Review: Bill Bailey: Larks in Transit, Hippodrome

Bill Bailey has a small button right at the front of the stage that he calls his ‘Jazz Button’. It is for use, he explains early on, in an emergency: when he’s lost the audience or a gag has fallen flat, one gentle foot-tap on the JB and the Hippodrome becomes a mellow late-night jazz dive, all smooth noodling sax, tinkling piano and gently swaying mood lighting. All tension dissipates: all is well.

The Jazz Button does, in fact, get deployed five times this evening, but one time is by accident (and masterfully handled), and the remaining ones more a kind of celebration. Because, of course, Bill Bailey never loses his audience, and nothing ever falls flat. He’s simply way too clever, too likeable, too packed-to-the-gunwales-with-obscure-and-fascinating-knowledge, and simply too unique a performer for that.

Bailey begins with a riff on how, in these dark and challenging times, we Brits keep our fears at bay with a diet of competitive a) dancing and b) baking on TV. And the whole tone of the evening might be boiled down to: yes, we are living in crazy, uncertain times – but what a lot of incredible stuff there is out there (um, not the competitive dancing and baking) to get fascinated by while the handcart tumbles hellwards! And who better to guide you through this cabaret of curiosities than the straggle-haired polymath from Keynsham (or the “pound-shop Gandalf” as Bailey calls himself)?

Bailey’s mind is a huge, lavishly decorated and nicely untidy palace, and its contents spill out with an infectious enthusiasm during this wonderful show. He discusses Iceland (“just lava fields and disgraced banks”), the West Country accent (“I don’t have it anymore because I wanted to get on in life”), and how West London hipsters struggle when ordering cheese in a delicatessen.

He regales us with the awkward, stuffy and often downright absurd exchanges from an English-Indonesian phrase book. His is a world where, if the Devil met you on a stormy, desolate night and offered to trade your soul over a game of cards, the game you’d choose is… Happy Families.

Birds, one of Bailey’s many specialist subjects, figure large. He reveals how the call of the Great Northern Diver has been unwittingly sampled across dance music (we’re looking at you, 808 State); he dances the courtship ritual of the Red Bird of Paradise to the sounds of Stayin’ Alive (oh boy, you need to see Bill Bailey dance); he tests our knowledge of bird calls – and, being the man he is, tries sampling them into dance and metal tracks.

And oh yes, music is everywhere. Bailey doesn’t so much break for a bit of music as run it (via synth, guitar, or the Beach-Boys-beloved theremin) like a long continuing discourse under his comedy. So we get treated to Bill’s idealised vision of family life, where every mundane encounter (‘what do you want for breakfast?’, ‘there’s someone at the door’, etc) is intoned in a deep heavy-metal growl.

We get showed how practically every melody in the world, from The Star-Spangled Banner to You Are My Sunshine (which we learn to sing in German – keep up), sounds far better in the minor key. And one of Bailey’s trio of encores is to play the riffs from Smoke on the Water and Stairway to Heaven, quite fast, on his impressive collection of cowbells.

This is the thing about Bailey: his comedy is very much more than just a bloke standing on stage saying funny stuff. It’s a vast, music-and daft-dancing-fuelled tour of everything he finds most fascinating, absurd and hilarious about the world. And by the end of this gleeful evening of stand-up, stories and impromptu Cockney crab-dancing (did we mention that?), you can’t help but share his wonder.

Bill Bailey played the Hippodrome on Friday, May 11 and Saturday, May 12. 

Read more: Preview: Bristol Comedy Garden 2018