My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (23 page)

a period when our impecunious circumstances even led us to share the same bed—like Morecambe and Wise, dreaming of better things.

It’s a shame that it has to be me that tells the following story,

’cos Karl always said he would tell it in his autobiography (though obviously the fact that I’ve got there fi rst doesn’t mean he won’t get the chance, and the more different angles people get to hear this from the better as far as I’m concerned). We were in bed reading Shakespeare together (oh yes, ours was a very cultural house hold).

At one point I broke away from the text and was just making stuff up as I went along, but Karl hadn’t realized and kept looking at the book, struggling to find out where those lines were coming from. Now obviously I’m not saying that I’m as good at improvising dialogue as Shakespeare was at writing it—that would be ridiculously conceited—but this story does seem to suggest as much. Just look at the evidence.

189

RUSSELL BRAND

It wasn’t all late-night Shakespeare readings and off- the- cuff brilliance, hanging out with me at that time, though. My egotism and the single-mindedness with which I pursued potential sexual conquests could often make me uneasy company.

Karl and I would often muse that in this secular age where man no longer believed in or devoted himself to God, salvation could only be sought through love, that love was a new religion—romantic love, devotion to the female, a return to pagan roots—and women were goddesses who could be saved through worshipping. Thus I was forever on my knees before women, hungrily devouring truth, seeking out redemption wherever it may lie—usually squandered between someone’s thighs.

After about six months to a year of working together, my alcohol and drug use and erratic behavior with women eventually drove Karl away. We didn’t have a formal falling out, we just sort of stopped phoning each other. I think it was partly the pressure of both being poor and me drinking too much and taking too many drugs. But either way, I adored him, and missed him terribly once we stopped working together.

That summer, I went up to Edinburgh with a group of students to do a series of short plays by the bloke who wrote Moon-struck, in a fifty-seater room. That was the first time I’d been to the festival, and I loved it. Me and this other guy who was in the play had a league to see who could pull the most women (I believe I won). There were lots of big parties we couldn’t get into, so we just kind of blagged our way around.

It was in the midst of these misadventures that I did my first solo open-mike spot, above an Edinburgh pub called Th e Blind

Poet. It lasted only seven minutes, and it was terrifying and difficult—even though there were only about fifteen people in the audience, most of whom were in the play that I was doing—but I loved it.

190

Don’t Die of Ignorance

I sat in a laundrette writing jokes about swans, which are quite a staple of the surrealist lexicon. When I finally performed the piece, I was every bit as scared as the first time I stepped on the stage as Fat Sam, but this time there was no character, no hat and no accent to hide behind—only me and material about swans (remember this is ten years ago: at that point no one had found out just how funny swans were; you could say I was a real pioneer).

My first gig was yet another profound epiphany—I’ve been lucky enough to have had several in my life. I hope I reach the point where epiphanies become so commonplace that I scarcely bother to register them: “Oh look, another epiphany—as we acquire knowledge we become mired in the ignorance of the educated, delivered from the wisdom of innocence by a corrupted midwife. Now what’s on telly?” (That’s probably why I put the stuff about Saul on the road to Damascus in my nan’s poem, because I recognized how it feels to suddenly be rendered holy and complete by a realization of the exact nature of your destiny.) Obviously doing Bugsy Malone as a kid was my main incidence of what Jack Kerouac called satori, but since I’ve been thinking about it, I’ve realized that there was probably one even earlier than that—when I had to read at a school poetry competition in the third year. The fact that this happened at all was probably down to Mr. Hannebury—this En glish teacher who would sometimes show me a bit of encouragement (when he wasn’t slamming his hand down on his desk and saying, “Russell, have you done your homework? No? Case proved!”). In my mind, he seems like a very worldly-wise, almost avuncular figure, but in reality he was probably younger than I am now.

The piece I read was called “The Nightmare before Christmas”

(I presume it was written by Richard Curtis, because it was in a Comic Relief annual). It had the word “bastards” in it, which they wanted me to change, and right up to the moment I read it, I 191

RUSSELL BRAND

thought I probably ought to say it anyway. In the end, I toned it down to “rotters,” or something similarly ridiculous. In a sense, I’ve never really forgiven myself for that—probably because somewhere within me I knew that when it came to tell the story in an autobiography, it would sound much better if I could write

“. . . and then I said bastards.”

