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GIVING IT LARGE

BY CHRIS WILSON

PHILL JUPITUS is a jack of all trades. The showbiz all-rounder is a skilful stand-up and compère, an accomplished impressionist and tuneful singer. He briefly played bass guitar in a band with Billy Bragg, presents a weekly radio show and is an able artist and illustrator.

He was also a leading punk poet and directed videos for Bragg and Kirsty McColl, and is now a big hit as a team captain on the BBC1 panel game, Never Mind The Buzzcocks.

So much talent in one man could easily make you sick - if he was not such a thoroughly down-to-earth and amiable chap.

When we meet at a photographic studio in north London, he greets me like an old friend.

Then Jupitus sits down, takes off his socks and places them on the table. His manner is so relaxed, this quirky behaviour seems natural. The big man merely wants to air his feet after a hard morning thinking of new jokes to tell in Edinburgh.

He admits he has not done much stand-up for six months and is feeling rusty. He is a little worried but determined to put on a cracking show with lots of new material and the reworked best of his old routines - for his return to the Fringe, at the Assembly Rooms in August 1999. One headache, he admits, is that he never writes down his gags, so he has been forced to watch videos of his old performances to recall the routines!

Jupitus is keen to move on from the Star Wars theme which he employed to great effect in his Jedi, Steady, Go tour last year and in live work from 1996.

Instead, his health - and particularly the fear of having a heart attack - will take centre stage. "I used to do a routine about heart attacks," he says, "but now I'm 37 it has become a more real fear and I can approach it from a different angle." At 20 stone in weight, he has good cause to be concerned about his health.

All the same, he does not exercise or diet. "There's an irresponsibility within me which says, 'F*** it. You only live once!' About twice a year, I drink like a teenager. I get merry and then have one drink too many and spiral out of control. It's foolishness."

Most of the time though, he is teetotal - believing that he has lost the capacity to drink and work the next day. "Ten years ago on my 27th birthday, I drank shots of Jack Daniels and pints of lager like a conveyor belt all night at the Town and Country Club in London.

"I got completely off my face but felt fine the next day. Now I can have three bottles of San Miguel and wake up in the morning feeling like sh*t."

Doing stand-up while drunk is one of the toughest challenges a comedian can face, he says. "I used to go to gigs and have a skinful of beer. There were times I went on stage while off my face.

"I couldn't do that now. Performing while drunk is hard - your timing is all cock and you forget your material. It's all in your head and your head's somewhere else."

Jupitus is warming to the subject and jovially says he has seen fellow comedians "twisted on various substances doing gigs, including people using cannabis, doing lovely, mellow, laidback, Izzardesque, rambling material."

Has he tried the drug? "I might have had the occasional puff and wandered out there and felt a little bit dizzy," he confesses, "but now I don't use it because it makes you hungry, giggly and lazy and I am already these three things.Cannabis turns people into Phill Jupitus! So why take a drug which makes me more of what I am already?"

But he says he would never take cocaine or the other hard drugs, although he is not prepared to totally dismiss their usefulness in comedy performance.

"Most people I've seen on cocaine become obnoxious. They are, 'Me, me, me, me, me!' If you are somebody who isn't normally like that, I can see how cocaine would make you do a good gig.

"But if you have that control anyway, all the coke will do is turn you into a monster. So I can see the positive and negative of working on the stuff - on any drug, except psychedelic ones. Then you would just be silly watching butterflies through the audience consisting largely of goats. They are not performing drugs."

But who needs drugs for inspiration, points out Jupitus, when there is the tabloid press.

He trawls popular newspapers for quirky yarns that will set his creative juices flowing.

"I like to start on page four and look for the odd little stories. In Edinburgh a few years ago, I ended up getting half an hour of material out of a story about a woman who was suing London Zoo because an elephant threw a log at her. I need those little springboards to get going.

