Grin Vender

“It's a sunny day in London,” comedian Bill Bailey proclaims warmly, as we start our conversation. “The sun's shining, the birds are singing, and it's not freezing rain. Today, I'm off to find a sitar, which is somewhere in my lock-up.”

Bill Bailey, of Hot Fuzz fame, of Black Books fame, of all those fantastic things that invariably spot your Best Of list, is a busy, multi-talented man. His days, when not filled with Whitmanesque nature-gazing and trips to find dusty sitars, are spent furiously writing new material. Outside of that, he's touring, or he's making an appearance on a local talk show, or he's working on a sitcom, or he's starring in a new film. “I think that one thing does win out, though, and that's live comedy,” he explains. “I think live comedy is something I've realised I love doing, and I can't see a time when I wouldn't do it. You know, those other things that I do I enjoy very much, they're just great ways of punctuating the times [between] when I'm touring or writing.”

And that old adage about the unparalleled rush of performing to a live audience, insists Bailey, is completely true. “Individually, [the other work] is great extra credits. But I think [live] comedy is something which really involves a bit of everything I do – a bit of performance, a bit of acting, a bit of writing, a bit of travel, and music: all the elements that I try and include in everything I do. I'm yet to find something [else] that will adequately satisfy all those crazy needs.”

And of course, Bailey too originally foresaw himself as a travelling rockstar. He laughs: “Yeah, I always thought I'd be in a band. I wanted to play keyboards with Talking Heads, but it turns out they had a keyboard player already, which was annoying.

“But in a way,” he quips, “I'm glad I didn't do that. What comedy allows you to do is exercise both the disciplines of music – the music itself, and spoken word. And I love the spoken word. It's fascinating; it's endlessly unpredictable – I never quite know what's going to work with an audience and what isn't. That's one of the great joys about it; it's not a known science.”

Encompassing all of that and more, Bailey's new show, Qualmpeddler, represents a new height for his multi-faceted style. “My shows have become quite labour intensive, but I'm all the better for it,” he explains. “I [recently] travelled to China and I realised that [the material] I was [writing] about was coming out of that trip, hence the tour poster [as] a parody of one of their propaganda posters. [They're] these beautiful hand-painted works of art, but it's all about oppression, it's all about misery and despair. They've this strange duality about them, which I just find fascinating. And that's a lot about what the show's title is, it's about people that are selling the stuff.”

Cheekily, it's put to Bailey that comedians are in fact a form of Qualmpeddler, too. “I suppose we are,” he laughs. “We're all anxiety mongers, hawkers of concerns!”