Bill's Latest News

Well that’s another Antipodean tour over, and it was a quite a belter.. So much was going on – I arrived in Melbourne before the tour started for two days of publicity, and found the ruling Labour Party in the middle of a leadership crisis ( sound familiar?). Kevin Rudd was ousted in a brutal putsch and Julia Gillard was installed as the new leader and de facto Australia’s first female PM. (Don’t want to pour cold water on that particular milestone Australia, but after our experience of that I can’t guarantee it’s for the best.) and now there’s a hung parliament while the two parties are flirted with by the smaller..wait, this is all a bit familiar.

Christchurch with it’s elegant trams, and quaint waterways was the starting point, and a great audience.Then came Wellington which was engulfed in freezing rain and storms for three days. I managed to venture out but the jet lag was still happening, so I read a lot, mainly the Stieg Larsson trilogy, and a book about the isles of St. Kilda off the west coast of Scotland which I visited during the Highlands and Islands tour back in the Spring. They are truly breathtaking, and if you ever get the chance to take a boat out to see them you must. The story of the inhabitants lives, and how they came to eventually leave St Kilda, or Hirta, is fascinating and moving.

By the time I got to Auckland, I was still wide awake at night, which meant it was no problem staying up to watch the World Cup, and all it’s accompanying disappointments.

I flew back to Sydney after some fun shows, especially liked the Civic Theatre in Auckland, beautiful old art deco friezes inside – how could they even have considered knocking it down?

From Sydney I flew up to Newcastle, and another Civic Theatre, and equally impressive. Only problem here, I bounded onto the stage and immediately began wheezing like some ancient rusting piece of farm equipment.. I was gripped by a totally unexpected asthma attack. I had to leave the stage, and run back to the dressing room for me inhaler ..audience initially baffled, later appreciative.
Driving back to Sydney, I remixed the ‘Cars’ tribute on the laptop. Technology, sometimes it’s a beautiful thing.

After the chill winds and horizontal rain of New Zealand, Perth with it’s balmy sunny days was a relief. Convention centres aren’t always the most conducive to comedy, but this worked I think cos it’s new and comfortable, and maybe the artist had something to do with it, whatever these were fun times. As all my gear was being trucked around Australia, there was a day off while it rumbled across the desert ..I took the opportunity to fly up to Lake Eyre. About an hour and a half’s flight north of Adelaide, this is a vast inland basin, which remains dry for most of the time, but occasionally when there is a lot of rainfall, it fills up to form a huge lake, only a few feet deep, but covering hundreds of square kilometers and attracting flocks of nesting pelicans, and many sightseers. There’s even a bunch of nutters who take their yachts out on it. The water is so heavy with salt, it hardly moves..ripples don’t break it’s surface and the effect is of a gigantic limpid mirror, stretching off as far as the eye can see. To get there, you have to fly first to Coober Pedy, the self proclaimed ‘Opal Capital of the World’ and that is equally a fascinating and unique place. Hopeful miners have been pitching up here for decades, staking out their claims, and burrowing into the earth like monstrous ants. In fact, the landscape around Coober Pedy looks like nothing on Earth, a mass of holes, each one accompanied by a neat cone of soil..the legacy of thousands of prospectors hopes of the big score. The heat here in summer is blistering – it can regularly reach 50 degrees Celsius,so many of the residents have chosen to live underground in the cool of the earth. This is perhaps the most striking feature of the place, these partially subterranean dwellings, ordered, and smartly appointed ‘caves’. I stayed in an underground hotel which was surprisingly comfortable, the temperature was a constant 22 degrees, and the huge scarification on the bare walls by the huge gouging devices used to dig it out only increased its pod-like charm.

Adelaide’s Thebarton Theatre is a fine old rock and roll hall and it didn’t disappoint. As did not the falafel I ate on the way back to the hotel.
As we were there for two nights, the weather was fine I seized the chance to go quadbiking with the crew. And the boss of the facility was from Gloucester and sported a fine west country accent – world, small innit? My lover.

For the second time touring Oz in their winter, I was looking forward to Brisbane.. there’s a relaxed and tropical atmosphere here that I love. What greater pleasures are there on tour, than strolling along a riverside boulevard on a warm and balmy night, sitting outdoors and nibbling on satay sticks, artfully marinated, and elegantly presented..while sipping a cold Boags.. ? On the last day, I drove up the coast to the Holden V8 Supercar facility, and hooned around the track with the excellent Dennis, the test driver. What larks.

