By Allan Sko
A rare recording was captured between BMA’s Allan Sko and beloved UK comic Bill Bailey, in which we hear two old men trying to avoid talking about “the old days” and failing spectacularly.
Flights of fancy, extraordinary music and thought-provoking ideas, Thoughtifier is classic Bill Bailey. Whether it’s with Bluetooth bouncing ‘rock balls’ or his love of gospel music, he revels our human instincts for harmony, melody and rhythm to brilliant effect.
With a giddy mix of instruments, screens, and AI, Bill Bailey shows that our human capabilities can transcend pesky algorithms with his hilariously useless AI, ‘BillBot’. With outlandish new instruments such as the dazzling laser harp and a thread of philosophy running throughout, Thoughtifier takes all the greatest elements of a Bill Bailey show and propels them to new dizzying heights.
ALLAN SKO: Ahhh, hello! And how are you, Mr. Bailey?
BILL BAILEY: I’m very well. Thank you.
Excellent. The last time we had the chance to chat, I believe, was just a few months before a particular world event that, uh, tipped everything a little bit upside down.
Yeah, it was a bit of a kerfuffle.
It WAS a kerfuffle; that’s a lovely way of putting it.
Yeah, it was a palava.
Oh yeah, a kerfuffle, a Palava… I’d even go as far as a hullabaloo.
Yeah, I think you’re right. It definitely tipped over into the hullabaloo-esque side of things. We’re still feeling it’s tentacular reach even now.
Oh, SO very tentacular.
It’s shocking… I got whooping cough over Christmas…
And that’s not all bad for someone who uses their voice for a living.
Yeah, I know, and it came exactly when I was about to embark on a national tour where you use your voice every night, singing, and trying not to be coughing in front of 1000 people.
I didn’t even think it was a thing! I thought it was only, like, Victorian-era urchins who got whooping cough.
Yeah, wouldn’t be surprised if you had a spot of gout an a few of the ol’ boils along the way.
Yeah! ‘Excuse me, Mister, want any lucky heather?’
(joins in with overly hacking cough)
Yeah, but no; apparently not so. And it was—sorry, just to make it relevant—this was a result of our incarceration, our, our… enforced domestic, errrr… coddling. This meant we were out of the loop, as it were, and not exposed to all of these antibodies that have seen us open to all these kinds of ancient maladies…
Like a historical tour of illness.
Legacy illnesses!
Bringing us all the closer to our Dickensian cousins, I guess.
Yeah, that’s right! It was, yes. ‘I got a case of the Bloody Flux, did you? Well! Good lord!’
Suddenly, all the doctors are there with their pipes smoking away. ‘I say, that’s a rum fix, old boy. Take these leeches.’
‘Yes! Take a leech. That’s what I say. We’ve no cure for this; I would just rest and be administered a beating.’
‘Nurse! My bloodletting knife!’
It felt like I was catapulted back into some ancient era. But I guess that’s just it; that’s what we have to deal with. That’s the world today.
It is, it is.
When you think everything’s just happening for the first time, and go: ‘Wait a minute… Where have I heard this before?’ That’s what I feel now. I don’t know about you, but I swear I’ve heard this before; I know this one.
I formed this theory recently about that nostalgia that kicks in during your late- 30s/early 40s. And you see it in society of, like, certain decades suddenly come back in vogue again. I think Mother Nature or whatever overarching deity you prescribe to hasn’t caught up with the fact that our life expectancy is no longer 35-ish years of the Keats era. So we get to 40, push past it, and Nature’s gone, ‘Shit… I don’t have anything past this…’
Yeah… ‘Now what?’
‘Ummm… Alright then, same again! Same again! Run it back.’
‘Just keep rolling through it!’ Yeah, that’s right. Then you get a second wave of nostalgia, and it just keeps happening. ‘You’re not supposed to be living this long!’
Yeah, the manual’s blank after this.
There’s nothing, just keep going. Yeah, I get that. I see it a lot in trends, particularly in music, actually. I think there’s, you know, a huge swathe of quite specific ‘80s music that suddenly became very popular… ‘80s styles, ‘80s fashions…
And, of course, ‘80s politics! So, these things have a cyclical nature.
It’s because we have our collective consciousness that what you think you’re going through individually, collectively it’s happening all together. We’re going, ‘Oh yeah! The ‘90s! I remember that! Let’s dig up not just the fashion of the time but, as you say, the politics and the everything else. It’s a funny old thing.
Yeah. I know. It is. It is, indeed.
Do you find, as a man who has charged gleefully through many a decade now that, like the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s—heck, you can go back to any decade in the 1900s, really— each holds a very strong identity to them. And then the millennium ticked over aaaand… not so much?
Not so much, no. Not really. It’s become a kind of, you know, a grab bag of a lot of different musical styles. It actually starts to become quite homogenous. I mean, and I’m very wary of sounding like these people say, ‘Oh, there’s no tunes anymore! Why, back when I was a boy, you would whistle any tune…’
O, I am aware of that on a daily basis, my dear Bill.
But yeah… It sort of IS that! That’s the terrible thing about it. If you look at the charts, which I don’t tend to do—I don’t even know if they’re still going—but if you were to do such a thing, you would see… I remember the charts when the music was wildly different. There’d be a bona fide disco song, then a sort of a metal song, and then…
I remember Top Of The Pops in England in the ‘90s, in that little half-an-hour show you’d have, like The Grid pumping out, like, sort of Kraftwerk-era electronica, then suddenly you had Nirvana, and Dave Grohl playing the drums with his hands and just, yeah, back and forth.
