It is 1992, in the old Chasen’s restaurant in Beverly Hills. The occasion is a birthday dinner for the actor Sylvester Stallone, hosted by the film producer, Leonard Goldberg. I have arrived before Billy, and in the course of surveying my immediate environment, I’ve noticed that the former President, Ronald Reagan, is dozing off at a table facing the door.
Billy makes an entrance in a green, red, gold and turquoise paisley suit. Reagan catches sight of him and is immediately shocked to an upright, fully conscious state. He stares for a moment in amazement at our Scottish fashion-maven before they exchange smiles (they once had a heart-to-heart about the man’s hearing-aid problems). Reagan then turns to make a private comment to his fellow diners, who seem grateful for Billy’s wake-up call. ‘Is this a dream or my medication?’
Sometimes I am wicked enough to take close friends to visit Billy’s clothing closet and they always burst out laughing. It is absolutely stuffed with bizarre garments in the most wonderful assortment of colours, styles and fabrics. Billy certainly knows how to cause a stir with his attire. On the American Tonight Show recently, the host Jay Leno surveyed Billy’s swish Japanese suit and silver-buckled sandals, out of which peeked his toes painted with black nail polish, and exclaimed, ‘What are you, Billy, some kind of punk pilgrim?’
Even very early in his career Billy understood the value, to a performer, of cutting a dash. He did not wish to turn up at folk clubs, most of which were held in lounge bars, the back rooms of pubs or function suites, and blend in with duffel-coated people who might nudge him and ask, ‘Who’s the guest tonight?’ Billy wanted to walk into a room in an outfit that identified him as a performer.
Iris began to make Billy’s clothes for the stage because shops never carried clothing that matched his outlandish ideas. One favourite item was a pair of wide, deckchair-striped trousers, which he wore on stage with startling T-shirts dotted with gigantic stars and hearts. Billy swooned over clothes in very wild prints, and he took to scouring furnishing fabric warehouses to find the most colourful, flamboyant materials he could, in velvet, corduroy, satin or tartan. Some of Billy’s folk-singing pals accused him of becoming too ‘showbiz’, but Billy in turn found their dowdiness a trifle fraudulent and forced.
Billy liked strange-looking hippie stuff and eventually he wore it in the street as well. He sent away for ‘mosquito boots’, which were like suede cowboy boots, from the shop Badges and Equipment, in the Strand, London. He tapered and flared some military tartan trousers in which he postured and pranced until somebody dropped a pint on them in the pub one day. After that, they were unbearable, like wearing a hedgehog.
Frank Lynch became Billy’s manager. Billy performed at Frank’s White Elephant Club in Edinburgh one night and, afterwards, Frank spluttered. ‘That’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in my whole life: I’m in pain. Do you want to come and talk to me?’
Frank also owned the Apollo in Glasgow. He told Billy he’d been backstage one night when Status Quo were playing. ‘You’ve got to see it,’ he hooted. ‘It’s really funny. They take off their Levi’s and put on their stage Levi’s.’ But Billy understood it completely. By now. Billy knew all about the importance of changing for the stage and that performing required a heightening of both the visual and the verbal.
Although Billy was basically just speaking his mind when he performed, he found himself in an accelerated state of magnified consciousness that wasn’t really him. He was essentially talking about reality, but he found he had to do so in an exaggerated way to make it special. That principle applied to his appearance too. He decided that, first and foremost, a stage performer’s hair and body should be clean. unless his grubbiness is part of what he does … he had seen that working really well and thought Tom Waits did it brilliantly. Tom always looks as if he’s been sleeping in the back seat of a car and has just stumbled upon the stage by accident.
Billy decided he would like to be sexier on stage, not like actors and film stars and matinée idols, but to have a kind of rebellious, rock ‘n’ roll kind of sexiness. He considered wearing a leather suit but he had already tried that on stage and it had been too sweaty and uncomfortable. Maybe just tight leather pants would be the answer, with a twinkling rhinestone at his crotch. He has very sensitive skin, so he decided on velvet. He had some suits made in white and black velvet with flared trousers, which he wore with platform shoes, and a target on his knee to throw it all off balance. He even ordered satin suits, in white, pink and a screaming red and purple, with Lurex stars on his backside like his costume for the Welly Boot Show. His sleeves were flared like a wizard’s, and the black suit had a hood that went way down past his calves. He designed many of those clothes himself, and was really proud of them.