I’ve always somehow missed out on Tasmania over the years I’ve been travelling to Oz . This time I was determined to go, and so I found myself in Launceston at The Princess, yet another lovely old theatre. The drive down to Hobart the next day, was one of the most picturesque on the tour, and I was taken aback by the sight of a huge flock of white cockatoos, probably some 400 birds, which swirled across the road ahead like a cloud of smoke.

Hobart is I think a rare gem of a place. The cafes along the wharfside are as good a spot to watch the world go by as any I have experienced. When the venue provided us with a chocolate fountain after the gig, it seemed momentarily like some 80’s Motley Crue tour in it’s utter decadence..

Arriving in Melbourne always rekindles many memories. I first came to Melbourne in 1996 as part of the Comedy Festival and it was really the first time I’d performed overseas. Well, if you don’t count Amsterdam that is.
There’s something which is hard to describe about performing in another country – there’s no map, there’s no way of knowing what will work and what won’t. Some things are familiar, others are utterly alien. We have a partly shared cultural history, some of it though is a mystery ..So it’s a half-blind stumble through patches of sunlight and darkness..and all the more exhilarating for it. It’s a feeling that never leaves me even now, that here, the other side of the world, with a shared language, a following wind and a bit of goodwill we can do the same comedy as back home. I came back to Melbourne for four years after that first festival, and my first memories of Australia are all tied up with the place. The accent,+the directness of the people – the quality of the sunlight, the cafes, the trams and the haunting beautiful song of the Australian Magpie at dusk.
And this was to be my most favourite Melbourne show experience..because I got to play the Palais Theatre in St. Kilda. At nearly 3000 seats, this is Australia’s largest theatre by some distance. Like the Civic in Auckland this nearly suffered an untimely death, but the far-sightedness of some investors made sure it’s still a magnificent Melbourne landmark. And you can’t miss it, standing alone like a huge church by the sea..It’s a beautiful building, and the more I learned about it the more I loved it. It was built in 1929, then almost immediately burnt down, so they built it again, this time hurriedly and up in the roof evidence of this haste is all around. Not by cutting corners on safety, but the joists and timbers are not neatly trimmed off, so many odd angles jut out.

There’s a closed hot water pipe heating system, that provides warmth to footplates in front of every seat, so in the chilly Melbourne winter, audiences sat down and immediately their feet were toasty – what a way to put the crowd in a good mood! When it was first opened, it was a cinema and the projection box was so far away from the screen that they had to make special adapters for the lenses to allow them to throw that distance. Even then it was hard for those at the back to see, mainly because of the thick pall of cigarette smoke hanging in the theatre. My shows here will live long in the memory. Sometimes stand-up comedy is hard to do , for me anyway. Some nights it’s just not flowing, the words don’t come easily, it’s like trying to push a pram up a hill with a piece of lettuce.. and then sometimes it’s working fine, the jokes are there, the material is good, your own performance is confident and the audience enjoy it.. but sometimes, on a few very rare occasions, everything clicks, … the pram’s flying up the hill , something else takes over and you and the crowd reach a state of mild hysteria… well, I do anyway.. there was a couple of times this happened in Melbourne and I attribute it to the venue itself, and the memories of all the good times had there over the years..

And when I thought I couldn’t have a better experience doing comedy in Australia, I went to Sydney, and the five nights I performed there at the State Theatre were some of the best shows I’ve done anywhere.. By now, the rough edges of a new show are starting to get smoothed off, the odd quirks of comprehension are ironed out.. And, wow, there’s a WW1 U-Boat engine under the stage! Ausgeseichnet!

I finished the tour in Canberra, a place which is often mocked by visiting artists, and Australians themselves. But I like it – I like the greenery and the oddness of it. After looking out of hotel windows onto cityscapes, it’s a welcome change to see trees, parks, and huge numbers of birds, cockatoos, lapwings and parakeets.

I don’t normally like last nights..I usually celebrate on the penultimate night. Last nights can be an anti-climax, everyone’s leaving after the show, packing up, moving on the next job, that often a celebration can’t happen. I’m always surprised and delighted by the huge demographic amongst my fans – long may it continue.

