The craic is mighty
Over the past 12 months, The Mighty Boosh have made the transition from cult favourites to arena-filling icons. Noel Fielding chats to Ed Power about playing huge venues, his friend Russell Brand's recent difficulties, and borrowing clothes from Courtney Love.
Ed Power, 17 Dec 2008
Noel Fielding may be a natural-born jester but there is one subject about which he is perfectly serious: his madcap fashion sense. “The way we dress in this country has gone really conservative,” says the google-eyed half of psychedelic Brit-com duo The Mighty Boosh, from his hotel in Brighton.
“When I grew up in the ‘70s men wore these amazing outfits. You had icons like Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie. Men were allowed to be dandies. One of the things I’m most proud of with The Boosh is my wearing these ridiculous costumes. I’ve met kids who are taking my look and putting their own twist on it. I feel very good about that. I’m trying to bring back a little glamour.”
He says this with a giggle. Fielding, you quickly discover, giggles quite a lot. His sentences are punctuated by laughter that might almost be described as girlish, were it not emanating from a pallid beanpole who looks like he’s wandered off the set of a Tim Burton movie. The more excited he becomes the louder the giggles. When, for instance, I ask him about the recent to-do over Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross’ bawdy call to septuagenarian Andrew Sachs he practically convulses with chortles.
“Jonathan and Russell are both really talented,” he says. “I guess at the end of the day if the broadcast wasn’t live, someone should have stopped it going out. I don’t really understand how something like that could happen. Surely it’s not just those two in the studio? It’s hard enough being funny, let alone making decisions as to what should air and what shouldn’t. That’s somebody else’s job, really. Often in comedy, it’s about the speed. Sometimes you go down the wrong path and find yourself thinking, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t have said that’...”
Did he join the rest of middle-class Britain in their outrage over ‘Wossie’ and Brand’s hi-jinks?
“Well, Russell is quite risky. He’s always walking that line isn’t he? The interesting thing is that, at the time, only one or two people complained. It was only after the press got hold of it that everyone else joined in – ‘Oh, that’s an outrage’.”
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