Billy was crazy about a strange band called the Pink Fairies who were wild and hairy, a bit like the Pretty Things. Two of them wore tights with riding boots, a style Billy really liked. Billy thought big pink or yellow fluffy après-ski boots might be a nice touch, worn with tights or leggings. He would look like he was a roadie for the rock band Kiss. He settled on boots that looked like two giant, half-peeled bananas, a bit like John Byrne’s Reggae Wellies.
Frank Lynch had a chain of discotheques and some alumni from the Glasgow School of Art who called themselves ‘Artifactory’ had created wacky interior designs for the dance houses. In one discotheque, there was a giant Liquorice Allsorts box with candy seats spilling out onto the dance floor, made of pink and black foam. One of the designers, Edmond Smith, was commissioned to make banana boots for Billy’s stage appearances. A few weeks later, one of these outrageous pieces of footwear arrived at Billy’s house. It just took his breath away, it was so damn clever. ‘Edmond. I love that welly,’ he cried. ‘Could you start on the other?’ ‘It won’t be identical.’ Edmond was dead serious, ‘but then, bananas never are.’
Delighted with his footwear, Billy looked around for something to complete the outfit. It wasn’t easy to find tights or leggings to fit him and Billy could never understand why people in shops looked so baffled at his requests. Eventually he found women’s oversized leotards and wore two pairs of tights so they would be opaque. Later on, Alan Jeffries, a young London designer who understood Billy’s daftness, made him woollen tights with a design of his face on the rear: a beard hung down like his real one, and a pair of blue eyes peered out from his bum.
Billy was once describing this outfit on a talk show in Canada when he became aware of a fellow guest, the American comedian Robin Williams, roaring at the back of the studio. Billy thought, ‘There’s that guy, that nutter from the dressing room.’ He had been instantly fascinated by the zero-to-sixty-brained, improvising genius in the Hawaiian shirt. They have been friends ever since.
When Billy dreamed up a suit that made him look like a giant pair of scissors, Alan fashioned the outrageous garment. The two halves of the scissors had large red handles that crossed at his crotch, with silver blades going down into the banana wellies. Billy admits he was a little apprehensive the first time he wore it on stage in the second half of his show at the Aberdeen Music Hall. For the first part of the show, he had worn his multicoloured deck-striped overalls with cowboy boots, but during the interval he changed into his scissors suit then nervously presented himself to his manager and stage crew in the backstage area. ‘Fucking hell, look at you, man!’ exploded Frank.
Billy never referred to his outfits on stage, but he thought his startling appearance helped to give him a licence to be unpredictable and say anything he damn well pleased. His show became half talking and half music and then, in time, his conversation very gradually overtook his playing and singing. It was like the hands of a clock; the next time you saw the show it was different, but you never saw anything moving.
Billy’s impression of British comedians in the late sixties and early seventies was that they had little satirical or political edge. Instead, they were talking about their mothers-in-law, referring to sex by innuendo, or making racist cracks about Pakistani immigrants. There was a show on TV called The Comedians and the men who received a platform on that show, largely Manchester-based wise-crackers and the Irishman Frank Carson, became the famous bow-tie stand-ups of the time. Billy had little in common with them. ‘How do you describe yourself?’ he was asked at the time. ‘I dunno … a comic singer … banjo player.’ He really wasn’t sure how to answer.
One day, Billy read in the paper that he was a comedian. It really surprised him because he had no idea how a person became one of those. And anyway, where would he fit in, among the bow-tie guys and the remnants of variety theatre? He looked like a hairy freak. He was the wrong age, the wrong shape and too wild by half. His solution was shrewd and required gumption. ‘I’ll just stay where I am,’ he decided, ‘and hope the genre gets bigger.’ It did.