BB August 2010

Ten minutes out of Adelaide you leave the tiled houses with their neat gardens and the bright green of football grounds and parks. The order of roads, roundabouts, and all the comfortable cosiness of human settlement ends and you are catapulted over the deep mesmerizing blue of St Vincents Gulf and when you make landfall the other side you look down on another world, a brutal, unremitting alien redscape – no houses, no footie ovals, just a few martian scratches in the dirt.

Miles of red dirt, miles and miles of nothing – not even tracks, roads, any sign of human presence – and those that are, look puny – tracks that faintly mark the landscape, that have to weave around natural obstacles, hills, rocks, valleys out of humble deference..

A vast, unforgiving, ageless, ancient..mysterious, land… utterly pitiless, formless, endless, changing, yet not changing..

A myriad of colours, almost surreally bright, unnaturally colourful… unfathomable space, the usual dominance of the sky for once rendered dull and one dimensional, the huge blue, almost quaint and apologetic by comparison.

Occasionally the eye is drawn to movement far below – a solitary white truck moving along a track, the huge plume of dust behind it hanging in the air like a smoke curtain, motionless in the windless air.

The land is a place of extraordinary beauty, a strange and utterly incomprehensible riot of colour. Deep iron-rust reds stain the landscape, which in turn is sprinkled with trees and spinifex that line the long winding creek beds and stream runnels that weave through the hills, wreathed in the smoky blue scrub.

The Painted Hills – so bright, and changing colour with such abrupt totality that those who first saw them were dumbstruck by the transformation – and could only meekly imagine they were painted somehow, so utter was their awe and befuddlement

Huge watery salt pans, vast inland lakes, with coastlines, and beaches.. unseen, and untrod by human foot slowly unfurl beneath us.

I gaze in awe from the plane window, on this other country, another, older, vast unspoilt natural wilderness that has changed little in thousands , millions of years, – you have to go back 120 million years ago to register any significant change, and even then it was a vast inland sea..which is what I’m here to witness.

Now that the Oscar huff and puffery has died down,  it’s time to judge the glories, the gaffes, the frocks, the speeches.. the…blah, di blah… yawwwwn.

Sorry, almost put myself to sleep there.

I watched The Hurt Locker again, and while I quite enjoyed it the first time, it’s just another unremarkable war film.. one-note performances, clichéd dialogue, action and characters.  I thought District 9 was a far better film – witty, gripping and ambitious. And every year I  cringe at the patronizing and insulting category Best Foreign Language Film.. foreign for who? For timid, parochial west-coast ninnies who think that an adventurous holiday is  a hotel in Hawaii, that isn’t full board. Weirdly, English is a foreign language in some parts of the world…

Avatar is a big simplistic wagging dog of a film, so it’s hard not like it, and even though it’s as morally complex as an episode of Last of the Summer Wine, it still is an extraordinary spectacle in the cinema.

But really, Oscars are like any awards, they shine a light for a moment, and then we’re back to reality, and the reality is, people will watch what they want, you can only influence them up to a point because the most powerful tool in marketing a film is word of mouth.  No amount of critical garlands heaped on a film will sustain it if people come out saying it was boring.

Up rightly won Best Animated Feature, and is a joy to behold – the opening 10 minutes are probably the most moving and ambitious of any animated film I’ve ever seen.

But as always, I  feel that we in the UK are like the kid who doesn’t know about the party, when films which haven’t even been released here are up for Oscars.

So now I’m away to watch District 9 again, those fookin prawns, man!

BB  March 2010

Well firstly many thanks for all your kind words about the Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra, which was shown recently on BBC2. The plan is hopefully to put together a few dates in the Autumn and tour the show in the UK. The full-length version of the show will be released on DVD in November, all being well.

Looking forward to the Summer tour and revisiting some old haunts . I made my BBC2 series ‘Is it Bill Bailey?’ in Glasgow and during my time there got to know the city a bit better, and I loved it. Great curries..and friendly natives… And first time for me in Plymouth I think, bigging up the South Coast Massive..or something. So many places, so many tiny individual pots of  Milk-Style Dairy Type Liquid…

Just going through my expenses, £4273.99 for Guinea Pig Anti-Flu BioDome, £723.48 for gold-plated Locust  Grooming-Tongs, £7,348,003.19 for second Chameleon Home allowance in the Yemen..

