PHILL JUPITUS IS CURRENTLY ON THE ROAD WITH HIS BRAND NEW SHOW JUPLICITY – A SHOW HE DESCRIBES AS “ADULT THEMES AND SITUATIONS DELIVERED CHILDISHLY”…  

He manages to drag great laughs out of the chaos of his own life – a life described as “flaky” and “chaotic” by fellow comedian Sean Lock. “Sean has this thing about comedians mining our own personalities for material and then in your head negotiating how much you keep back,” says Jupitus. “As a comedian you are a person in a society within the world; all you have to do is look at things and shift your camera angle. All comedians can do is put a wider lens on a situation so that it resonates with people. I have a lot of material to choose from for this tour. Initially there was some resistance to me discussing things on stage about my family. One of my daughters, Molly, married her American girlfriend and emigrated there, so what you get is a starting point: gay marriage is a trope that’s very much in vogue at the minute and dove-tails with what’s happening in the world, with Donald Trump and so on”…

Jupitus became a familiar face when he started as team captain on BBC2’s pop quiz NEVER MIND THE BUZZCOCKS in 1996, which went on to run for 19 years. Aside from Buzzcocks and live stand up shows all over the UK, he also appears as a regular guest on QI (BBC2) and ALAN DAVIES AS YET UNTITLES, and in 2012 returned to television stand-up for the first time since 2000 with an appearance on LIVE AT THE APOLLO. On BBC Radio 4 Phill is a regular panellist on the award winning I’M SORRY I HAVEN’T A CLUE and THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH and he was resident curator on THE MUSEUM OF CURIOSITY. In addition, he’s presented numerous radio documentaries including PHILL JUPITUS’ COMIC STRIPS, CALVIN AND HOBBES and THE MAN WHO BOUGHT HENDRIX’S STAGE. His theatre work includes playing Bottom in the Bath Theatre Royal production of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, appearing alongside Jason Manford in the UK touring production of THE PRODUCERS, the West End production of URINETOWN and a singing debut in 2009 when he played Edna Turnblad in HAIRSPRAY. Not a bad CV for a man who began his performing life as Porky The Poet – early 1980s support act (“a bit of piss and shit”) to the likes of Attila The Stockbroker and Billy Bragg. But in this new interview with The Mouth Magazine, Phill begins by looking back to where his love of words began…

 

WHENEVER I TALK TO A SPOKEN WORD ARTIST, A POET, I LIKE TO BRING UP THAT FANTASTIC ADRIAN MITCHELL QUOTE: “MOST PEOPLE IGNORE MOST POETRY BECAUSE MOST POETRY IGNORES MOST PEOPLE”… SO WITH THAT IN MIND WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST EXPOSURE, YOUR FIRST ACCESS, TO IT? AT SCHOOL, I’D GUESS… 
Indeed, yeah… Even though I wasn’t a Chelsea fan, I’ve still got a poem I wrote about being a Chelsea fan. I wrote that when I was seven. From what I can remember of it, it was basically a loose parody of their single BLUE IS THE COLOUR from them being in the Cup [1972]. I’ve still got that somewhere. I remember when I went to ‘big school’, when I went to senior school, I had an English teacher called Phil Taylor who was very very encouraging of my poetry. I had a poem that I wrote about an Anglo-Saxon warrior getting lost at sea in a coracle. It was called Kenny’s Coracle, ha ha ha. I remember the teaching was really taken with that. Whenever anyone took an interest in me outside of my ability to deliver homework, it meant something. Most teachers just want their students to do what it says in ‘The Teachers’ Guidebook’ that the students have to do. But this guy, Phil Taylor, was interested in me as an individual. So you respond to that – when people are actually engaged with you as a person, y’know?  I wouldn’t do what I do today if I hadn’t known Phil Taylor. Definitely.

