Bill Bailey had just finished a long set at the Craigmore Centre in Drumnadrochit, a village on the breathtakingly beautiful northern banks of Loch Ness. The venue was packed, and he’d gone down like a knocked-out Nessie, but the audience were still there.
“I’d done a couple of hours and been well-received but at the end, nobody moved,” Bill, 59, tells me. Bemused, he’d said, ‘What? That’s it’ and still the crowd just sat there grinning. “In the end the hall manager whispered, ‘Bill, they’re expecting a raffle…’
“So I had to draw the raffle for 45 minutes; the prizes were bottles of Blue Nun and boxes of Quality Street…
“I told my next audience about it and “someone shouted ‘We want a raffle!’; so I did a pretend raffle. A couple won the big prize, a pretend speedboat…and somebody shouted ‘Fix!’.”
There’s a very English eccentricity about Bailey’s playful freewheeling performances. The multi-talented musical comedian gleefully mixes high and low culture. Who else would have realised how great the Match Of The Day theme tune would sound in the style of Mozart?
Slowly Bill has morphed from a “Tolkien prog-hippy” to a national treasure. Winning Strictly Come Dancing with Oti Mabuse in 2020 helped, but by then Bill was already filling stadiums.
Yet he’d walked away from comedy 30 years ago after Rock, a two-handed play he performed with his close friend, the late comedian Sean Lock, flopped at the Edinburgh Festival. Bill played a jaded West Country rocker, Sean played his roadie. “We thought the show was great, but we weren’t getting audiences.”
One night they had just one person in, fellow comedian Dominic Holland. Demoralised, Bailey got a “proper job” in telesales, flogging ad space for an international business management development magazine but was swiftly sacked for refusing to wear a tie.
The tide turned in 1995 when he performed a one-man show in Edinburgh. “I realised the crowd quite liked me when they switched from throwing bottles to throwing plastic cups.”
Bill was nominated for the Perrier Award in 1996, landing his first management company. A year later he had his own Channel 4 special followed by the 1998 BBC show, Is This Bill Bailey? Regular slots on panel shows (QI, Never Mind The Buzzcocks) and roles in rated sitcoms Spaced and Black Books followed.
The public started to notice him, but not always for the right reasons.
“Somebody thought I was Del Detmer from Hawkwind. I said ‘Afraid not’ and they said ‘That’s just what Del would say…’ I’ve been mistaken for Lars from Metallica and bless him, Dave Myers, the poor guy from the Hairy Bikers. People used to say, ‘I love your recipes, man’.”
On occasions, he’d claim “No, I’m Aled Jones and it’s all gone wrong for me.”
Bill’s latest show, Thoughtifier, includes “extracts from Kraftwerk’s lost album of children’s songs”, and takes on the “existential panic” about AI.
“It’s not the end for humanity,” he says. “This show is a rebuttal of that, it celebrates what human beings are capable of in terms of art, music, intellectual thoughts…
“There’s lots of music, lots of gags and tech.”
Including a laser harp in a segment examining the link between Pachelbel’s Canon in D and rave music. Bill also plays a Metallica number using car horns. He toured it across 20 countries ahead of its new West End residency.
“It’s had a similar reaction everywhere,” he says. “British comedy is one of our greatest exports, because it’s so different. It resonates globally; Europeans seek it out. They love to hear comedy in English. It’s such an amazing language, full of supple nuances. Many other languages are more rigid.”
Born Mark Bailey in Bath, the son of a GP and a midwife, he grew up in Keynsham, north Somerset and went to King Edward’s, a fee-paying independent school where he excelled at music and sport and a teacher nicknamed him “Bill”.
His mix of musical virtuosity and sublime surrealism was partly inspired by his childhood heroes, deadpan comedian Les Dawson and the Danish classical humourist Victor Borge, both superb pianists.
“I remember three generations of us laughing when Victor Borge mucked around on a grand piano. He was blasted off his piano stool by a soprano’s top note and put on a safety belt…it made a lasting impression.”
At a sombre wake for an elderly aunt, he lightened the mood by playing Les Dawson’s wrong-notes routine. “My dad laughed so hard he spat his tea out.”
Classical pianists were Bill’s first musical heroes, “particularly Sviatoslav Richter playing Rachmaninov” before he was seduced by local cider-enthusiasts The Wurzels and then punk rock.
“I loved the Stranglers, the Undertones, the Buzzcocks, The Cure, Siouxsie & The Banshees…”
His first gig was in a Bridgewater community centre with school band Behind Closed Doors, aged 15. “The Kinks’ You Really Got Me was my first guitar solo. We were just kids having fun but I got the bug.”
When he dropped out of his English degree at 19, he’d already performed his first comedy spot in Bath, inspired by John Hegley, a comedy poet and ukulele player.
“A shambles but elements connected with the crowd and that connection was like grabbing electricity. I thought, I need more of that. When you get a laugh, it’s intoxicating. I did hundreds of gigs in little rooms above pubs, and cafés turned into comedy venues, learning the craft.”
His double act, the Rubber Bishops, faced their biggest challenge at a Blackpool working men’s club. “We were introduced as ‘a couple of lads from London’ – they didn’t look happy, but we won them over and made them laugh. Things like that are character building.”
Almost by accident Bill ended up in 1986 play, The Printers, with Francis de la Tour, Vanessa and Corin Redgrave promoted by the far-Left Workers’ Revolutionary Party.
“It was a very informative play, it was about the print unions and radical politics; historically, it was fascinating, but they did it on the night of the World Cup final. I kept saying ‘Maybe not the right date’, and they’d say, ‘Not now…’.
“They were supposed to be for working people and were so out of touch they didn’t realise everyone would be watching football…”
Genial, animal-loving Bill met his costume designer wife Kristin when she was part of a musical comedy act in Edinburgh in 1987. They live in Hammersmith, west London, with son Dax and Bill’s nonagenarian father, plus six parrots, three dogs, two iguanas, treefrogs and some carp.
They also own a house in the Lake District, inherited from Kristin’s parents.
Bird-watcher Bailey relaxes far from the hustle and bustle. “I used walk for miles with Sean Lock, setting the world to rights. Now I go along a lovely old path by the river to Tring, through areas of natural beauty.”
He’s irritated by how politics has become “short term and gossipy…so much noise; as a kid, politics was men in suits sorting things out. Social media is socially corrosive. If it disappeared tomorrow, nobody would miss it. When I got on Twitter, there were already three ‘Bill Baileys’ pretending to be me.”
Only one Bill will be on the West End stage as he puts Thoughtifier to bed with his band. Then he’ll start writing new music for a new touring show. “I’d like to create something with a bit more complexity, a musical or a film,” he says.
He’s written three books, his many DVDs include his Remarkable Guide To The Orchestra, and he loves presenting TV’s Master Crafters, devoted to old-school artisans. But Bailey takes nothing for granted.
“I do what I do and hopefully people enjoy it,” he says. “I put a lot of it down to my grandad. He was a stonemason and his mantra was just keep working. So I just get on with things. That’s all you can do – trust your instinct and give it both barrels.
“These days at any point, it could all go totally wrong. You say or tweet something that backfires, and that’s it. All you can do is say it wasn’t me, it was a Hairy Biker.” *BILL BAILEY performs Thoughtifier nightly at Theatre Royal Haymarket until 15th February 2025. His new book My Animals, and Other Animals is on sale now. www.BillBailey.co.uk.