I think you’ll find that’s all in order.

See you soon.

BB

Hello, and welcome to the new site. The Helper Wormes have been hard at work over the freezing months of Winter, and now the fruits of their labour are here for all to enjoy. Apart from Max Ellis’s fantastic artwork, my favourite new bit is the the addition of Glassbox TV, which will be showing behind the scenes clips of the arena tour and the West End run, with more clips, films and new stuff to come. As you can see, the different pages are arranged in the form of different climate zones, which is appropriate I feel, as Northern Europe marches on towards a malarial tropical zone, where a trip to your local Argos will require a variety of jabs and lightweight safari-style apparel.

As for me, I enjoyed doing the relative intimacy of the Gielgud so much that I have decided to go off round the country on a Summer Tour of Theatre Royals and the like – so look out for some musical whimsy coming to a velvety-seated Victorian Structure near you, no more draughty uber-barns, no more submarine maintenance yards just places where you can see the weft of my face-bristle.

The Wormes should be able to provide more information on this tour in their next email newsletter, which they are currently preparing. You can sign up for this at the bottom of the page.

Meanwhile, roam if you want to, roam around the world.

BB Feb 2009

I’m in the middle of the tour now, and it’s been going well.. plenty of applied weirdness along the way. In Auckland, on the opening night, after 4 seconds of the gig, some bloke shouted out ‘it’s too loud’ after which someone else said ‘it’s too quiet’. I then went round testing all the instruments as a kind of audience sound check.. quite the strangest start to a gig I’ve had in a long while. Also there, we had to move hotels, because the hotel er..stopped being a hotel during our stay, and became apartments..I’ve seen plenty of hotel strife over the years on tour, bomb threats, fires, flooding, hotel’s not built, but I can’t ever remember a hotel changing function mid-stay..

Can’t believe the LHC is finally being switched on, will be fascinating to see what happens – so many people know about this now, and I overhear conversations about it everywhere..there’s a great interview with Stephen Hawking on the BBC about it, he has bet $100 that they won’t find the Higgs Boson.

Looking forward to the rest of the gigs, hope to see some of you along the way.

Keep an eye on Switzerland.

Bill

It was quite a thrill to be asked on to Desert Island Discs, a bit like getting a knighthood without the militaristic connotations. An endorsement if you will, a validation.. I’ve been a fan of ‘Discs for quite some time, and the castaways are usually venerable politicians and esteemed writers, Nobel Prize Winners, former Secretary Generals of the UN, and captains of industry, basically some right top bananas. I’m guessing probably not many picked The Undertones. You can get my choices from the BBC website, but those 8 are the short list, I had to leave off quite a bit as you can imagine. Had to choose between Ever Fallen In Love and Teenage Kicks, the latter got the nod, only because I saw The Undertones at the Colston Hall and ‘Desert is quite a personal journey through your life, and this was a vivid memory (if anyone was there, or can remember the year then let me know – would love to hear your thoughts on it). I seriously did want to be the Talking Heads keyboard player, and I will maybe try and shout that out at The Tom Tom Club gig at Meltdown next week..Would have loved to put in some of David Byrne’s solo stuff also.. The King Curtis track, Memphis Soul Stew is a corker, and is about 7 minutes long, so they only had time to play the last 2 (instrumental minutes) but check out the whole track, because the best bit is at the beginning when King is introducing the band members one by one, as they start playing as ‘ingredients’ in the ’stew’…’ a little pinch of Mississipi congeros’ .. ‘gimme ’bout a half a teacup..of bass!’ – brilliant. We played a couple of Bowie covers in my first band, but Rebel made it in over Suffragette City, or Moonage Daydream. I was such a Pretenders fan, so that was a hard choice, Kid, Up the Neck, I Go to Sleep, Private Life, Message of Love, Back on the Chain Gang the list was going on..eventually went with Talk of the Town, great song and is typical of the sound, Chrissie Hynde’s classic vocal and James Honeyman-Scott’s jangling rich guitar sound -
don’t get me started – I’ll be here all day and the chameleons won’t feed themselves..
hope to see you all at a large temporary marquee-type structure somewhere soon,
‘Maybe tomorrow, maybe someday..’
b

Hello,

Got delayed in Indonesia due to our booking being lost to the ether..just vanished into cyberspace like a virtual muntjak.

