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Here are the talkSPORT shows
Confessions of a randy dandy (Russell Brand features)
Russell Brand to remake Drop Dead Fred
'...in the tone of Beetlejuice'
The 1991 Rik Mayall comedy film Drop Dead Fred is to be remade – with Russell Brand in the starring role. Dennis McNicholas, a longtime writer on Saturday Night Live, is reworking the script for Universal Studios.
The decision to remake the movie might raise eyebrows, as the original was a critical and box-office flop. However, it has gained some cult status, and trade magazine The Hollywood Reporter says it ‘is considered a film that fell short of its full potential’. The magazine adds: ‘The take for the new Fred is to make a film in the tone of Beetlejuice, building a universe around the concept of imaginary friends. Brand would play the trouble-making pal.’
The original starred Phoebe Cates as a meek woman who revives her childhood imaginary friend after losing her job and husband. Brand is currently shooting Get Him To The Greek – a spin-off from Forgetting Sarah Marshall – also for Universal; and he has also been lined up to star in a remake of Arthur.
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That seems an odd thing to do, but who knows...
'...in the tone of Beetlejuice'
The 1991 Rik Mayall comedy film Drop Dead Fred is to be remade – with Russell Brand in the starring role. Dennis McNicholas, a longtime writer on Saturday Night Live, is reworking the script for Universal Studios.
The decision to remake the movie might raise eyebrows, as the original was a critical and box-office flop. However, it has gained some cult status, and trade magazine The Hollywood Reporter says it ‘is considered a film that fell short of its full potential’. The magazine adds: ‘The take for the new Fred is to make a film in the tone of Beetlejuice, building a universe around the concept of imaginary friends. Brand would play the trouble-making pal.’
The original starred Phoebe Cates as a meek woman who revives her childhood imaginary friend after losing her job and husband. Brand is currently shooting Get Him To The Greek – a spin-off from Forgetting Sarah Marshall – also for Universal; and he has also been lined up to star in a remake of Arthur.
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That seems an odd thing to do, but who knows...
[web]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... areer.html[/web]
haha, another one in the eye for all those moaning arses who thought he was just some frail old man...
haha, another one in the eye for all those moaning arses who thought he was just some frail old man...
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Rory Bremner lampoons Russell Brand in new show
4 Jun 2009[/align]
Rory Bremner becomes Russell Brand, cheekily grinning by a microphone and looking uncannily like the long-haired comedian as he made his prank calls to Andrew Sachs, in his new show; a brand-new three-part series featuring the satirical skills of acclaimed trio Rory Bremner, John Bird and John Fortune, starting this Sunday.
Those behind the show said: "From greedy MPs to media scandals, the cult of celeb chefs and the Sachsgate affair to financial disaster and the PM's much-derided YouTube grin, modern Britain is in meltdown." They claim the team will "cast their collective sardonic eye over the chaos engulfing our culture to learn how naming and shaming may be the next best thing to a recovery, and the one thing in which we can still lead the world".
Bremner, Bird and Fortune: The Last Show Before The Recovery is on at 7pm on Sunday, June 7 on Channel 4.
Rory Bremner lampoons Russell Brand in new show
4 Jun 2009[/align]
Rory Bremner becomes Russell Brand, cheekily grinning by a microphone and looking uncannily like the long-haired comedian as he made his prank calls to Andrew Sachs, in his new show; a brand-new three-part series featuring the satirical skills of acclaimed trio Rory Bremner, John Bird and John Fortune, starting this Sunday.
Those behind the show said: "From greedy MPs to media scandals, the cult of celeb chefs and the Sachsgate affair to financial disaster and the PM's much-derided YouTube grin, modern Britain is in meltdown." They claim the team will "cast their collective sardonic eye over the chaos engulfing our culture to learn how naming and shaming may be the next best thing to a recovery, and the one thing in which we can still lead the world".
Bremner, Bird and Fortune: The Last Show Before The Recovery is on at 7pm on Sunday, June 7 on Channel 4.
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Prankster pushes Brand in fountain
By RHODRI PHILLIPS
8th August 2009[/align]
RUSSELL BRAND was shoved into a fountain by a prankster as he filmed a movie last night. The comedian was doing a "drunken" dance routine in London's Trafalgar Square. But an onlooker dodged security guards to grab him by the throat and push him underwater.
Guards hauled the man to the ground and cops also raced to the scene. But Brand, 34, insisted he would not press charges. He spent half an hour recovering with crew in a tent before reappearing - as crowds cheered. A witness said: "It only took a nudge, but the bloke used a bit of force. Brand was completely underwater. I expect he will have some bruises."
The star is playing rocker Aldous Snow - his character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall - in film Get Him To The Greek.
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I'm not sure if that sounds funny or mental... hopefully some video will turn up
Prankster pushes Brand in fountain
By RHODRI PHILLIPS
8th August 2009[/align]
RUSSELL BRAND was shoved into a fountain by a prankster as he filmed a movie last night. The comedian was doing a "drunken" dance routine in London's Trafalgar Square. But an onlooker dodged security guards to grab him by the throat and push him underwater.
Guards hauled the man to the ground and cops also raced to the scene. But Brand, 34, insisted he would not press charges. He spent half an hour recovering with crew in a tent before reappearing - as crowds cheered. A witness said: "It only took a nudge, but the bloke used a bit of force. Brand was completely underwater. I expect he will have some bruises."
The star is playing rocker Aldous Snow - his character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall - in film Get Him To The Greek.
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I'm not sure if that sounds funny or mental... hopefully some video will turn up
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Russell Brand: Seeking salvation
His amazing sexual prowess, his obsession with Helen Mirren, his recovery from addiction, his radio shame — Russell Brand confesses all to Chrissy Iley. Then he tells her he’s seeking redemption. Will we forgive him?
Sunday Times
1st November 2009[/align]
Russell Brand’s handsome assistant, Tom, is there to meet me in the lobby of a fancy hotel in Paris, telling me Brand will be about 20 minutes late. I don’t want to wait as I could be shopping, and anyway I hate waiting. So to disperse any potential mood I shop — demonically. In 20 minutes I buy very expensive black shoes — platform, peep-toe — and a moss-green top from Vanessa Bruno.
I feel better. I think not about Brand’s lateness but how my life will be transformed by shoes that are both incredibly high and incredibly comfortable. Now Brand is there waiting. A polite kiss on the cheek hello. Perched by him is a plate of mixed berries and an espresso. He orders some for me. Neither of us speaks French and both of us are scowled at.
He notices the purchases — it takes an addict to spot an addict. “The object of addiction is almost irrelevant. It’s just the condition itself. Drugs and alcohol might be the easiest way. As I’ve written in my book, I think heroin is a fantastic drug; all of us have this sense of yearning and longing. I need this woman, this car, or those shoes. If I have them it’s all going to be okay.”
Brand asks to see the shoes. He has looked at his own addictions with such scrutiny he’s now able to look at other people; he looks at me and the shoes as if he’s seeing a brain scan with all the neural pathways flashing. He started off in his early teens with bulimia, then alcohol, then drugs, then sex; for a while each worked as a salvation that eventually turned on itself and destroyed a piece of him.
From his book My Booky Wook you get the impression that his overriding addiction was getting famous and that he could channel all the other addictions away if only he could get worldwide fame — being loved by many obviously being so much easier than being loved by one.
The film Forgetting Sarah Marshall won him fame in America, so much so that his character in it, the rock star Aldous Snow, has had his own film written for him. It is called Get Him to the Greek, the Greek being a famous venue in LA. He’s also filmed a documentary about happiness with Oliver Stone, and is soon to begin filming Arthur, reprising the Dudley Moore role.
Now — today anyway — he is not too bothered about being famous. As it happens, fame was not his salvation: it made a lot of people not like him and others chase him obsessively. Fame made him a tabloid entity and he hated that.
He’s questioning all his old obsessions. He hasn’t eaten chocolate for ages. I tell him I love the comfort of chocolate. “Yes, but there’s a regret afterwards. I always think of that Damien Hirst title, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living. The impossibility of post-chocolate in the mind of the pre-chocolate. I am not going to run then eat a Twix — all that stupid running just for one Twix. As I am with chocolate, I am with everything. It’s better to not do it at all, because if I begin I’ll go as far as I can.”
Brand believes he is putting distance between himself and addiction. “I’m living in a disciplined way, do lots of yoga, exercise and transcendental meditation. It’s not half good. They give you a mantra… You feel attuned to a consciousness that is beyond your identity and beyond life.”
So now that fame is no longer his salvation, is he less driven? “I’m less neurotic and I’m easier to work with. When one is addicted one becomes accustomed to a certain amount of undulation in life. In the past I courted chaos; not a deliberate courtship, just inadvertently. I feel happier, and I don’t feel I need that same kind of attention.”
He offers to share his berries as mine haven’t arrived. “I’m becoming spiritually idealistic. We are physical beings while we have access to the divine and,” he says, not missing a beat, “I still love these boots.” He is wearing pale blue-grey Chelsea boots in suede. “They are comfortable in spite of being stylish. If I lost them I’d be really pissed off. I’m not ready to let them go.” Slightly bewildered, I say he doesn’t have to. “But at some point, Chrissy, and this is my concern. I don’t want to be chained to these ideas. I don’t want to be chained to wanting fame.”
The previous night Brand went to the Galliano show with his new girlfriend, the quirky pop star Katy Perry, who he met at this year’s Video Music Awards (VMA), and whose most famous hit is the attention-grabbingly-titled I Kissed a Girl. The Galliano show seems to have symbolised aesthetic beauty and excessive theatricality, just the kind of stuff you would have thought Brand loved. “Glorious on one level. An incredible spectacle. But on another level I thought the fact that this fashion show exists on our planet during the current ecological and economical troubles, it’s like visiting someone with cancer and finding them having a facelift. Stop the madness.”
Brand himself doesn’t seem mad. He seems vulnerable but accepting of his vulnerability. Therein lies his strength. He is tall, toned and seems happy in his yoga body. His hair is so clean and shiny it could be in a L’Oréal ad. His face has stubble, but not the full beard of a few months ago. He is very handsome, in a young-George-Best-performing-in-a-goth-rock-band kind of way. I wonder if the chubby teenager still lurks inside. He is polite and attentive. In his book he describes himself as “feminised yet hysterically heterosexual”. That makes him a winner with women. He likes women. They too have played a part in his salvation, but it seems he’s had enough. For now he’d like to try monogamy. Everything is “one day at a time”. That’s a mantra he repeats. Maybe he just knows himself or just knows life, that nobody can really make promises.
Brand grew up in Grays, Essex, never feeling he fitted in. He was an only child. “My personality was defined by solitude. A lot less now, but especially when I was a drug addict. I was always on my own, sat right up to the telly. I’m only now making friends with people. I’m only really happy when I’m performing. I’m like Judy Garland.” A performance as Fat Sam in Bugsy Malone when he was at school seems to have been an epiphany. “When I performed I thought, ‘Where’s the furthest that this can go?’ ”
His father left when he was a baby and they have had a hot-and-cold relationship ever since. His mother, who he adores, has survived cancer three times: uterine, breast and lymph. The last bout was when he was 17. He is now 34. “A lifetime away.” Brand is childlike and wise; people always come to him with their relationship problems — and he turns to Noel Gallagher with his. Gallagher, Oscar Wilde and Morrissey are the unlikely triumvirate of heroes he says saved him. He called his cat Morrissey.
