Despite me not liking Soho much, for the second time in eighteen months I was a major part of the opening of a new club right in its heart.
A few weeks before opening night there was a meeting at his house in Battersea of the comedians Peter had invited to be the founding acts at what was now called the Comic Strip Club. They were: me, Peter Richardson, Nigel Planer, Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, Arnold Brown and Pamela Stephenson. I think Pamela had sort of invited herself. Unlike the rest of us she was already a big star from appearing in the TV show Not the Nine O’Clock News. She had decided she wanted to do stand-up comedy but had made the rather odd decision to have an act written for her by several leading British playwrights. Harold Pinter might have been adept at claustrophobic comedies of menace or elegiac evocations of the shifting nature of memory but he couldn’t write a killer gag to save his life so she was there on the opening night but not for many nights after.
Sitting with the others in Pete’s little house I experienced a sudden surge of affection for this new group I was joining, then I remembered I’d felt exactly the same thing during the first meeting of Alternative Cabaret. Now those comics in my old gang were starting to get on my nerves. The fondness I had once felt for them was fading because when you were on a bill and there were two or three comedians all covering the same topics – the riots, Thatcher – followed by Keith Allen throwing things at the audience and/or taking his clothes off it was hard to stand out. But now at the Comic Strip I would be the only one doing the political stuff.
My affection for the Comic Strip gang (including Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders when they turned up a couple of months later) might not have been entirely authentic at first, but these were the people whom I would spend the next four years with: we would embark together on a roller-coaster ride that would take us all ultimately to success, wealth and fame. Over that time my affection for every one of them would deepen into a profound and sentimental love which as Linda always pointed out was almost certainly not reciprocated.
Our new club, the Raymond Revuebar, home of the Festival of Erotica, was in a flagstoned alley named Walker’s Court, a pedestrian passageway which linked Berwick Street Market, even at night still slick with discarded cabbage leaves, to Beak Street, a narrow and sunless road of hardware stores, pubs and old-fashioned tailors. After dark the alley was brightly lit by the light spilling from the windows of the little shops that lined both sides, tiny outlets selling either falafels or sex toys. The Raymond Revuebar was all gilt mirrors, flock wallpaper and red carpet, resembling a fancy Piccadilly tea room where all the female staff were inexplicably naked.
The Boulevard Theatre, one of two auditoria within the Revuebar, now renamed the Comic Strip Club, was a more theatrical venue than the Comedy Store. The seats were arranged in rows rather than tables and chairs, though you could bring drinks in from the adjacent bar. There was a proper stage with wings and a corridor giving access to two backstage dressing rooms and Peter had hired a house band, Rowland Rivron, Simon Brint and Rod Melvin, which brought a proper cabaret atmosphere to the proceedings and encouraged us all to use music in our acts.
Almost as important in the early days as the acts was Michael White who was providing the money. Just before we began I had been whining about some performance problem to Michael. He simply stared at me and said in his languid voice, ‘You haven’t chosen an easy profession, Alexei.’ I don’t know why this remark has stayed with me. I certainly found it bracing to have my self-pity challenged in this way but also I’d never before thought that I’d actually chosen comedy or that standing on a stage yelling was a profession.
Nobody I’ve spoken to remembers a single thing about the opening night of the Comic Strip and neither do I, which is odd. It certainly happened and there are many vivid recollections of the next nine months but of that night there remains not a scintilla of memory in the minds of all those that were there. Perhaps this lack of recall is because it did not have the magical, riotous feel of the first night of the Comedy Store a year before.
All the core performers had instinctively begun wearing suits though throughout the following year none of us had thought to get these suits cleaned ever, so pretty soon they were all stiff and stinking with sweat. Rik and Ade had bought their outfits at a discount place called the Houndsditch Warehouse. They had been made in Communist Romania out of what looked like cheap purple carpet and cost £10 each which wasn’t a lot of money even back then.
And on stage there was not much mucking about. Everybody made sure they did their best material, even the oddest member of the troupe, Arnold Brown. Arnold was still working as an accountant and much older than the rest of us. At the Comedy Store he had been a bit of a joke, dying most nights, but both me and Pete had been there to witness this one show when somehow he had suddenly caught fire and performed for over half an hour, sophisticated ideas pouring out of him, an expression on his face which suggested that even he didn’t know how he was doing it.
