Russell Brand The Interview ) Where Did It Go So Wrong?
From the off Russell Brand was different, dynamic and destined to do something. In this 2002 interview you can see the ambition and energy and the desire to get past his drug addiction.
Where did it all goth wrong?
When I met Russell Brand in February 2002 he was on a mission. He’d been sacked from presenting on MTV (for bringing his dealer to work), sacked from TV comedyCruise Of The Gods (something to do with masturbating, prostitutes, fighting and drugs, possibly together), and sacked from DJing on XFM (for reading porn on air). He’d just made Re:Brand, a great series for digital channel UK Play in which he challenged taboos by throwing himself into various confrontational situations, and I was commissioned by Jack magazine to meet him for an interview. He was putting together a documentary on the planned closure of East London’s Spitalfields Market, and I spent a day with him as he visited a school on Brick Lane to educate the kids about their community. Holding court at the front of a classroom, he made them laugh while explaining why the market was important and how they could get involved. They loved him.
I saw him play a lot of stand-up gigs over the next year or so, mostly upstairs in a handful of North London pubs. Everything he did was a fluid, passionate mix of politics and exhibitionism. He was the most charismatic stand-up I was aware of, and fed off crowds; the energy and electricity of those gigs, even with only 20 or 30 people present, was fantastic. Some of the staples of his current arena shows – self-loathing sex rants, tabloid dissections – were there back then, although those small gigs were undoubtedly more anarchic. Working the room, he’d interact with as many people as he could, would sometimes turn up as the Elephant Man, and performed riotous puppet shows with dead mice. Later, when he told me he’d cleaned himself up and got off the drugs, I wondered if he’d lose some of that energy and electricity, but he didn’t; he got his career on track, stopped getting sacked from jobs, and translated that energy and electricity to bigger venues.
Re:Brand was a great, unique series (much of it’s on YouTube). Based vaguely around the theme of exploring his, and society’s, masculinity. He hung out with Eddie Kidd, invited a homeless man to live in his flat with him for a week, hung out with the Youth BNP, had a boxing match with his dad, dated an old lady, and wanked off a man in a toilet. Just like its presenter, it was revealing, provocative and funny. After leaving the kids in Brick Lane, we went to a coffee shop in the market to sit down and talk about it.
The thing that stands out most for me about Re:Brand is your honesty. You almost have a childlike approach to things, like asking Eddie Kidd how it feels when he talks, or muttering about the girlfriend who left you because you’re an idiot. You’re very candid on stage too.
I suppose what that is, is that through some kind of psychological disorder I maintained a childlike sense of wonderment with stuff… George Orwell said ‘In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.’ Just don’t get too confused and distracted by all the brightly coloured lights and things that are meant to disorientate us, because everything’s quite simple, we’re all motivated by the same things. Even when I’m getting angry with someone, and my baser emotions are being stimulated, and I think ‘God, I wanna fucking kill that person,’ then you can take a moment to reflect that there are people that feel inadequate and just wanna be loved. And if you could keep that in your mind at all times, we are just simple, biological mechanisms that essentially just want to be looked after, it’s very disarming. Life and humans can be very complex, but really everything is so simple, really we’re just tall children, and the same things that scared us and frightened us in our infancy are prevalent in our adulthood.
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