He is sad about the cat just now. He came back to London after filming in the US and has so far been unable to reconcile their relationship. “He just uses the house as a place to get food. He comes in the middle of the night like a truculent teen. In an attempt to win him back, I put a trail of Madagascan prawns, starting with one by the cat flap, on espresso saucers leading up to my bedroom, like some ghastly Grimm fairy-tale hell for felines. The next day they were still there, tragic reminders of a broken-down relationship. It might as well have been an affidavit on the stairs. I feel sad about it because it was my most successful relationship with an animal… It was straightforward: I love that cat and he loves me. But there must have been a moment where he thought, ‘He’s not coming back, fuck it then.’ ”
My berries still haven’t arrived. Both Brand and I are completely ineffectual in making the waitress do what we want. He is extremely polite, and that doesn’t seem to work. Apart from in hotel lobbies, in most of the rest of his life he is confrontational.
The night before we met I watched his new DVD, Scandalous, which confronts the Sachsgate scandal (he calls if Manuelgate). The DVD starts with news footage describing Jonathan Ross’s and Brand’s behaviour as offensive. Sachsgate’s reverberations mean that the BBC is scared of its own shadow. Programming post-Sachsgate is entirely different from pre-Sachsgate. In all this enormity it is easy to lose sight of what actually happened. Andrew Sachs, then 78, who played Manuel in Fawlty Towers, had been booked to do a telephone interview on Brand’s Radio 2 show. When he failed to answer, Brand left a string of messages on his home voicemail. The BBC Trust later called this “a deplorable intrusion”. In the background is Jonathan Ross calling out, “He f***ed your granddaughter” (23-year-old Georgina Baillie, a dancer with a burlesque outfit called Satanic Sluts). This was in October 2008, and people still talk about it.
Brand and Ross say they didn’t know it hadn’t been edited out. The Radio 2 controller, Lesley Douglas, was forced to resign. Brand resigned, and Ross was suspended for 12 weeks without pay. Brand says: “I felt I didn’t have any choice but to resign. I thought, ‘I don’t have to do that radio show, I’m only doing it for a laugh and it’s become not a laugh.’ And then it was a relief.”
In his stand-up show Brand says it wasn’t as if he were Harold Shipman or Fred West. “There was no menace. Even a prank implies some kind of menace. I just did it and it escalated. ‘Let’s leave a message. Oh, let’s leave another message apologising for the message.’ It was just daftness. I read about the anger and vitriol, and it felt alien to me. I thought, ‘What are they talking about?’”
He has a history of intemperate behaviour. As a “befuddled lad”, Brand made a film with the BNP protégé Mark Collett. But of the BNP leader Nick Griffin’s recent appearance on Question Time, he said: “The more people who witness him equivocate on myopic loathing, the better.”
Around the time of Sachsgate, Brand was hosting an MTV awards show in America where he called George W Bush “a retarded cowboy fella” and discussed the Jonas Brothers wearing promise rings to symbolise their virginity as being like Superman taking the bus. He was more upset about America’s reaction to that because he thought his film-star dreams were over. But it turned out to be the most successful Video Music Awards for a decade and did nothing to impede his film career. It may even have helped.
Googling himself was another addiction that became satiated because everything he read was horrible. “It’s the most unrewarding, pointless activity, googling yourself. I’m doing a lot better. It’s like picking a scab. I have gone a few weeks without looking at it and it divorces you from the slurry of casual vindictiveness.”
He survived it because worse things have happened to him. Like his mum having cancer. How did he confront that? “I don’t know that I did the first two times. I confronted it the third time by leaving home. I thought, ‘She’s going to die, so I’m going.’ It’s very strange to have the closeness with my mum and confront the idea, the heartbreak, of losing her.”
How has your relationship with your mother affected your relationships with women?
“I’m an only child of a single mother — it probably meant that I’m demanding and have high expectations of women. I look for salvation and redemption, to be utterly embraced.”
Did you get that from your mother?
“Probably. Yes.” So, looking for redemption again, you had to look for lots of different women? “I don’t think you can find it in another human being. It’s a ridiculous, romantic and tragic idea that there’s someone who’s going to save you, that we need our own personal Jesus. Salvation comes from within.”
Do you think you were looking for salvation through sex? He smiles, a nostalgic smile.
“On the one hand, it’s bloody good fun. On the other I have addictive tendencies. And on another it’s a biological imperative. One of the keys to understanding life is the ability to hold opposing thoughts simultaneously, to never have one ideology that answers your questions.”
Are you saying that if sex saves you it also destroys you? “Well, there you go. I’ve stopped all that. One day at a time. I’m feeling a lot better. It’s nice not to be chained to something.”
Is that how it felt, being chained? “Sort of. If you are born in a tin helmet you barely notice the parameter, but once it’s been removed and you relax… Also, once somebody is in the sphere of your domination they can no longer be a channel of salvation. If a woman is under your spell, how is she going to be the one who saves you?
“When Britney Spears was on the VMAs, between takes, hair and make-up people would come over. We didn’t need hair or make-up, it was just like monkeys comforting us, grooming us in a primal way, and I think a lot of my liaisons were just like that, grooming… I am trying not to be glib about it. It’s not like there’s been an endless carousel of strippers and lap dancers, but there have been times when I have been in the company of prostitutes and they were the most wonderful women in the world.”
Do you think monogamy is possible?
“It is if you want it, and value something.”
You have said you were very good at sex, is that why you wanted to have it a lot, to be validated?
“Especially because I’m not good at any sport. It’s a pity there’s not some forum where you can do it publicly.”
How do you test being good at it?
“A requiem of screams.”
How do you know it’s real?
“There’s eye-rolling ecstasy, the bacchanalian loss of self where they’re ready to tear up the trees, the grapes are being ripped from the vines, animals are being strewn across the forest. I think the roots of misogyny are in the unity women have with universal forces when they come. Men go, ‘What are they doing?’ They become goddesses with oceanic pleasure that looks like it may never end and could devour us.”
Are you scared of the orgasm? “I was a bit scared of them, when I was younger.
It’s a bit frightening, this transformative quality, an orgasm in women. I imagine that it looks better than the miserable squirt men issue. It seems different, though, when there’s an emotional element — transcendent.”
I’m wondering if this transcendence has been recently observed in his shiny new relationship with Katy Perry. Happy to rip layers off himself and talk about anything, Brand suddenly doesn’t want to say much. “She’s lovely and I don’t want her to read anything about herself. The other day a journalist from a tabloid in a ludicrous fedora said to me, ‘Russell, are you in love with Katy?’ And I said, ‘You look like a character from a Graham Greene novel. I think I’m in love with you.’ I said that to defuse the situation. But what do they print? They print, ‘I think I am in love.’ ”
Of course since they met, a few weeks before my meeting with Brand, lots has been written about them. It’s hard to guess who is more smitten, who is the chaser and who is the chased. Her parents are churchy, both ministers. Perry is cattish in interviews, arch, motor-mouthed, conflicted, given to hyperbole. If they had met earlier, things might have been different. He concurs: “I am living in a different way at the moment. Regardless of what happens in my current situation, I am unlikely to be satisfied with the calamitous promiscuity of the preceding five or six years.” It’s as if he’s afraid to think long-term. It’s the teachings of all the recovery programmes not to. “I still dream about drugs but I’m never allowed drugs in the dream. I dream of smoking, drinking, former decadence, but I always wake before I get what I want.”
I wonder if he dreams the drug dream about women. He doesn’t want to answer, but later on we talk about him being in The Tempest with Helen Mirren. He has talked before about her overripe sexuality and how he fancies her. She gave him a book.
“She wrote in it, ‘Russell, to a genius from a mere mortal, love Helen.’ So I look at it sometimes when I’m wracked with doubt.” About your genius? “No, I just w**k over it. Already the genius page is stuck together. I squandered it on day one as soon as I saw it.”
It strikes me that he made a documentary with Oliver Stone about happiness because it is still what he is looking for. They filmed it at Louisiana State Penitentiary.
“It’s this beautiful Louisiana countryside — somehow bleak when you can feel the vibrating souls of the 5,200 inmates, 92% of whom will die in there. The governor is a Southern Baptist and if you’re in Louisiana State Penitentiary, you’d better bring a Bible. The prisoners I was exposed to had accepted Christianity and found happiness through that.”
I wonder if Brand’s stand-up self is an exaggerated version of himself or a different persona. “I wouldn’t behave the same with my mother as with a woman I wanted to seduce. I think one modulates one’s behaviour according to circumstance.” Despite Brand the soon-to-be-movie-star persona, Brand the stand-up is a hard act to follow because it is the place where he is most himself. “There isn’t a filter, and it’s easier to achieve success than it is through acting.” By this he means nobody else is making the decisions, he is not waiting for the call back. He is just being himself and unstoppable.
In real life though?
“I protect myself emotionally where possible. Last year at the VMAs there were death threats, so obviously this year when I did the VMAs it was deliberately designed to not cause anyone any bother, but be funny and confident. There was a very deliberate removal of self-destruction. I didn’t take the risks I’d have taken in the past.”
His hair isn’t backcombed, he is wearing no dangly jewellery. It’s a metaphor. There is less clutter, more purity, more control, lots of yoga. In fact, yoga is about to happen. We take a break while he goes to exercise. When he returns he’s still worrying about the fashion show last night.
“Girls might be subjected to more pressure on how they look. The fashion industry makes an elite few feel better about themselves and most people feel worse about themselves. It makes them bulimic and anorexic. It’s stimulating a desire that could never be fulfilled. It’s decoration on a dreadful wedding cake at a marriage between us and the demise of the planet. The doubts I’m currently confronting is that I’m part of this as long as I’m attending one of those events. I’m endorsing those ideas.”
Perhaps this rankles particularly because he himself was aspiring towards a role model that didn’t exist when he was a bulimic. “I wanted to feel thin and gorgeous. My dad was a good footballer, my stepdad was a good footballer. The culture was defined at my school by being good at football or fighting, and if you were chubby and feminine doing daft voices, you don’t realise until you encounter the Smiths or Oscar Wilde that it is cool to be different and not to fit in.”
Yesterday he went to Père Lachaise, to Oscar Wilde’s tomb. “Littered with kisses, it is — the pilgrimage of the dispossessed that he has inspired to go to that place. I was strange, awkward and peculiar and I would listen to the Smiths for the first time and think it’s the best thing in the world. Oscar begat Morrissey.”
The bulimia, though, was about wanting to fit in. “I was eating all those Penguins. I couldn’t leave them. Blue followed yellow followed green. An army of Penguins, marching into my mouth and out again. They didn’t stay long. Terrible state they were in. They went in all proud and came out bewildered, like Vietnam vets.”
When did you get confident? “It’s an ongoing process. I fluctuate in confidence and doubt, but probably as soon as I got out of my podgy teens and into drama school in my early twenties I did feel there were things that I was good at.”
I leave Paris on Eurostar and Brand is doing his yoga. Tabloids report more on the Brand/Perry love nest in the fancy hotel. We meet again the next day at the Sunday Times Magazine photoshoot in north London. He is in skinny jeans and a loose-knit mohair jumper. He tells me his nipples are pointing out. He looks groomed and handsome and quiet.
After our meeting he must talk with LA about Arthur. He says it’s a beautiful script. Some bits are from the original. “Arthur is still an alcoholic billionaire playboy and I’ll be getting a bit of a haircut for that.” Are you worried about that? “You have to move on. I have dreams of my hair being short and I wake up in a Samson-like panic, but I think I’m ready for transformation.”
The Liza Minnelli role has yet to be cast. “I figure Minnelli was a kind of kookie pop star then, so we’d have to look at the kookie female pop stars of the current age.” He’s laughing a little bashfully. You mean you want Katy Perry to play it? He doesn’t answer, but he blushes. “Am I blushing?” His silky, olivy skin looks a little burnt around the cheeks, and we move on to talking about prospective directors for Arthur and how he met Baz Luhrmann in a lift and talked to David Lynch about transcendental meditation.
Which one of his parents is he more like?
“Good combination of both. My mum is sensitive and tender, and my dad is very funny.”
How is your relationship with your dad?
“It hasn’t always been an easy relationship, but I want to be loving and generous. I know he is very proud of me, but we’re sort of in different places. It might take a while.”
