The Comedian's Love For AC/DC

At one point not so long ago, when he was still doing club tours, Bostonian Bill Burr was averaging around 300 shows a year. That’s a lot of practice. Burr got to Carnegie Hall in 2011, but it took him until this year to get any evidence of that fact out.

“I wanted to document that I was there obviously, but basically that recording and my previous special were done within two, three months of each other, so there was too much overlap in the material to release both of them without screwing over the fans. You don’t get to play Carnegie Hall too often so I just wanted to document that I was there so I put it out in a way that I knew only truly hardcore fans would get. You know, if you’re buying a comedy album you’re a hardcore fan, but if I was to release it on CD or iTunes, people would complain and be like, ‘Hey man, this is a lot of the same kind of stuff, you’re charging me twice for the same thing?’ So I gave them something unique, and I went all out too, I paid a lot of money to have the thing made, believe me, recording there wasn’t cheap, and I have an insert with all kinds of photos from the night and all that. Plus I always wanted to have a comedy album, so I checked that off the list.”

Burr’s latest special, which premiered on Netflix last month, I’m Sorry You Feel That Way, and shot entirely in black and white, constituted crossing another achievement off the list.

"There was so many comics I was a fan of and I felt that the way their special was shot hurt their material.”

“Doing a special in black and white was another thing I wanted to do, and trying to shoot it more like a movie. I’m not the biggest fan of how they approach shooting a stand-up special. And I’m not a big fan of HD TV; it looks so clear now it looks like you’re looking into a tropical fish tank.

“All of my specials have been working towards this one in terms of how they look, because when I started doing hour-long specials it was that era of doing very quick, choppy edits, doing crowd shots and swooping into jokes, and I just couldn’t stand how they looked! There was so many comics I was a fan of and I felt that the way their special was shot hurt their material.”

A spot on Breaking Bad? Tick. Getting killed on screen by Al Pacino? Tick. His first headline Australian tour looming, the “huge AC/DC fan” is ensuring another tick – a visit to Bon Scott’s grave.

“I already talked to my agent. He had me going right in and out of Perth and I said, you gotta switch up my flights, I got to have time to go pay my respects.”