My Booky Wook 2 (11 page)
I’m writing this in the Austrian Alps, for reasons that I’ll go into later (yes, the same reasons as the sudden awareness of blasphemy) and from my window I can see the mountains. In fact I can see them from everywhere, they’re ubiquitous, I suppose that’s why it’s called “the Alps”. God is in the mountains. Impassive, immovable, jagged giants, separating the celestial from the terrestrial with eternal diagonal certainty. As if silently monitoring the beating heart of the creator from the universe’s perfect birth. Stood in the thin air and the awe, one inhales God, involuntarily acknowledging that we are but fragments of a whole, a higher thing. The mountains remind me of my place, as a servant to truth and wonder. Yes, God is in the mountains. Perhaps the pulpit too and even in the piety of an atheist’s sigh. I don’t know; but I feel him in the mountains.
So, with that said and understood, let me try and earn my infidel medal. Glenn, amidst the swarm of brilliantly implausible claims that surrounded him like Jack the Ripper’s fog, mentioned that when the ol’ ETs return they’ll bring all manner of life-changing kit. “They’ll likely have cures for AIDS, tsunamis and indigestion,” testified Glenn. Well, the first two seem jolly important, but indigestion? Bloody hell, we’ve got Rennies for that (my mate Danny calls ’em Renés, like the bloke from ’Allo ’Allo!). Brief enquiries revealed that whilst Glenn was AIDS and tsunami free, he did suffer from terrible indigestion.
Once we’d charmed the regional head of the extraterrestrial cult we were free to meet the head honcho in Miami, Rael himself. He did not disappoint. Dressed in white with a too-young wife, Rael, a Frenchman, was everything you’d want from a cult leader: eccentric, randy and smart. He was so bloody good at cult leading that when he told me he’d been up in a spaceship with Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad and Moses, I still believed him. I refused to introduce reasonable doubt even when he said that up in that spaceship he’d had it off with futuristic, ET, prossiesex-bots. Who could anticipate that flying saucers could be so damn saucy? Flying saucer is a bloody stupid term when you consider the minor role that piece of crockery plays in contemporary dining. Why not a flying plate? You only see saucers in Merchant Ivory films and Claridge’s. It’s too esoteric. It’s like calling molehills dirty eggcups.
At this point I was begging Rael to let me join.
I sat in a Miami compound – a bit like sheltered accommodation it was – where Rael was holed up. He skipped around the world like a Ziggy Stardust bin Laden, avoiding indifferent authorities, so was practically homeless. His devotees would lend him a sofa. He’s a slacker Jesus, bowling along with his knapsack and his child-bride, peering out the window all day long waiting for kinky Martians to turn up and put on a stag-do for prophets. There’s a space in my heart for a loony with a yarn, and I’m apparently quite susceptible to cult-recruitment, because by the time the Rael interview was twenty minutes old I was pledging to help his cause in any way I could. Perhaps by raising awareness in the British media? Given that at that time my sole contact with high-profile figures came through the dubious conduit of Big Brother, I don’t know that I’d’ve been of much help. “Rael – I can get you an audience with John McCririck if you’re interested. No, unfortunately Jackie Stallone passed.”
Another influential factor in my sudden pie-eyed devotion was Rael’s generous offer to let me have it off with one of his female followers. “What a fuckin’ touch!” I thought. I was politely preparing an erection when Mark Lucey, quite rightly when all’s said and done, pointed out that it might not be that professional for me to have sex with members of a cult while making an impartial documentary about them. “Oh bloody hell, Mark! How impartial does this have to be? I’m not Alan Whicker!” I reasoned that the sex could be part of the programme. “No, Russell,” explained Mark patiently, “once we film you having sex we stray into a very different type of film-making. It’s called porn.” I was still up for it; at that time I thought “ethics” was just the place I’m from said by a bloke with a lisp. With that we made our excuses and left.
I loved them Raelians, but Channel 4 decided it was all a bit too barmy to be on the television, so we turned our attention to a studio-based show instead. Trev could no longer be in the E4 show we were hurriedly devising, as he had the looming accusation hovering above him like a tartan vulture, but I still had a good bunch of chums, an ever-expanding and fluctuating coterie with which to bake this undercooked, over-promoted TV recipe. When you’re hot, people will move swiftly to cash in on the glow. This lack of guidance from the channel coupled with the tooth-melting velocity of my own ambition created a right pig’s ear of a programme.