When Brand was growing up his father was a fluctuating presence. They bonded when he was 16 and his father took him on a holiday to the Far East and they ended up picking prostitutes in Thailand. It seems an extreme way to bond. When you saw him last were you on good terms? “No, it was a difficult, but it’s something I could mend. I’d like to mend it.” He talks about his father with love but I’m not sure he really knows him.
His phone rings and he’s asking after a little boy. “I love that little boy. He’s one of the loves of my life, a gorgeous child.
I knew his parents before he was born and now he’s six. Brilliant, challenging, obnoxious. The last time I saw him I was at his house at bedtime. I was talking to him and he was absent-mindedly playing with my hair. It was precious.”
So you’re feeling broody? “I am, actually. It’s seven years since I took drugs. I’ve made a film. I don’t think I have to fight so much. I’ve grown weary of the carousel.” He’s also stopped working so compulsively. “I am more into having jaunts. It’s been a while since I’ve done terrible things like shoplifted or threw a phone…” He’s almost doing okay. Only the fact that the cat won’t talk to him is a source of unresolved pain. He is really upset about it and hopes he might have returned when he gets home. The next day I get a message: Morrissey was lured back with some Greek yoghurt. Brand’s life is replete, at least for today.
The Russell Brand DVD Scandalous — Live at the O2 is out on November 9
Russell Brand: Seeking salvation
His amazing sexual prowess, his obsession with Helen Mirren, his recovery from addiction, his radio shame — Russell Brand confesses all to Chrissy Iley. Then he tells her he’s seeking redemption. Will we forgive him?
Sunday Times
1st November 2009[/align]
Russell Brand’s handsome assistant, Tom, is there to meet me in the lobby of a fancy hotel in Paris, telling me Brand will be about 20 minutes late. I don’t want to wait as I could be shopping, and anyway I hate waiting. So to disperse any potential mood I shop — demonically. In 20 minutes I buy very expensive black shoes — platform, peep-toe — and a moss-green top from Vanessa Bruno.
I feel better. I think not about Brand’s lateness but how my life will be transformed by shoes that are both incredibly high and incredibly comfortable. Now Brand is there waiting. A polite kiss on the cheek hello. Perched by him is a plate of mixed berries and an espresso. He orders some for me. Neither of us speaks French and both of us are scowled at.
He notices the purchases — it takes an addict to spot an addict. “The object of addiction is almost irrelevant. It’s just the condition itself. Drugs and alcohol might be the easiest way. As I’ve written in my book, I think heroin is a fantastic drug; all of us have this sense of yearning and longing. I need this woman, this car, or those shoes. If I have them it’s all going to be okay.”
Brand asks to see the shoes. He has looked at his own addictions with such scrutiny he’s now able to look at other people; he looks at me and the shoes as if he’s seeing a brain scan with all the neural pathways flashing. He started off in his early teens with bulimia, then alcohol, then drugs, then sex; for a while each worked as a salvation that eventually turned on itself and destroyed a piece of him.
From his book My Booky Wook you get the impression that his overriding addiction was getting famous and that he could channel all the other addictions away if only he could get worldwide fame — being loved by many obviously being so much easier than being loved by one.
The film Forgetting Sarah Marshall won him fame in America, so much so that his character in it, the rock star Aldous Snow, has had his own film written for him. It is called Get Him to the Greek, the Greek being a famous venue in LA. He’s also filmed a documentary about happiness with Oliver Stone, and is soon to begin filming Arthur, reprising the Dudley Moore role.
Now — today anyway — he is not too bothered about being famous. As it happens, fame was not his salvation: it made a lot of people not like him and others chase him obsessively. Fame made him a tabloid entity and he hated that.
He’s questioning all his old obsessions. He hasn’t eaten chocolate for ages. I tell him I love the comfort of chocolate. “Yes, but there’s a regret afterwards. I always think of that Damien Hirst title, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living. The impossibility of post-chocolate in the mind of the pre-chocolate. I am not going to run then eat a Twix — all that stupid running just for one Twix. As I am with chocolate, I am with everything. It’s better to not do it at all, because if I begin I’ll go as far as I can.”
Brand believes he is putting distance between himself and addiction. “I’m living in a disciplined way, do lots of yoga, exercise and transcendental meditation. It’s not half good. They give you a mantra… You feel attuned to a consciousness that is beyond your identity and beyond life.”
So now that fame is no longer his salvation, is he less driven? “I’m less neurotic and I’m easier to work with. When one is addicted one becomes accustomed to a certain amount of undulation in life. In the past I courted chaos; not a deliberate courtship, just inadvertently. I feel happier, and I don’t feel I need that same kind of attention.”
He offers to share his berries as mine haven’t arrived. “I’m becoming spiritually idealistic. We are physical beings while we have access to the divine and,” he says, not missing a beat, “I still love these boots.” He is wearing pale blue-grey Chelsea boots in suede. “They are comfortable in spite of being stylish. If I lost them I’d be really pissed off. I’m not ready to let them go.” Slightly bewildered, I say he doesn’t have to. “But at some point, Chrissy, and this is my concern. I don’t want to be chained to these ideas. I don’t want to be chained to wanting fame.”
The previous night Brand went to the Galliano show with his new girlfriend, the quirky pop star Katy Perry, who he met at this year’s Video Music Awards (VMA), and whose most famous hit is the attention-grabbingly-titled I Kissed a Girl. The Galliano show seems to have symbolised aesthetic beauty and excessive theatricality, just the kind of stuff you would have thought Brand loved. “Glorious on one level. An incredible spectacle. But on another level I thought the fact that this fashion show exists on our planet during the current ecological and economical troubles, it’s like visiting someone with cancer and finding them having a facelift. Stop the madness.”
Brand himself doesn’t seem mad. He seems vulnerable but accepting of his vulnerability. Therein lies his strength. He is tall, toned and seems happy in his yoga body. His hair is so clean and shiny it could be in a L’Oréal ad. His face has stubble, but not the full beard of a few months ago. He is very handsome, in a young-George-Best-performing-in-a-goth-rock-band kind of way. I wonder if the chubby teenager still lurks inside. He is polite and attentive. In his book he describes himself as “feminised yet hysterically heterosexual”. That makes him a winner with women. He likes women. They too have played a part in his salvation, but it seems he’s had enough. For now he’d like to try monogamy. Everything is “one day at a time”. That’s a mantra he repeats. Maybe he just knows himself or just knows life, that nobody can really make promises.
Brand grew up in Grays, Essex, never feeling he fitted in. He was an only child. “My personality was defined by solitude. A lot less now, but especially when I was a drug addict. I was always on my own, sat right up to the telly. I’m only now making friends with people. I’m only really happy when I’m performing. I’m like Judy Garland.” A performance as Fat Sam in Bugsy Malone when he was at school seems to have been an epiphany. “When I performed I thought, ‘Where’s the furthest that this can go?’ ”
His father left when he was a baby and they have had a hot-and-cold relationship ever since. His mother, who he adores, has survived cancer three times: uterine, breast and lymph. The last bout was when he was 17. He is now 34. “A lifetime away.” Brand is childlike and wise; people always come to him with their relationship problems — and he turns to Noel Gallagher with his. Gallagher, Oscar Wilde and Morrissey are the unlikely triumvirate of heroes he says saved him. He called his cat Morrissey.
He is sad about the cat just now. He came back to London after filming in the US and has so far been unable to reconcile their relationship. “He just uses the house as a place to get food. He comes in the middle of the night like a truculent teen. In an attempt to win him back, I put a trail of Madagascan prawns, starting with one by the cat flap, on espresso saucers leading up to my bedroom, like some ghastly Grimm fairy-tale hell for felines. The next day they were still there, tragic reminders of a broken-down relationship. It might as well have been an affidavit on the stairs. I feel sad about it because it was my most successful relationship with an animal… It was straightforward: I love that cat and he loves me. But there must have been a moment where he thought, ‘He’s not coming back, fuck it then.’ ”
My berries still haven’t arrived. Both Brand and I are completely ineffectual in making the waitress do what we want. He is extremely polite, and that doesn’t seem to work. Apart from in hotel lobbies, in most of the rest of his life he is confrontational.
The night before we met I watched his new DVD, Scandalous, which confronts the Sachsgate scandal (he calls if Manuelgate). The DVD starts with news footage describing Jonathan Ross’s and Brand’s behaviour as offensive. Sachsgate’s reverberations mean that the BBC is scared of its own shadow. Programming post-Sachsgate is entirely different from pre-Sachsgate. In all this enormity it is easy to lose sight of what actually happened. Andrew Sachs, then 78, who played Manuel in Fawlty Towers, had been booked to do a telephone interview on Brand’s Radio 2 show. When he failed to answer, Brand left a string of messages on his home voicemail. The BBC Trust later called this “a deplorable intrusion”. In the background is Jonathan Ross calling out, “He f***ed your granddaughter” (23-year-old Georgina Baillie, a dancer with a burlesque outfit called Satanic Sluts). This was in October 2008, and people still talk about it.
Brand and Ross say they didn’t know it hadn’t been edited out. The Radio 2 controller, Lesley Douglas, was forced to resign. Brand resigned, and Ross was suspended for 12 weeks without pay. Brand says: “I felt I didn’t have any choice but to resign. I thought, ‘I don’t have to do that radio show, I’m only doing it for a laugh and it’s become not a laugh.’ And then it was a relief.”
In his stand-up show Brand says it wasn’t as if he were Harold Shipman or Fred West. “There was no menace. Even a prank implies some kind of menace. I just did it and it escalated. ‘Let’s leave a message. Oh, let’s leave another message apologising for the message.’ It was just daftness. I read about the anger and vitriol, and it felt alien to me. I thought, ‘What are they talking about?’”
He has a history of intemperate behaviour. As a “befuddled lad”, Brand made a film with the BNP protégé Mark Collett. But of the BNP leader Nick Griffin’s recent appearance on Question Time, he said: “The more people who witness him equivocate on myopic loathing, the better.”
Around the time of Sachsgate, Brand was hosting an MTV awards show in America where he called George W Bush “a retarded cowboy fella” and discussed the Jonas Brothers wearing promise rings to symbolise their virginity as being like Superman taking the bus. He was more upset about America’s reaction to that because he thought his film-star dreams were over. But it turned out to be the most successful Video Music Awards for a decade and did nothing to impede his film career. It may even have helped.
Googling himself was another addiction that became satiated because everything he read was horrible. “It’s the most unrewarding, pointless activity, googling yourself. I’m doing a lot better. It’s like picking a scab. I have gone a few weeks without looking at it and it divorces you from the slurry of casual vindictiveness.”
He survived it because worse things have happened to him. Like his mum having cancer. How did he confront that? “I don’t know that I did the first two times. I confronted it the third time by leaving home. I thought, ‘She’s going to die, so I’m going.’ It’s very strange to have the closeness with my mum and confront the idea, the heartbreak, of losing her.”
How has your relationship with your mother affected your relationships with women?
“I’m an only child of a single mother — it probably meant that I’m demanding and have high expectations of women. I look for salvation and redemption, to be utterly embraced.”
Did you get that from your mother?
“Probably. Yes.” So, looking for redemption again, you had to look for lots of different women? “I don’t think you can find it in another human being. It’s a ridiculous, romantic and tragic idea that there’s someone who’s going to save you, that we need our own personal Jesus. Salvation comes from within.”
Do you think you were looking for salvation through sex? He smiles, a nostalgic smile.
“On the one hand, it’s bloody good fun. On the other I have addictive tendencies. And on another it’s a biological imperative. One of the keys to understanding life is the ability to hold opposing thoughts simultaneously, to never have one ideology that answers your questions.”
Are you saying that if sex saves you it also destroys you? “Well, there you go. I’ve stopped all that. One day at a time. I’m feeling a lot better. It’s nice not to be chained to something.”
