“You know nothing of the crunch”

Here are some things I’ve been thinking about so far in 2024: memory, nostalgia, and the stories we tell ourselves. Also: The Mighty Boosh; Noel Fielding’s amazing Joan Jett jumpsuits; the absolute chemistry between him and Julian Barratt; the pure shambolic joy of those live stage shows; the fanfiction (oh, the fanfiction); that possibly apocryphal story about their first meeting, all the way back in 1997, when Noel saw Julian do stand-up for the first time. Afterwards, they got chatting, Julian gave Noel a lift home, and Noel invited him in for a brew. But as they got to the doorstep, Noel turned and gave Barratt a warning. “Before you come in, you must know… you can never leave.” Julian’s response? “You know what, that’s fine. I haven’t got anything on.”

How did we get here? The short version is: in those liminal blanket-bunker days at the start of the year, I re-watched the DVD of The Mighty Boosh live at Brixton Academy, filmed back in 2006. And it sent me spinning back in time: back to my freezing student attic in Leeds and those late-night episodes on BBC Three, literally twenty years ago now (wtaf), cackling with my housemates in our pyjamas.

Nights of two-for-£5 bottles of red wine from the dodgy off licence on the corner, caterwauling along with the songs from each episode and howling our heads off at the surreal daftness of Rich Fulcher’s Bob Fossil calling an elephant ‘grey leg face man’. There was an anarchic silliness to it that struck a deep chord, like a psychedelic felt-tipped-scribbled version of The Young Ones, but with a gorilla and a shaman and a taxi journey to Monkey Hell. To us, it was trippy and brilliant that a thing like that could not only get made, but find enough of a cult following and momentum to build into an international sensation.

(Side note: back then I was still somewhat sublimating my ever-evolving understanding of my own queerness into my deep love for homoerotica. Like: nah mate, I’m not gay. Or maybe I am, I don’t know. But either way I’m into perving over men getting off with each other. And yes, now I know they’re not mutually exclusive, but back then it was thrilling on multiple levels to watch Julian and Noel’s characters endlessly bickering, bantering, flirting, cuddling and kissing, their cosy love and intimacy a joyful balm to my still-representation-starved soul.)

What I couldn’t have articulated at the time about what I loved about the Boosh was their combo of imagination and defiance. It was weird; unabashedly, proudly so. Their dizzyingly colourful cast of characters involved a sinister sentient piece of chewing gum, a pack of mod wolves, an evil green hitchhiker, and a monster made of fabric who presides over a mirror-lined limbo. And that’s in the first few episodes alone. Yet they were somehow still tethered to reality, even in the most tenuous of ways: Vince wants a packet of Bovril hula-hoops, Naboo’s mate who he gets high with works at Dixons, Howard’s grandparents live in Wakefield (where I’d lived only the year before and had literally never heard referenced on TV before). The blending of fantastical and mundane drew you into the Zooniverse, and well… you can come in, but you can never leave.

So all of this came surging back when I re-watched the recording of the live show, and so too did some other memories. When I lived in London, people who lived in other places sometimes used to ask me: do you ever see anyone famous? I went clubbing a bit back then, and sometimes there’d be some familiar faces in attendance, like that time Gary Numan was loitering in the shadows at Stay Beautiful. My partner once bumped into Nicky Wire in the Covent Garden Disney shop. But this was Noel Fielding’s hedonistic chaos gremlin era: when he was partying with Courtney Love, Amy Winehouse and Donny Tourette, being a Goth Detective with Russell Brand, and getting gossiped about in Popbitch every week (and god, how’s that sentence for a time capsule, anyone else feeling old yet?). So it seemed probable that he’d be the one we’d see out raving or round Shoreditch or Camden, but I never did. But there was a night, in the Phoenix Arts Club, a hidden-away bar under the Phoenix Theatre, where I’d met with friends for drinks, and the night had gone the way London nights often did: one glass of red turning into two turning into may as well get a bottle turning into several bottles then a blur.

But in that blur, I remember being stood at the bar and realising that standing next to me was Julian Barratt, with an adorably goofy grin, literally swaying like on the deck of a ship because he was that pissed. He was there with some of the others, though sadly not Matt Berry (though I later interviewed him for a music magazine, and obviously we talked at length about fanfiction because sometimes I’m so on brand I’m an actual parody of myself), or Dave Brown, who remains to this day my favourite part of the Boosh, and not just for his insane breakdancing skills or because hiding him in that ludicrous Bollo suit didn’t stop him from being the fittest. But I did manage to get into a ridiculous conversation with Rich Fulcher that involved him phoning my mate Amy (who I’d lived with during those Leeds student days) for an epic chat, coming up with a indisputably stupid scheme to get a taxi all the way to hers in York, though the others thankfully intervened before we could put this plan into action.

There are other bits about that night that I include when I tell this story properly. I remember this night with fondness now, the way I sometimes romanticise drinking to myself, despite being more than four years sober and more solid in it than I’ve ever been. I don’t miss the booze: I’m grateful beyond words for what sobriety has given me (for more along these lines, this piece by Dana Leigh Lyons is a treasure trove of gems).

But I sometimes miss the stories it gave me: the unexpected spontaneous unfolding direction a night could take that I haven’t found my way to without it. There’s an entire other letter here, about how living the thing and telling the story of it can be such separate things; how what we learn from our stories can make them poignant or beautiful or heart-breaking in ways they might not have seemed or felt at the time. How time sometimes softens the edges of things, or makes the jagged edges hurt even more. Sometimes it distorts the memories so much we’re not sure what’s the reality and what’s the story.

I’ve been loving Becky Handley’s recent writing about being dissed by punks and being your own knight in shining armour, and I loved my recent read of Fern Brady’s brilliant memoir, Strong Female Character. Both have made me think more about the stories I give myself permission to tell — to myself and to others. For years, my favourite stories to recount were the rock’n’roll ones: the name-droppy ones or the death-defying misadventures. Preposterously bizarre anecdotes of nights out that started in one place and ended somewhere completely unpredictable, even when those ends were actually brutally sad, or dark, or dangerous (police cell, hospital ward: other letters for other days), as long as you spin the yarn with suspense and charm or turn the entire thing into a joke. I want to give myself permission to return to other memories and tell other sorts of stories. And to love the stories I first fell in love with decades ago — from Velvet Goldmine to the surreal scrappy weird bliss of Howard and Vince — in all their unashamed, ridiculous glory.

Originally shared on Substack in January 2024