The surreal thing: the return of Noel Fielding

Stepping into Noel Fielding’s North London lair is like passing through the back of the wardrobe into 1960s Narnia, where Aslan is Andy Warhol. In a bland office building just behind Gospel Oak station, a secret door conceals a studio with giant canvases strewn across the floor. Strange electronic tones burble from the stereo as Fielding’s girlfriend, the XFM DJ Lliana Bird, his friend and co-star Dolly Wells and a couple of pals with video cameras and paintbrushes drift around.

Fielding, 41, stands at the far side of the room, staring intently at white cards stuck on the wall bearing hastily scrawled phrases such as ‘Jelly Fox’. His peroxide-blond hair has half an inch of black roots and he wears a scruffy T-shirt and tight hipster trousers. The whole scene is such a mid-Noughties idea of London cool that I fall into an intimidated silence and watch for a minute or two, until Fielding turns to me with a wide grin and, in cheery Cockney tones, says: ‘All right! Come on in. Fancy a coffee? Sorry about the music — it’s about to make our heads explode.’

At a time when comedy is the new rock’n’roll, when almost any comedian with two minutes on a panel show can sell out a tour, and especially when Mrs Brown’s Boys can become a hit movie, there’s something almost exotic and glamorous about Fielding. His brand of fluid, rolling, surreal and fundamentally silly humour cuts through the crass comedy of Mrs Brown and the tweeness of Miranda. But it’s a brand of offbeat wackiness that has been bubbling through the roots of our national comedy family tree as far back as the Pythons, the Goons, even Tristram Shandy. Fielding is a panel-show member himself, on Never Mind the Buzzcocks. At Bill Bailey’s request, he first stood in as a team captain in 2009 and achieved a record for the highest team score ever on the show. He’s since done a further four series and will return in the next, on BBC Two in the autumn.

In June, he announced his return after almost a year’s silence (he’s been lying low, writing) by appearing on stage with Kasabian at Glastonbury, then with Monty Python at The O2 — racing to the latter on a motorbike taxi after a day at Wimbledon with Jonathan Ross. It’s hard to imagine Peter Kay, John Bishop, Michael McIntyre — or any other super-rich stand-up currently creaming a cool £20m per tour (including DVDs, merchandise and spin-offs) for their man-of-the-people schtick — slipping so effortlessly on to such stages. But Fielding isn’t strictly speaking a stand-up, he’s an artist. He just chooses to make us laugh instead of weep.

‘It’s been a funny couple of weeks,’ Fielding says, as we sit around a large white table covered with more paintings, empty cups of coffee and discarded bits of paper. ‘It was all so weird because I’m not drinking at the moment [he has an uneasy relationship with booze due to Gilbert’s syndrome, an inherited condition that gives heavy drinkers jaundice] and I’m trying to write a new live show, so I had a cup of tea before going on at Glastonbury and had to get a cab home afterwards.’ He grins. ‘Four hours alone with a driver who didn’t speak English, me pumped full of adrenaline thinking, “I literally don't know what to do.” ’

It gradually becomes clear that he’s not entirely at home in his skin at the moment. It’s not relationship strife — he’s been with Lliana for five years; they live together in Hampstead — but he’s worried about his new show, the second series of Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy, which started on E4 last night. ‘Everything has changed so much. At the time the first series went out, it didn’t feel that strange compared to TV comedy,’ he ponders. ‘But today everything has got so dull, so mainstream… I’m not sure what people are going to say.’

Luxury Comedy’s 2012 debut was a surreal swirl of trippy sketches, 1960s psychedelia, offbeat animation and green-screen weirdness. It rated very well — with more than 400,000 viewers, it boosted E4’s audience by some 50 per cent — but received mixed reviews. ‘Someone described it as the comedic equivalent of 9/11,’ Fielding recalls with horrified laughter. ‘Wow, I’m a comedy terrorist. I mean, it’s big, innit? Comedians are ridiculously oversensitive so, especially with the internet, you feel everything, like a spider on a web going, “Oh God, I’m getting stomped.” ’

In his darker moments, he took to late-night counterattacks on Twitter, raging against poor reviews and perceived slights. In April 2012, after The Sunday Times’ Waldemar Januszczak said that Channel 4 hiring Fielding to interview Damien Hirst was ‘like draping a naked woman across a bonnet to sell a car’, Fielding urged his Twitter followers to insult the critic. The resulting fracas hit the headlines and contributed to muttered rumours that Fielding was ‘a nasty piece of work’.

All of which is hard to square with the genial bloke making coffee and enthusing about early 1950s US TV comedian Sid Caesar. Yes, Fielding is a big lad with a broken nose and you don’t walk around his hometown of Croydon dressed as he does unless you can handle yourself, but he’s also shy and thoughtful. After reading an upbeat review of Luxury Comedy I wrote, he’s painted me a Dalí-esque collage face, looking like an Aztec god, on a china plate — he’s even engraved a message on the underside. He hands it over shyly.

The shyness may be down to his upbringing. His parents were just 18 when they had him and tried to live the boho dream of the 1970s while raising their infant son. They threw parties, went to gigs and he’d often wake up to find slumbering bodies around the house. He retreated into a fantasy world, making up stories. It wasn’t until art college in Croydon that he came out of himself, performing strange art routines while dressed as Jesus and firing off a water pistol filled with holy water.

His riffs gradually morphed into twisted stand-up. Working the circuit in 1997, he watched his future Mighty Boosh co-star Julian Barratt deliver a chaotic set and was instantly smitten. ‘He gave me a lift home, asked for a coffee and I said, “You must know if you come in, you can never leave,” and he said, “Fine. I haven’t got anything on anyway…” ’

Seven years later, after plugging away at underground gigs, The Boosh found its way on to BBC Three and everything went crazy. Fielding was a comedy deity; he partied with Russell Brand, Courtney Love and Kimberly Stewart, toured the UK playing Wembley and The O2 and earned a ton of cash. But he turned down Hollywood: ‘When we went to America, Robin Williams came to the gig, and Mike Myers had lunch with us and wanted to write a film for us. We’re idiots, we turned it down. I think we were just sick of each other at that point. When you get famous it takes some time to realise it isn’t going to be good.’

He pauses and it’s as if he’s drifted off, Boosh style, into a weird alternate universe that turned out to be his real life. ‘It was a very strange period,’ he muses. ‘I was on tour and you can’t imagine the adrenaline after coming off stage at The O2. There’s no way you’re going to sleep for hours, so you’re going to drink because it’s the only thing that brings you down. It’s so easy to just have another party, and only get up for the sound check. If you do that for six months… well, I was in quite a bad way. Russell [Brand] was quite explicit about wanting it and he could handle it, but I couldn’t really.’

Barratt hated the attention and didn’t want to be famous. He was settling down and having kids with fellow comic actor Julia Davies and trying to make the jump to serious acting. So, after three series and two national tours, they broke up the band after a final live performance in 2009. Fielding found it hard to cope: ‘After The Boosh I was like one of those six-year-olds at a birthday party: everybody gives them presents and cakes and too much sugar, and later on you find them slumped over their new bike, just staring, because they’ve had so much attention and sugar and presents they just implode.’ He gives a twisted half-smile. ‘I literally couldn’t go to any more parties, I couldn’t have more people try to hang out with me. But I was also really scared — I didn’t have The Boosh any more so I couldn’t write something like that. I wanted to get back to the things I liked in comedy, which were always Spike Milligan, Peter Cook, Monty Python, Vic Reeves and Chris Morris.’