Is that how it felt, being chained? “Sort of. If you are born in a tin helmet you barely notice the parameter, but once it’s been removed and you relax… Also, once somebody is in the sphere of your domination they can no longer be a channel of salvation. If a woman is under your spell, how is she going to be the one who saves you?
“When Britney Spears was on the VMAs, between takes, hair and make-up people would come over. We didn’t need hair or make-up, it was just like monkeys comforting us, grooming us in a primal way, and I think a lot of my liaisons were just like that, grooming… I am trying not to be glib about it. It’s not like there’s been an endless carousel of strippers and lap dancers, but there have been times when I have been in the company of prostitutes and they were the most wonderful women in the world.”
Do you think monogamy is possible?
“It is if you want it, and value something.”
You have said you were very good at sex, is that why you wanted to have it a lot, to be validated?
“Especially because I’m not good at any sport. It’s a pity there’s not some forum where you can do it publicly.”
How do you test being good at it?
“A requiem of screams.”
How do you know it’s real?
“There’s eye-rolling ecstasy, the bacchanalian loss of self where they’re ready to tear up the trees, the grapes are being ripped from the vines, animals are being strewn across the forest. I think the roots of misogyny are in the unity women have with universal forces when they come. Men go, ‘What are they doing?’ They become goddesses with oceanic pleasure that looks like it may never end and could devour us.”
Are you scared of the orgasm? “I was a bit scared of them, when I was younger.
It’s a bit frightening, this transformative quality, an orgasm in women. I imagine that it looks better than the miserable squirt men issue. It seems different, though, when there’s an emotional element — transcendent.”
I’m wondering if this transcendence has been recently observed in his shiny new relationship with Katy Perry. Happy to rip layers off himself and talk about anything, Brand suddenly doesn’t want to say much. “She’s lovely and I don’t want her to read anything about herself. The other day a journalist from a tabloid in a ludicrous fedora said to me, ‘Russell, are you in love with Katy?’ And I said, ‘You look like a character from a Graham Greene novel. I think I’m in love with you.’ I said that to defuse the situation. But what do they print? They print, ‘I think I am in love.’ ”
Of course since they met, a few weeks before my meeting with Brand, lots has been written about them. It’s hard to guess who is more smitten, who is the chaser and who is the chased. Her parents are churchy, both ministers. Perry is cattish in interviews, arch, motor-mouthed, conflicted, given to hyperbole. If they had met earlier, things might have been different. He concurs: “I am living in a different way at the moment. Regardless of what happens in my current situation, I am unlikely to be satisfied with the calamitous promiscuity of the preceding five or six years.” It’s as if he’s afraid to think long-term. It’s the teachings of all the recovery programmes not to. “I still dream about drugs but I’m never allowed drugs in the dream. I dream of smoking, drinking, former decadence, but I always wake before I get what I want.”
I wonder if he dreams the drug dream about women. He doesn’t want to answer, but later on we talk about him being in The Tempest with Helen Mirren. He has talked before about her overripe sexuality and how he fancies her. She gave him a book.
“She wrote in it, ‘Russell, to a genius from a mere mortal, love Helen.’ So I look at it sometimes when I’m wracked with doubt.” About your genius? “No, I just w**k over it. Already the genius page is stuck together. I squandered it on day one as soon as I saw it.”
It strikes me that he made a documentary with Oliver Stone about happiness because it is still what he is looking for. They filmed it at Louisiana State Penitentiary.
“It’s this beautiful Louisiana countryside — somehow bleak when you can feel the vibrating souls of the 5,200 inmates, 92% of whom will die in there. The governor is a Southern Baptist and if you’re in Louisiana State Penitentiary, you’d better bring a Bible. The prisoners I was exposed to had accepted Christianity and found happiness through that.”
I wonder if Brand’s stand-up self is an exaggerated version of himself or a different persona. “I wouldn’t behave the same with my mother as with a woman I wanted to seduce. I think one modulates one’s behaviour according to circumstance.” Despite Brand the soon-to-be-movie-star persona, Brand the stand-up is a hard act to follow because it is the place where he is most himself. “There isn’t a filter, and it’s easier to achieve success than it is through acting.” By this he means nobody else is making the decisions, he is not waiting for the call back. He is just being himself and unstoppable.
In real life though?
“I protect myself emotionally where possible. Last year at the VMAs there were death threats, so obviously this year when I did the VMAs it was deliberately designed to not cause anyone any bother, but be funny and confident. There was a very deliberate removal of self-destruction. I didn’t take the risks I’d have taken in the past.”
His hair isn’t backcombed, he is wearing no dangly jewellery. It’s a metaphor. There is less clutter, more purity, more control, lots of yoga. In fact, yoga is about to happen. We take a break while he goes to exercise. When he returns he’s still worrying about the fashion show last night.
“Girls might be subjected to more pressure on how they look. The fashion industry makes an elite few feel better about themselves and most people feel worse about themselves. It makes them bulimic and anorexic. It’s stimulating a desire that could never be fulfilled. It’s decoration on a dreadful wedding cake at a marriage between us and the demise of the planet. The doubts I’m currently confronting is that I’m part of this as long as I’m attending one of those events. I’m endorsing those ideas.”
Perhaps this rankles particularly because he himself was aspiring towards a role model that didn’t exist when he was a bulimic. “I wanted to feel thin and gorgeous. My dad was a good footballer, my stepdad was a good footballer. The culture was defined at my school by being good at football or fighting, and if you were chubby and feminine doing daft voices, you don’t realise until you encounter the Smiths or Oscar Wilde that it is cool to be different and not to fit in.”
Yesterday he went to Père Lachaise, to Oscar Wilde’s tomb. “Littered with kisses, it is — the pilgrimage of the dispossessed that he has inspired to go to that place. I was strange, awkward and peculiar and I would listen to the Smiths for the first time and think it’s the best thing in the world. Oscar begat Morrissey.”
The bulimia, though, was about wanting to fit in. “I was eating all those Penguins. I couldn’t leave them. Blue followed yellow followed green. An army of Penguins, marching into my mouth and out again. They didn’t stay long. Terrible state they were in. They went in all proud and came out bewildered, like Vietnam vets.”
When did you get confident? “It’s an ongoing process. I fluctuate in confidence and doubt, but probably as soon as I got out of my podgy teens and into drama school in my early twenties I did feel there were things that I was good at.”
I leave Paris on Eurostar and Brand is doing his yoga. Tabloids report more on the Brand/Perry love nest in the fancy hotel. We meet again the next day at the Sunday Times Magazine photoshoot in north London. He is in skinny jeans and a loose-knit mohair jumper. He tells me his nipples are pointing out. He looks groomed and handsome and quiet.
After our meeting he must talk with LA about Arthur. He says it’s a beautiful script. Some bits are from the original. “Arthur is still an alcoholic billionaire playboy and I’ll be getting a bit of a haircut for that.” Are you worried about that? “You have to move on. I have dreams of my hair being short and I wake up in a Samson-like panic, but I think I’m ready for transformation.”
The Liza Minnelli role has yet to be cast. “I figure Minnelli was a kind of kookie pop star then, so we’d have to look at the kookie female pop stars of the current age.” He’s laughing a little bashfully. You mean you want Katy Perry to play it? He doesn’t answer, but he blushes. “Am I blushing?” His silky, olivy skin looks a little burnt around the cheeks, and we move on to talking about prospective directors for Arthur and how he met Baz Luhrmann in a lift and talked to David Lynch about transcendental meditation.
Which one of his parents is he more like?
“Good combination of both. My mum is sensitive and tender, and my dad is very funny.”
How is your relationship with your dad?
“It hasn’t always been an easy relationship, but I want to be loving and generous. I know he is very proud of me, but we’re sort of in different places. It might take a while.”
When Brand was growing up his father was a fluctuating presence. They bonded when he was 16 and his father took him on a holiday to the Far East and they ended up picking prostitutes in Thailand. It seems an extreme way to bond. When you saw him last were you on good terms? “No, it was a difficult, but it’s something I could mend. I’d like to mend it.” He talks about his father with love but I’m not sure he really knows him.
His phone rings and he’s asking after a little boy. “I love that little boy. He’s one of the loves of my life, a gorgeous child.
I knew his parents before he was born and now he’s six. Brilliant, challenging, obnoxious. The last time I saw him I was at his house at bedtime. I was talking to him and he was absent-mindedly playing with my hair. It was precious.”
So you’re feeling broody? “I am, actually. It’s seven years since I took drugs. I’ve made a film. I don’t think I have to fight so much. I’ve grown weary of the carousel.” He’s also stopped working so compulsively. “I am more into having jaunts. It’s been a while since I’ve done terrible things like shoplifted or threw a phone…” He’s almost doing okay. Only the fact that the cat won’t talk to him is a source of unresolved pain. He is really upset about it and hopes he might have returned when he gets home. The next day I get a message: Morrissey was lured back with some Greek yoghurt. Brand’s life is replete, at least for today.
The Russell Brand DVD Scandalous — Live at the O2 is out on November 9
Last edited by faceless on Tue Jan 27, 2015 3:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
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'The squad has turned into a Caligulan sex fiasco'
Russell Brand writes for the News of the World on footie-sex, fighting and the Cup
By Russell Brand,
28/03/2010[/align]
LIKE most people, when I pop to the lavvy during a football match something important happens. I missed Gazza's yellow card against Germany in 1990 because I was in the loo. Michael Owen's goal against Argentina in 98 - I was unwell that year and by the time Beckham scored a penalty against Argentina in 2002 I had quite a serious drug problem and never really left the toilet.
So now that I've been away from home for a few months, living with my future wife and squinting at football on the internet, I shouldn't be surprised that the National game has gone berserk.
Oddly, I suspect that my absence has been an influence, in fact I feel like that bloke in Gremlins who entrusted the lad with the Mogwai with very simple, if mysterious, instructions only for bedlam to be unleashed when they were ignored.
Not that I offered the FA or the Premiership any guidelines before I departed. I didn't say for example "Keep Wayne Bridge's ex missus well away from Stamford Bridge" or "You might wanna confiscate Ashley Cole's phone" or "Don't feed Peter Crouch after midnight." But after all the chaos that's ensued I wish I had.
Not that Crouch has done anything weird yet, but I've a hunch that he is going to self subdivide into a tribe of malevolent Goblins and wreak havoc on a small American town any minute now.
Which in my view would be no more peculiar than Manchester City's Roberto Mancini's preppy sideline assault on grizzled Everton boss Davis Moyes. In history few men with great hair have been decent fighters and Mancini's glorious silver summit looks like it could manage City without him and still find time to pick up chicks on it's Vespa at the Trevi fountain. David Moyes on the other hand, comports himself as if he's always on the precipice of nutting someone.
If I was gonna kick off against a premiership manager it would not be Moyes - he looks like a biter, plus he's Iggy Pop wiry and them fellas can normally pummel ribs with whippety abandon.
I suppose Mancini, who along with Arsene Wenger, has too many letters of the side he manages in his name, is new to British football and probably hasn't sized up who it's wise to have a crack at yet, like a new kid at school trying to make a rep for himself. Yes, I was once that new kid and foolishly elected to establish myself by "offering out" Jeff Dawkins, who it transpired, was a man-child warlord for whom fighting was a kind of hobby, like Subbuteo but without being able to glue the broken legs back together. Mancini also ought to have considered removing his scarf before embarking on his boffin squabble, which I notice he'd tied in a Brit-Pop Chris Evans style, resembling a prefect afraid to leave Sixth Form and thus loitering in quads into his late forties.
Wenger with his intellectual continental airs and graces (by which I mean glasses) would actually be a more befitting opponent if Mancini does want a row, unless he's one of those blokes who looks a bit nerdy but then is surprisingly good at martial arts - like Spiderman.