Given that the Comic Strip was part of a long-term plan to establish our own place and build our careers the second weekend of a club could be almost as important, indeed sometimes more important than the first, but the following Friday and Saturday I wasn’t there because of a long-standing booking with Alternative Cabaret to play a series of gigs in Dublin. Peter Richardson pleaded with me not to go but I mulishly insisted that the engagement had to be honoured. This was one of the things I did, be stupidly and stubbornly loyal when there was absolutely no reason to be, while on the other hand I would often let down those who’d been good to me. The gigs in Dublin were by way of a farewell because, as my future was now firmly tied to the Comic Strip, they were the last that I would play with Alternative Cabaret.
The last time I had been on an aeroplane was when me and Linda had taken a holiday to Greece in 1977. We had come into land at Athens Airport during a lightning storm in a rickety old Boeing 707 which had confirmed in me a nascent terror of flying. Over the next few years, Linda became increasingly adept at finding innovative and original ways to get us to distant places in not much more time, and at not much more cost, than it took to get there by plane. In this case to travel to Dublin we first took a train from Euston to Liverpool. At Lime Street a bus was waiting that transferred us from the station to the Pier Head. At the Pier Head a long gangway led to a pontoon that gently bobbed up and down on the brown river and from where there operated an experimental, water-jet-powered hydrofoil service that on a good day got you to Ireland in just over three hours.
To be in transit in your home town felt odd. On the bus we passed Central Station where I used to sell our Maoist newspaper to nobody and the pub where the man looking for a fight called me a ‘greebo’, while from the river we could clearly see Linda’s parents’ block of flats. We had not told any of our parents that we were there. Linda’s would have probably been all right about it but I still half expected Molly to leap out and stop the bus with her lollipop.
After we cast off the craft turned in a wide arc and headed slowly towards the mouth of the Mersey. Once out in open water the engine note grew deeper as the craft rose up on its underwater wings and charged towards America. This service did not survive one harsh winter on the Irish Sea but it was still a spectacular way to arrive in Dublin swooshing across the water until we splashed down right in the centre of town where from the dock we were able to walk to our hotel. On the way I was surprised to see beggars posted every few yards on the bridges over the River Liffey; it made Ireland seem very backward and inhumane. I could not imagine such a thing ever happening back home but almost by the time we returned they were a common sight on the streets of what I liked to think of as ‘Thatcher’s so-called Britain’.
The working lives of the old-time British comics and their US counterparts would have been ones of endless travel, nights or weeks spent in unfamiliar and unfriendly towns where in the evening you were supposed to make the inhabitants laugh. The lives of the Comic Strip/Alternative Cabaret comics were unusual in that we had largely worked in our home towns, where we understood the lives of our audience and slept in our own beds at night. By travelling to Ireland I felt like I was embarking on another step towards the true life of the comedian, a world of bizarre hotels and strange encounters that flavoured, poisoned and distorted your view of the world.
Linda had paid 50p to the Irish Tourist Board for a booking at one of their recommended small hotels. This turned out to be a gloomy building in central Dublin named the Adelphi. It was much shabbier than we expected, dingy with peeling paintwork. I think I might have imagined the chalk outline of a body on the floor in reception but there was certainly an empty fish tank. As the taciturn receptionist showed us to our room on the top floor we noticed that the landing light wasn’t working and the stair carpet ran out after the first floor. When we finally reached our room he had to give the door a substantial shove to get it open and inside it was dark and dirty. We put our bags down but hanging up my coat I noticed that carved with a sharp object into the broken door of the wardrobe were the words, ‘If you think the room’s bad wait until you have the breakfast.’
We checked out immediately though this left us in a bit of a fix because we didn’t have any Irish currency. However as we wandered the rain-slicked streets a man in a top hat suddenly stepped out of a doorway and said to us, ‘If you’re looking to change money this is the place,’ pointing to the only illuminated shop in a darkened row which turned out to be a bureau de change experimentally staying open late for that one night. After that we walked a little further until we came upon a grand old hotel called the Clarence where we took a room.