SO IT STARTED WITH A GREAT TEACHER WHO WAS INTERESTED IN YOU AND ENCOURAGED WHAT YOU HAD TO OFFER – WHICH IS THE DREAM, REALLY, FOR A CREATIVE KID… BUT HOW DID YOU GET FROM BEING THAT KID, PENNING POEMS ABOUT CHELSEA, TO PERFORMING GIGS?
As far as ‘how I came to do it’ goes, the key point for me was seeing Cooper Clarke on the 26th July 1980 in Chelmsford, opening for Siouxsie & The Banshees. I was eighteen. That – seeing someone on stage doing what they want, really – was massive for me. He was doing his brilliant poems but in between them he was just telling these really rubbish pub jokes. The fact that you didn’t have to conform to any sort of rules became apparent. The seed was kind of planted then. A few years later, around 1983, I saw the ranting poets. So you’ve got people like Seething Wells and Joolz Denby and Attila The Stockbroker. By that time I’d also seen Linton Kwesi Johnson and I’d seen The Circus Of Poets – some lads who toured around. Ian McMillan was in them, so I saw Ian when I was very young. So I saw a lot of live performance poetry. But I’m really serious about this being important too; seeing Pam Ayres on the telly. The fact that poetry could be funny became apparent through Pam’s storytelling sort of poems. So John Cooper Clarke and Pam Ayres were really big early influences. I started writing again when I was in my late teens; eighteen, nineteen, twenty… And then, because I was a cartoonist at the time and I was doing cartoons for fanzines, Attila The Stockbroker asked me to do some illustration work for him for his first book. When I went to meet him, I got my folder out with some drawings in. There was also some poetry in there, in the folder. It was unintentional but Attila saw it. He took the poetry out and he started reading it and I went “No, no. The drawings are in there, behind that”… But he read the poems and he went “You are performing these tonight at my gig”… So that was the beginning of it. Attila forced me onto the stage…

THE MOUTH MAG ACTUALLY PUT ON AN ATTILA GIG JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS LAST YEAR, AND WE PODCASTED AN INTERVIEW WITH HIM ALONG WITH HIGHLIGHTS OF HIS SET [LISTEN HERE]… HE’S GOT THIS LONG-FORM PIECE ABOUT THE DECLINE OF HIS MOTHER, WHICH WAS EXTRAORDINARY… JUST SO INCREDIBLY MOVING…
Yeah. Oh, yeah… There’s also one he does about his Stepdad which is quite fantastic too. In the early days when I knew John [Attila’s real name is John Baine] he hated his Stepdad. When I saw John recently he did that piece about his Stepdad and it was quite heartening to see that he’d softened in his later years. Actually, I put John on this year as a guest at my poetry show up at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, and it was nice to connect with him again (‘cos we fell out years ago and we didn’t speak for quite a long time).

YOU MENTIONED ATTILA, THERE… AND JOHN COOPER CLARKE AND PAM AYRES… I’LL TAKE A GUESS THAT ALSO, IN THEIR OWN VERY LYRICAL WAYS, JUST AS INFLUENTIAL ON YOU WERE ELVIS COSTELLO AND IAN DURY…
I think Costello, with that great sense of imagery he’s got. He always takes very simple conceits and likes to dress them up, I think. I quite like that flamboyance in his writing. Costello could do a song like PILLS AND SOAP – which, to anyone who’s a reader, is quite obviously him writing about Margaret Thatcher… It might be very difficult to someone who didn’t know what he was actually talking about to quite ‘get it’, I think… Costello would often cloud his stuff like that. And then right at the other end of the spectrum you’ve got the very open, the very blunt, the very direct approach of Ian Dury…

… WHO COULD BE VERY PLAYFUL WITH LANGUAGE…
Yeah, very playful. He was all about the shape of language and how the words actually feel in your mouth. On 4,000 WEEKS’ HOLIDAY, the album he did with The Music Students, he’s got a song called PERCY THE POET (so part of why I became Porky The Poet was as a nod to Ian, actually). There’s a line in that song… “I am the Count Dracula of spectacular vernacular”… That’s just lovely, isn’t it? A classic Ian Dury line. His work is packed full of those.