What is more surprising than the fracas itself (and my presumed ability to induce the absurd bout by being in America) is the ridiculous punishment meted out by the officials at the match. "Gentleman! Stop fighting! You're grown men and you're behaving like schoolboys! Now go and wait in the changing rooms. When you're ready to apologise you can come back out and play."
I bet Moyes gave Mancini a right kicking in the tunnel: that scarf wrenched tight around his perfumed neck till his face was as red as Moyes' is when relaxed. And none of this would've happened if I'd been watching - just like Gazza's yellow card.
I know it's daft to believe in these superstitions: sods law (my Dad calls it c**ts law, he loves swearing), knocking on wood, and toilet rituals but how else are we to cope with the chaos in the world around us generally and football specifically?
My team, West Ham, on current evidence seem like they would benefit from crossed fingers and lucky charms even if that were in the form of some novelty breakfast cereal and severed arthritic digits as the Championship plummet has begun at an eerily inconvenient time.
New chairman David Sullivan wrote an open letter to Hammers fans on Wednesday morning in spite of admitting "not having slept." Never write anything that can be broadly read when exhausted. I'm writing this while buzzing on coffee and morning glory, when I write things late at night, mostly love-letters, I'm always incredibly relieved to see them on my pillow in the morning if I don't send them. They're always desperate and tear-stained (or worse) and are better off in my possession than tormenting their intended recipient.
The best thing about getting married is that now I only have one person to write to and we live together: in the past there were a lot of people to correspond with - I had to resort to spamming. I suppose I could've done a Sullivan-style open letter "I was disgusted by last night's performance against Wolves" is a direct quote from Sullivan's rant and directly applicable to a scenario I became involved in after once getting locked up after hours in London Zoo. The letter doesn't cover all of the indiscretions committed that drunken night though, I'll have to learn sign language to apologise to that chimp. Again, thank God I'm getting married.
It seems marital and conjugal relationships are destined to have an impact on England's success in the South African World Cup this summer. Which is a pity because it seemed that when I left the shores of Albion all was well with the forthcoming campaign. The moment my back was turned and I embraced a life of cherished monogamy the England squad became a Caligulan sex fiasco.
Flirty texts, affairs and spurned handshakes, that's no way to lure back the Jules Rimet to Blighty. Jules Rimet actually sounds like the sort of kinky move that Wayne Bridge's ex, Vanessa Perroncel might enact.
I for one hope that Wayne Bridge changes his mind and joins the squad. The World Cup is once every four years, during that cycle a half-decent Premiership player could go through nine marriages.
Sadly David Beckham won't be playing at the tournament due to his Achilles injury. It's a bit ironic that his Achilles heel turned out to be his Achilles heel, we should've seen that coming. That's like discovering that Chernobyl was caused by someone literally throwing a spanner in the works.
I don't know if Beckham should accept FIFA's offer to "Play some part in the opening ceremony". The opening ceremony is always rubbish, usually some combination of releasing balloons, spelling out words by getting people to hold bits of coloured paper above their heads or worst of all "Majorettes". I can't see David Beckham wanting to be involved in that: "David would you mind holding this purple card above your head? It dots the I in the 'Kick Racism Out Of Soccer' sign. No? Well could you twirl this baton? What do you mean you'll drop your crutches?"
If something interesting does happen you can rest assured that I'll miss it, although now that I'm a "fiancé" and happily engaged if I'm in the loo it won't be for a fix or a threesome, I'll be checking that I put the seat down.
If I wipe it as well and maybe arrange a little dish of Potpourri it might buy us enough time for England to win the World Cup.
'The squad has turned into a Caligulan sex fiasco'
Russell Brand writes for the News of the World on footie-sex, fighting and the Cup
By Russell Brand,
28/03/2010[/align]
LIKE most people, when I pop to the lavvy during a football match something important happens. I missed Gazza's yellow card against Germany in 1990 because I was in the loo. Michael Owen's goal against Argentina in 98 - I was unwell that year and by the time Beckham scored a penalty against Argentina in 2002 I had quite a serious drug problem and never really left the toilet.
So now that I've been away from home for a few months, living with my future wife and squinting at football on the internet, I shouldn't be surprised that the National game has gone berserk.
Oddly, I suspect that my absence has been an influence, in fact I feel like that bloke in Gremlins who entrusted the lad with the Mogwai with very simple, if mysterious, instructions only for bedlam to be unleashed when they were ignored.
Not that I offered the FA or the Premiership any guidelines before I departed. I didn't say for example "Keep Wayne Bridge's ex missus well away from Stamford Bridge" or "You might wanna confiscate Ashley Cole's phone" or "Don't feed Peter Crouch after midnight." But after all the chaos that's ensued I wish I had.
Not that Crouch has done anything weird yet, but I've a hunch that he is going to self subdivide into a tribe of malevolent Goblins and wreak havoc on a small American town any minute now.
Which in my view would be no more peculiar than Manchester City's Roberto Mancini's preppy sideline assault on grizzled Everton boss Davis Moyes. In history few men with great hair have been decent fighters and Mancini's glorious silver summit looks like it could manage City without him and still find time to pick up chicks on it's Vespa at the Trevi fountain. David Moyes on the other hand, comports himself as if he's always on the precipice of nutting someone.
If I was gonna kick off against a premiership manager it would not be Moyes - he looks like a biter, plus he's Iggy Pop wiry and them fellas can normally pummel ribs with whippety abandon.
I suppose Mancini, who along with Arsene Wenger, has too many letters of the side he manages in his name, is new to British football and probably hasn't sized up who it's wise to have a crack at yet, like a new kid at school trying to make a rep for himself. Yes, I was once that new kid and foolishly elected to establish myself by "offering out" Jeff Dawkins, who it transpired, was a man-child warlord for whom fighting was a kind of hobby, like Subbuteo but without being able to glue the broken legs back together. Mancini also ought to have considered removing his scarf before embarking on his boffin squabble, which I notice he'd tied in a Brit-Pop Chris Evans style, resembling a prefect afraid to leave Sixth Form and thus loitering in quads into his late forties.
Wenger with his intellectual continental airs and graces (by which I mean glasses) would actually be a more befitting opponent if Mancini does want a row, unless he's one of those blokes who looks a bit nerdy but then is surprisingly good at martial arts - like Spiderman.
What is more surprising than the fracas itself (and my presumed ability to induce the absurd bout by being in America) is the ridiculous punishment meted out by the officials at the match. "Gentleman! Stop fighting! You're grown men and you're behaving like schoolboys! Now go and wait in the changing rooms. When you're ready to apologise you can come back out and play."
I bet Moyes gave Mancini a right kicking in the tunnel: that scarf wrenched tight around his perfumed neck till his face was as red as Moyes' is when relaxed. And none of this would've happened if I'd been watching - just like Gazza's yellow card.
I know it's daft to believe in these superstitions: sods law (my Dad calls it c**ts law, he loves swearing), knocking on wood, and toilet rituals but how else are we to cope with the chaos in the world around us generally and football specifically?
My team, West Ham, on current evidence seem like they would benefit from crossed fingers and lucky charms even if that were in the form of some novelty breakfast cereal and severed arthritic digits as the Championship plummet has begun at an eerily inconvenient time.
New chairman David Sullivan wrote an open letter to Hammers fans on Wednesday morning in spite of admitting "not having slept." Never write anything that can be broadly read when exhausted. I'm writing this while buzzing on coffee and morning glory, when I write things late at night, mostly love-letters, I'm always incredibly relieved to see them on my pillow in the morning if I don't send them. They're always desperate and tear-stained (or worse) and are better off in my possession than tormenting their intended recipient.
The best thing about getting married is that now I only have one person to write to and we live together: in the past there were a lot of people to correspond with - I had to resort to spamming. I suppose I could've done a Sullivan-style open letter "I was disgusted by last night's performance against Wolves" is a direct quote from Sullivan's rant and directly applicable to a scenario I became involved in after once getting locked up after hours in London Zoo. The letter doesn't cover all of the indiscretions committed that drunken night though, I'll have to learn sign language to apologise to that chimp. Again, thank God I'm getting married.
It seems marital and conjugal relationships are destined to have an impact on England's success in the South African World Cup this summer. Which is a pity because it seemed that when I left the shores of Albion all was well with the forthcoming campaign. The moment my back was turned and I embraced a life of cherished monogamy the England squad became a Caligulan sex fiasco.
Flirty texts, affairs and spurned handshakes, that's no way to lure back the Jules Rimet to Blighty. Jules Rimet actually sounds like the sort of kinky move that Wayne Bridge's ex, Vanessa Perroncel might enact.
I for one hope that Wayne Bridge changes his mind and joins the squad. The World Cup is once every four years, during that cycle a half-decent Premiership player could go through nine marriages.
Sadly David Beckham won't be playing at the tournament due to his Achilles injury. It's a bit ironic that his Achilles heel turned out to be his Achilles heel, we should've seen that coming. That's like discovering that Chernobyl was caused by someone literally throwing a spanner in the works.
I don't know if Beckham should accept FIFA's offer to "Play some part in the opening ceremony". The opening ceremony is always rubbish, usually some combination of releasing balloons, spelling out words by getting people to hold bits of coloured paper above their heads or worst of all "Majorettes". I can't see David Beckham wanting to be involved in that: "David would you mind holding this purple card above your head? It dots the I in the 'Kick Racism Out Of Soccer' sign. No? Well could you twirl this baton? What do you mean you'll drop your crutches?"
If something interesting does happen you can rest assured that I'll miss it, although now that I'm a "fiancé" and happily engaged if I'm in the loo it won't be for a fix or a threesome, I'll be checking that I put the seat down.
If I wipe it as well and maybe arrange a little dish of Potpourri it might buy us enough time for England to win the World Cup.
[align=center]
Let flops die of drugs
16th April 2010[/align]
OUTSPOKEN RUSSELL BRAND has called for "teenybopper" pop stars to take heroin - so some of them DIE. The comic said the idea would "weed out" those who did not have true talent and save the industry.
Brand, 35, who has battled drugs himself, said: "The hit parade would look very different. We'd be spared their awful music. It's Darwinian, the law of natural selection." Brand told Rolling Stone magazine he mostly listens to music "by the dead and the dying".
Last night anti-drug campaigners called his comments "idiocy".
-------------------
I'm more offended that he's basically played on Bill Hicks bit over this!
Let flops die of drugs
16th April 2010[/align]
OUTSPOKEN RUSSELL BRAND has called for "teenybopper" pop stars to take heroin - so some of them DIE. The comic said the idea would "weed out" those who did not have true talent and save the industry.
Brand, 35, who has battled drugs himself, said: "The hit parade would look very different. We'd be spared their awful music. It's Darwinian, the law of natural selection." Brand told Rolling Stone magazine he mostly listens to music "by the dead and the dying".
Last night anti-drug campaigners called his comments "idiocy".
-------------------
I'm more offended that he's basically played on Bill Hicks bit over this!
[align=center]
Russell Brand Talks Sex, Barbies and George W. Bush in Playboy
Crude comedian demonstrates his no-holds-barred schtick for men's magazine.
By Hollie McKay
FOXNews.com[/align]
It’s no secret that English comedian Russell Brand is well, pretty promiscuous, but let’s just hope his fiancé Katy Perry really knows what’s she in for. After all, Brand still classifies the time his father bought him a prostitute in Hong Kong when he was just 16 as one of the most “exciting” moments in his life.
“I can still recall everything about that night—the women in their high heels clinking across the floor and the smell of perfume and booze. I’ve had a strange attraction to prostitutes ever since,” Brand told the new issue of “Playboy” magazine, obtained exclusively by Pop Tarts. “I just liked hanging out with them and talking to them. Prostitutes are some of the most fascinating women I've met in the world.”
However, the “reformed” sex rehabber feels pretty confident that he’s overcome his addiction and no longer has that strong appetite for group sex.
