Homepage News Reviews - Acts - Shows - Screen - Radio - Books - Clubs Interviews Awards 2006 Edinburgh 2005 - Reviews - Blog - Previews Features Archive Awards 2005 Edinburgh 2004: - Previews - Shows - Diary Guestbook Forum © Emporium Of Mirth 2004 Editor: Lauren Murphy Reporters: Fiona Wilkie Natalie Joanne	Emporium of Mirth Mitch Benn Musical comedian Mitch Benn is one of the busiest acts on the circuit at the moment, and as such is ridiculously In demand. Naturally, we couldn’t let him get away without interrogation so we nabbed him in the 20 minutes he had between appointments and tried out a new interview technique… Stealth questioning! Luckily, Mitch talks faster than anyone I’ve ever met so here, for your reading pleasure, (after mucho technical issues and general problems) are the fruits of the experiment…. So, Crimes Against Music, obviously it’s going really well so what are your plans? Well the plans are we’re going for a second series; we’re pitching that right now, hopefully we’ll hear about that sometime in the next couple of months. The signs are very good as it’s just been rescheduled so it’s going out again in the 6.30 slot so it would be very weird for them to bump it up a notch and then cancel it! We’re going to do another series but we’re going to try and get six episodes out of it this time then we’ll have done ten and then we’ll have covered most of the bases by then cause we’re painting with pretty broad strokes and I think once we’ve done ten have said more-or-less everything there is to be said. Then there are ways to open the format out, so that’s what we’ll do if we take a shot for a third one, so that’s the plan. Do you ever think maybe your material isn’t right for Radio Four? I think a lot of my material isn’t right for Radio Four but as long as we’re willing to commission it and play it and people listen to it that’s fine. I mean Radio Four kind of has a really broad remit really… I find Radio Four kind of has a defining level rather than a defining content, do you know what I mean? I think the content can be pretty much whatever it likes but there’s a level of… erudition if you like and there’s a level of consideration and just general smartness if you like about Radio four and I think the only time something feels really inappropriate for Radio Four is if it’s not clever enough. And I’d like to think my stuff is. But you’re right, I mean it is a bit innocuous because most of my stuff is music based and Radio Four prides itself on being pretty much a non-music station. I mean we’ll see, we’ll see, I mean obviously the network seems to like it - I haven’t heard what the public think! I don’t think anyone’s bothering to ask them! Well, they keep coming back! Well yeah, I mean as you guys know, people nearly always turn up for the recordings, the recordings nearly always sell out. I mean it’s nice that mine did as well because it’s a new show. But The Now Show always has to turn people away and I think if half the people who came to the Now Show came to our recordings then we’ll be ok, and that’s pretty much what we got, so that’s great. So, How are you managing to fit everything in? Ahh, extraordinarily difficult. I think I’ve been knackered for about eighteen months basically. It is pretty hard going generally. It was an insane time trying to get Crimes finished in November and December because I was in the middle of a run of It’s Been a Bad Week at the same time I was doing Crimes so I was trying to finish of the writing for Crimes and write two songs a week for Bad Week and there was all kinds of wacky little commissions that came up in the middle of that that I had to write for as well. And even just recently I’ve had to do Three Jammin’s in the last two weeks as well as doing The Now Show. Yeah it’s pretty busy but there are people who put in 12 hours in a casualty ward, you know what I mean! You’ve got to put everything into perspective. Yes, I’m knackered but you know I’m enjoying what I’m doing so you don’t really notice it. Do you have any plans for Edinburgh this year? I don’t know, I think The Now Show might be going up there to do one or two. Radio Four records a lot of stuff up there and I think the plan is – we took it up a couple of years ago and it was quite good fun so… Um, other than that I don’t know.. I’m leaning towards probably not. I was thinking of taking the girls [Kirsty and Tash – The Distractions] up there for maybe a week but I don’t know. The economics of it are ridiculous, quite frankly, compared to other stuff we can do and some of the stuff we have done. And the amount of time and effort relative to how much cash can be gained from it has made it look a bit silly. But you never know, we may yet do it but at the moment it’s looking like probably not. Taking maybe