As we were sitting in the bar late that night a drunken priest came up to us clutching a fresh-faced young man by the arm and said, ‘I’m going to take up a post in Rome tomorrow and this is one of my pupils, Declan. He’s the one who’s organised this lovely party for me.’ Then he reeled away.
The young man watched him stagger off then turned to me and asked, ‘Are you Declan?’ Molly’s adoption of all things Irish, the blarney and the bollocking rebel nonsense, had given me an aversion to the idea of the country as some sort of magical place but you had to admit that some mad stuff did go on there.
After we got back home I wrote a letter of complaint to the Irish Tourist Board which said, ‘If the Adelphi is one of your recommended hotels I would hate to see one that failed to meet your stringent standards.’ In return they refunded our 50p.
This was the first time I had performed in a foreign country. In a shabby arts centre the way the Dublin audiences responded was explosive. Our acts were shocking enough in Britain, still a country with a relatively liberal climate, but here in repressive, corrupt and priest-ridden Ireland nearly anything you said caused a jolt of horrified and scandalised delight. This is turn spurred me on particularly to say more and more outrageous things until I made some unpleasant remarks about the Pope that would in later years come back to haunt me.
The rest of Alternative Cabaret set off for a tour of other towns in Ireland but having fulfilled my commitment I returned to the Comic Strip for the third weekend. My missing the previous Friday and Saturday did not seem to have affected the health of the club.
Slowly we began to gain press attention, though the first intelligent piece the place got was not in the Sunday Times or the Observer but from that erudite publication the London Review of Books – a long article written by the critic and author Ian Hamilton. He wrote:
The Comic Strip’s compère and guiding star is a Comedy Store veteran called Alexei Sayle, a portly, spring-heeled Liverpudlian with a convict haircut, a Desperate Dan chin and an Oliver Hardy silkette suit well buttoned at his bulging gut . . . Sayle hurtles onto the stage, spraying the audience with saliva. A big man who can move like lightning; a pathologically aggrieved pub lout who’s read some books. Sayle’s posture is manically contemptuous, his rhythm a hysterical crescendo of obscenity with spat-out satirical asides. Both the stance and the timing are near-perfect, and within seconds he has the audience agape. Most of them, it seemed, had never been called cunts before.
The bouncers at the Raymond Revuebar had a simple rule of thumb for who was directed where. If they reeked of aftershave they were sent to the strip show, if they smelt of beer they came to us. These men also had very fixed ideas about what anybody Japanese wished to see, which meant that Ryuichi Sakamoto – musician, activist, producer, writer, actor and member of the pioneering electronic music group Yellow Magic Orchestra – got shoved into the Festival of Erotica no matter how much he protested that he’d come to see the comedy. He was one of the celebrities who began to visit the Comic Strip. Dustin Hoffman sat unsmiling through the show while Bianca Jagger’s visit was celebrated with a News of the World front-page headline splash as ‘Bianca’s Four-Letter Night Out’. I was quoted as saying, ‘I won’t tone down my act for Bianca nor none of the nobs.’ Which though the paper had never actually spoken to me was sort of about right.
When we’d had our initial meeting at Peter’s house there had been some talk about the Comic Strip becoming a co-operative with each member having a single non-transferable vote, yearly elections and an upper and lower house based on the Norwegian parliamentary system, all of which horrified me. Having spent years in left-wing politics I never wanted to attend that kind of meeting ever again. No good ever came from meetings: the Russian Revolution was just a meeting that got out of hand. As it turned out I needn’t have worried because Peter Richardson ran everything apart from the show itself, which suited me. Peter had always had a vision of the club as a springboard to bigger things and in the middle of our run there he raised finance for a film, part documentary, part fiction, based around the Comic Strip.
On the night when we had a large crew in – lighting, sound, two cameras filming the show on stage – Robin Williams turned up and said he wanted to go on. I told him he could but he’d only be able to do fifteen minutes rather than his usual hour because if we went past midnight we’d go into terrible overtime with the film crew. ‘I have to do an hour,’ he said. ‘David Bowie’s with me, I’ve told him I do an hour.’