“When I was at my most promiscuous, I was like a charging locomotive…I had a team of experts who took care of finding women for me. They had very specific instructions. It was as if I was talking to a wine steward. ‘I’m looking for something French, a bit fruity, smells of oak.’ I’ve reached a point in my life where I understand empirically that this is not the answer. When you sleep with loads of women, it becomes a bit pointless and futile."
As you may have noticed, Brand is definitely missing the self-censorship gene. His raw sense of humor came under fire in 2008 when he hosted the MTV Video Music Awards and took several digs at the Jonas Bros and their “purity rings.”
“I’m not morally opposed to the idea of sexual abstinence. It’s just not practical for me; because I’ve got to have sex…It’s the public nature of it that I find interesting. Michel Foucault, the poststructuralist French philosopher, said that in Victorian society, the preeminence and celebration of chastity was in fact the mirror of hedonism,” Brand explained. “In other words, if you’re constantly drawing attention to your abstinence from sex, you’re also drawing attention to sex. With somebody like Mick Jagger, it’s all about sex, sex, sex. But with the Jonas Brothers, it’s no sex, no sex, no sex. You see what I mean? The emphasis is still on sex.”
When he wasn’t making fun of virginity during the show, Brand was making fun of then-President George W. Bush, referring to him as “a retarded cowboy fella” – which he says sparked an array of death threats.
“It was meant as a compliment. I wasn’t remarking on Bush’s mental retardation but the fact that Americans are so forward thinking they wouldn’t object to putting a man with his limited intellectual capabilities into political office. It’s quite a compliment that you let Bush run things for as long as you did. In my country he wouldn’t have been trusted with a pair of scissors,” Brand said, adding he was “surprised” that his agency forwarded along the many death threats toward him.
And just in case you weren’t already charmed off your pants by the “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” star, it turns out he also stuck a Barbie Doll where the sun doesn't shine during a stand-up routine in London to protest consumerism.
“I chose the Barbie doll because it represents the oppression of women, the stereotype of femininity, the commercialization of sexuality, blah blah blah. But what I learned from the experience, at least in hindsight, is that if you’re going to make a satirical point involving putting things in your rectum, be selective,” he added. “Don’t take requests from the audience.”
You can read the full "20Q" interview in the June issue of Playboy, on stands and online May 14.
----------------------
Fox News reporting on Russell Brand... and the best they can do is suggest that his fiance doesn't know who he is and that he's crude. On that basis I'd imagine Fox journalists are all paragons of virtue if it weren't for the fact they're Fox journalists.
Russell Brand Talks Sex, Barbies and George W. Bush in Playboy
Crude comedian demonstrates his no-holds-barred schtick for men's magazine.
By Hollie McKay
FOXNews.com[/align]
It’s no secret that English comedian Russell Brand is well, pretty promiscuous, but let’s just hope his fiancé Katy Perry really knows what’s she in for. After all, Brand still classifies the time his father bought him a prostitute in Hong Kong when he was just 16 as one of the most “exciting” moments in his life.
“I can still recall everything about that night—the women in their high heels clinking across the floor and the smell of perfume and booze. I’ve had a strange attraction to prostitutes ever since,” Brand told the new issue of “Playboy” magazine, obtained exclusively by Pop Tarts. “I just liked hanging out with them and talking to them. Prostitutes are some of the most fascinating women I've met in the world.”
However, the “reformed” sex rehabber feels pretty confident that he’s overcome his addiction and no longer has that strong appetite for group sex.
“When I was at my most promiscuous, I was like a charging locomotive…I had a team of experts who took care of finding women for me. They had very specific instructions. It was as if I was talking to a wine steward. ‘I’m looking for something French, a bit fruity, smells of oak.’ I’ve reached a point in my life where I understand empirically that this is not the answer. When you sleep with loads of women, it becomes a bit pointless and futile."
As you may have noticed, Brand is definitely missing the self-censorship gene. His raw sense of humor came under fire in 2008 when he hosted the MTV Video Music Awards and took several digs at the Jonas Bros and their “purity rings.”
“I’m not morally opposed to the idea of sexual abstinence. It’s just not practical for me; because I’ve got to have sex…It’s the public nature of it that I find interesting. Michel Foucault, the poststructuralist French philosopher, said that in Victorian society, the preeminence and celebration of chastity was in fact the mirror of hedonism,” Brand explained. “In other words, if you’re constantly drawing attention to your abstinence from sex, you’re also drawing attention to sex. With somebody like Mick Jagger, it’s all about sex, sex, sex. But with the Jonas Brothers, it’s no sex, no sex, no sex. You see what I mean? The emphasis is still on sex.”
When he wasn’t making fun of virginity during the show, Brand was making fun of then-President George W. Bush, referring to him as “a retarded cowboy fella” – which he says sparked an array of death threats.
“It was meant as a compliment. I wasn’t remarking on Bush’s mental retardation but the fact that Americans are so forward thinking they wouldn’t object to putting a man with his limited intellectual capabilities into political office. It’s quite a compliment that you let Bush run things for as long as you did. In my country he wouldn’t have been trusted with a pair of scissors,” Brand said, adding he was “surprised” that his agency forwarded along the many death threats toward him.
And just in case you weren’t already charmed off your pants by the “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” star, it turns out he also stuck a Barbie Doll where the sun doesn't shine during a stand-up routine in London to protest consumerism.
“I chose the Barbie doll because it represents the oppression of women, the stereotype of femininity, the commercialization of sexuality, blah blah blah. But what I learned from the experience, at least in hindsight, is that if you’re going to make a satirical point involving putting things in your rectum, be selective,” he added. “Don’t take requests from the audience.”
You can read the full "20Q" interview in the June issue of Playboy, on stands and online May 14.
----------------------
Fox News reporting on Russell Brand... and the best they can do is suggest that his fiance doesn't know who he is and that he's crude. On that basis I'd imagine Fox journalists are all paragons of virtue if it weren't for the fact they're Fox journalists.
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[align=center]
Photograph: Nick Ballon for the Guardian
Russell Brand: This charming man
He's the arch seducer who is settling down; the BBC renegade who is hot property in Hollywood. Everyone loves Russell Brand – but not half as much as he loves himself
Emma Brockes
The Guardian,
5th June 2010[/align]
Russell Brand stalks into a Manhattan hotel room, sharp-elbowed, bent-kneed, staring wildly through the windows of the 37th floor. He looks like Jack Frost and sounds – "Going for the hip-hop look?" – like someone's sarcastic older brother. I glance down. Above the waistband of my jeans something has, indeed, gone horribly awry.
"Two inches of visible pants!" Brand looks delighted. "But aren't you nice and slim! You don't look like a person who's – I mean, you're not tortured by that, are you? It's not like you starve yourself?" Er, no. "Nice work."
Here it is, Brand's stock in trade, the casual delivery of absurd or obnoxious statements, and it gets excellent results. The 35-year-old has enormous faith in his power to win over people, which is just as well, since he spent most of his 20s aggravating, in minor but persistent ways, the police, his employers and every woman he ever dated. Quite how a former heroin addict who kept keys to an ex-girlfriend's flat so he could let himself in to steal from her – who in public at least always talks in italics – can come off as guileless is a mystery, but he does.
You wonder what he is like in the off hours. Today, however, he is very much on, promoting Get Him To The Greek, a sequel to the 2008 hit Forgetting Sarah Marshall in which he played laconic British rock star Aldous Snow. Produced by Judd Apatow and co-starring Sean "P Diddy" Combs and Jonah Hill, the film is so full of Brandisms – those long strings of mock-serious locutions – that he might have asked for a writing credit. No, he says, "Given the opportunities these people have afforded me and the platform they've given me, that would be rather unchivalrous." Brand can afford to be generous. Engaged to pop star Katy Perry, free of his addictions and with several more Hollywood films in the pipeline, there's a sense of him teetering on the edge of the really big time, although what the Americans see when they look at Brand is hard to work out. Actually, he says, it isn't. "Americans: what are their assumptions about people from the United Kingdom? Probably they're informed by Monty Python, rock'n'roll and Victorian England. If you have those things about your character, they'll go, all right, I know what this is." He dips his head and gives me the look that says, how can you resist someone as quiveringly self-aware, as attuned to the mechanisms of his own irresistibility, as I, Russell Brand, am?
Of course, in among the comic verbosity and finely tuned bathos, Brand talks a lot of shit. In lesser hands what he does would be pretentious student comedy. When he was a presenter on MTV, he tried to break through the wall of meaningless white noise by coming in on cue with total absurdities. "Derrida! Kettle-Russell!" he would say in lieu of "welcome back after the break". Or "Baudelaire! Pipe-cleaner Russell!" ("I'd try," he explains, "to say one thing that was cerebral and one thing that was just stupid.")
As a child, he observed among his peers a group he characterised as "nan-kids" – children brought up wholly or in part by grandparents with vocab idiosyncrasies from two generations above, and has taken inspiration from their linguistic style. "Twit", he says, and "balderdash" and "nincompoop". His memoir, My Booky Wook – the title comes from A Clockwork Orange and has the same disruptive effect as trashing the MTV script – is a combination of fine comic schtick (in the US edition, he explains to American readers that what is known in England as a Waltzer is a "tilt-a-whirl" in the US, which sounds "like a nonconsensual, diagonal sex attack") and straightforwardly good writing: Oxford Street with its "perpetual glum buzz"; his father's "cheap charisma".
The most irksome part of his act is the babytalk, used to flatter and throw into relief all that intellect, and there is a question of how much the comedy plays on snobbish reactions to a guy with long hair and Essex vowels name-dropping philosophers.
Brand is a partial nan-kid. His mother suffered recurring bouts of cancer when he was growing up and he was farmed out to relatives in Essex, the nan he loved and the nan he didn't, and his absent father, who was half-useless, half-inspiring. "My dad is from an estate in Dagenham, but wholeheartedly believes you can do what you want if you work hard enough. If you refuse to give up. So I got that. That message was loud for me."
When Brand's father was flush, he was sent to private school, then the cash ran out and he went back to a comprehensive. The most useful part of his education, he says, came from obsessively watching TV comedies. He has huge bits of script still by memory: "I do have a regard for the musicality of language that came from BBC sitcoms like Fawlty Towers. 'Your glasses are there, Mrs Richards! You can see the sea, it's there between the land and the sky – you'd need a telescope to see that – well, then may I suggest that you move to a hotel closer to the sea, or preferably in it!' "
It was his role as Fat Sam in a student production of Bugsy Malone that convinced him to apply to Italia Conti, that "famous school for unbearable brats" as he calls it, from which he was later expelled for drug use. His mother was always being called to the school for one crime or another, so that, he writes, "even now when I do something wrong – if I say something inappropriate on a live TV show, for example – I half expect to have to deliver a note to Barbara Brand: 'Please come up to Channel 4 head office, Russell's done something despicable.' "
Brand conveys all this with the talent he has for putting himself outside his own experience, as if he is, to some extent, an innocent bystander to his own histrionics. From the beginning he cultivated a style based on the idea he would one day be famous – that these would be stories to enliven a memoir. "I don't know if this is the kind of retrospective analysis that people are fond of applying to their work or actions, but it feels like I knew I was going to be famous and I knew that an element of that would be traumatic, so that if I could make myself something big and otherworldly, it would be a kind of defence. That I would have a degree of safety."
When Brand was 17, his father took him on a sex tourism holiday to the far east – unorthodox parenting that was, he says, actually quite helpful. If there are roots to his bad behaviour, particularly the incontinent sexuality that would see him checking into a sex-addiction clinic in America, it was something that happened a decade earlier. He was sent to a tutor who, he writes in the memoir, "when I got a question right – by way of congratulation – stuck his finger up my arse and felt my balls." He told his mum, who told his dad, who said "he'd deal with it. But he never did anything."
