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BYRNE OF CONTENTION

BY CHRIS WILSON

ED BYRNE has the face of an angel and the gift of the gab. And, on stage, he comes across as being too amiable to be true. Surely he cannot really be that pleasant?

Yet meeting him in a swanky club in London's theatreland, you have to concede he is instantly likeable. He exchanges greetings with his agent and another comedian before sitting down to talk cheerily - only when his former girlfriend is mentioned does the mood darken.

It is seven years since Byrne took up stand-up, bravely starting his own little comedy club in a Glaswegian pub. He moved to London where his hard work, talent and charm saw him rise above the bickering of the club circuit.

He has put on three hit solo shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, gone on television and played gigs in Britain, America, Australia, Holland and Ireland.

The central plank of his work is the war of the sexes and it is here that a less happy side to Byrne is evident.

"A lot of my material is about my ex-girlfriend," he says. "And I don't give a s*** if she objects. I went out with her for a year-and-a-half but we lived together for most of it. We had arguments all the time.

Probably the darkest bit of material I did about it was that we had reached the stage where the relationship itself became one big argument and you only stayed because you want to win that argument. You loved it when the other person made a mistake because it gave you licence to be a b***ard."

They split up three years ago when, Byrne says, he fled "screaming mad out of the place" to save his sanity.

"It was really nasty. She was actually shouting, 'Stop thief!' when I was running away, trying to cause more trouble by pretending I had stolen her bag. It was crazy. I jumped into a cab and she jumped into another taxi and tried to follow me."

Maybe, I suggest, Byrne's problem is that he is too attractive to women. Has comedy brought him many lovers?

The 27-year-old grins mischievously and says his sexual peak before he did comedy - when he was doing a student sabbatical year at Strathclyde University, in Glasgow. "Being a comedian, you get groupies," he says in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.

"But being the vice-president of a students' union gets you laid far more often than any showbiz job. I had a ridiculous amount of sex.

"I lost count of the number of girls. I was in charge of the largest licensed premises in Scotland and had an office on top of the building. I'd say, 'Do you want to see my office, love?' It worked every time.

"University was like my 1960s. I would say I had sex with around 100 women at university, most of them in my sabbatical year."

The seeds were sown for Byrne's comedy career when he started introducing acts he had booked and found that audiences liked his humour.

It set him on a path that led him a long way from his roots.

Byrne was born in Swords, a County Dublin suburb. His father was an aircraft technician and mother a therapeutic radiographer, but he liked the idea of market gardening, until he started studying horticulture at Strathclyde in 1990.

He spent more time involved in student politics than studying and after two years was elected the union's vice-president. When his sabbatical year ended he quit his course to try to make his name in comedy.

"I started a club in a Glasgow bar to give myself experience as a compere. I did every week for three months but then moved down to London where the streets are paved with comedy clubs. Even if you go to New York or Los Angeles, there's nowhere with the number of comedy clubs that London has."

Doing try-outs, he progressed quickly, getting a paid booking from his second open spot.. With no early traumas to use for material - he had a happy childhood - Byrne on more recent events.

He says his first "cohesive" material was about the time he and a friend had looked at hardcore pornography in a German sex shop. "I did a whole routine about it," he says. "It was funny but it was just shocking and rude, basically."

Despite his talent, Byrne was hard up.

"I was on the dole for a year as I was starting out and it lit a fire under my arse. A lot of good new comics have day jobs when they're trying to make it. Then they don't leave their nice cushy jobs to go professional because of the drop in salary. When you're on the dole, you need every gig.

But someone with a full time job might not be bothered to perform in a Firkin pub for 30 pounds. Sometimes I was so broke I couldn't even get to gigs on public transport. I remember walking miles from my flat in Camberwell to an unpaid open spot in Battersea because I couldn't afford the bus fare."

Byrne found himself bonding with other new comics on the circuit including rising stars Brendon Burns, Adam Bloom and Ross Noble.

"We became fast friends. We'd drink late into the night having discussions about comedy which we could only have with each other because you think anyone who's been doing comedy not quite as long as you knows nothing and anyone who's been doing it for longer is too jaded to want to talk to you about it."

By October 1994, he had signed off the dole, and in March the next year, he stopped claiming housing benefit. The following year, he split up with his girlfriend, a musician, and starting sharing flats with other comics.

"The sh***iest places were the ones I shared with Ross Noble. We had three different flats in north London: one in Haringey, where we had rats, another in Finsbury Park on the third floor but still managed to get rats. Then we went to Leytonstone, where we also got rats. We managed to infest every property we moved into."

It was 1996 and his career was taking off. He stormed comedy gigs and festivals as far afield as Amsterdam, Holland, Melbourne, Australia, and Kilkenny, Ireland, and was offered a slot on ITV's The Big Big Talent Show.

But he claims tha professional acts had to pretend to be wannabes so the programme makers could boast that they had discovered them.

"It was irritating and unfair," he says.

All the same, the slot helped him sell out his first solo comedy show at the Edinburgh Fringe, and the following year he sold out again with his first thematic show, Psychobabble. "I was pleased with that. The whole show was based around psychology.

I sat down with psychology books when I was writing. The workings of the mind fascinate me."

His reputation was growing and television slots came flooding in: Channel 4's Father Ted Christmas Show , ITV's Funny Business , The Comedy Store on Channel 5, and even Call My Bluff on the BBC.

But he really needed a brilliant original idea for an Edinburgh show.

On St. Patrick's Day, his current girlfriend, comedy performer and playwright Susan Earl, came to the rescue. "I went to an opera with my girlfriend on our anniversary.

Halfway through, I thought this is the perfect vehicle to do a show about. I still say it was best thing I ever wrote because I took the piss out of the plot of Cosi fan tutte from start to finish.

It's about relationships and gave me jumping off points to do my own material. It lent itself to stuff I was writing anyway about travel, sex and death."

The resultant comedy show, A Night at the Opera, caused an enormous buzz at the 1998 Edinburgh Fringe and won him a Perrier Award nomination and last year he sold out again at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh with general standup show.

Byrne acknowledges his debt to current love Susan who inspires comedy material as they chat in their flat in north London.

"We slag each other all the time," he says. "We love taking the p*ss out of each other. Sometimes the two of us will laugh at something really nasty I have said to her and there will be a pause and she will know my mind is clicking away turning it into a routine."

It's a process you can sense even on a short acquaintance with Byrne. Beneath his cheery exterior and easy charm, there's the fierce and hilarious desire to stir everything up with a good "slagging", which makes him such a compelling comedian.

As if to prove the point, he produces a tiny tape recorder from his pocket.

"Yesterday this was 70 quid's worth of voice recording technology," he exclaims in his strongest Irish brogue.

"Then my girlfriend put my trousers in the wash with it in the pocket and now it's a piece of useless s***."

© 2000 Chris Wilson