Tribute to a friend

Below is the full article I wrote for the Observer's New Review on Mackenzie Taylor, whom many comedians knew and loved. I'm proud that he was my friend too. He died on 18th November after taking an overdose.

I had no idea how to start writing this piece: this thing that I hope will be a proper tribute, a eulogy, something that gets at the true essence of what Mackenzie Taylor was and is. When I think of the cheerful and extraordinary person face he presented to the comedy world in spite of his illness, the incredible number of people that he helped, made laugh, and helped to understand their own human condition, I am horrified that he is no longer with us. But more than that, I want to talk about him, and the wonderful performer, friend, brother and son that he was. To know Mackenzie was to know that he was an empathiser; insightful; wise beyond his years and much loved by many, many people.

Mackenzie suffered from bipolar schizoaffective disorder, a condition which leads to periods of psychosis, depression, mania, paranoia and a whole host of symptoms which make doing comedy both almost impossible and practically essential. However I had no idea of this when I first met him, which was in 2005 at the Wayward Council comedy gig that he ran and hosted at the Redhill Theatre, Surrey. You don’t remember every gig that you do as a stand-up, but I remember this one because I was so intrigued by Mackenzie’s material. It was just simply really good: interesting, original, thoughtful and funny. I told him so afterwards, and we had an illuminating, lovely conversation. His enthusiasm and intelligence were so clear, and I remember thinking that I’d be seeing more of him on the comedy circuit.

That turned out to be the case when in 2007, at Mackenzie’s invitation, I performed an Edinburgh show with him and the brilliant actor Alex Dee. ‘Open Mic At The Globe’ was based on the idea of Shakespeare characters doing stand-up, and I have to thank Mackenzie for asking me to do it because that was my first foray into comic acting, something I hadn’t previously considered. Indeed I’m laughing as I write this, given Mackenzie’s comments about the brilliance of being in a manic phase, where you feel you can ‘do anything’ – I don’t know if he was then, but there was something so persuasive about him, and the idea was so intriguing, that I’d instantly wanted to meet up and get going.

Mackenzie hosted that show as a sternly entertaining, rollicking Bill Shakespeare, introducing his creations and letting us fly. For my part it was one of the most fun and liberating things I’ve done in comedy, but also watching him work and deal with the pressures of the Edinburgh festival, I learned a lot about him that summer. His creative instincts, his indomitable spirit of ‘no surrender’, his ability to analyse and lucidly explain himself and his condition so that others might not feel alienated, were astonishing.

Those qualities were never more in evidence than in his 2009 Edinburgh show, No Straitjacket Required, a show which dealt with his suicide attempt of the previous year. It was a brilliant hour: illuminating, funny, humane and wise: like the man himself, really. I remember the metaphors he used to convey what his illness felt like, especially the one about it being like having a terrible modern jazz band playing in your head all the time, which he would then play insistently and gleefully. I laughed at the show so much, as did everyone, especially if they related to the darkness behind the merriment. It struck me as an extreme version of something that all great comedians do: making sense and fun of your own problems, to entertain other people. And yourself, obviously (inflicting his ‘brain soundscape’ on the audience! He loved that).

Humour’s a tool to improve the world; Mackenzie knew this better than anyone. When I think of how funny that show was, I’m reminded of the quote that Mackenzie would use night after night in Edinburgh during the Shakespeare show, about tragedy plus time equals comedy “so 400 years ought to make this hilarious”. Well, No Straitjacket Required was only a year afterwards, and he’d already transformed the bleakness of the previous year, where he’d told me that his brain felt like a computer that needed to be shut down. It didn’t matter whether you remained alive afterwards; the main point was, you couldn’t carry on with your brain continuing to, for want of a better description, betray you.

The last gig I did with Mackenzie was less than a year ago, and he was rocking the joint – MCing an unruly and slightly difficult crowd, and coming up with a beautiful, thoughtful and courageous rebuttal of a racist comment from an audience member. His philosophising on the ‘point’ they had made stopped the show for a while, but he brought it back with aplomb and a great joke. Both sides of his response were necessary and superbly done.

