer to my son as a vagina.
He’s got a natural comic mind, a quick turn of phrase. Later, when I asked if we could play “Rock and Roll Star” at the start of the MTV VMA Awards, he said, “Of course you can, then the people of America will see a bloke they’ve never seen before walking on to a track they’ve never heard of.”
When things went wrong on the show, as they frequently did, we’d tell people. We were childishly honest and avoided any form of artifice, something for which the BBC was always being criticised.
We deconstructed entertainment radio. All of the items were postmodern, they were there for the sake of having an item – hence “Gay” and “Nanecdotes” (all of which originally came from emails sent in by listeners).
One week we invited linguist and radical thinker Noam Chomsky on the show and he replied saying, “Thanks for the offer but sadly life is hard and I see no place for comedy.” So we went on air and launched a “Cheer up Chomsky” campaign. (Five minutes after the show Nic Philps gets a text saying that Chomsky’s wife is terminally ill, that’s why he’s miserable. The item was then wisely abandoned.)
We had Richard Dawkins, Ricky Gervais and Slash on the same show. We would go from an interview with Big Bird from Sesame Street (a bit up himself ) to one with newsreader Peter Sissons (a real dreamboat). I asked Sissons if he thought the news agenda was set by the government and the forces of consumerism that control all of our minds, and whether he thought about that whilst reading the news. “Oh no,” he blithely replied. “No, that isn’t what courses through my brain actually, it’s usually, ‘Is the autocue going to work?’”
My tricky gear-shift into ubiquity was coupled with a fair amount of commentary saying, “He’s come from nowhere, he’s a flash in the pan.” I can see why people would have been sceptical, because by the time I did become famous it was such an articulate stab; I arrived with a vocabulary, a manner of speech, a style of dress, a hairstyle, an ideology, all in alignment. Looking back a few years later, it was a perfect pantomime entry into the national consciousness.
This is where that preparation became relevant, because no longer was it just for the kids on 6 Music, there was a DVD out (and I was soon to be performing at The Secret Policeman’s Ball at the Albert Hall). When you have to be sought out on digital media you’re only going to be watched by people who actively want to see you. When you’re on Radio 2 you’re going to be encountered by a lot more people who don’t like you. I’ve come to terms with the impossibility of total acceptance. Not everyone will like you if you’re in a pub with twenty people in it, so when you’re exposed to sixty million people obviously there’ll be people who don’t like you. Jonathan Ross said, “With anyone famous, there’s as many people who don’t like us as do, that’s still enough for you to have a career.” To achieve absolute acceptance, one would have to become totally enlightened or utterly innocuous. Until then there’ll always be some sort of understandable irritation.
I was very nervous about that Secret Policeman’s Ball gig. Every gig I’m nervous about still. I can see the straight line from when I first stepped on a stage for Bugsy Malone to the last time I stepped on a stage, because I take performing very seriously, I’m meticulous about it, I care about it enormously, and I can’t bear to be anything other than well prepared and give a good account of myself.