If comedians are the new rock stars, there is probably no comic more up to the task than British comedian and actor Bill Bailey.
Anglophile comedy fans may have seen him on the sitcom Black Books — where he played Manny (what he calls "an enhanced version" of himself), the foil to the misanthropic, alcoholic used bookstore owner Bernard Black played by Dylan Moran — or on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, the British music/comedy show that became, in his words, "a harsh, sarcastic scourge of the music industry."
But he's best known for his stand-up, predominantly masterful music-driven performances that he says are reliant mainly on juxtaposition, noting that he has been referred to previously as "The Jedi of Juxtaposition." (For the music geek, his performance of German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk's version of the "Hokey Cokey" is essential viewing.)
Despite selling out enormodomes such as Wembley Arena in London and the O2 in Dublin, as well as performing at Bonnaroo this past June, he creates the material to work in venues of any size — he began touring his current show, Dandelion Mind, in smaller venues throughout the Highlands of Scotland.
And though you may not see him playing "Dueling Sitars" with a full Indian orchestra, his live shows in New York, Chicago, Toronto and Boston over the next week will include films, Middle Eastern instruments, Japanese technical gizmos, and of course, his one-of-a-kind takes on popular music and more.
Have you been doing music-related routines since you started?
Yeah, pretty much. I started out using a guitar, because it's a lot more portable than a keyboard. Then I used a piano for the first time in the Edinburgh Festival. And that was a bit of a revelation. Suddenly that opened up a lot of other opportunities and options in terms of what kind of music you could pastiche or use as comedy.
Have you noticed a lot of other musical comedy acts coming up over the last 15 or 20 years?
Sure. When I started it was deemed to be very uncool. It would seem to be, like, "Oh, you're just like a prop comic, with a keyboard…" And I was always very hurt by that because I thought, well, it's more than that. I'm not just coming on with an inflatable chicken or something. You have to know how to play this — you can't just bring it on and expect comedy to ensue. But I doggedly stuck to the task as it were. And now, of course, it's cool again. So I feel vindicated.
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