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Chapter 2

New Musical Expletive

Being sanctioned by the Princess Diana of counterculture made an immediate impact on my career. The relationship itself went nowhere as I was ill-equipped to cope with the protocols of having a globally worshipped paramour. (To be honest, I struggled to maintain the marriage to my cat – I stoke the romance by taking him up west once a week to the Ivy, plus I keep things spicy in the bedroom by putting dead birds down my pants, so that relationship pretty much takes up all my time.)

What no one realised, not Kate nor the red-top tabloid press, was that far from viewing her as a conquest, I was absolutely smitten. When I clumsily ballsed it up by flatly telling journalists who I’d not yet learned to ignore that I was “just larking around”, she wisely withdrew and I had enough sense to stop calling her. I didn’t delete her number from my phone though. I left it stored under “Grimy Tyke”, which is what I called her in an attempt to punctuate the endless flattery and awe. She’s probably had about five different numbers since then, but I keep it as a digital memento, just to assure myself that it did really happen, that it wasn’t a dream.

I could never have anticipated the instant elevation that this liaison would afford me, it was like being awarded a celebrity Victoria Cross. The word “approved” was stamped on my forehead and I was now to appear in the Sun newspaper as regularly as the horoscopes and as spuriously as page 3. My mate Mark Lucey, with whom I worked on Big Brother’s Big Mouth, remarked that in the paparazzi photos from the night I met her I looked like a shifty, greased rat as I peered out all blinking and apologetic from the back of the rain-spattered cab. “You look like you don’t belong there,” he said. “But here,” he continued, regarding a shot several days later where I dashed from her house, “you look like a dandy lifeguard sprinting up the beach all cocky.”

Due to my friendships with funny colleagues like Mark Lucey and Matt Morgan and strategists like Nik, the ol’ work was going in the right direction. The Big Brother show was a cult hit, my stand-up was improving and we were deluged with further opportunities. I was even offered the chance to host the NME Awards, a notoriously difficult gig where the baddest, drunkest musicians of the year nonchalantly RSVP, then indifferently attend a debauched, yet carefully staged, indie rock and roll award show.

This was a month before I’d appeared on Jonathan Ross’s show or been kissed into the mainstream, which was unfortunate because I could’ve used any extra status available to control a very difficult room. The NME Awards were challenging because, like all the awards ceremonies I’ve hosted, I was not quite famous enough to do it. If Jonathan Ross is hosting an awards show, everyone there accepts his authority, we all respect him and sit down and shut up. But when I hosted the NME Awards, around half the people there didn’t know who I was. Bob Geldof, for example, began the evening not knowing who I was and concluded it deciding I was a cunt. I know this because he said so when he collected his award.

Matt, in spite of spending much of his life skulking about like a menstrual Hell’s Angel, frequently says things that are apposite and profound. Once, when we discussed negativity towards others, he said that we ought imagine that we each have an individual connection with a God or higher power through “a Doc Brown from Back to the Future-style metal helmet” (bear with me) that has an electric tendril that reaches up through the sky, puncturing the ozone layer, into the heavens, past the Milky Way, right into the mind of God. Like them hairdrying plastic mushroom contraptions beneath which elderly ladies sit in hairdressers, but instead of being attached to a plug socket, they are attached to God. When someone, a critic, a teacher or an enemy attacks you, it’s as if they are petulantly disgruntled and dissatisfied with their own connection to the universe and like snitchy little berks, reach over and yank your tendril. We are all connected to an objective higher mind and through that to each other, so why bother jerking around with other people’s connection? It’s a senseless interference. We all do it, but really what’s the point of sniping at our fellows? You may as well go into your garden and holler abuse at a nasturtium. In the end it’s between you and God.

The NMEs were my first high-profile job and a significant breakthrough. Handled correctly these risky gigs can propel you into ever more exciting yet futile stratospheres of success. My career has certainly been expedited by three notably tricky industry galas; first the NMEs, then the Brits the following year, and more recently the MTV Video Music Awards. All three events were just beyond my reach, so were bloody difficult and combative. Good televised award shows need an element of chaos, you need to feel that at any point they could descend into a food fight or gratuitous nudity. Think of your favourite moments from ceremonies gone by – Liam Gallagher spitting, Madonna and Britney kissing, Jarvis Cocker getting his bum out at Michael Jackson, and possibly when Bob Geldof called Russell Brand a cunt.

The NME Awards were held at the Hammersmith Palais, which was also the venue for those ridiculous “School Discos” in which grown women cavort in schoolgirl uniforms and baffled paedophiles puzzle over boundaries. “Is it all a big sexy laugh or am I a demon?” they must think.

Do we humans yet properly understand the notion of the future? It doesn’t seem that we do. I’ll agree to almost anything as long as it’s in the way-off yonder – secretly believing the allotted time will never actually arrive.

“Russell, will you castrate this pig with your molars?”

“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.

1 I called him “Sir Bobby Gandalph”.

2 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.

3 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.

†