PLAYING Leeds Brudenell Social Club on Friday will bring back memories of Stephen Jones’s early Babybird travels.
“We deliberately requested these places [Bristol, Manchester, Leeds, London and Cardiff] as it feels like a rite of passage to return,” he says of this month’s short tour.
“These cities featured in our first tours in 1996 and 1997 and are the most memorable for the between-song banter and the enthusiasm. Though I live near Manchester, these other cities are our musical homes too.”
Joining 60-year-old Stephen on the road will be guitarist Luke Scott and drummer Robert Gregory, fixtures in the line-up since 1995, and bassist Danny Lowe, a band member for 15 years. “Everyone’s doing different things these days – Luke is a senior lecturer in London – but as soon as we get into the tour van it’s like a Chuckle tour,” he says.
Babybird officially split after ten Top 40 singles and 11 albums in 2013, but Stephen continues to write prolifically – up to seven songs a day – for solo release on Bandcamp. Around 100 albums so far and still rising, recorded on a laptop, Stephen still bursting with “monstrous lullabies for an unstable world”.
“Writing tunes is just something I can do,” he says. “Mowing the garden, I’ll put off forever, but going upstairs to the ‘fourth room’ to write the lyrics, that’s the hard part.”
He has been known to write in six-hour bursts, but he does not have a set routine. “Sometimes at four in the morning, I’ll have an idea that I’ll put on the phone, but I’ve never been the kind of writer who will be writing every day because that’s what they do. There’ll be days where I get up and don’t want to do it, but when I do it’s a pleasure,” he says.
“Looking back to those early albums [lo-fi Stephen Jones recordings made initially on cassettes in his Sheffield bedsit over six years], I had no intention of releasing them, but people were coming over and stealing them and saying I should release them!”
Now as then, “I always write for myself. I think everyone does. If you write for an audience, you become an automaton,” he says.
One tour preview summed up Stephen Jones’s post-2013 career as one where he will still “persist and meddle”. “I don’t think I would use the word ‘meddle’,” he says. “But I need to keep going financially, so you have to persist, and even if I had another job, I would persist with making music – but I’ve never had to give it up.”
Born in Wellington, Telford (“the same place as the comedian Stewart Lee,” he notes), Stephen was raised in Repton, Derbyshire, and Nottingham, where he studied film; made those notorious bedsit albums in the Steel City; moved to Manchester, and then to London for 15 years.
Home for the Jones family is now Hale in Altrincham, just outside Manchester. “We were living in a really nice place in London, a maisonette, but with no garden and with two kids, we decided to move back north. Nice garden…and my wife’s mother lives up here too. I love being on the verge of the Lake District,” he says.
If one album were still to sum up Babybird, it would be October 1996’s Ugly Beautiful, the one with “songs to annoy, enjoy and employ God with”; the one with the singles Goodnight, Candy Girl, Cornershop and global hit You’re Gorgeous.
The poster for Babybird’s May tour that opens tonight and arrives in Leeds on Friday
“Obviously some songs I write are out-and-out happy and beautiful too, but that album title sums up everything. I like to write about subjects that aren’t necessarily dark but are realistic. When lots of songs have a sheen, if you’re going to write songs like a David Lynch film, there has to be beauty within,” says Stephen.
“I studied film on the creative arts course at Clifton, at Nottingham Polytechnic as it was then. Fassbinder movies; David Lynch; Eraserhead made a big impression on me. That’s my humour. Dark!”
You’re Gorgeous, a number three hit in autumn 1996, will forever be the signature song, with its theme of male exploitation and yet a misleadingly upbeat chorus. “It’s funny what happened,” says Stephen. “Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown, whose humour I don’t like, did a version. The Wurzels have done a version. Pinky And Perky, they did it, without changing the lyrics. The Smurfs wanted to change the words, so we could say ‘No’ to that!” Dame Berwick Kaler once sang it in a York Theatre Royal pantomime too, by the way.