What Billy created wasn’t called ‘alternative comedy’. There was no such thing. The press began to take notice of this crazy person with weird boots: ‘Is he the new Harry Lauder?’ read the headlines. Billy felt insulted. He didn’t want to be the new anything. He just wanted to be Billy Connolly, whoever the heck he was. He never really approved of Harry Lauder anyway, wearing a kilt and being a ‘Scottish showbiz personality’.
At that time, Billy wouldn’t have been seen dead in a kilt: ‘I wouldn’t know how to tune one,’ he told his audiences. Billy’s real desire was to be as funny as ordinary people. He thinks it’s magical to be in a bar around lunchtime with a bunch of people who are having a get-together. They might be office workers or nurses from the hospital along the road, or men who’ve been digging a hole out front. Maybe one of them is leaving, maybe there’s a birthday, or one of them might have been promoted. Billy says you can recognize this little mob by their explosive laughter. They’ll talk away, then Boom! there’ll be a huge, backslapping laugh. They’ll talk away again, and then Boom! there’ll be another. There isn’t a comedian anywhere in sight. These are just people talking about their lives and roaring. There’s a wonderful, real quality to that laugh that show business doesn’t have. It’s unrehearsed.
Billy believes the catalyst for that electric hilarity is a particular kind of tension. Perhaps the individuals are oppressed or controlled by someone else, or else they might be bored or frustrated. Whatever the root cause of the tension might be, if it creates some type of siege mentality it will often spark that intense jocularity. Billy seeks it passionately. While acknowledging that it’s impossible for professionals to achieve it exactly, Billy attempts to create it spontaneously every time he goes on stage. He retains something up his sleeve in case it doesn’t happen, but on those heavenly nights when he successfully puts himself out there on a limb, something happens that rehearsed material can never instigate in a million years. On those magical occasions, he knows he’s flying and the audience does too. He comes off stage after those shows and whimpers, ‘I wish I was in the audience tonight.’
When Frank insisted that Billy begin to play larger theatres, Billy resisted it but he knew his manager was right. He belonged on a bigger stage and eventually began to appear at the Pavilion Theatre, the Carnegie Hall and the Kings Theatre in Glasgow. After his success in those venues, he realized that it had been an act of cowardice to try and stay where he was. Some people objected to this hairy upstart daring to play venues that variety theatre had dominated for years. Andy Stewart and others had come through that way, yet here was Billy in his weird clothes with a head like Jesus, swearing and talking about farting and shagging.
William’s approval was still far from forthcoming, too. William verbally acknowledged his son’s achievements only once in his whole life, when the Variety Club honoured him and gave him a statue. It was an enormously satisfying occasion for Billy. People he loved and admired turned up, including several Celtic football heroes. After dinner, Billy spoke to the invitees for a few minutes and was very warmly received. On the way home in the limousine, Billy’s father turned to him: ‘You were very good.’ That blew Billy away. He’d never said anything positive before. William only came to see Billy half a dozen times. One of those times was to watch him play Frosch the drunken jailer in Die Fledermaus with the Scottish Opera. At the performance, William passed out in a drunken stupor and had to be woken for the finale. Billy rather enjoyed that.
In October 1973, Billy went to London to do a voice-over for a tourist film called Clydoscope, directed by Billy’s friend Murray Grigor, a film-maker from Fife. Billy had bicycled the entire Clyde’s journey from Lanarkshire to the sea, stopping every so often during the filming to phone Iris who was pregnant again. When Billy sang a song to an image of himself on a gigantic sound-studio screen, he thought it was his original tune, but Billy had unwittingly stolen it from The Wombles. Fortunately, Mike Batt, who wrote the song, was merely amused. Billy put the last chord on the banjo, then turned round for feedback:
‘How was that?’
Murray was standing behind him with a tray of champagne.
‘It’s a girl,’ he announced.
