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Bill Bailey: Live
Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide To The Orchestra
Bridgewater Hall
November 16, 2009
YOU can just imagine the morning Bailey woke up from a beautiful dream in which he'd performed his playful musical parodies with some of the country's greatest orchestras.
In his hazy bubble, he roped in Academy Award-winning conductor and composer Anne Dudley, added some classical gloss to his own compositions and prized a punchline out of Handel’s Messiah.
That Bailey has been allowed to run with such a harebrained idea is testament to how well he is now regarded by both the musical and comedy fraternities. He is, after all, a skilled pianist with perfect pitch as well as being an A-list stand-up comedian.
And he’s been afforded such a luxury, complete with Dudley and an enviable list of orchestras playing one-off shows in their home towns, because his Remarkable Guide To The Orchestra is an entertaining romp on two levels. Firstly, it’s dusted with some of Bailey’s own compositions and curious observations, a few already familiar from previous tours (in particular his Cocknification of well known classical pieces).
There’s a reworking of his Bryan Adams tribute Hats Off To The Zebras and a particularly doom laden version of his anthem Insect Nation.
As always, it’s his wry attack on Chris De Burgh via a song called Beautiful Ladies that attracts the biggest laughs. If music is the delicious filling in a cup of science, observes Bailey, De Burgh’s oeuvre is “the cheap lager knocked over on the picnic table of disappointment”.
Tangential thoughts
Moreover, though, the show is a very unusual way to see and hear an orchestra. For many of Bailey’s fans, it’s likely to be their first live encounter with one; for those already familiar with classical concerts, it opens up a whole new aspect of the orchestra’s abilities.
For Manchester, Bailey has enlisted the Bridgewater’s chamber orchestra, the Manchester Camerata. Their interpretation of music from Bach to the Bee Gees is flawless, and proves the orchestra has comic timing of its own.
If the shows lacks anything, it’s the guide element it promises. Bailey makes occasional attempts to introduce the orchestra’s components, but we learn more about his tangential thoughts than the instruments themselves.
There are times when their involvement is just an indulgent luxury. But then there are others when this show lives up to its remarkable billing: the transformation of the Match Of The Day theme into a Jewish folk tune, the skipping blast of David Rose’s Holiday For Strings, or the Jacque Brel-style version of the Doctor Who theme (“Docteur Que?” whispers Bill in pidgin French).
A storming delivery of the News At 10 theme is made hilarious by some classic Bailey headlines: “Man buys France on eBay”, “Dish runs away with spoon, fork wins custody of saucer”.
But nothing beats the pleasure of Bailey and the orchestra’s rhythm section shaking their way through The Swan on Alpine cow bells, Bailey playing it for laughs like Eric Morecambe, dashing up and down the table to ring the bells. A marvellous meeting of musical and comic talent.
Reviewed: Wed, 18 November, 2009
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Sarah Walters
10/06/09 10:39
KEEP your eyes peeled at one of Bill Bailey’s 11 performances this month in Salford and Manchester, and you’ll notice that the gig doesn’t start with the usual welcome message.
And that’s because Bailey is a comedian who simply can’t help himself; if there’s a spot of comic tomfoolery to be had, then he’ll grab it with both hands.
In The Lowry’s Narnian backstage area, Bailey’s leaps around behind the show’s big screen, forming shadow puppets and peering at the audience.
Not everyone in the sold out house notices this pre-show horseplay – but that’s half the reason for doing it; that one audience member might catch something another misses is a big part of Bailey’s shtick (one need only listen to the way he fires out throw away lines of comic gold for evidence of that).
This is (in theory) the opening night of his new tour, Bill Bailey Live, but the show is already well bedded in.
Unsurprisingly, it draws on chunks of material from his arena tour – Tinselworm – a performance that BB Live grew out of during a 10-week residency in London’s West End.
It’s a gamble throwing in material you’ve been using for two years, especially when it’s also been immortalised on DVD for over a year.
But such is Bailey’s charming manner and the immortal comic genius of the material, that it comes across as freshly delivered almost two years after he first uttered it.
Improvisation proves he’s no script slave, and he spends a good 15 minutes messing around with audience responses and opening night gremlins.
A booming blast of feedback from above is quickly turned in a skit: “Take me now,” he yells at the sky. “That’s the first time I’ve ever been heckled by a tractor beam.”
Salvador Dali
With Bailey, most roads lead to the guitar or a piano. A little local material about the Lowry-inspired dirge Matchstalk Men And Matchstalk Cats And Dogs leads to a fantastic trial-and-error parody with other artists’ names (Salvador Dali proving the most satisfactory) while a politicised version of the Friends theme tune drags in some current affairs.
It’s his ability to pick these stranger comic themes that makes Bailey special.
Take his observation that instructions on painkillers alienate the middle classes, for instance (“Do not operate machinery?” he baulks. “How about, ‘Do not operate a cafetière’.”), or his social networking song I Unlike U.
Facetious? Yes. Non-compliant – certainly. “I got thrown out of the Trocadero Centre in London for sarcasm,” he says.
“The security guard said he was authorised to use ‘minimum force’ to remove me. What was he going to do? Flick me out of the building?”
What really sets Bailey and this show apart, though, is its clever ending – an hilarious silent film set to a dramatic live soundtrack that brings together all of the bizarre tales and quippy asides he’s told throughout the evening.
It’s a test of how diligent the audience has been, but moreover, it’s remarkable proof of how splendid a physical comic Bailey is.
That he holds it back until the end of the second encore says something about his showmanship, too, and shows more than a smattering of contempt for those who sneak out after the first encore to avoid the queues in the car park.
Proof that good things really do come to those who wait.
Bill Bailey's at The Lowry until Sunday, June 14, £25/£27.50, and then The Palace Theatre, June 16-20, £25.
This review is the opinion of a CityLife reader and not that of CityLife itself
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