Stephen wrote the song in his lo-fi recording days. “I always thought it might be a hit of course, but I was listening to Stewart Lee talking to Adam Buxton on his podcast about successful acts who wanted to be cults and those who are underground but who wanted to be successful,” he says.
“It’s a hard gap to straddle, but I’ve kind of done both and that’s why ‘Gorgeous’ is good, because although it can define you, I can keep going into the studio because all the airplay keeps the money coming in.”
Stephen has come through a heart attack too in 2017. “It did stop me in my tracks. It was like having an iron cage put over me, but it was coming,” he says, attributing what happened to alcohol. “Does it make you reassess? Well, you do for a while, but then you go back to a glass of wine.
“What I’m doing is the same as an office job. Now I get up every 20 minutes when I’m writing – and I go to the gym too. I was in a ward with four men who looked so much worse than me, but then depression comes, but you come out of that. The doctors say I’m in better health than ever, with a stent in me, and now I’m just having a good time doing these gigs.
“There’s no pressure to promote things, which doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s perfect now. I’m older now. I was inspired by the tail end of punk, seeing The Stranglers, and it’s still that DIY thing of glueing your sleeves together, thinking it’s totally up to you what you do.”
Stephen’s 20-year friendship with Johnny Depp found “lyrical diamond” Stephen attending the Hollywood A-lister’s guest appearance with guitarist Jeff Beck in Manchester last May in the aftermath of Depp’s successful libel trial against ex-partner Amber Heard. “I was meeting him in the dressing room, shortly after the verdict. I fell over and smashed my leg. I now have a huge tear,” he says.
Nothing that will stop him from performing in Leeds on Friday, however, still searching for the meaning of life that he happily acknowledges he may never find.
Babybird, supported by Terrorvision’s Tony Wright, Leeds Brudenell Social Club, May 5, doors 7.30pm. Box office: brudenellsocialclub.co.uk.
Did you know?
STEPHEN Jones has written two novels, The Bad Book in 2000 and Harry And Ida Swap Teeth (also the title of a Babybird B-side) in 2003. He wrote the score for the 2004 film Blessed.
Did you know too?
CHEF, cookery book writer, TV presenter and restaurateur Gordon Ramsay used Babybird’s song The F-Word in one of his TV series.
The return of RSJ: York metalcore band reconvene for one -off reunion at The Crescent
HEAVYWEIGHT comedy, hardcore rock, reshaped Shakespeare and a ‘roarsome’ children’s show fire up Charles Hutchinson’s enthusiasm for the week ahead.
Resurrection of the week: Mr H presents RSJ, The Crescent, York, tonight, doors 7pm
YORK’S mightiest metalcore groovers reunite for a special one-off show, fronted once more by Dan Cook, now of Raging Speedhorn. “RSJ were/are one of the most intense groove and hardcore noise monsters, not just in York but across the UK. It’s no wonder they stormed stages at Bloodstock, Knebworth and Hellfire,” says promoter Tim Hornsby.
RSJ’s spine-rattling polyrhythms and huge guitars will be preceded by the return of much-missed melodic hardcore band Beyond All Reason and Disinfo. Box office: thecrescentyork.com.
Justin Moorhouse: Plenty on his plate to get off his chest at Burning Duck Comedy Club night
Lancastrian in York of the week: Burning Duck Comedy Club presents Justin Moorhouse, Stretch And Think, The Crescent, York, Sunday, 7.30pm
MANCHESTER stand-up, radio presenter and actor Justin Moorhouse is back, “still funny, yet middle aged” (he’s 52), in a new suit for a new show that may contain thoughts on yoga, growing older, Madonna, shoplifters, Labradoodles, cyclists, the menopause, running, hating football fans but loving football…
…not drinking, funerals, tapas, Captain Tom, Droylsden, the environment, self-improvement, horses, the odd advantages of fundamental religions, the gym and shop-door etiquette. “Come, it’ll be fun,” he says. Box office: thecrescentyork.com.
