The last time I saw Bill Bailey live in Aberdeen was at one of the final shows in the old AECC, which he described as more of a “submarine shed” than a venue.
So what description would he use for the P&J Live, I thought? Hopefully something a bit nicer given it bears the name of our paper.
“A crab processing facility”, the beloved comic dubbed it as he was warming up the crowd. Oh well.
Bill’s show last night in Aberdeen really was one of the most unusual comedy performances I’ve ever seen, and not just because of the national treasure’s trademark use of all sorts of weird instruments, light shows, and surrealist humour.
A quiet start for Bill Bailey that soon ramped up the pace and hilarity for the Aberdeen audience
After a pretty tame opening musing on the state of politics and some gentle ribbing of the naturally shy Aberdeen audience for the first half hour or so, the Black Books star really came into his own.
The first big standout was a crowd interaction segment you would be forgiven for thinking think I made up in a dream if you hadn’t seen and heard it for yourself.
He revealed a series of bluetooth-enabled bouncy balls, which when struck, produced individual drum beats, and chucked them out into the audience for a rendition of the famous drum break from In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins.
Cue much hilarity from an ever so slightly rhythm-deficient Aberdeen (and surrounding areas) crowd.
But it wasn’t until the second half that things really started to get bizarre.
A professional opera singer and a laser show in the second half
At several points during the show, Bill brought on professional opera singer Florence Hvorostovsky for some duets on a few eccentric songs that were simultaneously beautiful and hilarious, given the obvious contrast between the glamorous Florence and the beardy Bill.
I’ve seen Bill do his fair share of musical grand finales, (Metallica on bicycle horns being a particular favourite) but the showstopper for his Thoughtifier show was his best yet.
Laser beams, protective glasses, white gloves and disco music made for a truly breathtaking spectacle — and it’s this marriage of off-beat self-deprecating humour with Bill’s astounding scale of talent and creativity that really makes his appearances so memorable.
But, it turns out that wasn’t the grand finale.
In fact, there really wasn’t one, much to people’s delight and/or confusion…
The grand showstopping finale that wasn’t
Perhaps limbered up by some liquid refreshments during the break, the Aberdeen crowd grew suddenly far more animate in the second half, and after the laser show, Bill was peppered with shouted-out heckles and questions.
I feared it would derail the show a bit, but instead, the comic masterfully rolled with the punches, using each heckle as a jumping off point for an off-the-cuff story or song on his arsenal of instruments.
The back and fourths and crowd work went on for so long, that people started leaving, thinking the show was over… and honestly, it was hard to tell if it really was or not.
These multiple “Is the show over yet? Is it not?” encore moments went on for so long in fact, that to me it almost stopped being funny… but it just went on for so long that the shtick became funny again, even moreso.
In one of these final moments, which Bill called a “bizarre Q and A” combined with a hostage situation, he described a gig in Shetland where he was encouraged to hold a fake raffle for an invisible car by the crowd — but said the Aberdeen show last night was stranger still.
By the time we and most of the crowd gave Bill a standing ovation and filed out, when I looked over my shoulder he was still at it, greeting fans at the front of the P&J Live — the consummate showman, a truly earnest performer you could genuinely tell was loving every second of it.
I’ve been seeing Bill Bailey perform since I was a teenager and I’m delighted to say I reckon this show in Aberdeen was his best yet.
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