THERE WAS THAT REALLY TERRIFIC BOOK (IT’S ALMOST LIKE A MASTERCLASS, REALLY) OF IAN’S LYRICS AND POEMS AND PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED THINGS… ‘ALLO SAUSAGES…
‘ALLO SAUSAGES, yeah. That’s a great book. It compiled a lot of his writings and some of his artwork and other things. What you got there, with Ian, was a visual artist who worked with words. The way that he wrote the words, he’d write them on the page and look at the shape of them… Language to him was a visual thing, a living thing, that he’d write down and look at. And after he’d looked at it all there written down, it achieved this second life through being verbalised, through being performed.

THERE’S SOME BEAUTIFUL FLOW TO IT, SOME LOVELY CURVES, OR SOMETIMES SOME SHARP EDGES… I LOVE THIS PARTICULAR LINE IN ‘ALLO SAUSAGES, I THINK IT’S FROM AN UNPUBLISHED PIECE. IT’S, AS YOU SAID EARLIER, BLUNT AND DIRECT… IT’S BOTH EVOCATIVE AND HILARIOUS… THE LINE IS: “EVEN WITH HER BRA OFF, SHE LOOKED LIKE BORIS KARLOFF”…
Ha ha, yes! Ha ha… That is briliant. Do you know the story about why that book is called ‘ALLO SAUSAGES? When he was ill, in the last year that he was around, he was obviously quite ill… He had very good days and very bad days. The family were very aware, and he was quite up-and-down with the treatment, the chemotherapy. The family were quite insistent; “It’d be good if Dad could write all his stories and his poems and bits-and-pieces down”, so they got him a MacBook so he could do that. But Ian was kind of funny about new technology, so he played around with it a little bit. They’d see him open it and tinker around doing e-mails or what have you, but they didn’t really know what he was actually doing on it. They never pushed him to write a book or anything, but they’d taught him to use Word and they hoped he would… After he died they were going through all of his bits-and-bobs, all his worldly possessions and so on, including this laptop. They opened it and powered it up and put in the password. There, in the middle of the home page, is a Word document. This Word document makes them go “Oh my God… He actually did do something. Dad did it, he wrote a book of his stuff”… So they double click on this document and it’s just a totally blank sheet, except for right in the middle the words “… ‘allo sausages”… Ha ha ha ha…

THAT’S HILARIOUS! MY FIRST MEMORIES OF YOU ARE AS PORKY THE POET, AND YOUR CLOSE ASSOCIATION WITH GO DISCS… IN SOME WAYS I THINK YOU’RE INTRINSICALLY LINKED TO THE FIRST FOUR BILLY BRAGG ALBUMS, AND ALSO TO THE HOUSEMARTINS, THROUGH A SORT OF ‘SPIRIT OF GO DISCS’ VIBE… RIGHT BEFORE THIS CHAT I WAS WAS LISTENING TO GREETINGS TO THE NEW BRUNETTE…
Cor, I haven’t heard that record in ages. When was the last time I heard the song? Erm… the last time I heard GREETINGS TO THE NEW BRUNETTE was probably a live version at Glastonbury? He did Glastonbury this year so it was probably then, yeah.