But I suppose now I’ve managed to make a virtue of not saying it, so all’s well that ends well. Still, if you were looking for early motivation for my subsequent reluctance to censor myself in any way whatsoever, this would probably fit the bill. I came second in that contest (Ranjev Mitra won it, as he did every year—he was a thoroughbred when it came to that competition), but this was probably the first time I experienced that euphoric feeling—

“Thank God, there’s something I can do.”

I felt something like it again in 1994, when Channel 4 broadcast a tribute screening of Bill Hicks’s show “Revelations” at the Dominion Theater, and an accompanying documentary.

Seeing Hicks for the fi rst time (ironically, just after his death) affected me incredibly strongly. I thought he was extraordinary—a funny, powerful, poignant, passionate, clever, erudite, brilliant and moving man. And I watched that video so many times that I learned it off by heart.

I’d grown up on Blackadder, Fawlty Towers and Only Fools and Horses—rewinding my dad’s tapes and playing them again so many times that the rhythm of those programs is forever in-grained in my mind. I wasn’t madly into music growing up.

Comedy was my music, and the same way other people can always call upon the songs they loved as teenagers, the contours of my emotional landscape were shaped by lines of dialogue from minor characters in BBC sitcoms of the 1970s and ’80s.

As I started to get more interested in comedy, I began to feel the same way about Hancock, Peter Cook and Richard Pryor. I 192

Don’t Die of Ignorance

loved the fact that Pryor made big Hollywood films and did brilliant stand-up shows at the same time, because that’s what I wanted to do. I loved the iconography of Cook—the rakish bohemian sophisticate, who had seemingly achieved everything he wanted by his early twenties and then became bored of life, but still remained a beautiful, debonair genius. And I loved the way Tony Hancock perfectly articulated how miserable and out of place and bored and snooty I felt. But when I was taking my first tentative steps as a stand-up—a few years after I’d first seen him on TV—it was Bill Hicks’s confrontational—almost hectoring—style and radically politicized subject matter that were the clearest influences on what I was trying to do.

After that first experience at Edinburgh, I came back to London and started doing other open-mike spots at places like Th e

Purple Turtle, on Essex Road in Islington. I was cripplingly nervous, even when doing tiny five-minute spots. What the fuck can you do in five minutes in those bawdy loud rooms where people are hardly listening? It’s so fucking difficult. But even when I was waiting nervously in North London pub toilets, having diar-rhea and smoking grass to calm down, I could still cling onto a new sense of purpose.

I felt that I was finally in alignment: that at last I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. From this point onward, the seeds that had been planted in me with my endless hours of watching comedy videos could finally begin to germinate.

I’ve seen Matt Lucas talk about how angry Vic Reeves Big Night Out made him initially (I think he even made a complaint to Channel 4), but then he really grew to love it, and I was exactly the same.* I was about fourteen when the first series came

* Vic Reeves was, along with Bob Mortimer, part of a TV comedy double act from the early ’90s to present day, which was, in many ways, traditional, but in terms of content, 193

RUSSELL BRAND

on, and I thought, “What does he mean, ‘What’s on the end of your stick?’ What is this rubbish?” But then I watched a couple more and realized it was the most amazing thing in the world.

It’s funny and charming and specific in its language and its references. It taught me that you should never pick the first word people would think of, you have to train your mind to sift through the obvious stuff until you come to something that’s really funny. When Bob Mortimer came on Big Brother’s Big Mouth last year he referred to Mikey as “the perfumed laborer”: that’s just beautiful.

Around the time of those first stand-up gigs, I was going out with this girl called Josephine, whose dad was a high-court judge (I remember seeing him on the front of the Eve ning Standard once). I think she’s married to a rabbi now—I don’t like it when ex- girlfriends get married. I always think, “Come on, you never really ever got over me did you? That wedding—be honest with yourself, it was a sham.”

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.

194

Don’t Die of Ignorance

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

RUSSELL BRAND

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