Noel Fielding interview: 'Adults can't deal with anything that's illogical'
On the eve of a solo tour, Noel Fielding - formerly one half of The Mighty Boosh - talks to Mark Monahan about this all-new banquet of weirdness, and explains the benefits of his Bohemian childhood and how he survived turning 40
The Telegraph | 18 October 2014 | Mark Monahan
Fantasy man: Noel Fielding, in his north-London studio Photo: Rick Pushinksy
The first thing that catches my eye upon entering Noel Fielding’s north-London studio is a cartoonishly bizarre rubber mask, perched atop a limbless female mannequin, daubed with zombie-like flourishes of paint and crowned with a daft shock of green hair. It could be the product of an unholy fertility rite involving Frankenstein’s monster, the Incredible Hulk and The Silence of the Lambs’ psycho Buffalo Bill.
“I made this the other day,” says Fielding, in those breezily honeyed tones of his. “It looks a bit like Lionel Messi. In Kiss make-up?” He pauses for a second, as if pondering whether the reference to the flamboyant glam-metal band is quite right - but he is soon sure. “If Lionel Messi wore Kiss make-up, that’s what he’d look like,” Fielding says firmly, roaring with laughter. “Imagine if he did wear Kiss make-up for the final, and said nothing about it. He just went, 'This is what I’m wearing: what are you going to do about it!?’ It’d be amazing, really frightening.”
The chances of Argentina’s star footballer ever representing his great nation while slathered in Estée Lauder are, admittedly, slim. But then, this is Planet Fielding, where things make only the trippiest kind of sense.
For Noel Fielding is one of surreal comedy’s 24-carat originals: a worthy heir to The Goons, Monty Python and (yes) Kenny Everett, and a match for the great Eddie Izzard. He won the Perrier best newcomer award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1998 – as half of oddball duo The Mighty Boosh, with Julian Barratt – and, four years later, made the main-prize shortlist with with his solo début, the intoxicating shot of pastoral eccentricity Voodoo Hedgehog.
Between 2004 and 2007, there followed three Boosh series on BBC Three - “little fairy-tales” as Fielding now puts it – whose cult popularity gradually burgeoned to the point where the pair’s 2008-2009 live tour was filling arenas and raking in millions and Fielding had become a national heart-throb. (During a telly interview around the time of that tour, when the pair were asked if there were any questions that people often asked either of them, Barratt instantly and brilliantly replied, “Yes – 'Where’s Noel?’ ”).
Many, however, will know Fielding as a team captain in the BBC Two comedy pop quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks, or perhaps as a teammate of friend and fellow dandy Russell Brand on Channel 4's Big Fat Quiz of the Year, and he was also Richmond the goth in the sitcom The IT Crowd. Close pals with the band Kasabian, he is said to have counted Ben Stiller and the late Robin Williams among Boosh admirers, and is these days living in north London with his girlfriend, Xfm DJ Lliana Bird. He has also twice held exhibitions of his own paintings in a Soho pastry shop.
Add a face that's part matinée idol and part Dickensian villain, and a manner (in the flesh, as on stage or screen) somewhere beguilingly between Woodstock hipster, teddy-bear and Clanger, and you have a fellow both as idiosyncratic and as rock'n'roll as any comedian has ever been.
One of Fielding's recent creations: 'It looks a bit like Lionel Messi, in Kiss make-up' (Picture: Mark Monahan)
I meet him just a few days after the second series of his most recent venture, Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy, has finished on E4. This second helping of kaleidoscopic, dream-logic, often hilarious live-action and animation, set in a café perched on the side of a volcano, won more or less unanimous praise from critics (including the Telegraph's own Christopher Howse), which, as Fielding points out, was in stark contrast to series one.
“It’s been weird,” says Fielding, an alumnus of both Croydon Art College and Buckingham Chilterns University College. “With the first one, we just wanted to make a mental show and try lots of animation techniques and lots of characters. But it was the strongest reaction to anything I’ve ever done! It was either: absolutely love it, or absolutely hate it. And the people who didn’t like it were angry: 'WHAT... IS ... THIS!?’ I mean, I literally could have raped a horse and people wouldn’t have been as angry.”
Fielding is currently, however, giving telly a rest to do something he hasn’t done since 2009: go on the road. Unlike that earlier tour, An Evening with Noel Fielding is a solo venture, even if it does also feature his younger brother, Michael, and actor Tom Meeten, regular collaborators both. He describes it as “half-an-hour of stand-up, and then it’s characters and music and animation”.
