Kicking Against The Twists

Although Phill Jupitus has more than 200,000 Twitter followers, the English comedian and TV personality hasn’t posted a new tweet since December 22nd, 2011. “It was on the tenth anniversary of Joe Strummer’s death,” he recalls. “I posted an old photo of the two of us and, within a minute, there were three ‘fuck off, you fat cunt!’ replies. I just thought, ‘Right, I’ve had enough of this’. When I started, it would take a lot of retweeting for that to start happening, but it was happening instantly.

“I’m never surprised by bile, but Twitter is a bit like leaving your front door open and hoping cunts won’t walk in, it really is,” he continues. “And so I thought, ‘Nah, I’m only supposed to do this in clubs, I shouldn’t be putting heckles down when I’m home with my wife and kids’. Rather than go, ‘I am quitting Twitter because it is blah blah….’ I just stopped.”
Not that the poisonous comments of pathetic Twitter trolls are any true measure of the 51-year-old’s popularity. We’re meeting in the bar of the Galway Radisson Blu before this evening’s launch of the Bulmers Comedy Festival programme in the Roisin Dubh. Later, as we stroll down Shop Street together, he’s stopped numerous times by fans looking for autographs and smartphone photos. Likeably unaffected, Jupitus happily obliges every time.
Most of them recognize him from his longstanding role as team captain on BBC Two’s hit music quiz Never Mind The Buzzcocks or his regular appearances on panel shows such as QI. However, Jupitus wears many other hats – performance poet, stand-up, actor, cartoonist, radio DJ and podcaster. This is probably the reason festival promoter Kevin Healy has him doing no less than eleven different shows over the week-long Comedy Festival.
“Do you know what?” he laughs. “I’m not shitting you, but I still don’t know exactly what it is that I do. I was doing a lot of acting. But whenever something becomes the pre-eminent form, I start to not trust it a bit and so I step back from it.”
Does he consider himself a jack-of-all-trades?
“Well, not really. There was this very interesting thing. When I was appearing in Hairspray, John Hegley came to see me and he said, ‘You do realise that doing this is going to make you a better comedian?’ And I went, ‘How’? And he goes, ‘Firstly being away from it, because it will make you miss it and love it, but, secondly, it makes you see the audience differently. When you are performing something with a discipline to it and you’re on point, it just changes’. He was right. Since Hairspray I do find myself acting it more. It’s totally changed how I do the poetry, too, it’s extraordinary really.”
Ah yes, the poetry. Following a few years working in the Civil Service, Jupitus quit his safe pensionable job in 1984 to launch himself upon an unsuspecting public as a performance poet under the self-deprecating moniker Porky the Poet.
“Post-John Cooper Clarke, there was a new wave of performance poetry called ‘rant poetry’, which was a bit more political. People like myself and Kool Knotes, Swift Nick, Attila the Stockbroker and, loosely, Benjamin Zephaniah.”
Although he also had a job in a record company (where he worked closely with the likes of Billy Bragg and The Housemartins) and as a radio DJ, he credits one-time Loaded editor James Brown with giving him the confidence to make the transition from performance poetry to stand-up comedy.
“James, at the time when I was around, was the editor of a fanzine based in Leeds,” he recalls. “I remember him coming to see me support Surfing Dave and the Absent Legends at Leeds University. I stayed at his house that night and I remember sitting in his kitchen and him saying to me, ‘You should just do the bits between the poems; the poems aren’t that funny but what you say between them is’. I took that on board, so I did slowly phase the poetry out. It just became less and less poetry in the set and more and more talking. Quite a few of us did that. Mark Lamarr also started off as a poet.”
One of his numerous Comedy Festival shows will be a reprise of Porky the Poet, alongside Irish stand-up Barry Murphy, in Café Kai on October 25th. Asked for a sample of his work, he instantly rattles off some lines from an old poem called ‘They’ve All Grown Up In The Beano’: ‘They’ve all grown up in the Beano/ Dennis the Menace has got pubic hair/ Biffo is well into anarchy now/ bit more of a punk than a bear…’
He tells me that he’s recently begun writing poetry again, and is taking it a bit more seriously this time around (there’s a series of limited edition chapbooks in the works). Having done the TV star thing for years, he’s now looking at winding down his celebrity status.
“It’s a blessed life, man, and I’m really happy,” he declares. “There is nothing else to prove and I’m as famous now as I’m ever going to be – or want to be. So now what you are witnessing is me just trying to manage a dignified exit from this career. It’s a very gentle, nice, easy downslope. I’ve just got to find a nice level where things can tick over.”
Genuinely disinterested in increasing his public profile any further, he’s even turned down numerous reality TV offers.
“I don’t get reality TV,” he says, shaking his head. “Don’t get it, never got it. Anything where people are voted off, I will not participate in. I’ve been invited on Strictly Come Dancing every year for the last eight years. It would completely alter my profile, and career-wise it would be a fucking brilliant thing to do.”
He takes a satisfied swig from his pint and shrugs indifferently. “At this stage of my life, though, I have no fuckin’ interest in that at all.”

Phill Jupitus will be appearing in multiple guises and venues throughout the Bulmers Galway Comedy Festival, which runs from October 22-28th.