Cara was a stunning baby, and the most pleasant child. She looked like a Smartie, completely round and smiley with the nicest manner. Billy called her the ‘sleepy dumpling’, which later became the name of his entertainment company. Billy absolutely loves babies. He refers to them as ‘talking sausages’ and has quite a way with them all. If you ever need a baby to fall asleep. Billy’s your man. He has a special technique called ‘Sleepy-Toes’ that never fails. Cara was always a placid child with very knowing eyes. She listened a lot and giggled a great deal.
Jamie, meanwhile, had refused to go to kindergarten because they made him settle down for an afternoon nap. He was already taking after his father. ‘Bollocks to sleep, let’s do things!’ Billy and Iris were peeling Jamie off the railings to try to get him inside, when Billy remembered his own school horrors. ‘What are we doing?’ He looked at Iris. ‘Let’s take him home.’
Jamie’s main memory of that time is that everywhere he looked there were extremely hairy people. He himself had shoulder-length hair by the time he was four and was furious with his mother for refusing to take him to the barber. He was frequently mistaken for a girl.
Billy and his family had moved from the ‘den’ to an elegant and spacious apartment in Redlands Road, well away from his father’s place in White Street. William had left Singer’s when Mona first became ill, to become a night-shift telephonist at the Buchanan exchange so he could be available during the daytime. Mona had been allowed home occasionally but she could no longer sit crocheting mats and embroidering lovely cushions as she used to. Instead, she wandered around in a state of disarray, while her family exhorted her to wash. Margaret had never married and still lived with William, so she took care of Mona at night.
After Mona’s death, Margaret seemed to soften up and Billy became more comfortable in her company. Just before Michael married Helen, a bank teller from south Glasgow, Margaret, or ‘Gags’ as Michael called her, took him aside. She intended to reveal the identity of his biological father, whom he’d never met, and the circumstances of his conception. ‘I don’t want to know.’ insisted Michael. ‘I don’t really care. The people who brought you up are your parents.’ It was his last opportunity to receive Margaret’s information, for soon after her fifty-first birthday she died of cancer.
Returning home to Redlands Road after her funeral service, Billy spotted a couple of fans sitting on his garden wall. Redlands Road was too accessible to members of the general public now that he was growing in stature. He was very grateful for the appreciation people were showing him, but he didn’t want them turning up at his door or stealing his jeans from the washing line.
Billy and Iris decided to move to the countryside, to the peaceful town of Drymen just outside Glasgow. At last they had a wonderful garden for the children to roam around in and Billy made them a sandpit. As a toddler, Cara always loved having a job to perform. She trotted off to feed the rabbits, guinea pigs and the donkey they named Booby after one of Billy’s roadies, Booby Daniels. Afterwards, she would take a nap in a wheelbarrow.
Billy was happy that his children were having the kind of life he had only dreamed about, but deep down he was hitting a wall, frequently tormented about his own lost childhood. There was a woodland between the house and the road and a river ran beside the house. Jamie was an Action Man fan at the time, so he pleaded for a battery-powered toy dinghy for his Action Man to drive. Shortly after Jamie received the expensive toy, Billy heard a great din in the garden and went out to investigate. Jamie had commanded Cara to launch the dinghy further upstream, while he and a friend waited in the bushes to ambush it with huge, jagged boulders. Billy himself had never had a toy worth anything close to thirty pounds, yet here was Action Man, tragically wiped out by heavy artillery fire.
On the surface, Billy’s life was quite jolly, but inside he was lost. When he made public appearances, he arrived to great fanfare. He would open shops and cut ribbons while pipe bands played. A little voice inside, however, kept nagging him. It sounded a little bit like Mona. ‘Who do you think you are? You don’t deserve this.’
Billy was getting drunk very regularly and was even having blackouts. The trick, he decided, was to never let his hangover catch up with him, just stay drunk. He began to go off on long solo tours of Australia, Canada and Britain, playing ninety nights in each country.
Touring was an interesting phenomenon. After about a month of little sleep, endless packing and unpacking and a brutal performing schedule, he would enter a kind of limbo where life was quite dream-like. The drinking and carousing became normal, while the rest of the world became blurry. Billy likens it to the experience of sailors who spend so much time at sea they begin to hate shore people.