Crimes up there? Well it is a possibility, I mean, if we do get a second series then last year when we did it we did one of those up there. Now, it was easy because we were all already there. But they may want us to do one of those up there and if we had to take our whole rig up to Edinburgh to do Crimes while we were there, we might as well gig a bit with the band as well. But certainly I’ve heard no plans to that effect bit it is a vague possibility but if they did take Crimes to Edinburgh then myself and the girls will probably do something else while we’re up there. Just to justify the trip really, because it’s a long way. Where did you find Kirsty and Tash? Through osmosis of a gentleman called Tony Moore who is like a mainstay on like the London song writing and musician scene. He was in the cutting crew in the 80’s and he ran a little music club called the Cashmere, which used to be in a bar on Baker Street but it’s now homeless because they lost that venue and they’re looking for a new home. Basically it happened about a year ago when myself and my management were looking to get me and my routine and my standup stuff into some music venues to see if I could cross over into music as well as comedy and basically we were in touch with Tony about coming down to the songwriters' nights that he used to have at the Cashmere and we got talking about it: “do you know any musicians that are looking for something to do?”. We’d been thinking about it so maybe we could tour Radio Face a little bit. Because Radio Face, being a bit over produced there’s only so much of it I can actually do justice to on my own so erm, Tony put us in touch with Kirsty who’d just left the band she was in and we said to Kirsty, “do you know any drummers?”, and she said "well, Tash’ll probably do it!", so she was a girl as well which was even better. So, we didn’t think “Oh, we’ll put a band together and we’ll get girls cause that’ll be a great gimmick” y’know. We put the feelers out and it just so happened that the two people we found were both women and we thought well that’s become a little accidental gimmick, but screw it, it’s there! And also there’s also something weird and also subversive of having it that way round, having a band of glamorous musicians and an ugly male lead singer. It’s a great sort of inversion of rock cliché you flaunt your Sleeper, sort of Transvision Vamp kind of arrangement, a bunch of ugly guys and one hot chick singing, so we’re the other way round. Are you going to do another album with them? We’re about to start work on another album, which the girls will be on because, obviously the band aren’t on Radio Face. Since we put the band together it’s taken us off on altogether different directions. We’re not actually doing that much off the album, there’s only two or three songs a night on the album. But it has taken us off on altogether new and interesting directions. The stuff I’m writing specifically for the band, whether it’s for Crimes or not, I’m kind of deliberately writing to overstretch them, because I’ve seen how good they are and I’m saying, “Come on, let's really stretch the limitations of what we can do, let's change style and genre key at the end of every line" and things like that! We’ve sort of wandered off in a sort of frank Zappa kind of territory, he sort of used to do things deliberately ludicrously over complicated and it was actually kinda funny in terms of how complicated it was. You do seem to take the musical element very seriously… It’s not so much a point of taking it seriously, it’s more about treating it with respect. A lot of times with musical comedy, one of the reasons why a lot of people have a bit of a problem is that by and large the musical aspect of it often tends to be a bit perfunctory, “we’ll string about three chords together and shout a bunch rude words over the top of it”. I’ve always though if you do one of the things I do is sort of all-purpose pastiches of other people’s styles. I do think that if you’re going to take a shot of someone on that level you owe it to them, to be able to do what they do about as well as them. Or at least make an attempt at it. If you’re going to lay into Iron Maiden then at least make an attempt to be able to play like Iron Maiden. If you’re going to lay into The Doors then you have to be able to get The Doors' sound as well as you can, otherwise it’s cheap. Basically, it’s a way of kind of qualifying yourself to have that kind of opinion on something. So you can sleep at night? Well yeah, it is a kind of conscience thing I think, it’s like if I’m going to write a song about the sheer banality of boy-bands then I have to write something which is, musically at least, as good as what they’re doing otherwise, who the hell am I to talk? It’s not so