➤ At The Comic Strip, ‘alternative cabaret’ throws up the next generation
of household names
First published in Over21 magazine, January 1981
The satire boom of the Sixties chose as its targets politicians, church, unions. The world moves on, and in 1980 so-called “alternative cabaret” is gunning for rock entrepreneurs, media manipulators and a pre-packaged youth culture inherited at second hand . . . This was the first article to identify the New Wave of comedy. Words and pix by Yrs Truly.
Airline disaster movie: Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson as The Outer Limits at The Comic Strip, Nov 1980. Photographed © by Shapersofthe80s
◼ WE ARE IN A SLEAZY CLUB DEEP IN SOHO STRIPLAND. On stage, corseted by a too-small mohair suit, a South London Mod of particularly repellent aspect is delivering from beneath pork-pie hat a foul-mouthed tirade: “Do what? Leave it out! P—, b——-, c—! Jean Paul Sartre! I don’t give a monkeys. Know what I mean?” He is more than usually inarticulate. He tells us: “When I was at school the careers adviser asked me what I wanted to do. I said hurt people – badly. Mentally or physically? she asked. Oh physically, I said, so she said well, that’s social work out, isn’t it?”
This is Alexei Sayle, Chelsea Art School graduate turned nightclub entertainer, discharging his brutish black humour with all the menace of a charging bull. To him, the audience are as red rags to be trampled on, especially anyone who’s into saving the whale, street theatre, self-help groups, Zen, drugs, the Open University, the Arts Council, live-in lovers, Habitat, pine, or scatter cushions.
Since October Sayle, aged 28, has been keeping company here with an SAS squad of young performers whose armoury of malice and ridicule is blitzing a new front for comedy in the 1980s. Theirs is unsentimental up-front clowning geared to such peers as can decipher the code.
Angry Feminist Poet: Rik Mayall at The Comic Strip, Nov 1980. Photographed by © Shapersofthe80s
Rik Mayall, of an act called Twentieth Century Coyote, gives us a scathing lampoon of a feminist poet reciting with gifted timing “an angry love poem” that’s as hilarious as any Monty Python creation. The Outer Limits give us an OTT trailer for a two-man airline disaster movie, plus a shrewdly informed parody of a heavy-metal rock star’s story as told to a mass-circulation newspaper. “Music?” he says. “Don’t talk to me about music.”
There is a dour Scot, Arnold Brown, who tickles the intellect as he delicately knifes the Hampstead “NW Twee” set by referring to “silent picketing vigils outside the white-sugar factory”. And there are exquisite speciality acts like Furious Pig, Britain’s first voice band (look, no instruments yet oh so musical) and Cardboard Cut-Outs, singers whose dislocated gestures gently pastiche the skin-deep sincerity of the average showbiz animal.
All this closely calculated anarchy is being whispered about as Alternative Cabaret and it is a visibly youngish audience who is to be seen stumbling legless with laughter out of the ambiguously named Comic Strip which shares premises cheek by jowl with the Festival of Erotica at Paul Raymond’s celebrated Revuebar. The tawdry location, tacky scenery and costumes, all conspire to attract the word-of-mouth cognoscenti and keep the less receptive at bay.
Furious Pig: voice band in action at Kensington Market in 1980, pictured by © Shapersofthe80s
As it is, some luckless ticket holders find their sensitivities under assault and sit stunned and frozen-faced like those first-nighters in Mel Brooks’ film The Producers. Regulars, however, leave wet-eyed with mirth, purged and elevated. They know to bring their hair-shirts.
“This is basically a rock audience,” says Alexei Sayle unhelpfully afterwards. “All right, they are in the B,C,D socioeconomic groups, have degrees from universities like Exeter and have at some time probably been vegetarians,” he adds sarcastically, borrowing the detestable jargon of the adman who herds consumers into precisely targetable social groups. His patter is so personalised as to seem monogrammed.
“My humour is aggressive because it is inspired by things that annoy me … like graphic designers on roller-skates wearing headphones. Why? Because they’re symptomatic of manufactured values. It’s living a certain dictated life-style just like the Sunday supplements depict. A fat lot of good my Chelsea Dip AD did me – I certainly didn’t learn the craft of painting. Art school is a cock-eyed form of higher education for the academically thick. It did teach me to perceive nuances in fashion and equipped me with the intellectual references for my act. Our cabaret would mean FA to a manual worker from the North, though.”
’Ello John, Gotta New Motor? — Alexei Sayle’s Mod Two-Tone Poet at The Comic Strip, Nov 1980. Photographed by © Shapersofthe80s
◼ WHAT WE ARE WITNESSING AT THE COMIC STRIP and select other places is of course the rebirth of satire, but of a subversive pungency Britain hasn’t known in 20 years. When Peter Cook erupted into 1960 with the Beyond The Fringe team, their audience was the middle-class theatregoer, their language that of Oxbridge intellectuals, and their aim to tilt at the old order: politicians, church, unions. As institutions, these made easy targets and it was enough then simply to dare to satirise a previously unassailable Establishment for The Fringe crowd to cause absolute furore.
