More about: Bill-Bailey

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For Bill Bailey – nature-lover, thrill-seeker, panel show Gandalf and the West Country Wizard Of Odd – the world is made of music. In a BBC News theme he hears a potential ambient rave banger. That iPhone alarm you hate so much is a prog rap piece in his hands. European police sirens are merely Gallic folk romances in waiting. And, hang on, does that seatbelt sound like Coldplay?

“I’ve been travelling a lot these past few weeks and months and there’s music and tones and sounds out there where someone’s had to choose what sounds these things make,” he says. “I hired a car and the seat belt wasn’t going in and the first few bars of what sounded like ‘Clocks’ by Coldplay kept playing until you put your seatbelt in. It was going ‘din-din-din-din’, and I was like ‘what? What’s that? Is that Coldplay? Do they get a little bit of royalties every time you don’t put your seatbelt on?’”

Bill’s obsession with discovering music in everyday background noise might well reach its natural conclusion during his forthcoming Larks In Transit Christmas residency at London’s Wyndham theatre and 2019 arena tour. “In our world we’re surrounded by sounds, tech sounds and music,” he explains, “and I like to incorporate that, I like to use that as a resource to make music out of it. One of my ambitions for this show, I’ve got this plan to try and sample everyday sounds, use a typical day and all the sounds that accompany us through the day. Obviously you have to be quite selective but pick them, use them and try to incorporate that into a daily sonata, almost like a classical form or a pop song that incorporates our own personal soundtrack.”

“Music,” as Bill is wont to state in song, “is the butter on the crumpet of the soul”, and it’s been at the heart of Bill Bailey’s comedy since his earliest pastiches with his erstwhile ‘80s and early ‘90s comedy duo The Rubber Bishops. And it’s been Bill’s passion since his first school band, Behind Closed Doors.

“It was quite concept,” he recalls. “We were quite ambitious in the scope of the music, it was all sorts of things, anthemic, lots of keyboards, a bit rock. We pre-dated Muse by quite a number of years. We had a smoke machine which we tended to over-use to the point where we completely flooded the stage with smoke, nobody could see anyone. There was a visual cue where the singer would jump off the drum riser and we would then change into the second part of the song, but no-one could see the singer, no-one could see anyone. He apparently jumped off the drum riser and nothing happened, so he climbed back on and jumped off again. I think he jumped off about four times before we realised what had happened.”

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Bill then toured the West Country in a boyband called The Famous Five before the draw of confusing hecklers with surrealist Lord Of The Rings references became too strong to resist. “It was all getting a bit serious,” he says. “I was still a teenager so it was very exciting for me. It was probably then that I realised that just playing music was not enough. I did a comedy gig outside of doing the music and thought ‘I like this. I’ll play the music and then this spoken word’, I realised I loved that as much as music.”

For much of Bailey’s early career, music and comedy went hand-in-hand. Becoming a classically trained musician, he toured the Hilton hotel cocktail joints of Britain as a struggling young lounge pianist and once turned down a job playing piano in a bar in Miami: “I nearly took it – if I’d have taken it my life might have turned out very differently, I might still be in a Miami hotel somewhere.” He even worked as a crematorium organist, which remains a plan B if the QI bookings dry up. “I mentioned it in an interview,” he laughs, “and suddenly I get this letter saying I’ve been inducted into the Organisation Of Crematorium Organists, I’m an honorary member. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know if it means that if there’s a funeral going on in a crematorium and the organist doesn’t show up I can just show a card or something. ‘Let me through, crematorium organist!’ It’s something to fall back on.”

Whether rattling out ‘Iron Man’ on the cowbells, twangling away on a banjo Bible or launching the Cult Of The Oud – a middle-eastern lute instrument that garners haunting, worshipful groans of “OOOOUD” from his fanbase regulars whenever he holds it aloft - Bill’s virtuosity and broad-minded musical expertise is a fundamental part of his enduring appeal – he’s the aging rock obsessive in us all, rocking the sort of wizard mullet that is, if we’re truly honest with ourselves, our spirit haircut. And every tour brings with it a new musical skill or oddball instrument he’s mastered, clearly still fascinated by music’s many shapes and possibilities.

“I’ve never wanted to stop learning about a new thing, finding out about a new instrument, how it works,” he agrees. “Going backwards, looking at traditional ancient instruments and also technology and how we use tech as it’s become much more in our hands. Another ambition, a thing I want to try to do, is to play a piece which uses an ancient instrument like the oud or the mandola or a citern or an old English stringed instrument, to then pick up a phone and using various apps you can create something right there and then.