Nobody in that insulated world ever told him he was drinking too much, or that he was too loud or hogging the company. The road, he decided, had its own rules, structure and hierarchy. Everything was provided without any effort on his part. There was never a shortage of cigarettes, cigars or drinks. He met women who wanted to sleep with him, which usually seemed like a very good idea. When he came back from breakfast every morning, somebody had made his bed. Wonderland! He never took stock, because that would bring him back into the real world, and to hell with the real world. The real world was where disease, unemployment and unhappiness dwelled, not to mention having to take responsibility for his actions. Unfortunately, when the tour was over, he was obliged to go home. It was lovely to see his family again, but he could never get room service on the phone.
Touring was not his only activity in the seventies. Billy became a successful recording artist with Polydor Records. Michael had criticized Billy for years about his music and his ‘stupid folkie friends’. ‘You watch,’ Billy had forecast, ‘I’ll be on Top of the Pops one day. You’ll be laughing on the other side of your bloody face then.’ ‘Oh yeah, right,’ laughed Michael, ‘with your banjo. Terrific.’
Billy’s contact at Polydor, George McManus, alerted Billy that the country-and-western singing star Tammy Wynette had recorded a song called ‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E’, a tear-jerker about a mother who spelled the details of her divorce to protect her child from heartache. In 1975, Billy recorded a parody of her hit, under the guidance of the Irishman Phil Coulter, a music producer who had been working with the popular group, the Bay City Rollers.
‘Frank Lynch had been putting the bite on me to see some guy who was funny and played instruments,’ reports Phil now, ‘so I went up to the Kings Theatre in Glasgow under sufferance, to record Billy’s show. We sniffed around each other like two dogs, then I went into my mobile studio and Billy went on stage. Within minutes. I had flung my clipboard away, arrested my stopwatch and had fallen across the mixing desk, which screwed up all the faders. He was the funniest man on the planet and he still is.’
Billy’s version of ‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E’ went gold. It climbed to number one in the British charts, while Tammy Wynette’s original version only made it to number twelve. Billy appeared on Top of the Pops in a purple polka-dot suit, playing his guitar and singing:
‘Our little dog is six years old
And smart as any damn kid
And when you mention the “v-e-t”
He damn near flips his lid.
Words like “s-h-o-t” shot Or “w-o-r-m” worm
These are words that make him “s-q-u-i-r-m” squirm.’
Frank Lynch thought Billy should play the London Palladium and, to Billy’s surprise, it sold out without a single advertisement – every McAnyone in London bought a ticket. The twelfth of January 1975 was a staggering night: Billy had never before heard such noise or enthusiasm from an audience. At the end, the stage crew brought down the fire curtain because they were afraid the crowd was going to rush the stage.
One early morning that same year, a Glaswegian taxi driver was transporting a passenger from his hotel to the airport when he suddenly became aware of the identity of the hung-over gentleman slumped in the back. It was Michael Parkinson, Britain’s most famous television talk show host, in the middle of a promotional tour for his biography of the football player George Best.
‘You like the funny men, don’t you?’ assumed the driver.
‘I do.’ Michael opened one eye.
‘D’you know the “Big Yin”?’
‘No.’ He was irritated. ‘What’s that?’
‘You should have him on your show.’
With that, the driver screeched to a halt, leapt out and disappeared into a shop. When he re-emerged, he presented Michael with a copy of the album Billy Connolly Live.
‘Play that.’ he ordered.
Michael took the record home and stashed it away in his record collection. His son Andrew finally persuaded him to put it on. ‘You’ll really like it, Dad, play it.’ Michael had never heard anything like it in his life. It was ‘The Crucifixion’, and he could only understand about half of it because Billy’s accent in those days was much more raw; nonetheless, Michael began to laugh to the point of losing control. He took the album to his producer, John Fisher. ‘This guy’s hilarious,’ he told John. ‘We have to put him on the show.’
