Is Noel ready to bid bye-bye to the Boosh?
The Mighty Boosh The Mighty Boosh
TANTALISING: it’s the only word on CityLife’s mind as we peruse the hanging rail of glittery, fluffy, hairy and velvet costumes in Noel Fielding’s dressing room.
In a few hours, when Noel and his Mighty Boosh co-creator Julian Barratt take to the stage, all these creations will find their context – even the silver micro mini skirt; anyone wanting to see comedy’s poster boy flash the flesh this tour is in for a treat.
When Noel arrives, he looks as sharp as you might expect: a tailored leather jacket complete with generous faux fur trim, black drainpipe jeans that cling to his slender pins, skin-tight vintage T-shirt, silver boots and (the pièce de résistance) perspex jewellery.
He’s statuesque – much taller than reported. “5ft five?” he gasps, ushering me to my feet and standing over me (nose to chest) to prove online reports of his height are false (for the record, he's 5ft 10ins). “Oh well, all the best people are small.”
It’s little wonder he’s become a style icon for a generation of kids growing up in an age of identikit rock stars. At least 35-year Fielding had Bowie to look up to. And his mum, the person who started Noel’s zest for fashion and who he admits he still shares clothes with.
His Mighty Boosh character, fashionista Vince Noir, is an extension of Fielding’s own persona – stylistically at least; Noel is less of an exhibitionist – and has become half of the most outrageous double act since Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer.
Commercially, the Boosh now rivals the success of shows like Little Britain; it still airs on BBC3, but the sting of sold out shows are proof it could hold its own on the broadcaster’s terrestrial channels – if only they were hip enough to house it.
The first 45 dates of their second live tour sold out in days and they had to more than double the schedule, adding two nights at the M.E.N. Arena to their four night run at the Apollo (where they’ll be filming their next DVD).
Monsters
A third show at the arena has also been added on December 23 – their last gig before a hard-earned Christmas break.
Which all adds up to an aural double-take when Noel tells CityLife he and Julian are considering pulling the plug. “I think we’ve done enough on television in England,” he dangles.
“We could keep doing these adventures of us coming out of Shoreditch and into magical worlds, meeting monsters that have usually got something wrong with them and a style of music that goes with them.
“But we’ve done 20 of those and it would feel a bit weird to do more. If we were going to do another TV show we’d do something else, a different kind of show.
“We’ve got enough stuff left over from the last series to probably write four more episodes, and then we’d only have to write a couple more and we’d have another series up our sleeves. But you have to keep it fresh.”
There’s talk of expanding the Boosh franchise to do just that. A film and an album of the show’s songs and ‘crimps’ – a spoken word skit that Fielding and Barratt invented – have been discussed on and off (Noel says the search for the right story for the silver screen continues) and even a Little Britain-like move to America.
But they’ve also staged a festival, published a book and formed a band, the last of which appears in the latest live show alongside series favourites like Tony Harrison, Charlie and the Crack Fox. It all stops people pigeonholing the concept, says Noel.
Art school
Their backgrounds explain the mix. Noel went to art school and says he spent his childhood “writing stories”, while Julian “stumbled into comedy through being in a band”. “We could both do stand-up but we never thought, ‘This is it, let’s just do this’. We always thought there was room for weird music and characters.
“I still remember my first gig in Cambridge – all my stuff was about starfish and nonsense. They were the ramblings of an insane person. But weirdly enough, it worked.”
There’s drawbacks to success – the most troubling? Tabloid notoriety and copyists. Noel has become a mainstay of the gossip columns, and was recently ‘pictured’ hand in hand with Kurt Cobain’s widow Courtney Love.
“That was actually a picture of me holding my girlfriend’s hand and they’ve put that under a picture of Courtney Love,” sighs Noel.
“If you told anyone that they’d be like, ‘Come on, no one does that’. It’s a strange game. I ask for it because I go to parties, I go out with the wrong people.
“You can just stay in, I’ve realised, and then they’ll go and annoy someone else; there’s always some other idiot in a hat, drunk.
“I remember at the GQ Awards, me and Julian were getting photographed and we were there posing away, and then all the paparazzi lost interest in about five seconds.
Orlando Bloom
“I looked round and Orlando Bloom was behind us. It’s just so humiliating! ‘No, we like him better than you’! Then Jack Nicholson comes in,” he laughs. “Then Nelson Mandela. There’s also someone more famous on the food chain. And we’re quite low down on it.”
Last March, the Boosh unsuccessfully tried to pursue legal action against an advert for breakfast cereal Sugar Puffs, which mimicked their crimping style (the episode is now responsible for a running gag in the live show).
“They started sending us e-mails from the Honey Monster like he’s a ******* person,” Noel yelps. “He’s invited me onto his Facebook. It is so surreal.
