My Booky Wook 2 (10 page)
“There are these stories about you and Courtney Love,” said Nik. The tabloids were now ever-present in my life providing salacious commentary, and wilfully misunderstanding everything I did. Initially it was a laugh, even when they said hurtful things; me, Matt and Trev would dissect it on the wireless – they’d torment me and I could defend myself. Sometimes we’d call the papers up and give them false stories, live on air. Everything could be fed into the whirring comedy buzzsaw.
I didn’t care if the papers wrote that I slept with Courtney. “That’s OK,” I said to Nik. “She’s cool, Kurt Cobain and all that – I’m not bothered.”
I was less nonchalant, however, when I received a call informing me that one of the girls at the “party” on the final night in Edinburgh had said she’d been drugged and coerced into sex by one of the men present. OK. Drugged and coerced. That sounds bad. “One of the men” – why didn’t I invite more men? The thing is I distinctly remember not drugging or coercing anyone into sex that night. Or ever, actually. I don’t expect praise for that – I’m not saying, “Hey, I’ve never drugged or coerced anyone into sex – where’s my effing medal? Where’s my ticker-tape parade?” I’m just saying I’m opposed to drugging and raping. Except when the victim and perpetrator are both me.
The nature of such a terrible slur is that the accusation is itself a condemnation. Also I’m not impervious to the moral codes of the civilisation of which I’m part, so it’s difficult not to have, if not a visceral sense of guilt, certainly an ethereal awareness of that guilt. Occasionally you feel the ghost of that guilt passing through you. My mum is an ordinary person who’s probably had three or four partners in her life, while my grandmother on one side is very Catholic and family orientated, and on the other side Protestant and quite staunch, so it’s not as if I grew up in a kibbutz or some sort of commune utterly free from restrictive sexual morality. I’m subject to it, and in fact it’s only my habit of defining myself as external to any culture that I’m ostensibly part of, that makes me distance myself from it. By existing in opposition to it I’m subject to its influence … it is influential.
That sense of guilt was similar to when at school in assembly they say, “Somebody here has done something terrible.” I’d think, “Oh God, it’s probably me.” Sometimes I’d almost go, “Yeah, I did that,” almost admit to it because of a sense of guilt. Enough people in my life have told me, “You are bad, you’re a bad person, what you’ve done is bad” – in the end you start thinking, “I am a bit bad.” So you are awaiting judgement, awaiting the Sword of Damocles or some guillotine swipe. Like in assembly when they said, “We’ll find out who it is anyway.” On the rare occasions when it hadn’t been me, I would still nearly put up my hand.
We travelled back from Morocco and I saw newspapers in the airport – it was in all the daily papers. Some had been moderate, but the Daily Star ran on the front page “Russell Brand Rape Quiz” and I thought, well, this is going to be a tough show to pitch at Channel 4. “It’s an interesting concept, Russell, but some of our female viewers might find it offensive.”
Quiz is such a light word to use in conjunction with Rape. “A Rape Quiz”, these two words don’t belong together. Enquiry, search, quest, I don’t know ... there was no quiz and there was no rape. The only words that are indisputable are “Russell Brand”, and whilst I agree that is a headline, I refute the other two words, rape and quiz. If I had to choose one word to go it would be rape, making it “Russell Brand Quiz”. I think that could be fun – every week Tuesday seven o’clock ask questions about me, I’ll even come along and host that – but you’re going to have to get rid of the rape if you want me attached.
We successfully sued the Star for a large amount of money as a result of that libellous headline. Then began the more important business of finding out what on earth was going on.
The Scottish police contacted the agency; and two police officers came down from Edinburgh to talk to me, Matt and Trevor. Trevor bravely admitted to having consensual sex. To be clear, I wholeheartedly believe Trevor; to accuse Trev of rape is like accusing Desmond Tutu of arson or Stephen Fry of racism. Possible but so unlikely the world would topple from its axis, spun out by the gravity of the preposterousness. Apparently at that point she was so drunk that she didn’t remember, she just said “one of the men at the party” – and because of my rather unusual invitation system there were only three men at that party. Thankfully I wasn’t the one the accusation was levelled at.