I cannot begin to express how much there is a void left in comedy at his passing, and how much his friends will miss him. Mackenzie is someone who, in spite or perhaps because of the problems he went through, was ever sensitive to the needs of others, and able to reach out and help so many people, including me. That he is not here is one of the saddest things imaginable. But he brought a lot of light into our lives, and in a way I know that he, too, has gone into the light.

No Anarchy in the UK

It’s a bad week for anarchy, civil liberties and just generally keeping it real. Malcolm McLaren died yesterday - now he was no Joe Strummer, but it's still part of the passing of a generation that protested and shook up the establishment. This morning, the Digital Economy Bill has passed, bar the shouting. And I think when people realise what they have given away in this bill, they’ll wish there’d been more protest against it.

In better times, decent musicians would have kicked off about this. Guilty till proven innocent, summary disconnection, government control… where are The Clash when you need them? But no, instead we’ve got Lilly Allen, who just really wants Peter Mandelson to clamp down. Artists like Allen, and the record companies, don’t seem to have realised that people who download music illegally are the people most likely to pay for music too. I actually don’t download music illegally – iTunes is just too convenient. I used to, obviously, until one part of the music industry evolved to keep up with technology and stop me doing that.

I’ve also never ‘illegally’ downloaded a TV show or film. To be honest, I feel a bit not down with the kids admitting that, but it’s true. But even supposing that downloading is losing the economy billions of pounds - rather than something which ultimately encourages people to go out and buy boxsets, music, see bands etc- I don’t see how this bill is the right answer. This bill will disconnect people’s internet if their usage is high, on the assumption that it must be illegal. The Magna Carta, anyone? You’d think this government would have learned from the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes that “guilty till proven innocent” isn’t a great basis for proceeding.

And what limit on usage is going to be set? Say it’s 30 gigabytes a month. You can get loads of illegal songs and movies for that. On the other hand, if you run a business from home, you’ll be way over your limit all the time. You actually can’t set a limit; it’s a completely unworkable law. But passing it makes the government look to the powerful lobbyists in the record and movie industries like they’re doing something. And of course it puts the onus on the people and the ISPs to prove their innocence – and makes us pay for it while we’re at it.

Basically the situation we’ve got here is that record company bosses like David Geffen are dictating government policy to fit in with their 20^th century business models, when the way the world works has moved on. And instead of creating new technology to adapt to this new way people want to own content, they’re forcing the Internet Service Providers to do the job of the police. Maybe we should give them guns and sniffer dogs too, or let them beat people up if they can’t prove what they’ve been doing online, or don’t know enough to stop their wi-fi being jacked.

Actual artists and musicians don’t benefit from the record industry’s way of doing business. They benefit from the egalitarian, information sharing way the internet works. They never got much money from record companies selling their albums. They might do if the technology were to exist for them to sell it themselves online. The record and Hollywood movie industries are not some kind of ’12 Good Men’, sticking up for what’s right and fair. The situation we’ve got now is more like some kind of French film noir, where the little guy just keeps getting twatted.

And that will include you, if your usage goes over this whatever arbitrary limit they set. The Digital Economy Bill is a very, very bad law, that has been barely discussed (by people who don’t know what they’re talking about anyway) and then rushed through. Keep lobbying your MP about it. So far, the Lib Dems are the only ones who have taken a stand against it – everyone else barely seems to understand it.

So in the spirit of punk, here's the mish-mash version wot Liam did of our protest song, against All This Sort of Thing...

A short but important rant I couldn't deliver to the Labour canvasser

Someone from the Labour party has just rung the bell to our flat. I went to the door and saw his big red rosette through the spy-hole. I wanted to tell him how Labour have destroyed our civil liberties, introduced tuition fees for uni making it harder for working class kids to get there, started an illegal war, lied and lied, killed David Kelly, given us the millionaire war criminal Tony cunting Blair, are planning compulsory ID cards, have destabilised and ultimately destroyed the British economy by raiding pension funds and overspending, and finally, replaced the Blair cockmonster with someone who, whilst incompetent, is not actually evil, making it harder to vote against them. But I couldn't tell him all that in my pyjamas, so I just stared at him through the spyhole and he went away.

