Phill Communication

I feel like a successful indie band. Izzard is Led Zeppelin. Billy Connolly is Tom Jones.

The successful indie band that is Phill Jupitus is propping up the Capitol Bar in Dublin where he launched this year s Murphy s Cat Laughs Comedy Festival in Kilkenny. Jupitus is one of the star attractions of this year s event, which he will be playing for the first time.

Best known for his larger-than-life performances on BBC s Never Mind The Buzzcocks, where he lampoons B-list celebrities and washed-up eighties pop stars with considerable relish, the Essex comedian had dipped his fingers in many showbiz pies before becoming the Beeb s plat du jour.
Of Lithuanian descent and proud of it! Jupitus is a straight-talking no-nonsense Essex bloke who possesses an unquenchable enthusiasm for comedy, music and, well, life in general.
Jupitus grew up in the East End of London and worked as a civil servant for five years before deciding on an alternative passage through the arts.
He worked as a cartoon illustrator. Then he became a leftie poet and humorist.
I went to a poetry gig, remembers Jupitus. It was the 80s and the time of Thatcher and anti-government doggerel. I got to know Attila The Stockbroker and Seething Wells. My poetry was funny, piss-and-shit humour. Fuck the government kind of stuff. Agit-prop ranting poetry, it was called.
Funnily enough, muses Jupitus, the first thing [Mark] Lamarr did was poetry. Sean [Hughes] came to it the other way round: he was a stand-up and then became a poet. And a fine one he is too! I don t know why I said that I ve not read any!
That makes two of us. Aside from being a garrulous gadfly in the ointment of the Thatcherite Establishment, Jupitus also worked in the schmusic biz as a press officer and, later, tour manager of the fourth best band in Hull !
It was great working with The Housemartins. I remember being with them when they first heard themselves on [BBC] Radio 1. We were in a caff in Dundee. We walked in and we were ordering and suddenly Sheep came on the radio Simon Bates was playing it and they all ran to the counter and as one yelled can you turn the radio up, please? THIS IS US. THIS IS US!!! .
It s funny to think back. There I was waiting on my egg and chips with two future millionaires the Beautiful South s Paul Heaton and Norman Cook aka Fatboy Slim a children s book writer (Stan Cullimore) and poor old Huey, who ended up in prison. And Sean, their roadie, ended up playing drums in the Beautiful South.
It can t have been easy leaving such auspicious company behind, but Jupitus decided that he wanted to forge a career out of making people grin themselves to death.
The only brave thing I ve ever done: I chucked my job in and decided to become a stand-up, declares Jupitus. And then I discovered that my girlfriend was pregnant. The guy that ran the record company, bless him I really hated him but he actually said to me: you can have your job back. I ll tear your notice up. That was really decent of him. But I said, no, I ll carry on .
I was a very cheap support act so I ended up going on the road with Billy Bragg this was 1984, just before he released Brewing Up. He s one of the main people who kept me going. I had stopped doing the poetry by then and I d left the music business.
Now every other quiz show and sitcom (such as Dark Ages, where he starred opposite Pauline McLynn) on telly features the big, bearded bon viveur from Essex. He s a veritable Phill of all trades.
When I filled in the form for my passport, he says, I put broadcaster because it s a catch all. But you never want to put fucking comedian . To me it s not a real job. The career I ve got now: doing stand-up, Never Mind The Buzzcocks, and fucking about for a living, basically, is a great holding pattern to be in.
I m like a 737 full of very keen passengers flying around waiting for the right airport to land in. I don t know what I m supposed to be doing. Genuinely. Am I supposed to write a novel? Or a really good film? I ve got ideas for everything. Maybe a book of short stories.
On the subject of traditional and modern comedians, Jupitus becomes quite animated. When it comes to looking for a place to sit, the fence is not an option.
Frank Carson thinks it s a weakness of modern comedians that they don t tell jokes one after the other, states Jupitus. [adopts impressive Carson accent] I can tell jokes for 12 hours . Well, Frank, you re a fucking idiot. Why didn t you spend 12 hours trying to have an original idea rather than regurgitate these things you ve been told?
It s what I like about new comedy: it s comedy with thought. I truly believe anyone can make a group of people laugh. It just takes the right combination of words. If you can think up the combination of words, you re great. If you can think up the combination of words no-one s ever thought up before, you re a fucking genius.
But it s a great illusion that comedy s difficult to do. Other people say to me: oh, stand-up, it s the hardest fucking job in the world . I say to them: try mining, try working with a fucking hammer and a chisel at a coalface in total darkness with a canary behind you. Try sailing across the Atlantic in a sailing boat for four weeks.
This is a luxury. What if I d stayed in the civil service? I d be running an unemployment benefit office in Grays in Essex.
Indeed, getting to ridicule the likes of Spandau Ballet s Tony Hadley with millions of viewers across Britain and Ireland must give Jupitus enormous job satisfaction?
I think you have to love music to take the piss out of it as much as we do, he says. You can t tell me that any of those fuckers who write for the inkies don t love music, despite the fact they write bile and horrible things. The fucking Stud Brothers at the Melody Maker: poisonous, scumbags. But you can t tell me they didn t love music.
An hour or so after our conversation, Phill will make a now infamous speech where he announces that during the Kilkenny festival, he will be up to his balls in Pauline McLynn and this as he stood next to her husband, Richard Cook. Best not to dwell on that one! But what does Phill think he ll be doing in the future?
If this comedy career exploded, I know what I d do: I d get a really nice car and I d become a driver for someone else. Fuck it, I d be Ed Byrne s tour manager. I d keep Ed on the straight and narrow. He wouldn t fuck with me, the little weasel.
Phill Jupitus appears at the Murphy s Cat Laughs Comedy Festival in Kilkenny in a number of venues on Saturday 3rd June and Sunday 4th June and in the Murphy s Laughter Lounge in Dublin from 15-17th June with the crew from Whose Line Is It Anyway?.