In the limousine on the way to the BBC TV studios for his first appearance on the Parkinson Show, Frank had warned Billy. ‘Whatever else you do, don’t tell that joke about the bum. You’ll ruin everything.’ He was referring to one of Billy’s favourite stories of that time. Billy was dressed for the show in a pale brown leather suit he’d had specially made in Glasgow and an obscenely hairy sporran. ‘It’s hideous.’ said Michael, staring at the suit, ‘but let him wear it.’
Billy was the first guest that evening. Michael introduced him as ‘One of the most original and best comedians I have heard in many a day’. Billy played it safe by opening with a song by Leo McGuire:
‘I am heading with my crummoch up from Gretna Green to Skye
But my journey has an element of farce
Cos the calendar has stated it’s the middle of July
Yet here I am with snow up to my arse.”
It was a parody of all the ‘tartan and velvet’ entertainers and the audience loved it. Then Billy sat down and Michael interviewed him. He thought his new guest seemed shy, gauche, and a little wary. ‘In those days you really had to get it out of him,’ remembers Michael, ‘but he was so bloody funny, and he had an extraordinary way about him. People liked him.’
‘I hope I can get away with this, it’s a beauty,’ Billy said suddenly. There was a close-up shot of Parkinson nervously fidgeting with his collar. ‘This guy was going out to meet his friend in the pub,’ began Billy, while Frank Lynch buried his face in his hands. ‘Oh no, Billy, not the one about the bum!’
Typically, Billy couldn’t resist. He continued. ‘How’s it going? Fine. How’s the wife? Oh she’s dead. What? I murdered her this morning. You’re kidding me on! No, I’ll show you, if you like. So he goes away up to his tenement building, through the close …’ at this point, Billy smiled indulgently at Parky, ‘that’s the entrance to the tenement,’ he explained, ‘and there’s a big mound of earth there and, sure enough, there’s a bum sticking out. He says, Is that her? He says aye. He says, Why’d you leave her bum sticking out? He says I need somewhere to park my bike.’ When Billy delivered the punch line, the crowd just exploded.
‘You see him on stage now and he’s exactly the same as he was in that studio,’ says Michael now. ‘He got away with that joke at that moment in time, and he always gets away with murder. Little old ladies come to his shows, sit through a torrent of “f” words and end up wanting to adopt him,’ he observes. ‘They don’t mind what he does because they say. “He’s a nice man”, and he is. Likeability is an extraordinary gift.’
Billy was grateful to Michael, who had come to his dressing room before the show and treated him like he was Bob Hope, although, as far as Billy was concerned, Michael was the big shot. Best of all, Michael hadn’t asked Billy to be funny in rehearsal. Billy is a performer, not a technician. He’s always afraid people will lose faith in him in rehearsal, for he cannot shine in an empty room.
Michael thought Billy was ‘the genuine article’, as he puts it. ‘We have a shared background and aspirations … It was like he was talking about my own life. I saw him as a class warrior. There was a political edge to his humour: it was as if he was saying to working-class people, “Look at me … if I can do it, you can.’”
After the Parkinson Show, it seemed as though a door had opened for Billy and a brilliant light shone through. ‘It would have happened anyway,’ says Michael graciously, but the truth is that appearing on the Parkinson Show made Billy a star all over Britain and Northern Ireland. He embarked on a two-month, sell-out, one-man UK tour, which he titled ‘The Big Wee Tour’. When the lights came up at the beginning of the show, the audience was greeted by a life-sized cutout of Harry Lauder with Billy’s hirsute head stuck through a hole above the neck, singing Harry’s own song, ‘Keep Right On to the End of the Road’. A blackout followed and, when the lights came up again, Harry had disappeared and Billy was standing on stage alone. ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen,’ he began, ‘I come to bury Lauder, not to praise him.’
By now, Billy was determined to explore every nook and cranny of his ability, whether that meant acting, or writing a book, a play or some poetry. He looked at himself in the mirror one morning and spoke his epiphany: ‘Fuck, you can do anything you like! You don’t need lessons! You don’t need fucking permission! The greatest guys in the world will be happy to show you how. All you have to do is look interested!’