And, as with Luxury Comedy, there is also music recorded by Fielding and Sergio Pizzorno, of Kasabian (for whose 2014 Glastonbury show the aforementioned fright-mask was in fact made). But none of this comes close to conveying the eccentricity on offer.
Along with Fielding favourite The Moon, and Luxury Comedy’s Joey Ramone, Fantasy Man and Sergeant Raymond Boombox, there are also some tantalising new characters, and not merely that celestial body’s evil alter ego, Dark Side of the Moon.
“My brother plays my wife,” says Fielding, “and he’s been having an affair with a triangle.”
My mind races. The instrument, perhaps?
“No, just a triangle shape”, Fielding replies with a giggle, whereupon I happen to notice a three-sided slab of pink foam-rubber propped up on the floor nearby, with a fake arm dangling ludicrously from it. Is that Fielding’s love-rival, then?
“That’s him, yeah,” he says. “He’s called Gordon, but he’s quite a bloke. He’s like, 'Nah, yer ou’of oar-dah!’ So it’s quite absurd.”
Barely less absurd is that Meeten is playing Hispanic film star Antonio Banderas. “The idea is that he’s in-between jobs,” says Fielding, “and that I met him at a salsa lesson and he said he’d be my understudy, but then he starts trying to take over. And there’s a new character called Chicken Man, who’s half man, half chicken, and has got Chicken Tourette’s."
Chicken Tourette’s?
“A little bit. He flips between being a Southern lady, like in A Streetcar Named Desire, and being a sort of insane Foghorn Leghorn. And then, there’s some stand-up about turning 40.”
Ah yes, I say, I was going to ask him about that. Fielding, now 41, laughs loudly.
“I don’t know how that happened.” he says. “Apparently, that’s time. Julian’s older than me, and he said the thing about being 40 is that it’s like someone drops a fridge on you, from above, and after that the fridge is already on you and you’re crushed, and then 41, 42, 43, they’re just like pebbles. Once you’ve been flattened by a fridge, it’s fine.”
Strange days: Fielding (right) with fellow Mighty Boosh star Julian Barratt (Picture: Steve Double)
Although Fielding has clearly survived his own fridge-collision with élan, he is already twice the age that both his mother (a Home Office employee) and father (a post-office manager) were when they had him. "My dad was maybe 19,” he says, “and my mum 18 – they were young.”
As a child, he would often have to step over sleeping guests – “quite crazy characters” – the morning after his parents’ parties so that he could get to the kitchen and make himself breakfast. He also fondly recalls his parents’ record collection – “Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Pink Floyd, Hawkwind – all the weird stuff” – and, like any of us lucky enough to have been born in the early Seventies, was weaned on a diet of blazingly odd, Sixties-hangover children’s TV shows such as Animal Kwackers, Chorlton and the Wheelies, Pipkins and The Banana Splits.
Fielding readily acknowledges the impression that all this made on him, and is proud to have retained a child-like view of the world. "I think I’m constantly surprised that adults can’t deal with illogical things or thing that are weird or psychedelic," he says. "I’ve never really lost that."
And yet, this felicitously immature trait is accompanied by a very grown-up dedication to his art: Fielding spends many months painstakingly putting together every project of his, and he not only wrote, starred in and co-edited Luxury Comedy, but even co-designed the costumes as well.
There are signs, too, that his teenager’s thirst for late nights might be ebbing. He admits, for example, to having been exhausted by that 2008-2009 tour, which saw Barratt and him perform to roughly a quarter-of-a-million people.
“It was like being in Aerosmith or something,” he says. “It was all arenas, and doing comedy to 15,000 people at once is weird anyway. It was great, but there were 50 people travelling with us and there were trucks of stuff. We had Marilyn Manson’s tour bus, we were staying in five-star hotels. It was mental. We used to get up for the [late-afternoon] sound-check and then do the show and then party.
"I don’t think I could physically do that this time at all.”
Certainly, Luxury Comedy provided a welcome change in pace. Ultimately, though, it's the thrill and immediacy of performing live that has now lured him from the editing suite and back on to the stage, even if this time round he has swapped the O2 et al for far more approachable (if not exactly miniature) 1,000–3,500–seat venues.
“Yeah, I did miss doing stand-up,” he says. “It’ll be nice to cut out all the middlemen. In television, there are so many things between you making a joke and the audience seeing it. It’s like an assault course.”
“But,” he continues, “when you do 100-seat clubs” – as he has recently been doing, in preparation for the tour – “you remember what it’s all about: a room full of people, laughing. You go, 'I’m a comedian! I forgot I was a comedian, 'cos I spent four years making television.'
"But,” he adds, clearly thinking back to the relentless carousing of that last tour, “this is a peppermint-tea tour, this one.”
