Eye candy with a sense of humour and without a drug habit ... it's what every girl dreams of. Russell Brand is a modern-day dandy who has taken the worlds of comedy, celebrity, TV - and perhaps soon film - by storm. He tells Brian Boydwhat it's like when most of your audience wants to sleep with you
CLUTCHING a bunch of freshly-picked lavender, Russell Brand crunches his away along the gravel pathway of his Serenity Spa Hotel in Co Durham. He proffers a sprig, saying "this is for you Brian, I picked it out specially."
The pastoral surrounds, the twittering of the birds, the distant sounds of the waves coming in on a North Sea beach . . . it's worlds away from the last time we met in August 2001 when he had just been forcibly ejected from a notoriously rowdy late-night show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He had been on stage for a few minutes and was struggling with a hostile audience when he smashed a glass and used it to cut open his stomach. He was shouting "You wanted blood, Edinburgh: you've got it" as security staff threw him out onto the street.
The events of that inglorious night prompted him to confront his cross-addiction to heroin and crack-cocaine. It took another incident a month later, though, to persuade him finally to seek out professional help. On September 12th, 2001 he turned up to his presenting job at MTV, strung-out and dressed as Osama bin Laden. He was sacked and two months later he entered rehab. He doesn't even touch coffee these days, but the drugs aren't entirely in the past - or at least the rituals associated with them.
"The first big job I got after getting clean was Big Brother's Big Mouth in 2003," he says. "But I was paralysed by fear that my druggy inner demons would emerge once I was back in front of a live audience.
"I honestly thought that once the red light went on I would Tourettically shout out something like 'Fuck off you cunt'. That fear still persists, so what I do now, which is consistent with my behaviour as an addict, is to take myself off to the toilet before a gig. But instead of jacking up, I sit there telling myself not to say anything bad or mad and not to do anything weird. I have to find that place where I'm morally happy with myself and where I wish no harm on anyone. I did it at the show in Sunderland last night and I'll be doing it again tonight. It's something I have to do."
Tippex-white of face, with artfully applied goth eyeliner, he stands at an impressive six feet two inches. His labour-intensive backcombed hair arrangement adds another few inches to a lithe body that has been toned into submission by regular Ashtanga yoga sessions. As we take tea in the hotel garden, he is dressed in his usual uniform of black circulation-endangering jeans, white shirt and black waistcoat and he's blinged up around his neck and on his fingers. It's a look that causes the taxi driver refer to him as a "queer" and a female guest at the hotel as a "total ride".
Why do all the ladies want to sleep with you Russell?
"I enjoy the company of women, and obviously I enjoy sex with women," says the 32-year-old Essex boy. "The key to all of this is that I was brought up by my mother - my father was never around. So it was just mum and her female friends when I was growing up. From a very early age, I was made aware that the notion of femininity in a man needn't be seen as something either repellent or as an indicator of a non-heterosexual lifestyle. A lot of men are predatory around woman - I'm not. I never do that thing of bonding with men through the verbal subjugation of women. I'm not hostile to women - I was brought up by them and I love female company both in and out of the bed."
A contemporary of Brand's who did the same comedy circuit slog as him during the late 1990s recalls sharing the same Edinburgh venue just as his Big Brother TV exposure was tipping him over into mainstream success. "Whereas before [ that] we would both attract more or less the same type of audience," says the contemporary, "I noticed the queue for his show at Edinburgh was now full of teenage girls with T-shirts saying 'Marry Me Russell' or 'Shag Me Russell'. Whatever about his tabloid notoriety, Russell remains a bloody good stand-up comic, but I do wonder how much of his Heat magazine audience annoys him."
"My first reaction to young girls turning up at my show wearing 'Shag Me Russell' T-shirts is 'Christ love, it's a shame you're only 14'. But I jest; no person of 14 should be allowed into my shows," he says.