Royal Shakespeare Company: Linking up with York Theatre Royal for York Associate Schools Playmaking Festival
School project of the week: York Theatre Royal and Royal Shakespeare Company presentYork Associate Schools Playmaking Festival of The Merchant Of Venice, York Theatre Royal, Tuesday and Wednesday, 6.30pm
SHAKESPEARE’S playis told in six sections by six schools each night, using choral and ensemble approaches to relate Shylock’s story through multiple bodies and voices in a celebration of the joy of performance that explores themes of prejudice, friendship and self-interest.
Participating schools on March 28: Acomb Primary, Applefields School, Millthorpe School, Vale of York Academy, St Barnabas CE Primary; March 29, Clifton Green Primary, Poppleton Road Primary, Brayton Academy, Scarcroft Primary, Fulford School and Joseph Rowntree School. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
Big in the Eighties: Andy Cryer in The Comedy Of Errors (More Or Less) at the SJT, Scarborough. Picture: Patch Dolan
Shake-up of the week: The Comedy Of Errors (More Or Less), Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, Thursday to April 15
ORIGINALLY by Shakespeare, now messed around with by Elizabeth Godber and Nick Lane, SJT director Paul Robinson’s vibrant new staging of the Bard’s most bonkers farce arrives in a co-production with Prescot’s Shakespeare North Playhouse.
The Comedy Of Errors (More Or Less) is brought to life in neon-lit 1980s’ Scarborough. Cue mistaken identities, theatrical chaos and belting musical numbers from the era of big phones and even bigger shoulder pads. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com.SEE REVIEW BELOW.
The poster artwork for Pick Me Up Theatre Company’s Oh! What A Lovely War
Revival of the week: Pick Me Up Theatre in Oh! What A Lovely War, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, March 31 to April 8, 7.30pm, except April 2 and 3; 2.30pm, April 1, 2 and 8
PICK Me Up Theatre present a 60th anniversary production of Oh! What A Lovely War, a satirical chronicle of the First World War, told through songs and documents in the form of a seaside Pierrot entertainment.
Devised and presented by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in 1963 before being turned into a film by Richard Attenborough in 1969, now it is in the hands of Robert Readman’s York cast. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.
Feeling hot, hot, hot: Zog is on fire in Freckle Productions’ show at York Theatre Royal
Children’s show of the week: Freckle Productions in Zog, York Theatre Royal, March 31, 4.30pm; April 1, 10.30am, 1.30pm and 3.30pm
JULIA Donaldson and Alex Scheffler’s Zog takes to the stage in a magical Freckle Productions show most suitable for age three upwards, although all ages are welcome. Zog is trying very hard to win a golden star at Madam Dragon’s school, perhaps too hard, as he bumps, burns and roars his way through Years 1, 2 and 3.
Luckily plucky Princess Pearl patches him up, ready to face his biggest challenge yet: a duel with knight Sir Gadabout the Great. Emma Kilbey directs; Joe Stilgoe provides the songs. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
Roy “Chubby” Brown: Bluer than Stilton at York Barbican
Still in rude health: Roy “Chubby” Brown, York Barbican, March 31, 7.30pm
ROY “Chubby” Brown – real name Royston Vasey, from Grangetown, Middlesbrough – is on the road again at 78, 50 years into a blue comedy career that carries the warning: “If easily offended, please stay away”.
Chubby may not be everyone’s cup of tea but a lot of people like tea, he says. Thirty DVDs in 30 years, thousands of shows worldwide and four books testify to the abiding popularity of a profane joker full of frank social commentary, forthright songs and contempt for political correctness. Box office: yorkbarbican.co.uk.
In the doghouse: Ferocious Dog attack songs with bite at York Barbican
Where there is despair, may they bring Hope: Ferocious Dog, supported by Mark Chadwick, York Barbican, April 1, 7pm
FEROCIOUS Dog, a Left-leaning six-piece from Warsop, Nottinghamshire, slot somewhere between Levellers and early Billy Bragg in their vibrant vein of Celtic folk-infused punk rock.
Fifth album Hope came out in 2021, charting at number 31 in the Official UK Charts. Special guest will be Levellers’ leader Mark Chadwick, joined by Ferocious Dog violinist Dan Booth for part of his 7pm set. Box office: yorkbarbican.co.uk.