One of the things that was good about this BBBM rip-off was the title, Russell Brand’s Got Issues – Matt came up with that. They say, don’t they, never judge a book by its cover, but it would’ve been favourable if this cut’n’shut star vehicle had been judged by name alone because beyond that lay only codswallop. We’d round up a studio audience and do a Jerry Springer-type show where celebrities and the audience members would discuss an “issue” (see, good title) like crime or love or summink. It did not work, because it was inconsequential and there were too many daft ideas and not enough editorialising. Which was a shame because some talented people worked on the show. Matt, of course, who I’d kidnapped from MTV years earlier and had been writing with ever since in a fractious and hilarious partnership where we laughed like drains and bickered like sisters – he’d write the show with me and dream up disturbing and inappropriate VT ideas which we’d force on to the telly like an unwelcome nan pudding. Check YouTube, baby, because it’s all there. Me and Matt above an East End pie shop dressed as Colonel Sanders and a Nosferatu toddler, eating cold beans from a fake vagina, to intro a show about pets or plants or pipe cleaners. Me and Matt dressed as medieval peasants, dragging our arses across woodland floors in an “authentic” recreation of a past life a charlatan hypnotist had told me I’d had. And my personal favourite, Matt stood in the glare on the shiny studio floor, LIVE, next to a swingometer, dressed as “Peter Zod”, General Zod’s fictional lipstick-wearing nephew.
Suzi Aplin, who came on with Mark to produce the show, would sneak Matt a pint of wine before we went on air to calm his jangling nerves – he thought I didn’t know but I knew. I had my eye on him, that’s why he was there, so I could turn and look and see old Matt pinned to the spot and terrified. In the clamour and the chaos of a failing LIVE television show you need something to cling to, and I knew if he was there everything would be alright. The ratings told a different story of course. Everything was not alright. The show had been promoted like Coca-Cola, it was on billboards, buses and cut into students’ hair, but people weren’t tuning in. Thank God, because they’d’ve been watching a disaster. Matt told me that as the countdown wound down and the lights went up and we were “LIVE” he’d dig his fist into the pocket of his ridiculous costume and thumb his dressing-room key as a physical talisman that the show would eventually end; that the moment wasn’t forever. He rubbed that key like a little tin genie and waited for the ill-deserved credits to roll down the screen like bleach down a urinal. A reminder that he’d soon be free.
No one makes me laugh like Matt Morgan. Not Bill Hicks or Peter Cook or Richard Pryor. He’s all bound up in my psychosis and my humour. He could irritate and enrage me and simultaneously crack me up. Here are some of the funniest things Matt’s said.
INT. NIGHT.David Walliams’s opulent house-warming party – a celeb fest, there’s Dale Winton, ooooh, next to Richard and Judy and Sam Taylor-Wood, who chats to Geri Halliwell. What a night! George Michael’s (not present – a lot of intrusion and stress in his life at this point – arrested in his stationary vehicle on a roundabout and found to be over the limit) long-term partner Kenny Goss is drunkenly flirting with Noel Gallagher who greets Russell Brand and Matt Morgan as they enter.NOELFookin’ ’ell, I’m glad you two have turned up. Kenny Goss has been troubling me all night.MATT/RUSSELLAlright mate/ How’s it goin’?Kenny is sidling overNOEL(nervous)Here he comes, look …RUSSELLGod, he looks well pissed.Kenny is breathing all over Noel and MattKENNYWow! Who’s this cutie, Noel?NOELThese are my mates Matt and Russell.Kenny is clearly much more interested in MattKENNYOh I know the guy with the crazy hair, but who’s this hottie?He means Matt, who is getting nervousMATTAlright mate.Kenny moves in closer. Matt ain’t happyKENNYI’d like to have some fun with you …MATTFuckin’ ’ell. No wonder George Michael sleeps in his car.
That’s a gem. Look at these from the radio shows.
STUDIO. DAY.RUSSELL(about his boyband audition)And I’d been in the toilet, drinking, to cope with my nerves, so I was probably all red and blustery, and a little bit all plump and rubbish, all crooked and odd.MATTYou drink from toilets when you’re nervous?STUDIO. DAY.RUSSELL(reading out an email)“... All the great things are simple and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honour, duty, mercy, hope–”MATTGhostbusters.INT. DAY.Trevor was at a hairdressers in Peru –TREVORShe [the hairdresser] indicated to me a side room, so I went into that with her ... and, eh ... she got a bucket out ...RUSSELLTrevor! This story’s making me anxious.MATTWhat did she do? Milk you?
Plus like all truly funny people he makes you funny too. Check these set-ups, also from the radio show.