Ooh, offensive comedy

I was just reading Chortle and the Daily Mail Online (I know! I’d gone to incredulate at the Jan “tissue of lies” Moir article) and I saw that Jimmy Carr has been in trouble, for one of his jokes. So I clicked on the story, because apparently there’d been “tabloid outrage” and I thought, well this has got to be serious. I mean, if the tabloids are outraged.

Obviously, I wanted to disagree with the tabloids, but the thing is though, I kind of WAS expecting it to be an offensive joke. I mean by his own admission his comedy is offensive, and even if he didn’t ever make any such admission, I’m sure he won’t give a fuck that I do.

OK, maybe now you’re expecting something actually soulful and nice. Obviously it wasn’t. It’s Jimmy Carr. But I’m also a big fan of comedy that isn’t soulful and nice. Give me as offensive as you like as long as there’s guts and conviction behind it.

So anyway, with no run-up, one of the jokes from his current tour show was: “Say what you like about these servicemen amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re going to have a fucking good Paralympic team in 2012.” Now to me, that is a darkly funny joke. It draws attention to wars that most of us seem happy to forget are even happening, let alone how the nation sleepwalked into them. It raises this ridiculous yet subversive idea that it might actually be part of a cynical government plan (can’t win the war, well we’re going to win the fucking Olympics then) – and also it’s quite positive, really. “Fucking good Paralympic team?” Blimey, we only got the Falklands out of the Falklands War. And it doesn’t demean the troops. To me, it actually highlights what they are doing, and the way they are neglected and manipulated by the public and the government.

Of course, I might be reading too much into it. That might not have been how he wrote it. Or said it. I don’t reckon Jimmy was expecting his comedy reviewers to give his jokes an academic dissection: ”Despite the almost archaically traditional nature of his opening gambit – the well-trodden “Say what you like about…” – Carr goes on to prove that he is not only in the comedic debt of the music hall tradition, but may be compared to such satirical greats as Pope, Swift and Peter Cook with their visceral reminders of inconvenient truths, and plangent use of the F-word”.

Actually, what bothered me most about this episode was one of the Mums of the seriously wounded troops, who was quoted as saying “Soldiers are fighting for freedom of speech. I hope Mr Carr remembers that when he makes offensive jokes ridiculing them.” Firstly, I don’t think he was ridiculing them. Unless you think it is inherently ridiculous to be in the Paralympic team. Secondly, they are fighting for many things, but I fear that freedom of speech isn’t one of them. Mary Ann Evans used her freedom of speech to read out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq (while her friend read out the names of dead Iraqi civilians) at the Cenotaph in central London, and she was arrested and found guilty of breaching Section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act. Because she’d bothered to try and draw attention to what is actually happening, she was silenced. So the government could continue to fail to equip the troops properly for a war on a country whose Islamic institutions proved unconquerable by Genghis Khan and the Soviet fucking Union. So yeah, I liked Jimmy’s joke. It’s the way I read far too much into ‘em.

Tosser

I WANT A PRIME MINISTER WHO SAYS, I REALLY DON'T CARE THAT MICHAEL JACKSON HAS DIED; I HAVE QUITE A BIT OF WORK ON.
AND A LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION WHO DOESN'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT IT EITHER WOULD BE GREAT.

I'b sorry, I have a cold

Wow! I feel normal again! For the first time in a week. This week we've been doing the radio recordings for Shappi's new Radio 4 show. I do a guest spot every week... except we ended up recording all of my spots on the same night, due to "Radio 4 Compliance Issues". I don't know exactly what this means, except they are draconian. The very phrase "Radio 4 Compliance" strikes fear into the heart of every producer.

One of my bits involved a song which I call The Racism Song except when I'm on public transport. Anyway, we'd already recorded it once and it was all fine. It references idealistic songs like John Lennon's Imagine, Nina Simone's Ain't Got No... I Got Life and (terrifyingly) 4 Non-Blondes What's Up? (it was my own tune, but there were musical jokes in the middle where you can hear the other songs in it - I mean come on, Jammin' does this all the time, right?). But three hours before the second recording I was on the phone to the producer who was going, "it does WHAT? Oh my God, I had no idea. Oh... oh God, we're fucked. Sorry, but the whole thing's fucked. It's... Radio 4 Compliance."