Artwork by Cuban painter Leo Morey, one of the new artists taking part in York Open Studios 2023
Early sighter of the week:York Open Studios 2023 Taster Exhibition, The Hospitium, Museum Gardens, York, April 1 and 2, 10am to 4pm
FOR the first time since 2019, York Open Studios will be launched with a taster exhibition next weekend featuring examples of work by most of the 150 artists and makers set to open their studio doors on April 15, 16, 22 and 23.
This free preview gives a flavour of what will be coming up at more than 100 venues next month. Full details of this year’s artists and locations can be found at yorkopenstudios.co.uk. Look out for booklets around York.
In Focus: Luke Wright, The Remains Of Logan Dankworth, Selby Town Hall, March 30, 8pm
In the Wright place: Luke Wright making his political point in The Remains Of Logan Dankworth
PERFORMANCE poet Luke Wright returns to Selby Town Hall on Thursday to peform his 2022 Edinburgh Fringe political verse play The Remains Of Logan Dankworth.
Columnist and Twitter warrior Logan Dankworth grew up romanticising the political turmoil of the 1980s. Now, as the EU Referendum looms, he is determined to be in the fray of the biggest political battle for years.
Meanwhile, Logan’s wife Megan wants to leave London to better raise their daughter. As tensions rise at home and across the nation, something is set to be lost forever.
The third in Wright’s trilogy of lyrically rich plays looks at trust, fatherhood and family in the age of Brexit. Winner of The Saboteur Award for Best Show, it picked up four and five-star from the Telegraph, the Scotsman, the Stage and British Theatre Guide.
Wright was a founder member of poetry collective Aisle16, who shook up the spoken-word scene in the 2000s, helping to kick-start a British renaissance of the form. He is the regular tour support for John Cooper Clarke and often hosts shows for The Libertines.
He is a frequent guest on BBC Radio 4, a Fringe First winner for writing and a Stage Award winner for performance.
“Luke Wright is an astonishing performer and one of the best political writers around today, whose wonderful, lyrical writing translates really well to full-length plays,” says Selby Town Council arts officer Chris Jones.
“I was lucky enough to see The Remains Of Logan Dankworth in Edinburgh last summer and made sure I booked it for Selby Town Hall straight away. It’s a brilliantly told story by a powerhouse poet.”
For tickets: ring 01757 708449 or book online at selbytownhall.co.uk.
REVIEW: The Comedy Of Errors (More Or Less), Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough *****
David Kirkbride’s Antipholus of Scarborough in a headlock with Claire Eden’s Big Sandra in The Comedy Of Errors (More Or Less). All pictures: Patch Dolan
Stephen Joseph Theatre and Shakespeare North Playhouse in The Comedy Of Errors (More Or Less), Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until April 15, 7.30pm plus 1.30pm Thursday and 2.30pm Saturday matinees. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com
THIS Comedy Of Errors gets everything right. Not more or less. Just right. Full stop.
Shakespeare’s “most bonkers farce” has been entrusted to Nick Lane, madly inventive writer of the SJT’s equally bonkers pantomime, and Elizabeth Godber, a blossoming writing talent from the East Yorkshire theatrical family.
How does this new partnership work? In a nutshell, Lane has penned the men’s lines, Godber, the female ones, before the duo moulded the finale in tandem.
SJT artistic director Paul Robinson, meanwhile, selected a criminally good play list of Eighties’ guilty pleasures, from Whitesnake’s Here I Go Again to Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl, Nik Kershaw’s Wouldn’t It Be Good to Toni Basil’s Mickey, Cher’s Just Like Jesse James to Kenny Loggins’ Footloose, to be sung in character or as an ensemble with Northern Chorus oomph.
Oh, Dromio, Dromio, wherefore art thy other Dromio? Oliver Mawdsley’s Dromio of Prescot in the SJT’s The Comedy Of Errors(More Or Less)
Aptly, the opening number is an ensemble rendition of Dream Academy’s one-hit wonder, Life In A Northern Town, that town being 1980s’ Scarborough, just as Lane always roots his pantomimes in the Yorkshire resort.