STUDIO. DAY.RUSSELLWho are you going with, your lady friend?MATTMy laptop.RUSSELLIs that what you call her?STUDIO. DAY.MATTI also used to take, when I was quite young, take the day off and watch The Doors and drink whisky out of the cupboard.RUSSELLYou silly boy. Always drink it from a glass! Even Jim Morrison didn’t try and drink it from a sideboard.
The radio show was a double act after Trev went, and the initial TV shows all bore Matt’s sick stamp. Reigning in the lunacy was the aforementioned television legend Suzi Aplin, who produced Friday Night with Jonathan Ross and also Chris Evans’s masterpiece TFI Friday. Third time not so lucky – perhaps we should’ve put Friday in the title. Even her expertise and incredible personal warmth were not sufficient to save this impatient cathode crash. Three good things came out of the show, though. Here they are –
I met Juliette Lewis again and from a brief flirtatious exchange glimpsed a world where I might develop a relationship that stretched beyond the pelvis and into the ticker. She was a grubby sparkle of a woman; intense and pensive, crackling and sharp. I imagined when I spoke to her what it might be like to have a lover who would also be a mate. Nothing, literally nothing happened. I was far too ensconced in what the Chinese would call “dysfunction in the affairs of the bedroom”. It just made me think that maybe, one day, I might actually have a girlfriend.A lad that was a researcher on the show, Jack Bayles, a kind of handsome Phil Daniels, Artful Dodger of a geezer who Suzi had brought over from Jonathan’s show, stuck his bonce above the parapet and became an integral part of our ramshackle operation, our surrogate family. Jack’s unusual in our group because he’s cool; everyone else is a bit odd. Me – twit, Matt – freak, Sharon – warped, John R – communist, Nicola – Nan in a young woman’s body. Even Nik is too good-looking to be so nice – yet is. Jack is straight up cool and professional. The first person to do the achingly necessary job of turning our Borstal board meetings into functional affairs. So on Issues we nabbed Jack.And most importantly I learned I didn’t want to wind up in the goggle box, imprisoned in living-rooms, no. After a few months of digital-diva-dom I decided that the only screens big enough to convey my ego were silver.
†
The Happiest Place on Earth
“Do you want to go to Cologne to review the Rolling Stones and meet Keith Richards for Observer Music Monthly?” asked Nik, excitedly. Even after his flirtation with a vaguely comical death, it is counter-intuitive to consider Richards as mortal. Bill Hicks joked that Keith lived on a ledge beyond the edge: “Look, it’s Keith, he found a ledge beyond the edge,” implying that Richards was beyond death and that dying would somehow be beneath him. As someone who was born after the Rolling Stones’ greatest work had been achieved, my appreciation of Keith Richards is primarily as a defiant hedonist, an anti-establishment dandy and an indifferent sartorial pioneer. The music, upon reflection, is secondary.
I swung it so my Sancho Panza, Matt Morgan, could come with me. It turned a journalistic assignment into fun. We travelled with OMM’s photographer and one of the Stones’ army of public relations apparatchiks.
On the plane, Matt was pinned in at the window seat for some reason, that it would make him less sick or more sick or something – he had some justification for needing to sit near the window. A few minutes into the flight but before the seatbelt sign was off, Matt said, “My arse is itchy, I need to go to the toilet.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said, “just wipe it on a napkin here.”
“No, I’m not gonna do that. Come on, Russell, you’ve got to let me out.”
“I can’t be bothered to get up, look the seat belt sign’s on, wipe it on a napkin here, no one will mind, no one will ever say anything.”
He goes, “Alright then,” and he wiped his arse on a napkin.
“Ah, Matt, that was disgusting,” I said, and included that in the article that I subsequently wrote.
Interestingly I was told I would probably be in the company of Keith Richards for no more than ten minutes if that and I had to write five thousand words. A five-thousand-word piece had to be written on the basis of about seven minutes. Obviously I’d have to write about the whole journey, what I felt about the Rolling Stones, my relationship to music in general, what it was like to travel with Matt, what the hotel in Germany was like – the England football team had stayed there before us as the World Cup that had just been there. There was so much fucking padding – all filler, no killer. I liked it as a challenge, because really what is going to happen in an interview with Keith Richards? “Oh, what incredible longevity you’ve had as an artist, your relationship with Mick Jagger, well done not dying having taken all those drugs, you’re incredibly iconic, you’re a genius, why did you fall out that tree?” Anyone can ask that, but not everyone will expose that the person they went with wiped their arse on the plane – “Don’t, mate, my mum will read that, it will just undermine me.” I liked torturing him so much. Not every hack will include such details, and in fact not even I included the shameful truth that there was an amazing brothel in Cologne, probably one of the best brothels I’ve ever been to in my life.