‘I don’t care,’ I replied.
‘I’ll buy the club,’ he said.
‘You can’t, we don’t own it. It belongs to a bouffant-haired pornographer.’
So Robin, accepting the ruling of the MC, only did fifteen minutes in front of the crowd. Then he came off stage and performed the other forty-five minutes of his act to me alone, pressed up against a wall in the corridor outside the dressing rooms. Occasionally out of the corner of my eye I would see people appear round the corner, realise what was going on and slowly back away. This was the first time I’d encountered what I came to think of over time as ‘comedian’s disease’: a compulsion to perform, whether you were on the stage or not, to constantly be ‘on’, to relentlessly make people laugh. Anybody who knew me could attest to the fact that I didn’t suffer from that particular addiction.
TV and record producers as well as celebrities began to show up at the Comic Strip, which meant that my days started to fill up with meetings. Not the political type, but ones where you met somebody in a bar or a restaurant or an office and then you discussed a project that was never going to happen. I had lunches with the editors of women’s magazines, drinks with dodgy chancers who wanted to put comedy bits into the soft-porn videotapes they sold and I worked for ages with a woman photographer on a comical photo strip that was supposed to run in the Daily Mirror. At first I didn’t realise that most of these projects were never going to happen; I obsessed about how I was going to fit them all in.
I’d say to Linda, ‘If I move the documentary about the Soviet Union those guys who’ve got backing from the Yemeni Oil Fund want to make to mid-June, that means I’ll be able to fit in the comedy special in Carlisle I’ve been talking about with Border Television in August, but then I’ll have to say no to the puppet show at the inner-city farm at least until autumn . . .’
Finally Linda said, ‘Look, chances are not a single one of these things is ever going to happen ever so you can just relax and say yes to everything, then if one of them does go ahead you’ll be able to sort it out.’ Which was reassuring and depressing at the same time.
One of those wanting to work with the whole group of us was a film director called Richard Loncraine, who had made a film with the band Slade called Slade in Flame. He invited the whole Comic Strip to dinner at a smart Chinese restaurant called Gallery Rendezvous in Soho which featured on its walls several large photographs of the chat-show host Michael Parkinson accompanied by his fulsome encomium to the restaurant. The only Chinese restaurants I had been in before had been the takeaway at the bottom of our flats or late-night places in Chinatown that served white wine in teapots after the pubs closed. Unfortunately Keith Allen found out about the dinner and came along in his role as our own personal Lord of Misrule and started a massive row so we all ended up shouting and screaming at each other; even the normally placid Dawn and Jennifer joined in. The following day Richard Loncraine sent us an angry and hurt letter saying he had never before come across a group of performers who behaved so badly.
Our relationship might have ended there, but as well as being a film director Richard Loncraine was an inventor of novelty items. A company he owned manufactured a room light called Jonathan Livingroom Seagull, which was a pendant light set inside a plastic seagull. When we’d first met, he’d offered to give me one for free. Most days in the following weeks I would ring him or his assistant, send telegrams or write letters asking them when my seagull light would be arriving, until finally, months later, a badly wrapped parcel with the minimum amount of postage stuck on it appeared at our flat. By then I’d gone off the idea of having an illuminated seagull in my living room.
The television company that showed the greatest interest in the early days of the Comic Strip was Granada TV, based in Manchester – the company Roger Graef had been working for. Unfortunately, while they had a sure touch for documentaries and dramas, they were less competent with comedy. Granada would get various members of the Comic Strip up to their home town to make all kinds of different programmes, then they would panic and not transmit them. This experience of going up to Manchester became so regular that I developed a routine. Having a bit of money to spend, I had recently bought myself from Harrods a big old-fashioned Raleigh bike in traditional green with an enclosed chain case, which you could ride while wearing a suit. I would pedal to Euston then load it onto the Manchester train and at the other end cycle through the centre of the city to the Granada studios in Salford. I liked the idea of riding a bike through a town I didn’t live in.
