Bill Bailey: Original of the species

Bill Bailey talks Darwin’s adventures and rubber bishops with Richard Fitzpatrick

BILL BAILEY, due to tour Ireland next month, first visited this country in the 1980s. He came as part of a double act called The Rubber Bishops. “I don’t know what we were thinking,” he says.

“We were performing in cassocks covered in studs and chains. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t the best idea.”

The duo played venues all over the country. He remembers one curious incident during some downtime in Armagh: “I’ve never seen a fight in a chip shop quite so brilliantly executed by somebody in a wheelchair, and the bloke in the wheelchair won. It was extraordinary,” he says.

Bailey was born in 1964 and grew in Keynsham, near Bath. He was an only child, christened Mark, but took his stage name from a geography teacher who was impressed with the way he used to play ‘Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey?’ on guitar.

His father was a doctor, his mother a nurse, who often found it difficult to be critical of him. In his final year at school, he was cast in the title role of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, the German’s satirical play about the Nazi party’s ascent to power. For the role, the young, earnest Bailey dyed his hair black, combed it over, and grew a moustache. His mother thought he looked “very smart”. “But mum,” he said, “I’m supposed to look like Hitler.”

“I don’t care. You look very nice.”

He dropped out of London University “hours into it”, according to his chat on BBC’s Desert Island Discs, and spent his 20s in a succession of artistic endeavours (drawing on his prodigious musical talents; there is hardly an instrument he cannot play). These included time as one of four members of the band, The Famous Five, and as a lounge pianist in the foyer of a hotel.

“It’s a funny job — a lounge pianist,” he says. “You’re basically there to provide atmosphere and background music. You can only do it for so long before you go a little bit off the rails. You get free food and alcohol. Some nights I was trolleyed. It was a good thing I was sitting down for it. People would come over and say, ‘can you play the music from that advert on the TV?’ It was a thankless task.”

Bailey’s stage persona, the rambling storyteller with the keen eye for whimsy and life’s curiosities, came out of not knowing what he is going to say next, a moment of shared uncertainty with the crowd. His one-liners are legion.

His putdown of erstwhile Labour Party Party leader, Ed Milliband, comparing him to a “plastic big caught up a tree”, could easily be applied to several senior politicians in this country:

“No one knows how he got up there and no one can be bothered to get him down,” he says.

EDINBURGH AWARD

His stand-up career caught fire in the mid-1990s. He picked up a nomination for the Edinburgh Comedy Festival in 1996, the year the award went to Dylan Moran, his sidekick on the popular TV comedy series, Black Books.

Other high points from his career on screen include stints on QI alongside Stephen Fry and Alan Davies; a filmed life performance at the Royal Albert Hall of Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra in which he led the BBC’s orchestra on a merry dance; and a notable two-part documentary series on Alfred Russel Wallace, which has helped resurrect interest in an extraordinary naturalist who came up with the theory of evolution independently of Charles Darwin.

“Darwin was a collector,” says Bailey. “He was doing lots of experiments at home. He wanted specimens for his experiments, but Darwin didn’t like to leave his house. He had travelled. He had done his voyages on the Beagle. He suffered all his life with some condition he probably picked up in the tropics. He put adverts in periodical magazines like Nature and got people who were travelling around the world to send him specimens. Wallace was one of these people.

“Wallace came up with this theory of evolution so he thought: Who should I send it to? ‘I know — Darwin.’ The last person on the planet he should have sent it to! Or maybe the only person. Darwin knew full well what the implications were because he had already come up with the theory but he hadn’t published it so this letter from Wallace was the spur to publish his own theory.

“But the thing is Darwin was a gentleman. He wanted to give due credit to Wallace for having jointly come up with this theory; so, for years, from the 1850s all the way through to 1913 when Wallace died, it was known as the Darwin- Wallace Theory. It was only after Wallace’s death that his name drops off the radar.”

TROPICAL ULCERS

It was a wonder Wallace lived to 90 years of age. While traipsing around the tropics, he endured untold hardships, including tropical ulcers.

“They’re incredibly painful,” says Bailey. “At one stage, his legs were covered in ulcers to the point he couldn’t walk, he had to crawl everywhere.

“He was a tough cookie. His own brother joined him in Brazil on one of his early journeys and within three weeks he was dead from yellow fever.

“He had a very strong constitution. He was very brave. He suffered all kinds of things — earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, native battles. His scientific achievements are great enough but his physical courage required to do that was extraordinary,” he says.

Bailey met his wife, who manages his business affairs, at one of his gigs in 1987 and courted her by writing her a letter every week until they started going out sometime the following year.

They married on a whim while on Indonesia’s Banda Islands (one of Wallace’s old stomping grounds) in 1998 and live together in London with their son, Dax, and all manner of rescue animals.

“We’ve got tropical birds, parrots and such like. Owners get them, and they can’t look after them because they’re high maintenance, and they’re a captive bred so you can’t release them into the wild.

“Over the years, we’ve learned how to look after them. We’re almost like a sanctuary in the house. We’ve got birds, cats, dogs, fish, a snake, rabbits, chickens, ducks, the whole nine yards. It is like a mini-zoo when people come around,” he says.

Bill Bailey’s Limboland tour will visit several Irish venues including: The Black Box, Galway, September 29-39; The Olympia, Dublin, October 1-3; and Cork Opera House, October 6.