YOU HAVE QUITE THE ASSOCIATION WITH BILLY AND, IN FACT, YOU DIRECTED THAT ACE VIDEO FOR HIS SINGLE SEXUALITY…
I do and I did, yeah. I’ve toured with him about three times, and I go see him whenever he’s nearby, when he’s out and about. When he was on tour in Australia earlier this year he came and guested on my show in Perth. And I’ve seen Billy play loads over the years. I’ve actually lost count of how many times I’ve seen him play. I’m not joking. It must be into the hundreds now, the number of times – it has to be… He’s always great, but it’s really quite odd when someone’s who’s got such a good reputation, someone who’s such a consistent artist, is one of your mates ‘cos it can be very difficult to separate the work from them, the friend…

LISTENING TO SOME OF BILLY’S STUFF BEFORE THIS CHAT REMINDED ME OF JUST HOW AMBITIOUS AND CONFIDENT HE, AND THE HOUSEMARTINS, COULD BE IN LYRICAL TERMS…
Yeah, Billy and The Housemartins always had something to say – and they said whatever that was very very well, I think.

THEIR STUFF SPOKE AT A LEVEL THAT A LOT OF PEOPLE COULD RELATE TO…
Yeah, it did. Billy’s brilliant…

HIS LOVE SONGS ARE INCREDIBLY WELL WRITTEN… BUT I GUESS HE’S THOUGHT OF LESS AS A PERSONAL POLITICS WRITER (THE POLITICS IN RELATIONSHIPS), AND MORE AS A ‘POLITICS POLITICS’ WRITER, A GOVERNMENTAL / SOCIAL POLITICS WRITER… I THINK THAT ERA, THE EARLY 1980S TO THE END OF THAT DECADE, WAS HIGHLY POLITICALLY CHARGED AND FOR PEOPLE ABOUT MY AGE IT WAS A TIME OF AWAKENING. AT LARGE THAT’S OFTEN OVERWRITTEN IN THIS KIND OF MAD RUSH TO BE NOSTALGIC ABOUT RUBIK’S CUBES, DAY-GLO SOCKS AND DEELY-BOPPERS AND ALL THAT EASY SURFACE STUFF…
Yeah. I totally agree with you. I still oppose the Tories. I just know there’s a better way. But, yeah, I do remember being fired up back then. I mean, the miners’ strike happened. How could anyone not react to that? Thatcher was just absurd. There was a systematic dismantling of the mining industry in this country. The mine-workers were the last of the big powerful unions – and Thatcher couldn’t allow that so she was quite deliberately taking them down. It was obviously political.

I BELIEVE THAT, BACK WHEN SHE WAS ORIGINALLY CAMPAIGNING TO BE PRIME MINISTER, SHE WAS INTERVIEWED SOMEWHERE AND SAID SHE FELT IT WAS HER MISSION, HER DUTY, TO PUT THE WORKING MAN BACK IN HIS PLACE…
Yeah! It was overtly ideological. That was the motivation. Privatisation – look at that. The whole privatisation lie to ‘ordinary’ people: “We’re putting it in YOUR hands. YOU can have it”. No they weren’t. They were putting things on sale to big business. All of our utilities companies are now owned by businesses in France and China. I mean, you just try and pay your gas bill now. It’s all this nonsense about different tariffs and different this, that and the other. It’s all deliberate smoke-screening to screw money out of the consumer. That lie that we were told. “If everything’s privatised, you can own your own house”… Back when there were council houses, people had the chance to put their name on a list for a family home that they would always have. And then after they’d had it for as long as they needed it, someone else would have it. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that as an idea – and yet that idea was dismantled. There’s rampant development and housing in this country has never been in such a bad state. It’s never been in a worse state than it’s in at the moment… Oh, don’t get me going on this stuff. I could go on for ages about it…

WITH HINDSIGHT, IT WAS CLEAR THIS WAS COMING…
Yeah, in the 1980s we were aware of something coming as a result of Thatcher. Daniel Rachel, the author, has written a really really good book about the political activism of that time, called WALLS COME TUMBLING DOWN. The thing, my own thing, is – and you just heard it there – I can’t focus on one idea. So I’m terrible at politics because I just go straight to anger. I go straight to rage within a minute. I know what is wrong but I can’t actually argue for what is right because I get too angry too quickly. I just have to stand back, because I can’t deal with the ‘admin’ of being politically committed. So I’m useless to the cause because I can’t argue, but I’ll always support – financially or by doing benefit gigs or by helping out. That’s why I was always around that scene. It was the right place to be, for me. And they were very nice people.