Now, says Brand, "People advised me to take that part out. The reason I left it in was because I thought, if in chapter four you see this happen, when in chapter 12 I'm rampaging round having it off with prostitutes, you might see a corollary. It might be less unsavoury. That was my hope."
At some point, while he's off on one of his soliloquies, I go momentarily offline and stare out of the window at rainy New York. Brand notices instantly and for the next few seconds leans urgently forward, punctuates everything he says with pats to my knee and uses my name a lot, until I have clicked back in. It's not aggressive or sexual, but the highly tuned, professional insecurity that drives successful performers.
His honesty is of course winning, and his self-deprecation – he describes himself as a "right arsehole" and his early life as "a trivial Greek tragedy" – one of his key appeals, although it doesn't exculpate him quite as much as he thinks it does. Fairness is important to Brand. He has just delivered the second volume of memoir (it is currently with the lawyers, he says heavily), in which he had to tread even more carefully because so many of the people in it are famous. "I've tried to think, well, how is that person going to feel when they read that? And there aren't many cases in which I think, 'I don't fucking care.'"
It is striking how protective of Jonathan Ross he is, in a brothers-in-arms sort of way and in contrast to his history of infidelity to women – despite the fact he goes on endlessly about his matriarchal upbringing, his close relationship to his mother and how women love him because he loves women. (Ha.) Anyway, he won't say anything that risks getting his friend into more trouble over Sachsgate and denies the perceived disparity in the fortunes of the two men since the scandal – Brand going from strength to strength, Ross still in the wilderness. It was Brand who seemed the more sensible, quitting the BBC instantly before he could be pushed and promptly leaving the country. He had more options than Ross, but also, one senses, a keener eye to his own interests.
In fact, Brand's ambition is the strongest force within him. It's what got him, ultimately, to quit drugs, although he is still charmed by his memories of the bad years. "I hear stories from people who remember better than I do how I was, and I sometimes think, 'Wow, this guy sounds amazing.' A pirate! A wildman! Romping around with no shirt on, drinking tequila from the bottle, causing chaos, cutting myself up! It adheres quite well to the clichés one hears of rock'n'roll characters and self-destructive poets."
Still, everything subordinates to his desire to get ahead, which comes, he says, partly from his dad, partly from some innate part of him and partly from growing up under Thatcher, when families such as his were encouraged to buy their council houses, climb up the ladder and "be selfish!" Is a small part of him grateful to Thatcher?
"No." He laughs. "Not one bit. I have no gratitude to Thatcher, nor to Cameron, neither. I've never voted, never will."
What?
"Never. Coz I think, you're not blagging me on this ridiculous journey, with a bit of paper. I don't want to participate in this. I recognise the futility of it all. I think if you want to change things, it's not with an X on a piece of paper, it's with an X on someone's forehead. Ooooh, that's good."
Shouldn't you vote, then, for the least bad option?
"No, coz you're acknowledging the system. Look at the Lib Democrats. They're saying they want PR PR PR, and the first chance they get, they fuck off with the Tories. So no." There are moments when no amount of ironic window-dressing can overcome how seriously Brand takes himself.
This is most keenly in evidence when he talks about recovery. He is involved with David Lynch's foundation, which seeks to introduce transcendental meditation techniques into schools and refers to things like the "ocean of consciousness". Does he have a mantra?
"Everyone has their own mantra. They give it to you and you can't tell anyone what it is, ever."
Did he see that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm when someone stole Larry's mantra?
He looks fleetingly unamused. "I guess they perverted it for reasons of comedy." Abruptly he smiles. "I liked that episode a lot."
How does it work?
"You close your eyes and you think the mantra, think the mantra, your mind tries to drag you off, you go back to the mantra. You're right: anything that is pompous or serious invites ridicule. But this, to me, doesn't. Because apart from anything else, Lynch is fucking funny. Funny. I mean, obviously I'm aware of that drug addict recovery cliché. But this stuff is working for me. I'm into yoga, I meditate all the time, I'm vegetarian. The most serious thing in my life, I suppose, is my recovery."
And Katy Perry, with whom he is in the first monogamous relationship of his life. They got engaged at New Year. "It's lovely, actually. What I most enjoy is knowing that I'm trying my hardest, I'm really trying my best. It's rewarding for me to know that. There's no lying or tricking; it's a nice feeling."
Why doesn't he want to cheat on her, like he did on all the others?
"She's funny. She's really – I think what it is – and I don't want to rinse away the romance with some incredibly acute analysis, and I'm probably too befuddled and cockeyed with it all to even offer that – but: I'm quite able, I think, to seduce people. So usually I'd be like, right then, oh good, that person seems to be spellbound, I can get on with the rest of my day. But with her – I mean I love her, in a really pure way – she's a beautiful person, funny and gentle and sweet. But she's so demanding! You know that programme I Love Lucy? It's like that round my house. A lot of the time it's mental. Proper handful. It's very diverting. That woman can put on several voices that mean I have to stop what I'm doing."
I imagine her parents were nervous at the prospect of having him as a son-in-law? No, he says, and shows me a photo of them, which he has as a screensaver on his phone. "They're like refugees from the 60s. They're really spiritual, take their religion seriously, but also he did a lot of acid, her dad. He was born-again as a result of being almost on the point of vagrancy. Katy's mother went to Berkeley in San Francisco and went to a Doors gig and danced with Jimi Hendrix. They're not austerely judging me like Quakers. They really like me. Her dad gets me cute presents."
Like what?
"A teddy bear, bearing the legend When Did My Wild Oats Turn To All Bran? You press its hand and it sings, 'When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now…'"
Brand is in a position at this stage to turn things down and it plays into the idea he has of himself as highly ethical. "I was offered loads of money for an advert recently, I really nearly done it, came so close. Then I thought, I ain't doing it. I sort of think it would be good, wouldn't it, to steer a straight path through this. The thing that's a little bit frightening, Emma, is to garner some kind of actual authority; this is why I'm not having any part of it and I'm giving it all back, like Buddha. Aaarrgh."
Finishing the second volume of his memoir has made him consider his life and the anticlimax of having got what he wanted. He is honest about this in a way celebrities rarely are, lest it sound like whining. Of fame, he says, "It's peculiar and confusing and surprisingly unsatisfying." The prospect of success in America thrills and dismays him. "I don't want to get all Jean Genet, but the people around me are from Essex, not LA. I still feel an affinity with these people. I'm not suggesting that Essex is some kind of Steinbeckian doss house. But it almost is."
There is only so much satisfaction Brand can get out of things. "In the words of Morrissey," he says, "I was bored before I even began."
----------------------
[align=center]And while I'm here, this is a half-hour interview with Russell on KCRW radio, last year.
download mp3[/align]
Photograph: Nick Ballon for the Guardian
Russell Brand: This charming man
He's the arch seducer who is settling down; the BBC renegade who is hot property in Hollywood. Everyone loves Russell Brand – but not half as much as he loves himself
Emma Brockes
The Guardian,
5th June 2010[/align]
Russell Brand stalks into a Manhattan hotel room, sharp-elbowed, bent-kneed, staring wildly through the windows of the 37th floor. He looks like Jack Frost and sounds – "Going for the hip-hop look?" – like someone's sarcastic older brother. I glance down. Above the waistband of my jeans something has, indeed, gone horribly awry.
"Two inches of visible pants!" Brand looks delighted. "But aren't you nice and slim! You don't look like a person who's – I mean, you're not tortured by that, are you? It's not like you starve yourself?" Er, no. "Nice work."
Here it is, Brand's stock in trade, the casual delivery of absurd or obnoxious statements, and it gets excellent results. The 35-year-old has enormous faith in his power to win over people, which is just as well, since he spent most of his 20s aggravating, in minor but persistent ways, the police, his employers and every woman he ever dated. Quite how a former heroin addict who kept keys to an ex-girlfriend's flat so he could let himself in to steal from her – who in public at least always talks in italics – can come off as guileless is a mystery, but he does.
You wonder what he is like in the off hours. Today, however, he is very much on, promoting Get Him To The Greek, a sequel to the 2008 hit Forgetting Sarah Marshall in which he played laconic British rock star Aldous Snow. Produced by Judd Apatow and co-starring Sean "P Diddy" Combs and Jonah Hill, the film is so full of Brandisms – those long strings of mock-serious locutions – that he might have asked for a writing credit. No, he says, "Given the opportunities these people have afforded me and the platform they've given me, that would be rather unchivalrous." Brand can afford to be generous. Engaged to pop star Katy Perry, free of his addictions and with several more Hollywood films in the pipeline, there's a sense of him teetering on the edge of the really big time, although what the Americans see when they look at Brand is hard to work out. Actually, he says, it isn't. "Americans: what are their assumptions about people from the United Kingdom? Probably they're informed by Monty Python, rock'n'roll and Victorian England. If you have those things about your character, they'll go, all right, I know what this is." He dips his head and gives me the look that says, how can you resist someone as quiveringly self-aware, as attuned to the mechanisms of his own irresistibility, as I, Russell Brand, am?
Of course, in among the comic verbosity and finely tuned bathos, Brand talks a lot of shit. In lesser hands what he does would be pretentious student comedy. When he was a presenter on MTV, he tried to break through the wall of meaningless white noise by coming in on cue with total absurdities. "Derrida! Kettle-Russell!" he would say in lieu of "welcome back after the break". Or "Baudelaire! Pipe-cleaner Russell!" ("I'd try," he explains, "to say one thing that was cerebral and one thing that was just stupid.")
As a child, he observed among his peers a group he characterised as "nan-kids" – children brought up wholly or in part by grandparents with vocab idiosyncrasies from two generations above, and has taken inspiration from their linguistic style. "Twit", he says, and "balderdash" and "nincompoop". His memoir, My Booky Wook – the title comes from A Clockwork Orange and has the same disruptive effect as trashing the MTV script – is a combination of fine comic schtick (in the US edition, he explains to American readers that what is known in England as a Waltzer is a "tilt-a-whirl" in the US, which sounds "like a nonconsensual, diagonal sex attack") and straightforwardly good writing: Oxford Street with its "perpetual glum buzz"; his father's "cheap charisma".
The most irksome part of his act is the babytalk, used to flatter and throw into relief all that intellect, and there is a question of how much the comedy plays on snobbish reactions to a guy with long hair and Essex vowels name-dropping philosophers.
Brand is a partial nan-kid. His mother suffered recurring bouts of cancer when he was growing up and he was farmed out to relatives in Essex, the nan he loved and the nan he didn't, and his absent father, who was half-useless, half-inspiring. "My dad is from an estate in Dagenham, but wholeheartedly believes you can do what you want if you work hard enough. If you refuse to give up. So I got that. That message was loud for me."
When Brand's father was flush, he was sent to private school, then the cash ran out and he went back to a comprehensive. The most useful part of his education, he says, came from obsessively watching TV comedies. He has huge bits of script still by memory: "I do have a regard for the musicality of language that came from BBC sitcoms like Fawlty Towers. 'Your glasses are there, Mrs Richards! You can see the sea, it's there between the land and the sky – you'd need a telescope to see that – well, then may I suggest that you move to a hotel closer to the sea, or preferably in it!' "
It was his role as Fat Sam in a student production of Bugsy Malone that convinced him to apply to Italia Conti, that "famous school for unbearable brats" as he calls it, from which he was later expelled for drug use. His mother was always being called to the school for one crime or another, so that, he writes, "even now when I do something wrong – if I say something inappropriate on a live TV show, for example – I half expect to have to deliver a note to Barbara Brand: 'Please come up to Channel 4 head office, Russell's done something despicable.' "
Brand conveys all this with the talent he has for putting himself outside his own experience, as if he is, to some extent, an innocent bystander to his own histrionics. From the beginning he cultivated a style based on the idea he would one day be famous – that these would be stories to enliven a memoir. "I don't know if this is the kind of retrospective analysis that people are fond of applying to their work or actions, but it feels like I knew I was going to be famous and I knew that an element of that would be traumatic, so that if I could make myself something big and otherworldly, it would be a kind of defence. That I would have a degree of safety."