While most provincial British cities appeared run-down and bombed-out, Manchester, Italianate where Liverpool was neoclassical, had an almost European air – a city like Turin or Munich that was energetic and in some parts even prosperous. There were a couple of Italian restaurants that I was taken to by TV producers that weren’t entirely terrible and a thriving, garishly neon-lit Chinatown where the cooking was often as good as or better than in London.
Granada had plans for a late-night show starring the Cockney newspaper editor Derek Jameson called It’s All News to Me! and they kept paying for me, Rik, Ade, Dawn and Jennifer to come up to Manchester to make endless non-transmission pilots. They would tell us how great and talented we were and how they were going to be the ones to make us famous but then they would get us to perform terrible old- fashioned material. At one point they wanted me to do some racist sketch. I should have just come out and said that the material was rubbish but somehow I didn’t know the way to do it, so instead of refusing I just performed it very badly, slurring my words and moving my body in a robotic fashion. I found a pair of headphones lying around and noticed that if you plugged them into a jack socket in the wall you could hear what they were talking about in the gallery. The subject under discussion was me. ‘He’s completely out of control,’ they were saying.
One TV show that did get made was called Boom Boom Out Go the Lights, produced and directed by a young BBC producer/director Paul Jackson and featuring the best acts from the Comedy Store, the Comic Strip and Alternative Cabaret.
When the first Boom Boom . . . went out in October 1980 I rang Molly to ask her what she’d thought.
‘Well . . .’ she said. ‘Keith Allen wasn’t very good either.’
I’d thought that my being on the TV would make a huge difference but it didn’t seem to have any effect at all.
At the end of the summer we closed down the Comic Strip Club. Peter had booked us into the national tour which began on the 18th of September. We travelled in a proper large coach striped in contemporary colours of brown, beige and yellow with a toilet, seats and tables at the front and a lounge area in brown velour at the back, just like a rock band.
The tour manager too was from the rock business: a tall muscular man with thick glasses by the name of Nigel who had previously worked for The Damned and was inclined to treat us as if we were the same sort of dissolute outfit as they had been. ‘I don’t want to find no fucking slags in your room, you cunts!’ he would bellow, and, ‘I want you down in the lobby at nine firty or the coach is fucking leaving without you, no matter how fucking wasted on scag you are!’
Sometimes he’d threaten to hit us. None of us had the nerve to point out to him that several of us were married and our wives were accompanying us on tour, or that we had been college lecturers, accountants or schoolteachers in our previous lives.
Peter’s plan was that we would try and re-create the dangerous atmosphere of the Soho venue by playing places that carried a similar sense of loucheness. Our opening night was in a porn cinema on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow followed by a nightclub in Edinburgh then an old cinema in the Jesmond district of Newcastle and after that a German-style subterranean Bierkeller in Leeds. This didn’t really work out, the venues often being poorly equipped in term of sound, lights and basic hygiene.
Peter also seemed to have tried to find hotels with a similar demi-monde feel to the venues. In each town we appeared to have been booked into places that were Sheffield’s or Leeds’s closest equivalent to New York’s Chelsea Hotel, the place where Sid Vicious stabbed and murdered his girlfriend, except that Ipswich’s version of the Chelsea lacked any of the charm of its rat-infested New York cousin. For years afterwards when me and Linda were in some town and we’d see a hotel that was mouldy and decaying with drug addicts stumbling out of the doors or police tape around the entrance we’d say, ‘There’s the Comic Strip hotel.’
But struggling every night against inadequate auditoriums and awful hotels – in Glasgow, Dawn and Jennifer shared a room with a terrible smell that they finally tracked down to a soiled nappy stuffed inside the television, which warmed up every time they turned it on; Peter’s wife Marta found a boiled egg in the desk drawer of their room; in Sheffield the room was so cold I had to sleep with my hat on; in Leeds, Adrian and Rowland tumbled over and over down the sweeping central staircase of the faded station hotel wrestling each other for the ownership of the insides of a wine box which resembled a bladder full of urine – meant that we all grew much closer to each other. Because we were a little bit older, Linda and I sort of evolved into the rest of the group’s parents, though my parenting style would probably have got me flagged up by social services even in those more relaxed times.