“You get over it, but what’s annoying is that people think we wrote it – it’s a bad crimp, like if your dad did some body-popping. ‘Woah now! Not good’.”
Julian drifts in as we discuss the topic. “Nooooo!” he yells. “My mum thought we’d done it. She rang me up, she was really proud.”
Outside projects keep coming, too. Julian has just finished directing a film and Noel held his first solo art exhibition last year – typically unconventionally, above a cake shop in west London. Fielding’s sharp sense of style has even scored him approaches from fashion designers, something which he says he doesn’t want to do. Until CityLife suggests a range of wigs...
Dandy
“Bring back the dandy!” he shouts in agreement. “I am into boys dressing up. If all Vince manages to do is get boys to feel OK about wearing drainpipes and mascara and wearing their hair in a slightly gay fashion, that’s enough.”
Ten years on from its conception at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, then, The Mighty Boosh is validating its creators’ uncompromising vision. Noel says no one would have believed it if they’d been at the duo’s first writing session.
“Julian came round to my house in a red roll-neck. I didn’t know him very well at all and he was a bit of a strange character anyway.
“We sat down with a guitar and started singing this song because we had a gig booked. We needed a costume so I pulled the curtains down and made a mask out of one of those shower things you put on the taps.
O2 Arena
“I remember thinking, ‘What the **** am I doing?’. But it always makes me laugh when I see Julian on stage at the O2 Arena surrounded by these sets and security, and I say, ‘Do you remember when you used to come round in a red roll-neck and we used to yank the curtains off the wall?’!
“There’s no way if anyone had said we’d be playing the O2 Arena we’d have believed them. We’d have been, ‘Yeah right, what? With this stuff?’.
“We thought people would watch it and go, ‘What the **** is this?’. And that was partly the aim; I knew that young kids would like it, arty people and cool, open-minded people.
“But it’s gone from being kids shouting at you to cab drivers and chavs shouting, (adopting his best chavese) ‘Yee-ah, da Boosh’, when it used to be ‘What’da **** are you wearing?’.
“That’s when you know it’s crossing over. That, and you can’t go down the shops. We’ve had to have security on this tour – I never in my life dreamed we’d need that. I feel like Prince.”
The Boosh seeds were first sown back in 1998 (the idea of being zoo keepers came a little earlier, as part of Paramount sketch show Unnatural Acts alongside Rich Fulcher – now Bob Fossil in the Boosh series).
Perrier
They won the coveted Perrier for best newcomer at Edinburgh that year and a radio show soon followed, topped off by a two-series deal with the BBC’s “maverick” commissioner Stuart Murphy.
“No one does that,” laughs Noel. “They wait until the first series is aired – it could be awful.
“When we did the TV show, I think BBC3 had just started. We were saying to people, ‘Yeah, we’ve made a TV show’, and everybody was like, ‘Have you? When was that? How was that?’.
“We were like, ‘You saw it, right?’,” he laughs. “No one saw it. My mum bought me a digibox so I could watch it.”
By series two and three, Vince Noir and his crotchety foil Howard Moon (played by Julian) had broken out of the zoo and were meeting new nightmarish characters each week alongside shaman Naboo (Noel’s brother, Michael) and talking gorilla Bollo: Cockney murderers, demonic grandmothers, junkie foxes and hermaphroditic merman among them.
Faint-hearted
They’re not characters for the faint-hearted. But, says Noel, they are loveable. “With the crack fox, you know there’s some underlying mental health issues going on there and he’s homeless, but it’s difficult to hate a homeless, mentally ill character even if he is threatens to hurt you.
“Even the Hitcher’s quite charming; he’s an old man and it’s hard to hate really old characters. Same as Old Gregg; he is a sea monster, a transsexual and a sort of serial killer. But he’s just lonely. It’s difficult to hate lonely people.
“I love playing The Hitcher live. You can mix it up a bit and insult people. In Glasgow I came out and said, ‘Alright, you skirt-wearing nonces’. And even though they thought that was funny, they were still tensing up and going, ‘I’m ganne ******* hit ye in a minute’.”
The live show takes the Boosh story one step further, touching on Morecambe and Wise territory with a ‘play what I wrote’ where Howard’s tragic vision of the future becomes a shiny dream when Vince takes over the script.
There’s even a couple of new characters. “It’s a bit like what we used to do at the Hen & Chickens,” Noel says as we part. “It’s very live, you couldn’t do it on tele. And I quite like that – got to keep it interesting.”
The Mighty Boosh are the M.E.N. Arena again on Tuesday, December 23, also £25. Call 0844 847 8000.
Published: Wed, 22 October, 2008
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