I WAS ACTUALLY GOING TO ASK YOU WHERE YOU’RE AT WITH YOUR POLITICS – BUT I THINK IT’S PRETTY OBVIOUS!
Yeah. “Still furious”, ha ha ha…

A FRIEND OF MIND WHO HAD NOT LONG BEEN A DAD ONCE TOLD ME THAT SOCIALIST PRINCIPLES ARE VERY IMPORTANT, AND VERY IMPORTANT TO USE AS A MEASURE TO KEEP YOURSELF IN CHECK – BUT THAT CHANGES WHEN YOU BECOME A PARENT…
It’s very very difficult to just find any time when you’re a parent. There’s that awful moment when you’re not sleeping because they’re not sleeping… That feeling goes on for years. There’s always been times when people who aren’t parents have to get up really early to do something, and it feels really horrible. So, imagine if your whole life was that. Oh God, you feel grim. Really grim… There’s people out there who might feel a bit snippy about me saying that, and go “Well, you don’t live in Syria”… Well, shut up – I know I don’t live in Syria… I’m just talking about my own life experience. Your whole being becomes subservient to that of your children. You’re suddenly having to focus completely on their needs. It’s a bit of a wake-up call, I can tell you… A complete change in circumstances and focus is what it’s all about. So your bed-rock principles have to be ever-so slightly fluid because you’re totally responsible for other people. The principles never leave you. They’re still there. But they take an ever-so slightly back seat because of the immediate personal responsibilities in your life. But as they’ve grown up what I’ve found is that by me believing in my principles my children have ended up having similar principles. They feel the same way about right and wrong as I do. They feel the same way about life as I do. So you have to try and pass on important principles through your kids. I think that’s the job. That was my job as their Dad.

THERE’S ALWAYS BEEN THIS IDEA THAT PEOPLE ‘REBEL’ AGAINST THEIR PARENTS’ VIEWS AND POLITICAL LEANINGS…
My Stepdad’s a Tory – and I definitely opposed that standpoint. His father was a Communist – and my Stepdad opposed that. My Stepdad’s father fought in the Spanish Civil War [from 1936 to 1939] and he also fought against Mosley in Cable Street. Actually it was the anniversary of Cable Street a couple of days ago… He was a fervent anti-fascist. By being loosely associated with the Communist party, and being a Russian emigree as well, living in London, that made life for my Stepdad very difficult. In the 1950s when it came his time to do National Service, they weren’t going to let him do it because his Dad had fought for the International Brigade. So my Stepdad very much railed against his father’s political standpoint. And I railed against my Stepdad’s standpoint. I believe in having a free national health service, and I believe that education should be free too. I think it’s important that we have a generation of brainy kids – and so the way that you do that is by making sure education is free. Education shouldn’t be a bloody premium. In a world like ours it’s a right. There are some people who say it isn’t – but it is. Education is a right. And health is a right. They’re the two things I’ll nail it down to… Education and health (including the water we drink and the food we eat). Everything else, if you want it to go free market then, y’know, go enjoy yourselves because then it’s a matter of choice. But an educated and healthy population means an educated and healthy society – and that’s a very very important thing.

IT’S INTERESTING TO HEAR YOU SAY ALL THAT… PARTICULARLY IN THE CONTEXT OF YOUR NEW SHOW JUPLICITY – WHICH HAS BEEN DESCRIBED AS ADULT THEMES AND SITUATIONS DELIVERED CHILDISHLY… SITUATIONS FROM YOUR CHAOTIC LIFE…
Well, what I’m talking about is truths that would apply also to anybody in the room who is a parent. I talk about being raised by my Mum, I talk about being a Dad. I talk about my own experiences. What you have to remember at the gigs is that I’m telling you truths but I’m telling you truths through the guise of being Phill Jupitus the stand-up comic. So, they are truths through a very skewed lens. It’s real life but put through an amp and a wah-wah pedal. Then coloured-in with day-glo felt pens. That’s the best way I could describe it, I think. It’s an ‘amped up’ version of my real life, then it’s embellished.