From an original idea by Robinson, Lane and Godber’s reinvention of Shakespeare’s comedy is not too far-fetched but far enough removed to take on its own personality and, frankly, be much, much funnier as a result. To the point where one woman in the front row was in the grip of a fit of giggles. Yes, that joyous.
For Ephesus, a city on the Ionian coast with a busy port, read Scarborough, a town on the Yorkshire coast with a fishing harbour, although all the fish and chip cafés were shut without explanation on the evening of the press night. Was something fishy going on?
Ephesus was governed by Duke Solinus; Scarborough is run by Andy Cryer’s oleaginous Solinus. Still the merry-go-round action is spun around outdoor public spaces on Jessica Curtis’s set, where protagonists bump into each other like dodgem cars. Just as Syracusans were subject to strict rules in the original play, now Lancastrians are given the Yorkshire cold shoulder in a new war of the roses, besmirched Eccles Cakes et al.
In with a shout: Claire Eden, right, meets a Scarborough greeting from Alyce Liburd, left, Valerie Antwi and Ida Regan in The Comedy Of Errors (More Or Less)
So begins a tale of two rival states and two sets of mismatched twins (Antipholus and Dromio times two) on one nutty day at the seaside. Cue a mishmash of mistaken identities, mayhem agogo, and merriment to the manic max, conducted at an ever more frenetic lick.
It worked wonders for Richard Bean in One Man, Two Guvnors, his Swinging Sixties’ revamp of Goldoni’s 1743 Italian Commedia dell’arte farce, The Servant Of Two Masters, setting his gloriously chaotic caper, as chance would have it, in another English resort: Brighton. Now The Comedy Of Errors evens up the mathematical equation for two plus two to equal comedy nirvana from so much division.
One ‘guvnor’, Lancastrian comic actor Antipholus of Prescot (Peter Kirkbride) crosses the Pennine divide to perform his one-man show. Trouble is, everyone has booked tickets for the talent show across the bay, starring t’other ‘guvnor’, the twin brother he has never met, Antipholus of Scarborough (David Kirkbride, different first name, but same actor, giving licence for amusing parallel biographies in the programme).
The two ‘servants’ of the piece, Dromio of Prescot and Scarborough respectively (Oliver/Zach Mawdsley), are equally unaware of the other’s presence, compounding a trail of confusion rooted in Scarborough’s Antipholus owing money everywhere but still promising his wife a gold chain. He needs to win the contest to appease Scarborough’s more unsavoury sorts.
Comedy gold: Andy Cryer in The Comedy Of Errors (More Or Less)
Kirkbride takes the acting honours in his hyperactive double act with himself, Mawdsley a deux is a picture of perplexity; Cryer, in his 40th year of SJT productions, is comedy gold as ever in chameleon roles; likewise, Claire Eden fills the stage with diverse riotous, no-nonsense character, whether from Lancashire or Yorkshire.
Valerie Antwi, Alyce Liburd and Ida Regan, each required to put up with the maelstrom of male malarkey, add so much to the comedic commotion, on song throughout too.
Under Robinson’s zesty, witty direction, everything in Scarborough must be all at sea and yet somehow emerge as comic plain sailing, breaking down theatre’s fourth wall to forewarn with a knowing wink of the need to suspend disbelief when seeing how the company will play the two sets of twins once, spoiler alert, they finally meet.
Who knew shaken-and-stirred Shakespeare could be this much fun, enjoying life in the fast Lane with Godber gumption galore too. Add the Yorkshire-Lancashire spat and those Eighties’ pop bangers, Wayne Parsons’ choreography and the fabulous costumes, and this is the best Bard comedy bar none since Joyce Branagh’s Jazz Age Twelfth Night for Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre in York in 2019.
When The Comedy Of Errors meets the 1980s, the laughs are even bigger than the shoulder pads. A case of more, not less.