I said, "no, it's fine, I can just rewrite that bit, it'll only take me..." and he was just going "Oh God, oh God, no, we're completely fucked, you don't know what they're like, I mean, it's RADIO 4 COMPLIANCE". I started to get the seriousness of the situation. You do not fuck, apparently, with Radio 4 Compliance.

So I re-wrote the song, got myself to the Drill Hall and arrived to the producer going... "erm, you know the Unconventional Parents song? Well, we have to re-record it and change the ending because of..." at which point I whimpered, "Is it... R4 C?" We'd done a bit at the end for Shappi to sing "Oh, My Old Man's An Exiled Iranian Satirist"... and even though it's an old music hall song, apparently Lonnie fucking Donegan had recorded it and so there might be all sorts of compliance issues, so we rewrote the song into a generic Chaz n Dave style knees-up with about half an hour to go, whilst drinking more red wine than is feasibly good for me on the basis that "it might bring my voice back" (see aforementioned cold), I popped three Nurofen and applied a nasal spray and then wandered on stage thinking, "well, I can't see how this can go wrong."

It was ace though. Radio 4 audiences are the yin to their Compliance yang. And Shappi, John Gordillo, Felix Dexter, Paul Sinha and Aval Vidal totally rocked. Even my Religion bit, which I'd been very worried about under the circumstances, went fine, with the audience joining in like a proper congregation drunk at Midnight Mass. I would also like to thank Shappi for providing me with so many non-controversial topics to write songs on. I'm hoping next series we can do the Holocaust and abortions. Yeah!

Dude, what is this, like "recession"?

I am trying to work out what the hell is going on with the recession, and if any of us are going to have any money ever again.

And then I found something in my brother's shared items: an article written by my Dad a long time ago, which predicted exactly how and why this recession would happen. It was passed around the family quite a lot at the time, and we all giggled at what my brother Rich described as its predictably intemperate style. But the point is, it has incredible foresight. It's a brilliant article. And I can say that because my Dad is now too ill to blow his own trumpet, or indeed do anything. He certainly won't be writing articles like this again. Anyway, I think it's pretty impressive, given that this was written in 1998...

When he sent the article to me years ago, it was called "Angry With Gordon Brown". When he sent it to my brother he said "RB: Expect Errata" - but there really aren't many errors. This was written in 1998, after Brown's first budget.

Anyway. Here's Dad...

"Last month I heard the announcement that pension funds were to lose
their fully-tax-exempt status, hidden quietly in the corporation tax
"reforms". I was very shocked and angry. This plan formed no part of
the Labour Government manifesto. It will hit hardest on the working
men who voted Labour; they can least afford this loss of pension. The
abolition of the pension funds' exemption from the payment of advance
corporation tax amounted to a theft (not manifesto-announced or
electorate-approved) of at least 4.5 billion pounds per annum. This
was 4.5 billion pounds per annum that was to be taken from an industry
that was already weakened by a series of weird and inept legislation
(most of it Conservative).

The consequences began to occur to me, and I am truly shocked. To
begin with no industry or business or country can cope with any
unplanned-for disaster. When it is so huge - and Government-caused -
it seems to me that Brown must be incapable of thinking beyond next
week, incapable of working out what are the logical and inevitable
social and economic consequences of his actions. (Where did he go to
school? Belmarsh?) In contrast, I am thinking of the vicious circle
or inescapable downward spiralling consequences. Further thinking
makes me realise that the results are myriad, intertwined and
self-fuelled. They could amount to the swansong of a once wealthy
nation.

The irony is that this stealth tax will eventually be self-reducing:
the more revenue it raises the more damage it will cause to the goose
(the hybrid goose that is the pension/stock-exchange) until soon it
will stop laying golden eggs.

Beyond the lack of short-term wisdom, the ignorance of common
knowledge is startling. A child could work out that this is "not a
good thing". Only the mad or the very ignorant have not heard about
the demographic changes that everyone (and not just those in the life
and pensions industry) have known about since WWII. Why doesn't Brown
know?

The pension funds theft will cause lower fund yields - which will result in:-

I. Defined benefit schemes will have liquidity problems and face
wind-up. Previous (Tory) legislation penalised schemes which built up
big reserves for lean years. It is just possible, but unrealistic,
that the Tories did so not anticipating such a future degree of
planned destruction.