We flew into Terminal 5 with some trepidation but amazingly all went smoothly, bar a wait for the bags of an hour. During which we were funnelled like reluctant woodlice to a Costa Coffee, where the ridged cups of milky despair are routinely doled out by unsmiling Slavic frothbots.. The building itself looks impressive, huge shiny pillars arching upwards, connected with great bolts and plates to other equally huge struts that are slightly on a slant to the uprights. This does give the dizzying impression that the whole structure is about to fall over, so the combination of that and the coughey combines to create nausea. My advice for travellers to T5, keep your eyes and mouth clamped shut and hope for the assistance of strangers.

What is this lunacy of making people pledge allegiance to the Queen? I could understand if it was allegiance to the band Queen. Every day before assembly in schools up and down the land, pupil and teacher alike stand and chant “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality”. I could get behind that.

All is busy here at Tinsel Towers. The Wormes are burrowing round the clock to prepare the Tinselworm @ Wembley dvd for your perusal. I have begun a new diet, no carbs, no fruit, just honey, cereal and a box of pralines every other day to stop you from fainting.

Last night I performed at the benefit for SOS Sumatran Orangutan Society at the Lyceum. And got to duet with Chrisse Hynde. What a great honour, and what larks!

The founder of SOS is a remarkable woman called Lucy Wisdom and you can do me a favour here if you like. She has been nominated for an Ethical Business award by the magazine Eve, and you can vote for her via a website www.activatemoney.com, click on ‘Triodos Awards – Women in Ethical Business’ then click on ‘EVE voting and prize draw’. Click on Lucy’s name and leave an email address. Eh voila! Ta very much. It would be wonderful recognition for both her and SOS.

It’s been a busy time these last few weeks. Finished the Museum of Curiosity, which is going out now and what a lark that was. The WSPA benefit at the Hammersmith Apollo ended with my 4 year old son booting Robin Ince up the arse as he danced in a bear suit for the amusement of many people, not least myself.

The Helper Wormes have been most obliging and have woven a new, static site to go alongside the twiddly one. For those of you without Flash, or if your diary is so busy you can’t bear to wait, you can get at the stuff quicker.

Been at a radio recording for The Ragged Trouserd Philanthropists all week, something which Johnny Vegas has organised and asked me to do, and I was glad to oblige. During which , me and Kevin The Actor Eldon nipped into the Toxick Caverne of Woe, the West End to be photographed wearing huge orange pants bearing the slogan Fair Trial My Arse, to keep up the pressure on the gov. about the poor sods still banged up in Guantanamo without trial. Clive Stafford-Smith of Reprieve was accused of trying to smuggle pants into the inmates – don’t know exactly what they thought, whether these were laser pants , or special inflatable pants they could swim away on. The thing was hosted by the lovely people at LUSH so much love and respect to the alluring soap-bomb wranglers.

Also did a photo shoot for the forthcoming doco I made about Stonehenge for The History Channel. They had me got up in a load of hippy gear leaping about in a disused car-factory in Ladbroke Grove, which is probably what I would have been doing on a day-off anyway.

Could also be doing Tinselworm Part 2 in the West End of London this Autumn, as well as sorting out the OZ and NZ dates.. all go, no rest for the bearded. Onward onward I say. BB

IAR has set up sanctuaries in India to look after the rescued bears, but it desperately needs further funding to provide extra land and facilities . In the past four years they have already rescued nearly 400 bears, but it is estimated that there may still be several hundred being ‘danced’ on the streets.

I went to India in November 2005 with IAR and visited the sanctuaries, which are fantastic havens for these poor creatures. The bears might live for up to forty years, but once they’re taken off the streets, they can’t be released back into the wild as they have become too accustomed to human contact. These sanctuaries are vital not just for the well-being of these damaged animals, but for their survival.

If you want to find out more about the work of International Animal Rescue, or support them with a donation and help to end the suffering of the dancing bears, go to the website www.iar.org.uk or give them a ring on 01825 767688 and tell them I sent you!