As with all terrifying and difficult situations, remarkably, some incredibly funny things happened. Here are some of those incredibly funny things. Trevor had to describe to the police the night’s events, you have to go through it in meticulous fucking detail again and again and again, it’s a police inquiry. It’s tense. The word “rape” is flashing in neon throughout the proceedings. John and Nik are trying to be professional, although on some level they must be thinking, “Well, it was too good to be true … we took this junky and turned him into something.” The gravity of strife and mayhem had pulled me once more into its grim sphere. Perhaps I deserved it. All that showing off and decadence. There’s always a price to pay. You can’t just waltz out of rehab into stardom, diddling birds wherever you go, and expect the world to tolerate it. There is no escape, the gutter is greedy and it does not like to yield its brood.
“Well, what happened on the night in question?” asked the sullen, more Taggarty of the two Taggarts that had come down to resolve this case.
I do not like authority, so in a scenario like this, self-preservation is put aside in favour of tomfoolery. “Well thankfully I’ve got about a dozen witnesses who can tell you where I was, officer. I’ve got genetic evidence, DNA all over the bedroom. If you were to shine an ultraviolet light into my room it would look like Jackson Pollock had been in there, drunk on a trampoline, which I think at one stage he was, he’d strayed in by mistake with Alan Yentob who was making an obsequious documentary about him.”
Me and Matt were relatively safe now that Trevor had identified himself as the one who’d slept with the girl. Still, we had to accurately recite the events. “The girls all came upstairs and we had this gin and tonic and Trevor was nominated their barman.”
Trevor added piously, innocently, on the brink of tears, “I was in the corner of the room. I was in charge of preparing the gin and tonics. I was just there in the corner of the kitchen hacking up an old lemon …” Trevor paused, and the police looked up from their pads. Matt said, “Which is what Trevor calls a prostitute.” Well, we all thought it was very amusing and lightened the horrific mood. The police on the other hand simply arrested Trevor and took him down to Kentish Town Police Station.
It was a very difficult situation, and because of a quirk in Scottish law the case is never dropped. Trevor was accused but the case never went to court because the girl didn’t want to pursue it. The case can still at any time go to court, but it’s a little bit difficult because it’s two or three years ago now.
Matt and I were immediately exonerated and were able to continue the radio show, whilst the investigation meant Trevor was suspended. Also he was meant to do an item on a TV show we were doing, but had to be dropped, so the incident obviously had an incredibly negative effect on Trevor’s career, and it was the beginning of the end of our relationship really, because it’s hard to recover from that kind of thing. So the scandal claimed Trevor, a brilliant and innocent nitwit who was loved by the radio show listeners. The first negative consequences of fame had emerged. I learned then that it is a dangerous game and like all games there will be losers – in this case, I lost a friend and the tabloids found a controversial anti-hero and quietly awaited further opportunities for annihilation.
†
Take Me to Your Leader
Of course though, a career in show business isn’t all tabloid scandals and seeking shelter from the clumsy fist of Scottish law; no, at some point you have to actually make some television programmes, and with the success of Big Brother’s Big Mouth, E4 were double keen to give me enough rope. Is there some grit at my essence, some mark that I bear that prevents me escaping my tawdry origins? This I consider even as I ascend spectacularly like a spaceship above the screams and the applause and the roar, for distinctly I can hear the hum-drum tick-tock terror of fate tapping his watch and reminding me that everything NASA ever flung at the moon is now a bedraggled shelter for crabs and gulls, littering the ocean like David Bowie’s crashed caravan. After fifteen seconds of fame Trevor Lock, the world’s least sexually threatening man, had been dragged off to Belmarsh. “This can’t be the work of man,” I thought. “The Furies have been sent to claim me, the gutter’s henchmen. What’s next – will my dear old mum be banged up for the Birmingham pub bombings?” Mind you, she’s as guilty as them what did the stir for it.
I’d been scuttling around the foothills of fame for years. I’d done more pilots than a Virgin hostess, but this one had to be different – for a start it had to progress beyond the pilot stage and actually become a TV show, because now I was a face, a commodity, I had fans, a haircut, catchphrases – I’d bought my mum a car. There could be no more cock-ups. May I take this opportunity to say that although a lot of talented folk work on telly there’s an awful lot of rhubarb goes on. I’d sit in glass-walled meetings in Shepherd’s Bush (Auntie Beeb) and Horseferry Rd (C4) nodding along to doctrine from a commissioner – (no Bat-phone though), and think, “Well this all sounds very sensible – all these tips and rules and requirements – but how come whenever I turn on my TV set there’s naught but winkey-water to occupy my eye-hole?”
