When pop culture is at its best — when everyone’s fired up and collaborating and competing to outdo each other — there’s usually a shadowy figure linking all the great talents yet ignored by the public. Jimmy Page, for instance, played with the Who, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison and Donovan before stumbling through the Yardbirds to Led Zeppelin. Which makes Kevin Eldon comedy’s Jimmy Page.
Eldon’s wide-eyed, extremely malleable face has acted as inspiration for Armando Iannucci, Chris Morris, Steve Coogan and the creators of pretty much every critically acclaimed comedy of the past 20 years. Knowing Me, Knowing You, Fist of Fun; Jam, Spaced, Smack the Pony; Look Around You, Nighty Night, Nathan Barley, Hot Fuzz, Hyperdrive, Dead Set — all have featured his pursed lips, goofy sensitivity and cold killer’s eyes. It’s a face that can gurn, freeze and laugh like a maniac on demand, most recently as an incomprehensible French tech support man in The IT Crowd. He can also tune down, turning in a surprisingly raw performance as Julia Davis’s terminally ill husband in Nighty Night. Now, however, like Page, he’s founding his Yardbirds on the way to Zeppelin, a tortured metaphor that means he’s taking his stand-up on the road.
Last year, he delivered on a threat he’d been nursing for some time: to perform a full set at the Edinburgh Fringe, after years of cropping up at benefits as the pseudy political poet Paul Hamilton. His festival debut was a blistering mix of stand-up, character comedy, poetry, musical gags, impressions, existential angst and unsettling theatrical tricks, such as when he appeared to storm from the stage for ever. The show won a Chortle award and, after moving on to the Soho Theatre (where it returns this month), it has unfailingly been recommended by other comics as their favourite gig. People scratched their heads as they wrote five-star reviews: this is the actor Kevin Eldon. Who knew he was so funny?
In part, this is because he has little or no ambition and has been hiding his writing skills through sheer laziness. “Most of the jobs I get are with friends who, luckily for me, happen to be really good writers doing really good programmes,” he explains when we meet in a pub on a large north London roundabout. “I’d been in punk bands, then drifted into acting and comedy, and all the people I was on the circuit with started getting shows. Alan Davies had his first radio series and very kindly got me in, then Lee and Herring, and it grew from there. For years, the only stand-up stuff I had was material I wrote over two weeks in 1994.”
One night, I did a bit of stand-up, and I was immediately bowled over by the camaraderie of it He pauses, considers for a second and, for the first time, rolls his eyes slightly. Initially, I had been expecting him to loon in through the door, eyes bulging, barking at me like an assassin. In fact, it’s like having a pint with a chatty, thoughtful, even mild-mannered friend who takes time with questions, wanting to get the answers right. “I found it quite stressful to perform sometimes,” he nods carefully. “Live comedy in the 1990s wasn’t the epic tours of arenas that it is now. It would be grubby places, and you’d get physical confrontation, bottles thrown, that sort of thing. I remember, at one gig, a man coming up on stage, putting his face about 4in from mine and shouting as loud as he could, ‘Go. And never come here again.’ I just thought, what have I done to you?”
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“The thing about Kevin is that he’s a Buddhist, and I think he genuinely believes things will just work out all right,” explains the comedian Stewart Lee, who has worked with Eldon on and off since 1991. “He thinks that, when he dies, he’s going to come back as a Japanese monkey sitting in a hot spa, so he doesn’t have the drive that makes other actors so self-obsessed and thus almost perfectly designed to sabotage your writing, rather than improve it. He won’t admit to this, but I also think it’s because he started out in punk bands in 1978, where it wasn’t cool to advertise yourself or appear on Top of the Pops. I think he finds it impossible to sell himself — he sees that as selling out.”
Although Eldon admits to a couple of John Peel Sessions in bands such as Virginia Doesn’t and the Time — “We did all right, you know. We supported the Jam and the Vapors, and things like that” — comedy was his first love, inspired, in part, by two eccentric uncles called Eric and George, who provided him with a constant live show as he was growing up in Chatham in the 1960s. “Eric would be driving along a motorway, then would scream, ‘I’ve lost control, I’ve lost control’, and drive up the grass verge — which my mum didn’t appreciate,” he recalls. “And when George was putting the car away in the garage, it would take half an hour. He would pretend to be unconscious — he’d fall out of the car, pretend he couldn’t drive.”
The young Eldon would audio-tape programmes such as The Morecambe & Wise Show and listen to them over and over again, so he was always going to struggle with the earnest drama-school education that followed the collapse of his music career. “One night, I did a bit of stand-up, and I was immediately bowled over by the camaraderie of it, and how funny and interesting all the comics were compared to actors.” So he stayed, although his tastes and his comedy have always been closer to absurdist theatre than to sharp one-liners. In 2006, with Bill Bailey, he organised and produced a tour and West End run of Harold Pinter’s sketches. Eldon and Bailey appeared together in three of them, all originally sold to Kenneth Williams, but their version seethed with more suppressed insanity than any jovial Williams messing about. In all that time, though, Eldon refused to expand on his 1994 material. Until last year.
“I just thought, ‘I’m being far too lazy,’” he explains. “I really ought to try to write some new stuff. So I booked into The Stand club and spent the next six months kicking my own arse around my flat, with the whip of fear cracking across my back.” Has the critical acclaim — and the brief tour that follows — instilled the drive and ambition that have so far eluded his Buddhist heart? As we leave the pub, it seems for a moment as if it might have: “At some point in the next year, I have a very real aim — to write and direct a film.” He pauses. “And I’ll carry on writing and seeing what I come up with. There are a couple of interesting things coming up as well — although what?” He pauses again. “It’s two big things coming up that I’ve forgotten about.” He beams in a contented, all’s-well-with-the-world manner and waves goodbye. “If I remember them, I’ll email you.” He hasn’t, so far.
Kevin Eldon Is Titting About, Soho Theatre, W1, April 11-16 and 25-30