“I was doing a gig in Shanghai and I was given a Chinese gourd flute, which is literally that. It’s a little gourd about the size of a large grapefruit and it’s attached to three flutes and it makes this really haunting sound. You can open up different pipes of the flute to get different melodies…It’s a challenge to me. I see these things and I think ‘there’s something about this, there’s something intriguing about it, it’s funny it’s strange, it’s mysterious, I wanna get it in the show’. Part of what I like to do in a live show is to showcase these kinds of things, instruments you don’t normally see, sounds you don’t normally hear. Comedy music was always rather looked down on for many, many years and I did think it was quite limited in the scope of what the sounds were. It was usually a bloke with an acoustic guitar singing songs, strumming away and you think ‘I’ve seen this, I’ve heard this a lot’. There’s got to be other instruments, other sounds we can incorporate into it so it doesn’t conform to what has been traditionally the evolution of a folk singer or protest singer, and that’s evolved into a bloke with a guitar singing satirical songs. Music is the comedy for me. It’s not just an adjunct, it’s not something that accompanies some funny words, the music itself, the sound has to be the nub of the material in a way.”

At recent shows Bill has strived for the stage-filling musical extravaganza – at Prince Charles’ 70th birthday show at the Palladium he was backed by a military marching band and opera singers for a cowbell-rock ‘Jerusalem’, and during the 2017 run of Larks At Christmas in the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, Bill recruited a full choir. “That was a great experience for me,” he says, “it was a completely new experience working with a choir. I’d worked with musicians, orchestras and singers, but not in that way, and it was a revelation. It was something I really want to pursue a bit more in shows. Professional singers and musicians don’t need much rehearsal, they’ll turn up and do it straight away. The real fun comes when you can improvise with them and get on the same wavelength. That’s something I’d love to have the time to do more of. At the Christmas shows in Wyndhams I may revisit that because I loved it so much and I got a great reaction from the crowd.”

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Beyond the music, Larks In Transit promises to delve into the misadventures that Bill – adventurous birdwatcher, and a man unafraid to wade into a swamp or raft infested waters to scratch his nature-loving itch – encountered while filming recent wildlife documentaries. He is, it turns out, the John McClane of ornithology.

“We were filming in eastern Indonesia in quite an off-the-beaten-track sort of place,” he recalls, “we were trying to film the red bird of paradise, and it’s almost got a mythical quality to it, people have been trying to see these things for hundreds of years and still even now, with all the technology and stuff we’ve got at our disposal, it’s still hard, just getting there is a challenge. Once you leave our rather modern bubble of city life, that’s where it can get interesting, you get into all sorts of scrapes. I ended up getting bitten by a sand fly and it gave me some weird tropical disease, this strange skin disease which took me months to get rid of. Eventually I went to see a specialist and he was really delighted to see it! ‘Good lord, I haven’t seen this for ages!’”

Expect Brexit to get a bashing from this keen political commentator too. “It’s not getting any better is it?” Bill says.” I don’t know how history will judge this period of Britain. It’s gonna be interesting, all these missed opportunities along the way and the almost comically inept government we have trying to blunder their way through this. I try not to think about it to be honest. Other nationalities are just amused or baffled and look at us like ‘what happened to your incredibly stable, sensible, sober country, what’s going on?’

“It’s so depressing that they’re so bad at it, I just wish there were better people, better negotiators, better leaders, people who’ve lived a little bit. I just don’t think they’re up to it, I really don’t. I’m quite pragmatic about these things, I’m quite practical… I wasn’t in favour of it, I voted to remain, but I can understand why people voted otherwise… It seems almost impossible to turn it around, that seems like pie in the sky, what seems more practical is to make the best of what we’ve got. That’s the Britishness in me, there’s a sense of ‘come on, we could try to make the best of this’ and we’re not even doing that.

“The other side of it is, it might just go on and on and on and on for years and years and years to the point where people are sitting around going ‘are we in or out? Have we left yet? What line do we go in at the passport office? Brits, EU? What are we?’ In the short term there’ll be a resurgence in smuggling in Devon and Cornwall. It won’t be drugs, it’ll be parma ham and mozzarella being rowed ashore on a moonlight night.”

But with music embedded so deep in his (funny) bones, would Bill ever consider making a proper, serious rock album?

“At some stage I’d love to do that,” he says. “Unfortunately for me, my instincts for comedy take over. If I started to make something serious I’d go ‘yeah, but it’d be funny if this happened’. I’d have to be quite specific about what the aims of it were. If it was maybe a soundtrack to something or if it had a particular purpose. I’d be hard pushed to switch off writing comedy for a bit, long enough to do it. There’d have to be a very good reason to do it, but I definitely wouldn’t rule it out.”

Would you find it odd to do a proper music tour? Just come on, say hello, play some music and go off again? “It’d be very strange. It did come close to that at Sonisphere a few years ago, I was playing at Knebworth. I got this band together and we played metal versions of my songs. There was a time when we were just rocking out really, it was more rock than comedy at one stage. I started thinking ‘yeah. I could get used to this’.”

Well, he’s got the larks, and the Transit…

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Bill Bailey's Larks In Transit is at Wyndham's Theatre from 3 Dec 2018 - 5 Jan 2019, then touring. His preceeding hit show Limboland is released on DVD & Digital Download on 26 Nov 2018.

More about: Bill-Bailey