I had two ideas to launch me from the adrenalised-spaz-grip of reality TV and into my own stratosphere. One was a Louis Theroux-style immersive documentary and the other was a studio-based audience participation show. I like to be absorbed in the subject of my work regardless of how loopy it may be. Months before, working with Damon Beesley and Iain Morris (who have now blessedly found their rightful place in the firmament with the excellent Inbetweeners), I’d made a film with the members of a cult known as the Jesus Christians. Now if ever there was a tautologous adjective to emphasise a noun it is this one. “Ah, but we’re the Jesus Christians.” Fucking hell! How bloody Christian do you want to be? I’d say that once you announce yourself as Christians the involvement of Jesus is pretty explicit. “It’s to distinguish us from the marzipan Christians and the Terry Christians and the ‘One Up the Bum No Harm Done’ Christians.” Oh good. You might as well call yourself the Christian Christians.
Well, the problems with this bunch of doe-eyed do-gooders alas did not end with their inefficient naming strategy. There were only five of them and they travelled the world in a van like the KLF or Scooby Doo’s idiot mates, trying to dole out kidneys to an unsuspecting world. Yep. They would whip out a kidney as soon as look at you and give it to someone more deserving. Now organ donation is blatantly a wonderful calling – people will always need organs – you’ll never go hungry in the kidney donation game. The problem is you won’t be able to process any food that you do eat as you’ve turned your God-given body into a vertical fridge.
Me, Damon and Iain got a crew together and tracked down the Christians at a motorway service station where they were rifling through bins in search of what they called “free dinner”. They were all young, good-looking people – if a little jaundiced for some reason. Obviously I was fascinated by their sledgehammer altruism, and young people with a quest give me a stiffy because it makes me think that my oft-stated, never-realised craving for a global revolution could one day be a perfectly good system of government. They had wonderful intentions and obviously did some good, but it just made me feel a bit creepy to see their perfect bodies scarred by this cock-eyed kindness and, like a lot of people in cults, they didn’t seem to be quite in their right minds – perhaps they’d scooped ’em out and borrowed ’em to a poor person in some whacky misinterpretation of Leviticus. After half an hour’s tireless, Roger Cook-style investigative journalism I told the Christmas Christians that I thought they were, to quote Cypress Hill, “insane in the membrane” (Doctor, where is this mental disorder with which my poor mother is afflicted located? It’s in the brain. And what’s worse, the membrane), which made them go all cheesed off and refuse to film any further stuff with me.
The subject for my latest adventure was to be the Raelians – an extraterrestrial-worshipping cult who believe that ancient religious texts were written by primitive people trying to explain the advanced technology and ideologies of our alien creators. Which I’m well into. I was to make the programme with my mate and BBBM producer Mark Lucey. Rael was in Miami, so me, Mark and a camera operator called Craig who Mark christened “Russ-Lad” – like he was my sidekick – buggered off over there.
When making documentaries with clandestine cults, there’s a lot of pressing flesh and buttering up and allaying fears, so we met several representatives of the cult in Blighty. My favourite was Glenn – the UK leader. Glenn was an actor, his previous job had been playing the part of Jesus Christ, Superstar in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar – I like to imagine that Glenn got so caught up in the nightly adulation of the crowny thorns and free Maltesers that when the run came to an end he thought, “Oh no you fuckin’ don’t – no one brings the curtain down on Jesus, I’ll play this part till someone nails me to a cross.” Which for three months had happened every night – that would take the sting out of it.
I’ve recently, for reasons I’ll go into later, become sensitive to the idea of blasphemy, so let me make something clear. I am a spiritual man. If you’re like me, you’ll balk at someone telling you that they’re spiritual as it’s not a very spiritual thing to do, one can scarcely imagine St Francis of Assisi brushing a starling from his shoulder, grasping your palm then brusquely asserting that he’s “well religious”. He’d let you see for yourself. Well, that’s not my way – and to be honest I was never gonna come off well in a spiritual dick-swinging contest with one of the most enlightened beings of all time, but to quote Morrissey for the first time in this book (y wook) – “In my own sick way, I’ll always stay true to you.”