Billy really took to acting. He appeared in a couple of BBC television plays with politi-cultural themes, written by Peter McDougall, a fellow Glaswegian. Like Billy, Peter is largely self-educated and was abandoned by a parent. His father was a seaman whose frequent escapes from the family mirrored William’s and inspired in Peter the same type of deep pain overlaid with sullen rage that Billy feels about both of his parents. Peter is a brilliant, melancholic walrus with a fury and darkness as fathomless as Billy’s own. ‘He is still the tortured soul that he has always been.” says Billy of Peter, ‘and the light of truth shines through him like a beacon.’
Peter’s play, Just Another Saturday, won the Italia Prize and was about the Orange, Protestant order, while Elephant’s Graveyard tracked the hopelessness of an unemployed man. John Morrison was the leading actor in both but Billy received critical acclaim for supporting roles. Peter was immediately impressed by Billy’s innate acting ability and still considers his work in those early television roles to be the best acting he’s ever done. ‘He had a wonderful stillness.’ Peter says now. What ensured Billy’s solo comedic success, according to Peter, is his perspicacity, a quality both men share.
The two men embarked on a friendship based on background similarities, mutual admiration and a penchant for getting pissed. The second time Billy met Peter, he carried the intoxicated writer’s comatose body home to rest. Peter was living in London at the time, so Billy often met him in a pub in Little Venice. After a serious skinful, the pair once attempted to enter a nightclub, but were refused entry for being unpleasantly uninhibited. Peter knew a back way in, but it required an athletic challenge involving a Tarzan-type jungle swing across the canal. Billy attempted the manoeuvre with great bravado, fully clothed and wearing the high-heeled clogs he favoured at the time. Predictably, he lost his grip and fell into the canal. When he surfaced and climbed out of the water, he realized that one of his clogs had sunk without trace. Billy began removing his sopping jacket. ‘No!’ cried Peter. ‘Don’t go back in!’ It was too late. Billy dived back into the putrid canal and searched around in murky water. ‘You’d think the Dutch would have invented shoes that could float!’ he moaned.
In 1976, Billy wrote his own stage play, And Me Wi’ a Bad Leg, about tenement life in Glasgow. Bill Paterson played the leading role, and the play was first performed in Irvine, Ayrshire. It was successful enough to go on to the Edinburgh Festival and finally to the Upstairs Theatre at the Royal Court in London. During its run, Billy decided to visit his cousin John, who had moved to Bath. John was even crazier than before and his practical jokes had got completely out of hand. He had taken to riding around in a Bedford van looking for cyclists. He had a long broomstick with a red boxing glove on the end with the word ‘BIFF!’ written in white paint on the side. He would slide open the door of his van and drive alongside the unfortunate man. ‘Hello!’ When the cyclist looked in the door and saw the word ‘BIFF!’ coming at him, likely as not he would cycle into a hedge.
On his return from London, Billy attended the Edinburgh Festival premiere of Big Banana Feet, a documentary by Murray Grigor about Billy’s previous Dublin and Belfast tour. It presents an artist who is surprised to have filled the halls, exhibiting defensiveness about his proclivity for frank body talk. ‘Of course my show’s vulgar,’ Billy is seen arguing scornfully. ‘I do it on purpose. I enjoy it from the stage and they enjoy it in the audience. But I don’t think it’s rude or offensive because I talk about my willie: fifty-three point nine per cent of the population of Britain’s got a willie … what’s wrong with that all of a sudden?
And when it comes to four-letter words, most people swear,’ says Billy hopefully, ‘but I happen to think Glasgow people swear better than anyone else in the world. It’s like machine-gun fire. You hear it at a football match, usually accompanied by a mouthful of cold pie and Bovril.’
Billy innately understood then what he can verbalize today: ‘Anywhere you’re vulnerable, you’re funny,’ he explains, adding a truism that explains an awful lot, including his obsession with cavorting naked in public:
‘If your knickers are down, you’re funny,’ he thunders. ‘I love life with my knickers down!’