An homme fatale always has the last laugh

Brand has a talent for inducing apoplexy in girls’ fathers and the spat with Stewart was reminiscent of his verbal horse-whipping by Bob Geldof at the NME awards, hosted by Brand in February. Receiving his award, Geldof began his speech: “Russell Brand . . . what a c***.”

Whereupon Brand demonstrated his dexterity as a stand-up comedian with the cruel riposte: “Geldof’s the best person to speak about famine, seeing as he’s been dining out on [the song] I Don’t Like Mondays for 30 years.” Geldof, it seems, was worried about the honour of his daughter Peaches.

There’s no doubt the man’s a devil with the women. He’s a beguiling 6ft 2in confection of Cuban heels, tight jeans, snake hips, Byronic shirts, hollow cheeks and eyeliner that gives him the look of a hungry angel, all topped off with a floating bird’s nest of hair. Alternatively, he’s been described as a mixture of Dot Cotton and Kenneth Williams.

Given all the grooming and narcissism, it would be more convenient to be gay, he has confessed. He tried homosexuality once during an orgy but decided it just wasn’t him. “He wasn’t even a good-looking man,” he recalled. “But I have this kind of roaring heterosexuality. Traditional, uncomplicated heterosexuality, an almost clichéd Robin [Confessions of a Window Cleaner] Askwith thing. People have always said, ‘Are you gay?’ But it’ s just not in me.”

His liaison with Moss began when he picked her up during one of his gigs with the memorable words: “I know you want to shag me but you’re just going to have to wait a couple of hours until I’ve finished the show.” Moss’s fury after he crowed to the press has left him coy about mentioning her. It did not stop him from claiming that he had entertained five women in a day and observing that three at a time gets “logistically difficult”.

It seems he can’t avoid controversy. A woman claimed she was raped in his rented Ediburgh flat last month. She alleged her drink could have been spiked with a date-rape drug. Brand denied being involved and it was reported yesterday that another man had been charged.

He’s not just a pretty face in his own mirror. He’s a really funny guy who has wrung superlatives from the critics. One said: “He is an original talent, a rare break from the steady stream of solid comics with solid jokes and solid laughs and no aftertaste at all.”

His frenetic humour drove his devoted audience into hysterics on his E4 show Big Brother’s Big Mouth, in which a studio audience discussed the misdoings of the most recent Big Brother housemates. The show’s guests have included Tom Cruise, Uma Thurman and Christian Slater.

Its success has led to his new television debate show, Russell Brand’s Got Issues, in which he will conduct personalities and a studio audience in comic discussion of contentious and topical issues.

Then there’s his acting. He appeared in the made-for-television movie White Teeth and won a part in Mark Palansky’s film Penelope, with Reese Witherspoon and Christina Ricci. He morphs into darker, more confessional mode for his stand-up routines, which mine his degenerate past of drugs, mental illness, a dozen arrests and sleeping with prostitutes.

His recent eight-night show, Shame, at the Edinburgh Fringe was a sell-out, eclipsing the memory of his ejection from the city’s Gilded Ballroom for abusive behaviour in 2004. The Times called it “a fitfully brilliant show”. He was named best stand-up of 2006 by Time Out magazine.

Performing comedy, he discovered, was like drugs — an instant addiction. “The first time I took drugs, I took drugs every day until I stopped 11 years later,” he said.

His first experience of heroin, bought from some street boys, was divine. “Finding heroin, it’s like God’s home, a lover. Just this feeling of being engulfed by warmth, everything moving away, your life, everything, and withdrawing into this beautiful sanctuary.”

Heroin and cocaine crowned a pile of drugs that had included grass, acid and amphetamines. Which is perhaps why his Bin Laden stunt misfired so badly.

Brand says he wouldn’t do it now, but maintains it had a point: “There’s a distinction between those poor terrible people dying in those towers over there and me doing a joke about it over here. I think one function of comedy is to expose and unravel fear.”

He claims to have been drug-free for four years and is patron of the rehab charity Focus 12, which treated him. The doctors pronounced that if he didn’t stop immediately he would be dead, in prison or in a mental hospital within six months.

His substitute for heroin is the spiritual feeling he gets from looking at a beautiful valley, being up a mountain or falling in love, which he claims to do “every day for eight minutes”. With equal frequency he denies to the tabloids that he is a sex addict.

Brand did not have an auspicious start. He was born on June 5, 1975, in Grays, Essex, an only child whose parents divorced. His mother Barbara was a secretary who struggled to make ends meet. Her three bouts of cancer while he was growing up left him with an abiding sense of nihilism.

“You’ve only got yourself, haven’t you,” he said. “That’s the only thing you can hold on to. For me, I find it hard to motivate myself to keep breathing.” Treated for depression, he was thought to be bipolar, a state compounded by the binge-eating and vomiting syndrome of bulimia. It was a rare condition among boys, but he found it “euphoric”.

He did not get on with his stepfather and felt lonely, fat and inadequate. Then at 13 he fell in love with the stage while performing in a school production of Bugsy Malone.

“Things started going horribly wrong and I had to improvise my way out of it,” he told a magazine. “And people laughed, and I felt this sudden rush of adrenaline surging through me. It was like a drug.”

He was accepted into the Italia Conti stage school and the Camden drama centre, but his disruptive behaviour — “smashing things up, crying and cutting myself” — got him expelled from both. By then he was smoking, drinking and experimenting with drugs.

An urge for self-destruction has never left him. “I’ve had this thing in me, a bacchanalian impulse. The thing that says there’s only this, there’s only now, there’s nothing else, so f*** everything. I have to say to myself, ‘Remember, you’ve got all these things to do, don’t ruin it just for the moment’.”

Inspired by his comedy idols Reeves and Mortimer, Eddie Izzard and Richard Pryor, he tried his hand at stand-up and won a nomination as the Hackney Empire’s new act of the year in 2000. He got work with MTV on Select, Jackass and Re:Brand, as well as Xfm radio.

But he bought drugs with the money and his £100-a-day slide to oblivion began. After he was dumped by MTV, Xfm let him go because he read out pornographic letters on air. He lost a role in Cruise of the Gods, a Steve Coogan comedy, and parted company with his agent.

He has a vague memory of a night when he accepted an invitation from two girls to go back to their room. Then he was prodded awake and found himself on a bed surrounded by an old woman, several children and an angry man in a sarong.

“Evidently I’d got up in the night in this girl’s hotel room, gone to the toilet and ended up in another room,” he recalled. “What I love most about it is that there must have been a point when I got in bed with them naked.”

The turning point came when his new agent, John Noel, sent him for rehabilitation treatment. Slowly, all the television and radio work returned. With his star in the ascendant, he plans several new shows, including a sitcom for Radio 2.

Brand claims to be seeking a woman who can help him to end his libertine ways. He has even tried chastity, albeit as a television experiment. The experience was, he declared, “awful”.