There were all sorts of things! What’s happening now is there’s a post-punk kind of song, a ballad, a big power ballad, or something else. I mean, okay, we’re not saying that the quality was universally GOOD, but at least it was all different. It all sounded different. And that, I guess, that’s the one thing I’ve identified; a sort of general homogeneity, which I talk about, actually, in my show…
Ahhh, yes! The show!
Hehehe… Yeah, the show. I was reading this fascinating article about the way that algorithm, particularly in Tiktok, is now starting to mould people’s songwriting and guide the sensibility.
So now, people are basically writing songs for the algorithm. If they want to get a song to be seen or heard by a number of people, it has to fit to certain parameters, and as an artist, you find it quite depressing, in a way. It’s quite disturbing that in order to be seen, the very thing that I guess all artists want is to have their whatever-it-is, their art, their music, seen by as many people, is now dictated to by some predetermined… thing. It has to be this long, you can’t have a middle-eight…
That’s another thing! The middle eight is just GONE! Forget the middle eight!
I mean, you’re right, of course, but the thing is, Bill… I share your despair, yet I do come at it with a positive angle, because the more something seems to fade away and die and not be a thing anymore, the stronger that’s going to come back when our old mate Nostalgia comes into it. Like, there will be a middle eight resurgence the likes of which you have ne’er seen before.
Oh yes, I’d like a middle eight festival; just a bunch of middle eights from classic songs, with no context.
None. And you know what? That would actually serve the TikTok/Spotify generation perfectly, just snippets of middle eights.
But no, you know what would happen, though… is that they’d glom onto that and it’d be like, ‘we’re just looking for middle eights, now…’
Yeah… ‘I’ve just written this magnificent, like, four-minute pop masterpiece that incorporates different instruments. It’s got underlying themes. Every second word links back to the other word.’ And they’re like, ‘No middle eight. Not interested. Fuck off.’
Unless there’s a key change and eight bars of instrumental, I’m not interested.
I love my EDM and electronic music. I like all kind of music, but drum ‘n’ bass is my gun-to-the-head, if you had to pick one choice. And I’ve noticed, back in the day, like you would
have a seven or eight minute long track, and the reason for that is you’d have sort of a minute and a half, two-minute building up to the crescendo or the drop, if you will.
Yeeeeeeeah-up…
And then you’d rise, fall, rise, fall, and then you have, like, a minute or two outro because you would mix on vinyl and you’d use that outro to bring in the next one. Now, all these same artists are putting out these little three to three-and-a-half-minute tracks instead, which is fascinating to see.
I know, it is quite fascinating to see. And the tracks are front-loaded, often with spoken word intro, so they just get right to it.
Yeah, there’s no drama, there’s no setup. It’s ‘Bosch!’ straight in.
Straight into it, then chorus, then… you’re pretty much done.
That’s it, yeah. They’d never fade out, or have an outro, it’s like, Nah, hit that magic time mark and cut.
Because presumably, people are just scrolling through tracks, you hit that one, and if it’s any kind of intro… Ehhh, heard that, onto the next one. I read that Spotify don’t pay any royalties to artists until they’ve listened to about 35 seconds of a song.
I always wondered about what the cut-off point is.
It’s something like that. So you know if you can engage someone’s interest for more than 30 seconds.
The musical equivalent of jangling your keys.
Yeah! Like, if you watch something for a minute on Netflix, you’re logged as a viewer. And I thought yeah, that’s GREAT. I’m operating in this environment where people’s attention span is deliberately and commercially being eroded. I’m swimming against the tide here, mate.
Yep. Amen. Now look, I’ve promised that I’ll stick to quick 15 minutes, so I’ll ask this about the show… I believe you’re incorporating the AI Bill Bot. Tell us a little bit more about that.
Yeah, that’s right. I thought it was interesting because there’s this panic about it. ‘Oh, it’s going to replace us!’ and all this. And I just wanted to see how it might fit into a comedy show. And a lot of people use, you know, they do these roasts where they get AI to write jokes, because they’re all objectively terrible.
But it’s not really that. It was about using my image and manipulating that into a sort of version of me, with me then having a conversation with it and having a bit of fun. Anyway, little did I know this would start me down some AI rabbit hole. Because, in order for the software for me to get my image to be manipulated into characters, we use a software company in America, in LA, and they, I think conscientiously, refused to allow me to use my own image in the public eye!
And so I had to write to them say, No, it’s ME. It IS me. And I’m quite happy to have my image manipulated like this.
Ahhhh yes, Bill, but how do we KNOW you’re not an AI rendering of yourself?
Exactly! That was it. So, I send an AR of me going, ‘I’m quite happy with my image being used’. We got into some kind of meta doom loop. But anyway… it’s kind of fun. And quite disturbing as well, you know. But fun. It’s a great way to engage in comedy with this new technique.
Look, I can happily talk to you until the AI cows come home.
Yeah, heheheh…
But given there’s a minute left on the clock, I’ll leave you to it. But can I just leave you with this observation, which I hope you take as being the incredibly warm-hearted compliment that I think it is. But currently, your beard looks like, if you get into a nice big bath and you make a little foam beard out of it. That. It looks fantastic. It’s amazing.
Oh, thanks very much! Yeah, I’ve had done some work done on it, and I have actually worn the foam beard as well. So I know exactly what you mean. But this has got a lot more texture.
It absolutely has. Yeah, I love it. Oh, Bill, it’s always an absolute pleasure. You know, great to see you going strong, really. Thanks again for including Canberra on your itinerary, and greatly look forward to seeing you in your element.
Indeed, I will. Thank you, mate.
Bill Bailey will grace the Royal Theatre with his presence for two shows, each at 8pm on Sunday, 27 October [SOLD OUT], and Monday, 28 October, respectively. Tickets start from $91.65 + bf via Ticketek.
Keep up with Bill’s latest news and things via his linktr.ee