much taking it seriously as just treating it with the due respect. Do you ever get tempted to follow your musical influences? I kind of, I never really put any concerted effort into it but I was a musician before I was a comedian and I was in bands when I was younger but they never really got anywhere. Largely because we weren’t really organised enough! The best band I was ever in before this one was a band I was in when I was about twenty and it was just a like Cream / Hendrix kind of thing with three of us, me on guitar, a guy on bass and drums, both of them brilliant musicians and it was just like a loud blues-rock power trio and we just used to play like Cream songs and Hendrix songs and I loved all that. I was in another band about five years later and we were a five-piece and we were trying to be a bit sort of Squeeze-y Crowded House sort of thing but the fact that we were a five piece made it so bloody difficult to get anything together, when you’ve all got other things on the go and half of you have got jobs, trying to find a day when you’re all free enough to do something - we ended up rehearsing one day every three weeks, something silly like that... never mind gigging ever! So, how did you make the transition? I got totally sidetracked into it basically the first time I ever did comedy was in the summer 1991, I was twenty-one years old, I was in the middle of my degree and I’d been living in Spain all year, I did Spanish and French at Edinburgh University. I’d been living in Spain and I was teaching and I was supposed to be spending that summer somewhere I could speak French and I didn’t want to do France again. Now, a mate of mine had been at the University of Montreal and had been heavily into improv while he was there and had kinda gotten me into it when he came over to Edinburgh. So I went over to Montreal and basically hung out with these improv guys all summer and they had a residency at this comedy club in Montreal and because I basically didn’t know anybody else, I ended up doing a bunch of half spots and I ended up supporting a load of people who’ve gone on to do really well. Have you ever heard of a show called Everybody Loves Raymond? The lead guy from that, Ray Romano I supported him on the fifth or sixth gig I’d ever done. The way they do it in North America is that they’ll have a first half which would be a compare and two half spots doing 10-15s and then the second half is just the headliner doing like an hour and a bit all on their own…. Richard E. Grant just walked in! all we need is Chris Ecclestone and we’ll have a complete run of new doctors! [here lies a few minutes where both Lauren and Mitch have a tizzy over the presence of Richard E. Grant and try unsuccessfully to get the interview back on track] Quickfire Round…. Best heckle? I can’t think of a good heckle, they’re usually shit! The best heckle I’ve ever heard of was a comedian who was dressed all in black was dying really badly and somebody shouted “Put the chocolates by the bed and fuck off!” which I thought was quite nice. Favourite comedian on the circuit? Not just favourite comedian, but favourite human being is Alfie Joey is the nicest man in the world. No, seriously, the man is made entirely of niceness and sunshine. We all of us have a serious dark streak through all our beings, except Alfie, who is just solid niceness all the way through, he really is! The nicest character in all the world, which is one of the reasons I wanted him on the show. There’s various guys I could have got in to be the funny voice bloke, but half the time you pick people because “who do I actually want to be around?” Favourite TV? Little Britain is great, as we all kinda knew it would be and I was pleasantly surprised by Jon Culshaw’s ITV show as I’d heard terrible things. Non-comedy I like American fantasy TV. Now Buffy’s gone and Angel is going I like Smallville, and I’m stoked Dr Who is coming back because the only childhood ambition I had was to be the Doctor one day, so when they’ve got it up and running again I can make a bid for it when the one after Chris Ecclestone quits. Who should we keep an eye on? I would say a young lad called Patrick Monaghan, who’s got something of the Ross Noble’s about him, It may be the accent but it’s also, he has an utterly scrambled ethnic background and he’s incredibly good looking so all kinds of good things will probably happen to him. How about the other side of the coin, who should we stay away from? I would never vocalise such an opinion... not out of any common decency, but as an ass covering exercise! That kind of shit comes back to haunt you, seriously! For more information on Mitch, visit Mitch’s Website Speedily Interviewed by Lauren, Summer 2004 RSS  Printable version	Visit our Siamese Twin Sister Site!