On Charing Cross Road, something is up with West End theatre. Enter the Wyndham’s theatre over the next six weeks and you will be met by a blasted greeting of The Clash or Foo Fighters, the audience is likely to be made up of people who have either never taken a comb to their hair or, in the case of the most of the twenty-somethings filling the auditorium, have carefully sculpted East London flock-of-seagull quiffs, and not one person is going to raise an eyebrow as you happily slug down a beer.
There are few comedians that could keep such a venue laughing, or ‘rocking’ as he would likely put it, for six shows a week, but Bill Bailey seems to take it in his stride, taking down early hecklers – “Get your hair cut” must surely be affectionate abuse in this case – with a confident, friendly ease that sets the tone for the evening.
With a stage full of instruments, ranging from a traditional lute – on which he plays the not so traditional Ace Of Spades – to a high-tech Japanese invention, Bailey’s Dandelion Mind is two hours of musical comedy, random musings, audience interaction and flights of very funny whimsy.
Striding up and down the stage, in as smart attire as you can pull off when your head is attached to Britain’s most impressive mullet, Bailey takes on the philosophy of religion in the most ridiculous way possible, compares the coalition government to a kitten and a sea cucumber working together, and explores the irony of teenagers hanging around on park benches wearing clothing that is adorned with the very word Bench.
While Bailey takes that well trodden comedic route of dedicating a good proportion of the show to complaints about the monotony of Britain and all our ridiculous idiosyncrasies, his surreal flights of fancy and the whimsical images he conjures up take his moans and make them into delicious morsels of eccentricity that could easily have a home in the scripts of The Young Ones or The Mighty Boosh.
What Bailey has become well loved for is his impressive musical talent and what that can translate to when you combine it with his bizarre sense of humour. Dandelion Mind does not disappoint in this respect; The Stranglers’s Golden Brown becomes less about heroin and more about the plight of the red squirrel, Kraftwerk becomes an unlikely inspiration for a Leonard Cohen cover and Bailey’s version of Gary Numan’s Cars takes the literal sense of the song to the comedian’s extremes.
With enough performance and music to warrant a West End stage, the right amount of straight stand-up to call it a comedy gig and the odd hilarious video to add production value, this is truly what they must mean by a recession-busting show.
CM