"Look, I don't want to be patronising or prejudicial to those people who are there only because they've seen me in Heat magazine. It's only frustrating when I'm trying to do a laboriously-worked-out routine on, for example, why a certain social structure makes me feel inadequate or belittled and these people only really want me to take my trousers down and get my dinkle out. Last night, I had knickers thrown at me on stage. I find that strange, because in my own head I rather grandly refer to my stand-up show as 'an analysis of contemporary culture' and you come on and you get people shouting 'Shag me Russell'. It's all awfully post-modern."
"Here is all you need to know about me as a stand-up comic: in all the work I do whether it's Big Mouth or a chatshow or my stage show, all I try and do is to bring issues discussed in the Guardian to people who read the Sun."
Even if you disagree violently with the prevailing view that Russell Brand is the most naturally gifted comic since Peter Cook (see panel), there is no gainsaying his love of the English language.
"I get that love of words and what you can do with them from Peter Cook, and from listening endlessly to the audio tapes of Blackadder and Fawlty Towers and dissecting the rhythms. I grew up with the riffs of Only Fools And Horses. I admire loquacity - whether it be Baldric or Morrissey. As a teenager I was attracted to the works of Kafka, Bukowski and Baudelaire. People think it's strange because of my working-class background. My mum was a secretary and my stepdad, who arrived when I was eight, was a van driver. So it's not like there were Voltaire books lying around the house. But I was always into poets and artists and dreamers."
Not quite knowing how to become a poet, artist or a dreamer, he had an epiphany at school (just before he was expelled). "When I was 15 I appeared in a school play and I knew from that moment on that was what I wanted to do - I wanted to be on stage performing. I went to drama school and trained as an actor for three years before I was thrown out for my stupid behaviour. It was only when I was 23 that I did my first stand-up gig and I experienced this great degree of liberation, that I was only answerable to myself and to the audience."
His comedy has always been experiential. "Before it would be 'guess what happened to me today: a drug dealer knocked me back for 50 quid', but now it's 'guess what happened to me today: I met Madonna and this happened'. My sources are the same, but the context is different. I agree with the maxim that the truth is the funniest joke you could ever hope to tell and I try to have a relationship with an audience that is based on authenticity. I don't live in a bedsit in Finsbury Park eating only Weetabix for weeks on end anymore. There might be this thing called fame and all this tabloid stuff about me, but I still have feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. I like to see myself now as a sort of fifth columnist - infiltrating this showbiz world and reporting back on what I see.
"Some comics have a well they go to for material, but they find that dries up when they become famous. I like to think that I don't have a well; I have a river - and it's constantly flowing, it's constantly renewing itself and it rains every day."
His comedy can also be instructive, after a fashion. As one early review noted of his material: "If you've never participated in a seedy inner-city orgy, picked a fight with a gang of yobs while high on heroin or bought the extreme behind-the-counter specials from a sex shop, then Brand will fill you in."
To the alarm of some people, he has taken his first steps into Hollywood with a starring role in the upcoming film Forgetting Sarah Marshall. "I look at how Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Chris Rock and Richard Pryor have managed to do film work and continue as comics," he says. "Dudley Moore was a Hollywood star and he was an Essex boy just like me. Oscar Wilde had successful tours in America. Remember, I did train as an actor and I can carry a character, if I say so myself. It's like what John Lennon said 'If you live in Roman times, it's best to live in Rome', and Hollywood, for good or ill, is the new Roman Empire. Mind you, John Lennon moving to New York turned out to be a dreadful mistake.
"I will do film and TV if it's an exciting and valuable project, but really my default mode is stand-up. With film and TV there are legal reasons/commercial reasons/ corporate reasons as to why you can't say something . . . in stand-up there aren't any such considerations. Okay, film might bring you to a wider audience, but the live show is paramount."
Better than anything else he has experienced?
"Give me a microphone and room full of people and that's all I need. It is truly remarkable: the lights go down and the scream goes up. It's an exhilarating moment. That scream is for you. I love it. They're there for me and I'm there for them."
Russell Brand plays Dublin's National Stadium on Friday July 27th
