Jonny & The Baptists invite you to ‘Dance Like It Never Happened’

Jonny Donahoe and Paddy Gervers, better known as Jonny & The Baptists, have been described as musical-activist-comedians. But pinning them down to a neat description isn’t easy.

With their unique blend of silliness, songs, stand up, satire and storytelling, they have often been known for hooking their shows around a socio-political hot potato, giving voice to those issues they felt weren’t being spoken about enough.

Now back on tour with their seventh show – coming to The Hen & Chicken Studio on June 9, their focus is much closer to home.

The pair both lost a dear friend in 2019, and found themselves under huge mental pressure of dealing with private grief by “ignoring it, drinking heavily, and making jokes”. Then, the pandemic placed the world on pause while also giving rise to a global grief, and a collective trauma.

They found themselves writing an album over zoom, and from there, slowly emerged the show Dance Like It Never Happened.

While Donahoe walked his five month-old baby round the park – artfully changing a nappy mid-interview – the duo spoke to Bristol 24/7 about the catharsis of finding beauty and joy in the face of the most emotionally challenging times.

How is the tour going so far? What does it feel like to be back in each other’s rhythms again?

JD: “It’s rather brilliant, to be honest, the fact that we’re touring again. It’s quite life-affirming and special to get to be back, and I’m just over the moon and really thankful that people want to come and see us. When faced with the possibility of not doing this, I learnt that I don’t have another skillset, and that really worried me.”

PG: “It’s quite validating coming back to a job and going ‘ah, there were people that wanted to see people, that’s nice’. Initially, the excitement was that we’d get to see each other again, because that break in structure was so hard. Being in a double act is quite strange; we’re very fortunate that we get to tour together, and have that person to celebrate with or commiserate with, depending on how a show goes.

“But I don’t think I realised til the pandemic how that also extends to the rest of our lives. It’s not just the gigs that I’ve really missed, it’s the companionship. The show delves into it a lot but it was an really difficult time for both of us, emotionally – as well as an unprecedented period for the whole world.”

For those that are new to you, can you describe what it is that you do?

JD: “A newspaper once described it as ‘there are songs, and in between, they sort of bicker’. We’re a delightfully charming, angry, agitprop, musical, theatrical, poorly rehearsed, Brechtian nightmare. That’s what we’re going for anyway.”

PG: “Do you remember Sooty and Sweep? We’re what happens when Matthew has died, and it’s just the puppets at night, and there’s a question as to whether that’s ok, but everyone’s quite intrigued to see what they’ll do.”

JD: “Or perhaps we’re like Timon and Pumba. A spindly meerkat and a farty warthog; and there’s no lion cub.”

Dance Like It Never Happened is your seventh show. What was the inspiration behind it, and the process of making it?

JD: We always make an album to sell at the shows of the songs that we’ve done, but this time we decided it would be easier to make an album in lockdown than it would be to make a show. Normally we start with a big bold idea that we want to talk about, like the climate crisis, or the wealth gap, or the rise of populism.

“With this one we didn’t; we thought ‘well let’s just talk about how awful we feel, and see if we can make it very funny’. So it’s been song-led, rather than concept-led.”

PG: “Jonny’s right, the songs started from a completely different point from where they usually appear – which is from playing around on tour, or backstage, or on trains, and this time, the album came first.

“Back in 2019, we wanted to write a show about grief because we lost a dear friend of ours that year, and we wanted tackle it; to talk about loss and love, and how those two things are inherently intertwined. And then the pandemic happened, and we thought the show could still touch on those themes, but now we had to marry personal bereavement with global grief.”

JD: “I just think that as a country, Britain is very proud of having a stiff upper lip – which is in my opinion, fucking stupid. But the one thing that you should be proud of is dealing with your emotions and not holding them all in. If the show’s about one thing it’s about letting that out.

“Following a period when people hadn’t been allowed to come out of their houses, we were really conscious that we wanted it to be the most fun possible, and very entertaining from start to finish, but also accepted that we had to deal with what happened.”

PG: “Also, because it was built from 10 different starting points and then suddenly put onto a stage, it really is different every night. There are still things we get to discover about it, instead of getting that slight malaise that you sometimes get when you’ve been touring the same show for a long time.

“It remains exciting, and it’s finishing at the Edinburgh Fringe where we will hopefully have the most complete version of the events; then we can put a pin in it and move on to the next thing, both emotionally and artistically.”

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Would you say that retreading the emotion within the show night after night is cathartic?

PG: “I think so. No one has closed the book on everything that happened, and those that have are either extraordinarily talented at dealing with their emotions, or are in a version of denial similar to what Jonny and I have been at various points over the past couple of years.

“Re-accessing those emotions isn’t actually that tough because once you scratch away the surface you realise a lot of those emotions are still there, and we have to put a lot of things to one side to just get through the day, most days. That’s still something a lot of people are dealing with. Put the tiger on the table and shout at it; make sure that everyone knows it’s totally ok to feel that way and to talk about it.”

Have you found that audiences have reacted with more emotion than with previous shows?

PG: “It’s interesting, and it’s largely unintentional, but I think our shows tend to reflect the biggest thing that we feel isn’t being talked about, or needs more nuance in an argument. Our last show before this was called Love You and Hate Bastards, and it was an active attempt to make a less political show that sort of became about Jonny having his first child and me losing my mum.

“We ended up talking a lot more than we thought we would about grief and buried trauma. It was really the two sides of the double act going through something quite hard, and trying to express it on stage. It was our first show where we had serious songs; there was still lots of funny stuff but that were definitely songs that were lighter on jokes that provoked a bit more of a reaction.

“This show feels like a progression from that, opening it up from the individual to the collective. We hope that people will come away feeling some acceptance, or perhaps that the show is part of a healing process for them, because I feel it certainly is for Jonny and I. But it’s funny seeing which little jokes or turns of phrase resonate with individual people.”

What has your podcast Making Paddy Happy done not only for your listeners, but for yourselves?

PG: “The show connects to the podcast quite well. During the first lockdown we were obviously locked down separately; we lost all of our work, and our tour, and our mental health tanked. I quickly spiralled into a real hole, and Jonny suggested it was a good point to learn the incredibly boring administrative process of learning how to podcast, which I was very resistant to at first. He said perhaps we should just do 10 minutes every day, where we effectively check in with each other.

“I grumbled about it a lot, but I quickly realised it gave me a task, and a form of routine that I was totally lacking. And it allowed me every day to say how I was feeling, and to get how Jonny was feeling, and still feel like there was an aspect of support there.

“It built from there, and though it’s sort of morphed into a comedy chat, it still always begins with us asking how each other are. It’s been a real help that gave us a sense of purpose when our industry was sinking around us, and it’s something we still love doing.”

So did it achieve its end goal, Paddy? Would you say you’re happier now?

PG: Yes, it’s a resounding yes. Life is harder, but I’m now equipped to deal with it.

Jonny and the Baptists: Dance Like it Never Happened is at The Hen & Chicken Studio on June 9 at 8pm. Tickets are available at www.thecomedybox.co.uk.

Main photo: Matt Stronge

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