When Brand was 17, his father took him on a sex tourism holiday to the far east – unorthodox parenting that was, he says, actually quite helpful. If there are roots to his bad behaviour, particularly the incontinent sexuality that would see him checking into a sex-addiction clinic in America, it was something that happened a decade earlier. He was sent to a tutor who, he writes in the memoir, "when I got a question right – by way of congratulation – stuck his finger up my arse and felt my balls." He told his mum, who told his dad, who said "he'd deal with it. But he never did anything."
Now, says Brand, "People advised me to take that part out. The reason I left it in was because I thought, if in chapter four you see this happen, when in chapter 12 I'm rampaging round having it off with prostitutes, you might see a corollary. It might be less unsavoury. That was my hope."
At some point, while he's off on one of his soliloquies, I go momentarily offline and stare out of the window at rainy New York. Brand notices instantly and for the next few seconds leans urgently forward, punctuates everything he says with pats to my knee and uses my name a lot, until I have clicked back in. It's not aggressive or sexual, but the highly tuned, professional insecurity that drives successful performers.
His honesty is of course winning, and his self-deprecation – he describes himself as a "right arsehole" and his early life as "a trivial Greek tragedy" – one of his key appeals, although it doesn't exculpate him quite as much as he thinks it does. Fairness is important to Brand. He has just delivered the second volume of memoir (it is currently with the lawyers, he says heavily), in which he had to tread even more carefully because so many of the people in it are famous. "I've tried to think, well, how is that person going to feel when they read that? And there aren't many cases in which I think, 'I don't fucking care.'"
It is striking how protective of Jonathan Ross he is, in a brothers-in-arms sort of way and in contrast to his history of infidelity to women – despite the fact he goes on endlessly about his matriarchal upbringing, his close relationship to his mother and how women love him because he loves women. (Ha.) Anyway, he won't say anything that risks getting his friend into more trouble over Sachsgate and denies the perceived disparity in the fortunes of the two men since the scandal – Brand going from strength to strength, Ross still in the wilderness. It was Brand who seemed the more sensible, quitting the BBC instantly before he could be pushed and promptly leaving the country. He had more options than Ross, but also, one senses, a keener eye to his own interests.
In fact, Brand's ambition is the strongest force within him. It's what got him, ultimately, to quit drugs, although he is still charmed by his memories of the bad years. "I hear stories from people who remember better than I do how I was, and I sometimes think, 'Wow, this guy sounds amazing.' A pirate! A wildman! Romping around with no shirt on, drinking tequila from the bottle, causing chaos, cutting myself up! It adheres quite well to the clichés one hears of rock'n'roll characters and self-destructive poets."
Still, everything subordinates to his desire to get ahead, which comes, he says, partly from his dad, partly from some innate part of him and partly from growing up under Thatcher, when families such as his were encouraged to buy their council houses, climb up the ladder and "be selfish!" Is a small part of him grateful to Thatcher?
"No." He laughs. "Not one bit. I have no gratitude to Thatcher, nor to Cameron, neither. I've never voted, never will."
What?
"Never. Coz I think, you're not blagging me on this ridiculous journey, with a bit of paper. I don't want to participate in this. I recognise the futility of it all. I think if you want to change things, it's not with an X on a piece of paper, it's with an X on someone's forehead. Ooooh, that's good."
Shouldn't you vote, then, for the least bad option?
"No, coz you're acknowledging the system. Look at the Lib Democrats. They're saying they want PR PR PR, and the first chance they get, they fuck off with the Tories. So no." There are moments when no amount of ironic window-dressing can overcome how seriously Brand takes himself.
This is most keenly in evidence when he talks about recovery. He is involved with David Lynch's foundation, which seeks to introduce transcendental meditation techniques into schools and refers to things like the "ocean of consciousness". Does he have a mantra?
"Everyone has their own mantra. They give it to you and you can't tell anyone what it is, ever."
Did he see that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm when someone stole Larry's mantra?
He looks fleetingly unamused. "I guess they perverted it for reasons of comedy." Abruptly he smiles. "I liked that episode a lot."
How does it work?
"You close your eyes and you think the mantra, think the mantra, your mind tries to drag you off, you go back to the mantra. You're right: anything that is pompous or serious invites ridicule. But this, to me, doesn't. Because apart from anything else, Lynch is fucking funny. Funny. I mean, obviously I'm aware of that drug addict recovery cliché. But this stuff is working for me. I'm into yoga, I meditate all the time, I'm vegetarian. The most serious thing in my life, I suppose, is my recovery."
And Katy Perry, with whom he is in the first monogamous relationship of his life. They got engaged at New Year. "It's lovely, actually. What I most enjoy is knowing that I'm trying my hardest, I'm really trying my best. It's rewarding for me to know that. There's no lying or tricking; it's a nice feeling."
Why doesn't he want to cheat on her, like he did on all the others?
"She's funny. She's really – I think what it is – and I don't want to rinse away the romance with some incredibly acute analysis, and I'm probably too befuddled and cockeyed with it all to even offer that – but: I'm quite able, I think, to seduce people. So usually I'd be like, right then, oh good, that person seems to be spellbound, I can get on with the rest of my day. But with her – I mean I love her, in a really pure way – she's a beautiful person, funny and gentle and sweet. But she's so demanding! You know that programme I Love Lucy? It's like that round my house. A lot of the time it's mental. Proper handful. It's very diverting. That woman can put on several voices that mean I have to stop what I'm doing."
I imagine her parents were nervous at the prospect of having him as a son-in-law? No, he says, and shows me a photo of them, which he has as a screensaver on his phone. "They're like refugees from the 60s. They're really spiritual, take their religion seriously, but also he did a lot of acid, her dad. He was born-again as a result of being almost on the point of vagrancy. Katy's mother went to Berkeley in San Francisco and went to a Doors gig and danced with Jimi Hendrix. They're not austerely judging me like Quakers. They really like me. Her dad gets me cute presents."
Like what?
"A teddy bear, bearing the legend When Did My Wild Oats Turn To All Bran? You press its hand and it sings, 'When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now…'"
Brand is in a position at this stage to turn things down and it plays into the idea he has of himself as highly ethical. "I was offered loads of money for an advert recently, I really nearly done it, came so close. Then I thought, I ain't doing it. I sort of think it would be good, wouldn't it, to steer a straight path through this. The thing that's a little bit frightening, Emma, is to garner some kind of actual authority; this is why I'm not having any part of it and I'm giving it all back, like Buddha. Aaarrgh."
Finishing the second volume of his memoir has made him consider his life and the anticlimax of having got what he wanted. He is honest about this in a way celebrities rarely are, lest it sound like whining. Of fame, he says, "It's peculiar and confusing and surprisingly unsatisfying." The prospect of success in America thrills and dismays him. "I don't want to get all Jean Genet, but the people around me are from Essex, not LA. I still feel an affinity with these people. I'm not suggesting that Essex is some kind of Steinbeckian doss house. But it almost is."
There is only so much satisfaction Brand can get out of things. "In the words of Morrissey," he says, "I was bored before I even began."
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[align=center]And while I'm here, this is a half-hour interview with Russell on KCRW radio, last year.
download mp3[/align]
Last edited by faceless on Sun Jan 16, 2011 5:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
[align=center]Russell Brand heading for US airwaves
British comedian Russell Brand has been offered a multi-million dollar deal to join American radio station Sirius.
29 Jun 2010[/align]
Russell Brand is being lined up to host his own radio show in America. Satellite station Sirius Radio broadcasts shows by some of the biggest names in the US, including controversial shock jock Howard Stern, Eminem and Jamie Foxx, and bosses are now keen to add Russell to the roster.
Sirius have reportedly offered the 'Get Him to the Greek' star a deal "worth millions of dollars" to hit the American airwaves. A source told The Sun newspaper: "Russell has been itching to get back on radio for a while now. He has been off doing other things but radio still really tickles him." The source continued "Russell's sidekick Matt Morgan is also keen to get writing and broadcasting again. The Sirius deal is in its infancy but Russell is well up for it. He has been given the hard sell about how they could make him the new Howard Stern."
Russell's last foray into radio ended in disgrace when he was forced to quit his popular show on major UK station BBC Radio 2. The 35-year-old star along with friend and fellow broadcaster Jonathan Ross faced a public backlash after they made lewd and rude phone calls to elderly comedy actor Andrew Sachs, which included telling him Russell had slept with his granddaughter Georgina Baillie.
However, there is a possibility the deal with Sirius could see him reunited with Jonathan. The source added: "He is desperate to do something with Jonathan Ross again."
---------------------------
Now that could be great, though I'm not sure how is local references and Victorian lingo will go down!
British comedian Russell Brand has been offered a multi-million dollar deal to join American radio station Sirius.
29 Jun 2010[/align]
Russell Brand is being lined up to host his own radio show in America. Satellite station Sirius Radio broadcasts shows by some of the biggest names in the US, including controversial shock jock Howard Stern, Eminem and Jamie Foxx, and bosses are now keen to add Russell to the roster.
Sirius have reportedly offered the 'Get Him to the Greek' star a deal "worth millions of dollars" to hit the American airwaves. A source told The Sun newspaper: "Russell has been itching to get back on radio for a while now. He has been off doing other things but radio still really tickles him." The source continued "Russell's sidekick Matt Morgan is also keen to get writing and broadcasting again. The Sirius deal is in its infancy but Russell is well up for it. He has been given the hard sell about how they could make him the new Howard Stern."
Russell's last foray into radio ended in disgrace when he was forced to quit his popular show on major UK station BBC Radio 2. The 35-year-old star along with friend and fellow broadcaster Jonathan Ross faced a public backlash after they made lewd and rude phone calls to elderly comedy actor Andrew Sachs, which included telling him Russell had slept with his granddaughter Georgina Baillie.
However, there is a possibility the deal with Sirius could see him reunited with Jonathan. The source added: "He is desperate to do something with Jonathan Ross again."
---------------------------
Now that could be great, though I'm not sure how is local references and Victorian lingo will go down!
[align=center]
Russell Brand Held In Paparazzi Scuffle
September 18, 2010
Andy Jack,
Sky News Online[/align]
British comedian Russell Brand has been arrested in Los Angeles after a tussle with a photographer. The 35-year-old was held by police after he was involved in a scuffle with paparazzi at Los Angeles International Airport, California, on Friday.
Katy Perry's fiance had been "arrested for battery," said the entertainment news website RadarOnline. The TMZ site said Brand and Perry were going through security for a Delta airlines flight when there was a physical altercation, which led to one photographer making a citizen's arrest.
Police confirmed that Brand had been taken into custody for a misdemeanor charge of simple battery with bail set at $20,000 (£13,000).
---------------
Hare-fuckn-Krishna!
Russell Brand Held In Paparazzi Scuffle
September 18, 2010
Andy Jack,
Sky News Online[/align]
British comedian Russell Brand has been arrested in Los Angeles after a tussle with a photographer. The 35-year-old was held by police after he was involved in a scuffle with paparazzi at Los Angeles International Airport, California, on Friday.
Katy Perry's fiance had been "arrested for battery," said the entertainment news website RadarOnline. The TMZ site said Brand and Perry were going through security for a Delta airlines flight when there was a physical altercation, which led to one photographer making a citizen's arrest.
Police confirmed that Brand had been taken into custody for a misdemeanor charge of simple battery with bail set at $20,000 (£13,000).
---------------
Hare-fuckn-Krishna!
Last edited by faceless on Tue Jan 27, 2015 3:55 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Russell Brand - 2010-10-01 - Paul O'Grady
download 60mb avi[/align]
Russell Brand - 2010-10-01 - Paul O'Grady
download 60mb avi[/align]
Last edited by faceless on Sun Jan 16, 2011 6:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.