Flower power

POLYMATH:Bill Bailey is one of the most inventive stand-ups in the game. He discusses obscure instruments, dealing with stage fright, and why he's filming his latest show in Dublin, with KEVIN COURTNEY

WHAT DOES A West Country boy like Bill Bailey like to do of a Saturday morning? You can picture him, hunched in his potting shed at the end of his suburban garden, watering his collection of pet rocks, moving his Lord of the Ringsbattle figures around on a huge papier-mâché Helms Deep, listening to a scratchy old Faust or Tangerine Dream LP on an old turntable, and stopping every now and then to parp out a version of Paranoid Android on a crumhorn he bought at a car-boot sale.

He certainly wouldn't be wasting his precious Saturday morning doing promo for his upcoming show, Dandelion Mind, yet here he is, nursing a cold, and engaging in discourse on a range of subjects from quantum physics to questioning apostles. Shouldn't you be busy restoring a loom or something? "You're not far off there," croaks Bailey, "I'd usually be spending Saturday morning at home in Hammersmith, trying to master a new musical instrument – but these days I'm spending a lot of the time taking my six-year-old to football. I'll be standing there with the other dads, change jangling in our pockets, making awkward small talk."

Bailey’s not boasting – give him one morning with, say, an ondes Martenot, and he’ll be using it to belt out Holst’s The Planets suite by lunchtime. A true polymath, Bailey can absorb myriad skills like a hairier version of Joe 90. He’s a classically trained musician with perfect pitch; he’s got degrees in English and Drama. He can probably even speak Klingon. And he knows stuff. He’s a regular guest on QI, Stephen Fry’s smug quiz show strictly for the very clever. And his comedy is brimming with the kind of erudite, surrealist, explosively intelligent humour that typified Bailey’s childhood heroes, Monty Python.

As a teenager, young Mark Bailey wanted to be a pop star – he was nicknamed Bill after the song Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey, and he played in a four-piece called The Famous Five. Now, he's strutting his stuff in big arenas, backed by the finest technology known to humanity – in a way, he sneaked into rock stardom through the back door marked "stand-up".

And yet sometimes he wonders if he’s got it in him to perform. Like many a man whose brain buzzes with ideas, he is oft beleaguered by existential demons. “Yeah, some nights you just look out and you think, I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I can summon this up. Will I always be able to do this, or will a point come when I wake up in the morning and I can’t think of anything? Maybe there’s a finite amount of funny in your brain.”

Fans needn’t worry – since his Edinburgh debut in 1995, when he was pipped at the post for a Perrier award by Irish comic Dylan Moran (with whom he later starred in the cult TV comedy Black Books), Bailey has never shown any signs of running out of funny. Even when feeling grouchy and irritable with a cold, he says, he’ll take all that negative energy and channel it into an incendiary show.

Dandelion Mindaddresses the sense of doubt that niggles at the core of all human endeavour; it finds Bailey playing a modern-day Thomas the doubter, sniffing suspiciously at everything from reality TV to creationism to Sunday Timescolumnist Michael Winner. It has songs, jokes, rants and a French disco reworking of Gary Numan's Cars – all the ingredients you'd expect from a Bill Bailey extravaganza. And next Thursday and Friday, he'll be filming it Dublin's 02.

“I love coming to Dublin and the audiences are always really enthusiastic, but when you’re filming in a venue, it changes it slightly. Because if you’re in a small venue, cameras are very obtrusive, they’re in your face, and there’s cameramen walking around, and people can’t see, and huge areas of seating are taken over with equipment, and they always have to be overlit, so the audience is sitting there in this bright light with cameras everywhere, and they’re kind of getting a little self-conscious. Whereas if you have a stadium the size of the O2, then the camera crews get swallowed up in all of it. I recorded a show called Bewilderment in a nice theatre in Swansea, but the banter I was having with the audience was affected by the cameras, it wasn’t natural.”

More often than not, says Bailey, the banter can throw up some insights into local idioms and idiosyncrasies. In a show in Dublin a few years ago, he started a routine about the Taliban, and ended up improvising on a tune by the “Tallaght Band”. But if something similarly parochial ends up on the DVD, will he be worried that viewers around the world won’t get the jokes?

“I love language and the quirks of local humour – it’s very much part of the piece, and people can figure it out. I remember going to New York, and doing a show there, and I was a bit worried, because I was doing a piece about the smallest amount of light known to man, and it was the glove-box light of a 1974 Austin Maxi. And I was thinking, there’s no way they’re gonna know what an Austin Maxi is, or what the hell I’m talking about, but I did it anyway, and people laughed. If I tried to change it into, like, a Chevrolet Impala, it just wouldn’t sound right.”

Bill Bailey is at the O2 in Dublin next Thursday and Friday