Comic recovers from The Who
MOST stand-up comics try their hands at different things. Half of them, according to Colin Murphy, have an unfinished novel lying on a laptop somewhere. They’ll do voice-overs, or will act.
Phill Jupitus, best known for his role as team captain on Never Mind The Buzzcocks since 1996, has done the lot and then some. Other jobs include several years as a DJ on BBC radio. He has presented TV shows on everything from soccer and baseball (he has a tattoo of the letter B, as in B for the Boston Red Sox, on his inside left wrist) to Walt Disney.
He was a cartoonist and, before taking to the stage, he put down five years in the civil service working in a job centre. He spent another chunk of years as a press officer for the Go! Discs record label.
Over the last few years, he has starred in West End musicals and is a dab hand at improv. Jupitus is appearing as a guest in Whose Line Is It Anyway? at Whelan’s in Dublin on Saturday. Improv is the easiest of all his artforms, he says. If he gets tongue-tied on stage, his colleagues will give him a dig-out or else they´ll “just stare” while he dies on stage.
Jupitus, now on the cusp of 50 years of age, got into showbusiness as a performance poet, which ultimately led to his career as a stand-up. It was 1983. He went along to the Ranters’ Cup Final. There were 20 poets on the bill. Four were good; the others, he remembers, were woeful.
He came away from the gig thinking, “I could do better than those other 16.” It was enough of a scratch to set him on his way. He was known as Porky the Poet. For the next couple of years he supported acts like Billy Bragg and The Style Council.
Audiences were receptive to his poetry, he says. There was a kind of fringe, avant-garde feel to the entertainment circuit in Britain in the mid-1980s. Often, a show might consist of a poet, a stand-up, jugglers and a musical act.
It was years later, as a comic, that he encountered his most hostile audience. “Eleven years ago,” he says, “Harvey Goldsmith, the promoter, invited me to do a gig with The Who and guests. I thought there’s no way I can do stand-up, but it was with guests so I thought I’d be compering. Great, no problem — I´ll be introducing people. But what happened was The Who did a gig and then there was an interval act. He put me on during the interval. It was at the Royal Albert Hall. It was one of the worst nights of my life.
“Imagine, The Who have just finished playing Won’t Get Fooled Again. The song finished with that bough-bough-bough-booouuuugghhh. Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend synching on the microphone: ‘De-de-de-de. Ka-poh!’ Royal Albert Hall goes, ‘Waaaaaaaah!’ Then: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Phill Jupitus.’ You could not have created a worse environment. It was one of the worst nights of my life.
“The favour I did for Harvey Goldsmith that night. The next year for the same charity gig he did a separate night for the comedians, but he never invited me back. He had come and seen me do a one-man show for two hours and I blew the place apart and he thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll put him on with The Who.’”
Jupitus is back doing stand-up this year for the first sustained period in almost a decade. He’s also lost six stone — “a small person” — recently. He puts it down to his work in musicals. He noticed he lost 30 pounds during his run in Hairspray in 2009, owing to the “rhythm” of a regular working routine. For his five-month stint in Eric Idle’s Spamalot, which finished in June, he watched what he was eating and packed in the drink too.
He played Edna, the wife, in Hairspray. His mother was chuffed with his performance. “It was very weird,” he says. “My mother was genuinely moved and proud of me for Hairspray. More than any other job I’ve done. I think everything else is a bit modern for her. I think I’m a bit shouty and a bit sweary, but when she saw me in a dress and a wig, that to her, said: ‘Ah, he can sing. He’s in showbiz. I understand now. I thought he just has a big mouth and talks on television.’”
* Phill Jupitus is at Róisín Dubh, Galway, tonight; Dolan’s, Limerick, tomorrow; and City Limits, Cork, Friday, November 18. He also appears in Whose Line Is It Anyway? at Whelan’s in Dublin on Saturday, November 19. See: aikenpromotions.com.
