In 2000, the little-known UK comedy troupeThe Boosh(who would later be known as TheMighty Boosh) took Australia by storm. The group, comprising Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt alongside Rich Fulcher, was performing its stage showArctic Booshat the 14th incarnation of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. The show saw Fielding and Barratt play postmen, and became the underground hit of the festival – as well as providing the loose basis of theTundraepisode ofThe Mighty Booshtelevision series.
The Boosh’s penchant for mind-boggling surrealism and piercing dark humour ended up scoring them the festival’s prestigious Barry Award, named after Barry Humphries. 15 years later, Noel Fielding is back in Australia and performing at the Sydney Comedy Festival.
“Was it really 15 years ago?” laughs the affable Brit, mixing a tablespoon of milk into his tea. “I remember that after we won the Barry Award, about two years after, I actually saw Barry Humphries. I went up to him and told him that we had won the Barry, and he was like, ‘Is there such a thing?’ He had never heard of it. I was like, ‘Well, this is good. This is all bullshit!’ He asked what it entitled us to and I told him, ‘It means we get to keep you for a week.’”
Arctic Boosh was the second of three stage shows created by The Boosh. After working on Stewart Lee’s show King Dong Vs. Moby Dick at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Fielding and Barratt debuted their first self-titled show at the Oranje Boom Boom comedy club in London. When that show reached Edinburgh, it won them the Perrier Best Newcomer Award. Until then, The Boosh was never intended to become a long-term project, with both parties assuming they would return to their solo stand-up not long after.
“We always thought we’d make one show and that’d be the end of it,” says Fielding. “But after we won the Perrier, everyone was telling us that we had to do another, which we did and brought it to Melbourne and won the Barry, and then we made a radio show that won the Douglas Adams Award. We won loads. It was manic. We always thought we’d do a couple of years together and go our separate ways. We went from stages to the radio show to television to live shows. It went on and on.”
Following their snowballing success, in 2004 The Mighty Boosh transformed into the cult television series Fielding is best known for, and which eventually became a live concert in 2006. “On the first tour we didn’t really know if anyone actually liked the show,” says Fielding. “Well, you do roughly, but ratings can be quite misleading. But once we started touring and we’d see people dressed up as the characters we were all like, ‘Fuck! People actually like this show.’ Halfway through that tour we had to start doing bigger gigs and adding extra shows.
“On the second tour, we sold out a year in advance. We were performing in arenas and we had Marilyn Manson’s tour bus. I remember when we were doing a show at the O2 [in London], which is like 15,000 people. We were all, ‘This is ridiculous. There’s a been a mistake, there’s been an admin error!’ It was like being in The Rolling Stones. And we partied hard. We gave fucking Fleetwood Mac a run for their money. We partied every night. We’d get up just before soundcheck, do the show, and then go out again. It was crazy. I encountered everyone from Pete Doherty to Courtney Love, Kate Moss to Amy Winehouse, bless her.”
Since the days of The Mighty Boosh, Fielding has gone on to become a permanent team captain on the BBC Two music/comedy panel programNever Mind The Buzzcocks, and currently writes and appears as the central character on the television show Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy. However, he doesn’t rule out the possibility of a Boosh reunion of some form in the future.
“The only thing that we never did was a film, which I really regret,” he says. “We do still talk about doing that, but it’s just hard to get the right time when we’re both free. It’d take a year to write it, a year to get the money, a year to film it, a year to edit. That’s four years of our lives. I mean, that’s a long time. I hope that’s something we get to do someday, though, because then we will have done everything that we wanted to.”
Fielding’s festival show, An Evening With Noel Fielding, sees him appearing in another guise altogether. “My brother [Mike Fielding] is in the show and so is my good friend Tom [Meeten], who is also in The Boosh,” he says. “So there’s three of us. It’s like a little gang. I’ve always liked little gangs. There’s animation, stand-up, sketches, improv and some music that I did with Serge [Pizzorno] from Kasabian. I play some of my characters; we take someone from the audience and put them into an animation. There’s a lot of weird ideas, but hopefully people who liked The Booshwill like this.”
By Tyson Wray and Nick Taras
An Evening With Noel Fielding,as part of Sydney Comedy Festival 2015, is at Sydney’sState Theatre,Wednesday April 22, Thursday April 30 and Friday May 1. Noel alsoappears at the Enmore Theatre on Tuesday May 5.
