MILLIONS of viewers know him as the deadpan one from Never Mind The Buzzcocks, but the comic and punk poet Phill Jupitus is actually busy touring.
“This has been how I’ve made my living for the past four years,” he tells The Wokingham Paper.
“It’s something that’s an essential component of the game I’m in.”
He’s currently criss-crossing the country on his Juplicity show, which he promises is an hour of tales, laughs and diversions based on the chaos of his own life and the uncertain world that surrounds it.
And he will be one of the big names at this year’s Henley Festival next month: he’s headlining the Salon Comedy Club, appearing alongside some of the UK’s best-loved comedy names including Paul Merton, Jon Culshaw, Lee Nelson and Mark Watson.
He loves being in front of a live audience: “With live, anything can happen and there’s a slight nervous edge to it. It’s kinda a more proscribed situation in the studio.”
Being in the wild means that he has to deal with hecklers, but he says that he doesn’t plan any pithy put downs in advance.
“The reaction is based on what happens on the evening,” he said. “Usually the heckler is just showing off to their friends.”
Henley Festival is a black tie affair – it’s very Henley – but that doesn’t phase Phill. What he’s interested in is the audience themselves.
“I’ve played in some of the oldest theatres in the country, I’ve done upstairs in a pub,” he says, adding that he played a wide range of venues, from flea pits to posher places, in his time.
“It’s not about the room, it’s about the audience,” he says.
He also doesn’t spend time worrying in advance about what his audience that evening will be like. “It’s a waste of my energy,” he says.
Phill is looking forward to Henley, which will be a return for him: he played at the Kenton Theatre last year, an experience he thought was great. The Kenton has its own ghost, the lady in grey, but Phill didn’t spot her while he was there.
“Usually there’s a friendly stage hand pointing these out to me,” he says. “But in 33 years on tour, I’ve not seen anything unusual. I live in hope.”
It’s been nearly five years since Never Mind The Buzzcocks ended – does it bother him that people know him from that over and above his solo career? After all, it’s included stints on BBC Radio 6 Music, Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, several novels and punk poetry.
“It paid the bills, so I don’t mind it,” he says, revealing that often people will come up and tell him about how they started watching Buzzcocks when they were 10.
“It’s a shame Buzzcocks didn’t get a final series, I didn’t know it was the last episode when we recorded it,” he says.
For now though his energies are on Henley, and he’s planning to go to Edinburgh then perform a few more gigs in the autumn.
“It’s all a bit hazy, you get to a point where you don’t know what you’re doing in a year,” he says.
But somehow, you don’t think he minds.
Phill Jupitus appears at The Henley Festival on Thursday, July 12. For more details, log on to henley-festival.co.uk
