Marcus Hughes speaks with Bill Bailey about his latest live show, Limboland, examining life and its ability to fall short or, if we’re lucky, occasionally exceed our expectations.
Flick through the channels on any given night of the week and you’re bound to land on several appearances from Bill Bailey. Whether a repeat from one of Bill’s eleven series as team captain on Never Mind The Buzzcocks, puffing on a mockingly pompous unlit pipe behind the desks of QI, or performing one of his arena shows it’s certainly not difficult to run into Bill’s unique brand of musical satire.
What we can expect from Limboland? “It’s about the idea that there’s this slight gap between how you imagine something’s going to be and how it actually turns out. Limbo is a state of being between, of slight uncertainty between one thing and another. And we all think like this, just as we do planning a night out. Somebody says ‘we’re going out’, and you can’t really be bothered, but something happens and it turns into the most brilliant night ever! It happens so often that I just thought it was such fertile ground for comedy.”
Perhaps this is an unfair example, there must be very few people who feel worse three pints into a visit to the pub. Was there any particular event that got Bill into this frame of mind? “It kicked off when I was thinking about this story of when I took a trip to Norway to see the Northern Lights. I had this grand idea of how wonderful it was going to be and then, of course, it didn’t pan out that way at all. It was disastrous. Somebody got knocked off the sledge, and dragged along and they nearly died and then we got lost. A disaster! And I just found myself standing there thinking ‘this is not how I imagined this at all!’”
Reading reviews of the shows to date you get the impression that Limboland is lighter on musical elements than the majority of his other shows, but Bill was quick to put this right. “Somebody was asking me recently if I was scaling down the whole music thing, and I said ‘yeah’, then I started listing all the instruments in the show. ‘There’s a keyboard, a sampler, a drum machine, a Theremin, a sitar, and then there’s a long drum, a whistle, a swanee whilstle, a mandola, an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar…’, and I got to about seventeen instruments and it was like ‘yeah ok, so it’s not actually scaled down that much then.’ But I suppose by my standards it is.”
Bill laughs at this and it’s obvious that as an accomplished musician he wouldn’t dream of preventing himself from indulging his passion. Bill’s comedy lovingly pokes fun at popular culture through its relationship with music, parodying everything from television theme tunes and classical music to some of his favourite bands. One fantastic song of Bill’s is Unisex Chipshop, his attempt at writing a song in the style of Billy Bragg. Bragg is a friend of Bill’s and has even performed the song with him on stage, but what sort of feedback does he usually get from artists whose music has made an appearance in his act?
“I once played a version of the Hokey Cokey done in the style of Kraftwerk. So then when I went to see Kraftwerk at Brixton academy I started talking to one of the new guys they’d recruited after a big falling out. You can’t ever imagine Kraftwerk falling out, they’re so dour they don’t look as if they’d get excited about anything much, but they did. So I told this guy about my version of the Hokey Cokey and ages later I got a message back from them saying ‘yes, it was quite good’. And from Kraftwerk, I consider that to be a ringing endorsement.”
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Bill also recalls a less favourable review from the lead singer of Portishead. “A while back I did a new national anthem because I just thought our national anthem was a bit dull, so it would be good to kind of cheer it up a bit. So I reworked Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah into the style of Portishead, because I just loved that trip-hop style. I got some word back later that Beth Gibbons was not impressed. Oh well, (laughter) it was meant as a fond tribute.”
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Bill’s affection for the music and the artists he uses in his act is clear to see, and a genuine draw for audiences who share his fondness. With this in mind, it’s not long before we get onto the subject of David Bowie’s Black Star. “I’ve actually been listening to a lot of Bowie recently. I was, like a lot of people, really shocked by his death and it unlocked a whole series of memories; of listening to his albums throughout my youth, and how much of an affect they had on me. I was quite taken aback by how much I was affected by not only his death but also relistening to a lot of his music. I’ve been listening to the latest album Black Star, which I think is brilliant.”
Bill’s not alone in his sentiment, and it’s this ability to engage with an audience as a fan of popular music that makes his comedy so insightfully unique. The Limboland tour will see performances at a variety of venues, large and small capacity, across the globe. Which of these does he feel best serves his act?
“It’s undeniably exciting to play an arena, no doubt about it. It’s more of a rock gig. But I try not to play the big venues these days. I agonise over it a little bit. On the one hand I feel like comedy isn’t really best served by a larger venue. But I look around the stage at one of my gigs, and it’s littered with rock guitars and keyboards and projectors. And I just think ‘well, if anyone’s going to play an arena, it might as well be me.’ We just sling a few more speakers onto the stage.”
It’s true that Bill looks far more at home on a larger stage than one man with a microphone attempting to dance around and engage with a front row twenty feet away. In 2011 Bill headlined Sonisphere alongside Slayer, Motorhead and Metallica. To tackle this challenge Bill assembled a band and successfully performed to 60,000 ‘rain drenched metal-heads’.
“I remember a few years ago, the first time I played Wembley arena. I was standing on the stage with my foot up on the monitor, I had a Flying V guitar with a goose neck camera looking down the neck which was projected onto a 50-foot screen behind me. And I remember thinking, ‘yeah, this is it. This is rock ‘n’ roll.’”
Bill Bailey: Limboland, Swansea Grand Theatre, Tue 21+Wed 22 June. Tickets: £25.50. Info: 017 9247 5715 / www.swansea.gov.uk; Motorpoint Arena, Cardiff, Sat 25 June. Tickets: £29. Info: 029 2023 4500 / www.livenation.co.uk/cardiff