Twenty-one years after his Edinburgh debut, Bill Bailey has graduated to launching his new show in a 1,200-seat conference centre. But it’s not the comfy seats and air conditioning that stop this from being the Fringe highlight you expect. Steampunk lacks the urgency of Bailey at his finest, and offers little of what he does best: musical comedy.
So his keyboards and guitars are mere stage furniture for the first half-hour. Instead, he takes us on affable diversions that refer to his appearance — such as a Dutchman who “made a lot of guilders in the crazy Eighties” — and his ever-questful mind: “I analyse too much — or maybe not enough.”
Refreshing though it is to hear references to Wittgenstein and Jean Baudrillard, these are not much more than name checks. Post-Modernism may engage Bailey’s brain, but it’s sci-fi and fantasy that engage his imagination, leading to a nice gag about Hobbit weddings and a jazz-scat rejig of the death march from Star Wars. He drops in and out of streams of thought with a Harry Hill-like nimbleness, but it’s the musical ideas that sing most sweetly.
Steampunk also offers dispatches from the front line of fame, such as when hoodies near his West London home struggle to accept that anyone off the telly would do anything so humble as walk down a street. There are bursts of bile when Bailey attacks politicians, the Royal Family and, less predictably, Jennifer Aniston and those “nasty little twerps” from Friends.
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But there’s not much here that would have fought its way into his stunning 2004 show, Part Troll, an accumulation of his best material from the previous few years. A large backdrop, which sparks into psychedelic life during musical moments, is a distraction. And when he puts it to the fore in a routine in which he stretches stills of politicians to sing along to Tainted Love, a cute gimmick gets overplayed. His next finale — this show has more endings than The Return of the King — is a Da Vinci Code parody that’s deft but already dated.
For his encore, he revives his Kraftwerk-do-the-Okey-Cokey techno singalong. It’s a reminder of the sparks lacking elsewhere in this enjoyable but — by Bailey’s lofty standards — uninspired show.
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