II. Increase in money purchase membership with smaller benefits:
amounts to a future load on state benefits.

III. More pensioners become state dependent.

IV. Taxation will increase to pay for the above.

V. Less enthusiasm for pension saving.

VI. Thus less new money to invest - will further badly weaken stock market.

VII. Weaker stock market will exacerbate liquidity problems of smaller
schemes. May also adversely affect insurers with strong equity bases.

VIII. Membership withdrawals from schemes - less new money invested,
schemes further weakened, increased apathy (another vicious circle).

IX. Publicly funded defined benefit schemes will overcome shortfalls
(as revealed at their tri-ennial valuations) by increasing costs to
public e.g. local rates will have to increase by several times
inflation.

X. The sort of companies likely to be worst affected would include the
former nationally-run and Government-funded, but now privatised
companies. Often these are nationally important in providing services
and utilities. Traditionally staffed by bolshie loony lefties, these
workers are "hardline" on any changes or reductions in the perks that
they regard as their right. The pension tax will place their new
private employers in an invidious position. They will be unable to
maintain pension fund viability. A strike or national disaster of
some sort is virtually inevitable.

[On the hard-copy he sent me, point X was ringed with an exclamation
mark. It was the Grangemouth strike that had prompted him to dig this
out.]

XI. Will mostly affect poorer ratepayers and poorer future scheme
pensioners who will becomes even more state-dependent (more tax
increases).

XII. Will weaken the insurers and will put financial strains on their
funds' ability to meet pensions in payment - resulting in poorer
annuity rates - resulting in even less enthusiasm to buy pensions
schemes among the young, further weakening the insurers (another
vicious circle).

XIII. People will look elsewhere to invest: one result will be an
increase in buy-to-let house purchases - will further fuel house-price
inflation.

XIV. A potential problem would be the over-enthusiasm of domestic
property investors. The over-taxation of all other legitimate
investment might drive more people to try investing in domestic
housing.

XV. Combined with a political desire to have low inflation (as Joe
Soap will be told, based on the cost of VCRs, candles, 8-track players
and scythes, ignoring the costs of real items used by real people),
most people will see the only way out to be buy-to-let.

XVI. Joe will be encouraged by the lenders. Low borrowing rates will
possibly fuel borrowing on domestic property. Fringe lenders could
see profits based on lending to short-sighted people (starved of
pension fund savings growth) sums of un-repayable money secured
against freehold property which will probably be over-valued by the
lenders living in cloud-cuckoo land.

XVII. Fringe lenders (and usurers) might get fingers burnt, especially
those in the "buy a shit car on finance" market or the "we do dodgy
120% loans on over-valued shoddy houses" type of market.

XVIII. Tinpot lenders, the "fringe", will continue to lend, or
over-lend, on the assumption that inflation will continue as in the
70s and defend that lunacy by over-valuing freeholds, maintaining
their interest rates regardless of LIBOR or UK base rates. Such rates
will become a political ideal but a commercial irrelevance.

XIX. A possibility that the deemed financial inadequacy will cause
minor banks/insurers to fail/merge/de-mutualise, especially those
strong enough now to have such large equity exposure that they cannot
disinvest without causing further damage to their funds. [!]

XX. Financial inadequacy will result in the purchase of fewer equities
leading to more likely failures leading to greater financial
inadequacy.

XXI. Stock exchange may fall by 25-30% and will take many years to
recover to 1996 levels unless a major reversal enacted. Flying pigs
proposed.

All these possibilities are a direct chain of result leading back to
the raid on pension funds. Bless you Gordon. It is an inevitable
downward spiral, typical of 19th century socialist thinking: i.e.,
kill the independent spirit and force people into state dependency and
thus, as paupers, to vote for the lazy man's misery system. Snag is,
how are the wealth creators going to survive in this lunatic system?

It is possible. Having seen it before in the 70s my fears may seem
inevitable. If they bluster enough about "New Labour" it may keep us
immune from fiscal reality and we may have four/five years "growth".
The only winners will be the ultra-rich and the politicians who pay
themselves based on the sort of economics used by [moderately well-known local crook businessman]. Amazing how such a
fraud works over and over again."

Pretty good hey?