Bill Bailey on happiness, Jeremy Corbyn and how turning 50 changed him

The beloved stand up explains to David Ellis why happiness can seem fleeting, how turning 50 hit him hard and why he thinks Jeremy Corbyn is in a bit of a political bind
David Ellis @dvh_ellis11 December 2015

Watch Bill Bailey chat with London Live's Luke Blackall above, and read his interview with David Ellis below.

Sat in a white room in his Hammersmith office, Bill Bailey is plucking away at a length of wood with three strings and a snake-skin drum attached .

He runs a lick, a blurry country-blues line, and smiles. “It’s called a Shamisen. I bought in a place called Dali: I saw this guy playing it in a bit of an ensemble and was fascinated. He just said: ‘Do you want one?’ He took me to his house and I had tea with him and his family and he produced this thing. Extraordinary.”

This doesn’t seem to be unusual in Bailey’s world. The comedian-musician-actor-documentary-maker-quiz-show-regular is beginning the West End run of his latest show, Limboland, at the Vaudeville Theatre and, since his career took off in the late 1980s, has amassed a collection of oddities: “A lot the time, people just give me things. Somebody made me a theremin out of a garden gnome. I had another made literally in a tin, like a portable travel travel theremin.”

Bailey has had time to build his collection since his career took off in the late eighties, and it’s time that the good-humoured comic seems to thinking about as he sets the instrument down.

“I got to five-o, the five decades, and I had no real expectation it would feel any different to 40 or 30... they’re just numbers. And then it just landed with this boom. I was slightly taken aback about how it affected me.

“It just felt like a point of reflection had arrived. A little bit of existential doubt and angst starts to creep in, with friends and compadres leaving us early. You’re reminded of mortality. So the material has become a bit more reflective: about me, about family and it’s a bit more personal that it would perhaps normally be.”

On to the next thing: there's a sense with Bill Bailey he's constantly working towards his next project

As well, Limboland seems partly born out of the comic’s natural inclination to surprise: “I quite like confounding people’s expectations. Some people come to the show thinking, ‘oh, Bill is just this bumbling old hippy.’ There’s sort of an expectation with shows now – ‘well, Bill will do this, Bill will do that. He’ll sing some songs and all the rest of it and there’ll be a big spectacle.’ Or there’d be a series polished set pieces: one fits there, and another one, and on and on and on.

'I think people want a connection, they want to be a part of something, but are pushed out of that by the pressure to have this "great life"'

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“I wanted to get away from that a bit – so the aim of the show was to make it a little more stripped back.”

Stripped back it may be, but Bailey is tackling the big stuff: happiness, and the divide between our life and our expectations of it: “I think that generally there’s a pressure to live the best life you can. I genuinely think people want a connection, they want to be a part of something, and yet feel slightly pushed out of that by the pressure and the constant competition to have this ‘great life’. There’s a disconnect between that and how people actually feel and their internal lives.”

“Everything is about options. The person you want to spend time with? You just flick through a few options on your phone. You’re lonely? Here’s an app. And suddenly everything is quantifiable: there are dozens and hundreds more options of the thing you want to do. It’s more confusing in some ways.”

Not that options would appear to baffle Bill, whose interests run from bird-watching to yoga, and from paddle-boarding to politics. “I’m one for new things: I like new technology, I like new music, I’m not entrenched in some view of what culture should be. I like the fact that it’s constantly changing and that language is changing, that behaviour changes.”

'I think happiness really happens when you least expect it, when you’re not trying to get the perfect holiday, the perfect life, the perfect body, the perfect existence'

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Still, he doesn’t seem convinced that the constant change is making people happy, or that people are approaching their own contentment in the right way: “Happiness seems to be a kind of thing that changes to fit whatever the solution is: if it’s a state of a mind, then ooo, look, here are some books to deal with mindfulness. If it’s having a better balance in your life then, ooo, look, we have a book for that.

“I think happiness really happens when you least expect it: it’s when you’re not really thinking about it, when you’re not trying to achieve it, when you’re not trying to get the perfect holiday, the perfect life, the perfect body, the perfect existence.”

Maestro: Bailey, a master musician, keeps the musical elements of his show short, to try and avoid overshadowing the comedy

So is the man who once self-deprecatingly called his own tour 'Part Troll' happy? “Pretty much, yeah. I sort of bumble along, just above the line. You know what I mean? Just above contentment. It just dips up and down a little bit. You have the odd day when you think: ‘I just can’t do this anymore’, when it’s a wet Tuesday night…”

Does it ever get to that point? “It’s hard is when you have to get yourself up to speed for performance and you particularly feel like it. It’s part of the job. But hard. Comedy can mess with your head a little bit because it is a performance, but it’s what you think, so you’re actually revealing a bit of yourself and that makes you a bit vulnerable. And when you’re feeling a bit down in the dumps, you feel more vulnerable and it’s harder to separate yourself from the act. Stand up is very intense.”

Has that made the show more personal? “It’s not a deliberate, conscious sort of thing. It’s not a 'right, I need to write about this or be more personal'. Whatever you’re writing, you’re tempering it with the tyranny of laughter: there have to be jokes, because it’s a comedy show, and you have to make whatever it is relatable, so that it’s not about the audience trying to understand your particular set of circumstances.”

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With the personal comes the political, and Bailey, a Jeremy Corbyn fan, speaks passionately about the “rough and tumble of politics in the 24 hour Twittersphere”.

“Corbyn’s nomination showed there is a kind of craving for a bit of honest speaking, a bit of principled plain speaking. But I think he is in a bit of a bind. Nuanced debate doesn’t cut it in the toxic, political atmosphere. He’s having a fast-forward of his own political evolution, having to become ‘a politician’ – the thing he never was.”

Happiness, politics, obscure instruments: with the big things done, what’s next for Bill Bailey? Would he follow Jimmy Carr and do a greatest hits show?

“I think it would be hard to. Maybe one approach I could do would be to collect all the music together and put that in a show. But I was very pleased with the Alfred Wallace documentary. I’d like to do another documentary in that vein, another explorer people don’t know much about. I’m actually going to be doing some filming in the New Year with the BBC, up in the North Pole, artic stuff about wildlife.

Then maybe some more acting: get on the stage. A serious role. The new Bond?”

Bill Bailey is performing his new show Limboland at The Vaudeville from December 10 until January 17. For more information visit billbailey.co.uk and buy tickets here.

Follow David Ellis on Twitter @dvh_ellis

Follow Going Out on Facebook and on Twitter @ESgoingout

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