AS A STAND-UP THAT’S WHAT YOU DO – MAKE LIFE LARGER THAN LIFE…
Yeah, it is. You make life larger than life. It’s interesting ‘cos at one point during the show I go through what I’ve said, and I’ll say “Right, here’s the bits I’ve told you tonight that are actually true”… I do this routine about going to a chip shop in Edinburgh, and then after it I say “Now here’s what really happened”, and I tell the audience what really happened – and the routine I did was nothing like it, ha ha… I kind of deconstruct my own act at the end of the gig, to show how we do what we do. But my favourite bit of the gig is starting things off with this nice sort of low energy poetry bit. I kick off the shows by doing a Porky The Poet set…

… LIKE WHEN THE HOUSEMARTINS TOURED, AND SUPPORTED THEMSELVES AS ‘THE FISH CITY FIVE’…
Yeah! Yeah! Like that… That was always terrific fun, when they did that, when they’d go on low-key and do this a capella set… What a terrific idea… So I’m doing something like that by ‘supporting myself’ in my guise of Porky The Poet. There’s another way that I’m playing with the form, ‘cos I’m onstage, or in the room with the audience, for the whole of the show. I never leave the room. I’m either onstage with my back to them, or I’m milling around among them, or I’m onstage performing. They see me in three different states. Usually at a gig people sit there looking at an empty stage and then “I’m here!”, the artist arrives and does their thing. Then they disappear for fifteen weird minutes and you go “They’re gone!”, and then they come back and you go “They’re back again!” and… I wanted to play with all that. I wanted to break down that whole going to a gig thing. I wanted to mess about with the energy, and with expectations. So I’m in the room with the audience the whole time.

WOW… HOW DOES THAT ACTUALLY WORK? WHAT ABOUT GETTING READY IN YOUR DRESSING ROOM, OR HAVING A BREATHER DURING THE INTERVAL..?
At the start, the second people walk in the room I’m there onstage and they see me. Basically my dressing room is the stage. They’re like “What’s he doing there?”… So I’ve put a question in the audience’s mind straight away. I sit there, reading THE BEANO and playing an album. When the audience arrives I’m playing a John Betjeman album, which finishes at about a quarter-to-eight, and then I put on the album of the night, which is always a different album from my youth. Every gig, I’ve been going round second-hand record shops in the town I’m in, buying up copies of albums that I had when I was a kid. And I give ’em away. Last night I gave away a copy of BLACK AND WHITE by The Stranglers. At the very end of the evening I played I’M A BELIEVER by Robert Wyatt and I gave that away. So I give away two records per gig – an album and a single. At the interval I’m in amongst people, milling about talking to them and handing out biscuits and Tunnock’s tea-cakes…

BISCUITS… I CAN’T WAIT!
Ha ha… The thing is, I was never gonna be a big Hammersmith Odeon comedian. I was never gonna do massive tours playing really big theatres. I was never gonna be that guy. I know that most towns I go to I can pull two or three hundred people. My audience is probably about the same size as that for a very well-respected 1980s indie band…

… YOU ARE THE WEDDING PRESENT…
Ha ha, you know what? That’s about right. I still have the poster for a gig that I did ages ago with The Wedding Present, in the middle of nowhere in Cornwall somewhere. This Cornish promoter put me and The Wedding Present on the same bill on the same night. It was insane, but it was really really good. That’s the only time I’ve met Gedge, I think – but we both still remember the gig, ‘cos we were chatting about it on Twitter. They’re good, The Wedding Present. But at my shows the audience get biscuits.

For a list of JUPLICITY tour dates and ticket links go here