" He says his greatest source of jokes is the Daily Star. "I like the the hit-and-run nature of their stories," he says, citing the case of a Belgium man who took legal action against his spouse over his conjugal rights.

"The Star simply said: 'He's suing his wife. . . because she won't bonk him!'"

There is no doubt that Jupitus is a man of the people. He does not put alternative comedy on the pedestal of high art.

He is content to entertain on whatever level suits an audience, be it pavement, gutter or sewer. And when on stage, the steely backbone of the cuddly big boy becomes apparent. If a heckler taunts him about his weight, Jupitus will probably say: "You know why I'm fat. Every time I f*** your mother, she gives me a cooked breakfast."

And he waxes lyrical about the acerbic skills of Big Breakfast presenter Johnny Vaughan, whom he has stood in for on three occasions during the last year. "He puts most stand-ups to shame with his adroitness around any situation that's thrown at him."

Watching Jupitus warm up for his Edinburgh run, with a night of compèring at London's Comedy Store, makes you realise that he is spectacularly spontaneous.

A chance remark by an audience member triggers a string of hilarious gags from Jupitus about computer sex. In the interval, he says he was completely improvising. "I hope I can remember them," he says. "I'll build that into a 20 minute routine for Edinburgh."

Comedians often use the phrase "Work in progress" to describe material they claim to be testing.

If truth were told, most of them are rattling out the same jaded routines time and again - rarely changing a syllable.

Jupitus is an exciting act because often he is genuinely ad libbing, taking a topic from the audience and sprinkling a hastily made-up routine about it with impressions culled from popular culture - such as cartoon character Marge Simpson, President Bill Clinton and Blakey from the classic sitcom On The Buses .

Everything Jupitus does on stage is aimed at striking a popular chord, and, in this, his upbringing has been an enormous help.

Jupitus was born 37 years ago at Newport Hospital on the Isle of Wight.

His mother, Dot, is an artist ("really good at copying Renoirs"), his father, Bob, a self-employed surveyor. They moved from the island when he was aged four and settled first at Horndon-on-the-Hill, Essex, and then in Stanford-le-Hope.

"These places sound fabulous. But they are basically dormitory towns," says Jupitus.

Phill was the eldest of three children. His younger brother, Richard, a computer expert, is 33 and his publishing administrator sister, Kate, is 29.

His childhood was a happy one. He attended Northbury Infants and Junior School, in Barking, at the same time as Billy Bragg.

"Bill is four years older than me so he was in the juniors when I was in the infants," says Jupitus. "We would have been larking around in the same playground but didn't know each other until later."

But their paths were already crossing. With a schoolmate, Bragg formed a band called Riff Raff. They played a gig in The Brewery Taps, Barking, a pub run at the time by Phill Jupitus's grandfather on his Essex-born mother's side.

Jupitus's grandparents on his father's side are Lithuanian. They emigrated to Britain in 1917 when their surname in Russian was Anglicised to Jupitus by an imaginative immigration official.

He was christened Phillip, and says his mother drummed the two "l"s part into his head so firmly into this head that he has always spelt the abbreviated form "Phill".

As a child, he loved Monty Python and pop music. Sweet were my No. 1 band and Slade and Wizzard were a laugh.

And I loved the novelty single, The Streak. I remember thinking it was hilarious when it came out. I heard it recently again - what a piece of sh*t!'

He went briefly to an Essex comprehensive school but transferred, on a scholarship, to a private boarding school, Woolverston Hall, just outside Ipswich.

"My aunt managed to blag me a place," he claims, "and I hated it, although I wasn't b*ggered. There was no forced sex. But a senior boy who was 17 or 18 used to come into our dormitory late at night and toss himself off in front of us. We were all 12, so it was f***ing sinister and obscene. If I saw him in the street now, I'd stab the c***!" The harder side of Jupitus is on show again, but quickly goes back in its box.

