THE NEW VARIETY
I did many gigs at North East London Polytechnic, or NELP, as it was called then, but one was memorable for two reasons. The first was that the guy who was supposed to pay me disappeared with my money. He also disappeared with the door money, the cloakroom money, the beer money and the money of my supporting artists. And second, I met Roland Muldoon. He sat me down and told me about an idea he had. He wanted to get away from all the bullshit that other comedians were doing at the time, with their racist, sexist, mother-in-law gags, and he wanted to create something new. He called it New Variety.
He told me he had a pool of people to work with, among them Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Tony Allen. The a cappella group The Flying Pickets were also in, at least a year before they had their number-one hit. Then there was Arthur Smith, Ade Edmondson, Alexi Sayle and Rik Mayall. Another performer was Pauline Melville, who went on to become a respected novelist. These comedians were already performing in the Comedy Store in central London, but Roland wanted to get them into the working-class areas of London. I listened to him telling me all this and I thought, This is a great idea, but he could just be mad. It turned out to be a great idea, and he was mad, but we did it.
On a New Variety bill there would be a wide range of performers, each performing for 20–25 minutes. We would all get on stage and do our own slots, and sometimes we would combine. In July 1982, when Michael Fagan climbed into the Queen’s bedroom and woke her up to ask for a cigarette, me and Pauline Melville did our take on it. She played the Queen and I played the intruder, but I was looking for a spliff and a little conversation.
These were big gigs in great venues and my slot usually followed the comedians. The audiences were really open-minded, so it was great to be part of another artistic movement where we all had similar ideas. There were no gags about blacks, Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen going into pubs; no jokes where women were called ‘birds’ or ‘her indoors’; in fact, we poked fun at the people who told those jokes, and of course, at the political establishment.
The people on the New Variety circuit were a breath of fresh air. A year or two earlier, when I’d been in the bookshop, I was surrounded by people who’d read books and were full of ideas. There was a lesbian, or maybe two; there was a gay guy, or maybe three; a Jewish guy (or a guy that said he was Jewish), and a few black folk. We all talked about our experiences and the books we’d read, and we went on marches together, but with the New Variety family I felt that we came together to express ourselves politically through creating and not just reading. We were bringing the words to life and influencing one another. No one was trying to outdo anyone; there was no competition; we didn’t care who headlined, we just did whatever would make the show work and, backstage, well, there you could feel the love.
Roland Muldoon was, by his own estimation, militant. He was anti-police, anti-establishment and anti any authority. He was always smoking a spliff and wearing a hat, and would talk to me for ages about where to find the best weed. He was also part of a theatre group called CAST – he and his wife Claire told me it stood for the Campaign Against Shakespearian Theatre. One of his plays was called Sedition, with the subtitle Living off an Arts Council Grant. He’d actually got an Arts Council grant and had to write a play to justify it, but he didn’t know what to write, so he bought some weed with the money. When he (and the company, I guess) had smoked the weed, he wrote a play about smoking the weed. He’d done another play where they’d chopped off the Queen’s head. I don’t know where he got the money for that, but it wouldn’t surprise me if was from the Prince’s Trust . . .
Like most poets, my work went through different stages. There was a time when it was more about the ranting than the work itself. Ranting punk poets like Steven Wells (aka Swells), Porky the Poet (aka Phil Jupitus) and Attila the Stockbroker had the ability to perform at a fast pace and not lose the audience. Alongside them was a movement of radical black poets, whose main source of inspiration was reggae, and they were called dub poets. I could rant as well as I could dub, and because I was able to cross over so well and perform to both audiences it was very natural to call my first EP Dub Ranting.