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Letter to My Younger Self - Noel & Julian

What would you say to your 16-year-old self if you could go back in time?

Noel Fielding - surreal comedian, 38

20-26 February 2012, by Jane Graham {x}

I was obsessed with football when I was 16. I was skillful winger and plating regular semi-pro. I hated school, except drawing, so I thought I’d either go to art school or become a footballer. I looked like a girl. I had long blonde hair and was very skinny. I remember being in a pub with my mate when I was at college and a woman came up to him and asked if he’d like to buy a rose for his girlfriend. I was furious.

I was definitely a late developer. But I think that’s quite good. There were boys in my year who looked like big massive men and they went out with grown-up women. They seemed to peak when they were 15. But you see then now and the look much older. You have all the time in the world to grow up. I don’t think you should rush it. it breaks my heart seeing kids at 11 these days, all grown up – is that it then, childhood’s over in 10 years?

If I met the teenage me now and someone told me he’d go on to do stand-up comedy and be quite outgoing and be on telly, I’d think, no way. I was quite sweet but I was very shy. And I didn’t look cool – I wore some bad chavvy clothes and had a terrible wedge haircut. But I think I’d see a glimmer of hope in that boy’s eyes, a sign of the art student, the beads and the strange ponchos to come.

The first time I did stand-up I was terrified. I did some performance art at college where I dressed up as Jesus, jumped off a big cross and danced like Mick Jagger. I had a water pistol with holy water in it. That went well so I booked some real gigs, but I constantly worried my stuff wouldn’t work. In those early days of stand-up I made myself ill worrying. I got hepatitis, which is made worse by stress. I’d do a spate of gigs and knock myself back and end up on the sofa for six months.

When I met Julian [Barratt, Fielding’s partner in The Mighty Boosh] it felt a bit like meeting a soul mate. My friends had told me I’d love him. They said he was a bit crazy and jazzy and he had no jokes. I thought he was amazing. I went up to him and said: “I’m just like you!” I think he just thought I was some weird kid but a couple of years later, of course, we were working together. Somehow out chemistry was there from the beginning.

I came from a working class background and I wasn’t very academic so I always thought everyone else knew more than me. I’d tell my younger self not to worry about that – no one knows what they’re doing. I think there’s a little bit of an attitude in some working class areas – “What, you’re going to go off and be a comedian are you, mate?” I’d tell the younger me not to listen to anyone lese. Take some risks – you’ve only got one life and it goes faster and faster.

If I could relive one day it would be the day I got into Croydon Art College. I didn’t get in at first, I was on the reserve list. I was hanging round with other people who didn’t have jobs and didn’t know what hey were going to do. Then I got a call telling me someone had dropped out and I had got into college. It was like a tiny door opening, an escape, and I thought – yes!

Julian Barratt - comedian and actor, 48

27 April 2017, by Jane Graham {x}

At 16 I was into jazz fusion. Not even jazz, just jazz fusion. Rock instruments played like jazz. Really not fashionable in any way. People like Weather Report, Jack Pastorius. My dad was bang into it, so I thought it was normal. Until I played some to my mates. Then when I saw their reaction, it became my dirty secret. I could play guitar pretty well. Or pretty fast anyway. Me and my mate had duels, trying to outspeed each other to become the fastest guitarist in Yorkshire. That was all that mattered to me.

One of my first pieces of advice to the teenage me would be not to go with the white Whitesnake-style suit for his first live gig. Though it did have the benefit of disguising my dandruff. I got into heavy metal because you could legitimately play solos. Van Halen was a big influence. At my first live gig I wore a white suit and I had long hair, quite curly but not much of it, quite thin hair, all round the front, parted just behind, with just a sprinkling of dandruff. And I played a lot of long, fast guitar solos. It wasn’t a very good look. And it didn’t get me any girls.

I was obsessed with particular girls, a feeling often unrequited needless to say. I remember a field geography trip to the Isle of Arran, when I was so in love with this incredible goth girl, Katie Kinaid. She was really into rocks. Not rock, geology. She didn’t notice me. But I was besotted. I just thought about her all the time, hoping for a glance. I was a late starter, quite naïve. Later on, I could see how being a comedian did help in that area. When you’re funny people sort of feel you must be nice, or at least not frightening.

I tried to leave home at 17 to become a jazz guitarist. We went to stay with a friend of a friend’s uncle but we came back after three days. We thought we’d make inroads into the jazz scene in London – we’d read biographies about guys who got gigs at Ronnie Scott’s and got spotted and immediately taken into someone’s band. So we told our parents we were leaving home. They gave us two days and we lasted three, so we outdid expectations.

If I met teenage Julian now, I’d see this shy person, with long hair, into odd music. But he is also becoming interested in comedy. I found it quite magical, finding people who made me laugh, thinking about how they did it. I remember seeing Vic and Bob and thinking, ah yes, that’s just what my mates do, that absurd humour, making an in-joke a public joke. Controversially, I quite like Bernard Manning. He had this particular kind of Northern delivery and timing. And when the jokes weren’t horribly racist, they were so funny. I mean, my grandad was a racist. You can’t do anything about these people, they’re from a different time. I remember Bernard Manning was shown a clip of The Mighty Boosh on a TV show, which was a great honour in a way. He said: “These two don’t have a fucking clue. As funny as a burning orphanage.” He had a real way with radical imagery.

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Phoenix

And the sands of time Seep down through The hole of the hour glass With each grain More time passed And over time Everything changes Rearranged So you play the Chameleon Changing your skin To fit in But deep down You’re the same But at some point Your camouflage Is ineffective Requiring you to be Reflective And what remains Jumps into the flames Burning to ashes Arising reinvented Your Phoenix Flying out to the new The old left to burn In the flames Of the past

● Happy Halloween! » The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) ─ “I am the shadow on the moon at night / Filling your dreams to the brim with fright.”

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