He says he became even passionate about pop as a teenager, although the music criticism baffled him. "I used to read Paul Morley in the NME, spirally intellectually around a band until we were sick of it.

"I saw him walking along the road the other day. I wish I could have had the bottle to button-hole him and say, 'What are you doing now? I never understood a word you wrote!'

Jupitus failed three of his eight 'O' levels examinations and left Woolverston for a local technical college.

He struggled academically at 'A' levels and dropped out to work as a Job Centre clerk. "I was there for five years - it was very boring," he says. "But it could be fulfilling when you found jobs for people and they thanked you with flowers." Ironically, he admits that there were long lulls with little work to do at the Job Centre - when he would scribble left-wing poetry on sheets of Civil Service note paper.

He quit in 1984 with a burning desire to work in the music industry.

Then he saw some performance poets in action. "I thought it looked easy," he says. With characteristic confidence, Jupitus, who had renamed himself "Porky the Poet", offered his services to touring bands - as a support act. "I was very cheap. If you got another band to support you, there are probably four of them and roadies and managers. But me - I just turned up and read poems."

It was the Thatcher years, when much of Britain's youth was galvanised against a prime minister who incited an exceptional level of hatred. On the student circuit, leftie New Wave poets were the order of the day.

But perhaps the root of Porky's success was that he made humour the palatable filling in a politics sandwich. "I'd start and finish with something political and put all the piss-and-sh*t fun in the middle." Beano, one of his lightweight ditties, began:


They have all grown up in the Beano
Dennis the Menace has got pubic hair
Biffo is into anarchy now
More of a punk than a bear


Great poetry it was not. Nonetheless, by 1985 he was supporting Billy Bragg on tour.

It was only afterwards that Jupitus discovered that the bottom had fallen out of the ranting poetry market. "I couldn't get any gigs," he laments.

He found work as a dogsbody for the fledging record label Go! Discs, whose roster of stars featured Bragg and The Housemartins. "I used to make tea, sandwiches and jokes," he says.

Eventually, he became The Housemartins' press officer - a job he particularly liked. "They were a great pop band and very sensible with their money," Jupitus recalls. "They would take buses to gigs and sleep on fans' floors to save the cost of hotels." The Housemartins asked Jupitus to be MC at their gigs - to save the cost of a professional compère. He started cracking jokes on stage and found he was getting big laughs. The seeds of his comedy career had been sown.

As Go! Discs got more successful, Jupitus was less happy.

He says the founders, Andy and Juliet MacDonald were "millionaires very quickly" and came to believe they could create stars.

And although he says he liked them, he says it was the generosity of socialist Billy Bragg that helped out the label's staff. "Bill had company shares, half of which he gave to the staff and when Go! Discs was bought out by Polygram all of us got quite a chunk of change - tens of thousands of pounds."

Jupitus quit the music industry and embarked on the long trudge to make it as a stand-up comedian.

It was 1989. Jupitus's track-record as Porky the Poet helped him get gigs at some venues. But with most, it was back to square one. He specialised in compèring to maximise his stage time. Within a couple of years, he had established himself on the London circuit.

But he will never forget his foray to the Edinburgh Fringe, in 1992. "The comedian John Mann and I lost truck loads of money because we were playing a gym on the outskirt of town," he chuckles. "Forget the Third World debt. I think we are still paying back the Live Essex Show debt!" He has been several times since then, but says he has not done a full-length solo show for three years.

With an American-sized grin, Jupitus says he is looking forward to this year's challenge.

One can only wish him well. Jupitus is one of the most pleasant people in show business - a man so familiar with all sides of the media that his feet remain firmly planted on the ground.

And he is exceptionally funny. His show at Edinburgh's Assembly Rooms is definitely one to see. "Different things are going to be happening every night," Phill adds, "because I like messing around with my material. But I will also be finishing with a song about bestiality, for which I apologise in advance."

Apology accepted. A comedy treat is surely in store.

© 1999 Chris Wilson