In the pop charts of the day The Shadows were at Number One and the crazed media circus had yet to be invented to mass-market rock superstars, among others, and foist their “shoddy splendour” on a nation of “battery people”, as Alan Bennett was to describe Britain in his play Forty Years On by the end of that decade.
Today the Eighties satirist has as his target trendiness itself, a wholly Sixties creation exploited by the opportunists of the Seventies, phoneys like rock entrepreneurs and media manipulators, momentarily fashionable gurus like shrinks and sociologists. These today represent the old order which the Comic Strip satirist wants to pull down. His audience is one of young adults whose language is cynicism, a rock generation grown finally indignant at having inherited in the Seventies a pre-packaged youth culture at secondhand. Hence the rebellion in music and fashion against big business and towards homegrown alternatives … and the commandos of New Wave comedy who can liberate live entertainment both from the cosy iconoclasm of the Fringe clan and the mother-in-law jokes of the music-hall tradition.
“There is a pressure here to speak the truth
as we see it and Alexei’s Mod embodies
certain attitudes very truthfully.”
When in 1962 writer Dennis Potter wanted to deride the adman’s image of the Sixties Mum on satire’s pioneering television show, That Was The Week That Was (aka TW3), he described her as “so flaming ignorant she can’t tell Stork from butter”. When Alexei Sayle caricatures a typical creature of our own times, his repugnant Mod Two-Tone Poet, he goes tooth and claw to dress and perform him with maximum bad taste, hallmark of today’s New Wave street fashion.
And as Potter’s media Mum passed into folk memory for having “2.4 children”, so too will Sayle’s Mod for his brilliant song and dance entitled ’Ello John, Gotta New Motor? It is a hymn to the great goddess, Cortina, most prized of all cars among a certain class. Its language makes it unperformable outside a nightclub, says Peter Richardson, The Comic Strip’s founding producer and one half of The Outer Limits. As the guiding light who led these awkward talents into stripland, he adds: “There is a pressure here to speak the truth as we see it and Alexei’s Mod embodies certain attitudes very truthfully.”
“The stage is the only place you can say what you want,” Arnold Brown says. “TV would anaesthetise what we do.”
And Sayle: “People who go to rock concerts and are pissed off with fringe theatre represent an enormous market nobody is serving. They are looking for excitement in live entertainment. Anyone can bullshit about awakening the masses. What I’m good at though, is making people laugh. Of course, you wouldn’t find someone like me funny if we were living in a socialist Utopia.”
Text © Shapersofthe80s.com (Published here 16 Oct 2009)
Twentieth Century Coyote: Ade Edmondson and Rik Mayall, backstage at The Comic Strip, Nov 1980. Photographed by Shapersofthe80s
On the threshold of fame in 1980: Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson outside Soho’s Comic Strip, an enclave within Raymond’s Revuebar. Photographed by © Shapersofthe80s
2014 UPDATE: ‘DOING STAND-UP WAS LIKE A WAR’
Pamela Stephenson on-stage in 1980: “The Comic Strip was really hard”
“ New Zealand-born Pamela [Stephenson] first burst onto the British comedy scene in 1979 in the ground-breaking BBC2 sketch show Not The Nine O’Clock News. She went on to join The Comic Strip, which transferred to TV for Channel 4’s launch night in 1982.
These days Pamela doesn’t look back nostalgically at her Comic Strip days. She’s saddened by the shock news of Rik Mayall’s death at 56, but says she barely got to know him on the few occasions where they appeared on the same stage; in that competitive environment, she recalls, friendships just didn’t flourish.
“Doing stand-up was like a war with everyone playing this game of ‘I can be funnier than you’. You had to come in like a boxer with lots of chutzpah and try to scare the pants off people. I remember envying Rik and the other boys for being guys, because The Comic Strip was really hard: I was one of the few women doing it and the audience sounded like they were out for blood, so the boys would take their trousers down on stage and other stuff that I couldn’t possibly do.”
As for the very few females on stage, it seems there was precious little solidarity there either. “French and Saunders said mean things about me so I didn’t want to talk to them. I don’t remember exactly what they said, and it’s all water under the bridge now, but I can understand why – because we were all fighting for space and at each other’s throats,” explains Pamela.
She retrained as a clinical psychologist in California, using her knowledge of show-business to write her thesis on the harmful effects of fame. . .” / Continued at Mail Online
TAGS – comedy, music, fashion, satire, trendiness, youth culture, alternative cabaret, The Comic Strip, Raymond’s Revuebar, Soho, Swinging 80s, That Was The Week That Was, Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Beyond the Fringe, Forty Years On, Dennis Potter, Alexei Sayle, Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson, Twentieth Century Coyote, Peter Richardson, Nigel Planer, The Outer Limits, Arnold Brown, Pamela Stephenson, ’Ello John, Gotta New Motor?
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