Emma McAlpine talks to James Sherwood about life-changing advice, why he's changed his style in recent years and why one audience member will be taking home his piano...
I’m in a coffee shop, talking to James Sherwood about flyering.
“My approach to flyering is to get as many out as possible. I go with the scatter gun method of getting 600 flyers into people’s hands. I don’t actually hate doing it at all and it’s always amusing when you get double takes from people ten yards away who assume, because they’re holding a laminated piece of card with someone’s face on it, they’ve just met a famous person.”
Sherwood has a good instinct for how to market an Edinburgh Fringe show as you’d expect from someone who’s done their own producing and flyering there for the last five years. He believes having a good title helps to pull in the crowds: “My 2006 show about religion was called I Know What You Did Last Sunday and it had very good numbers even though I had a low profile at the time. The only reason I can deduce why that happened was because people thought: ‘how bad can a show be with a funny title like that?’” He pauses, before adding: “That said – I have never come up with a title even vaguely as good since.” Luckily for Sherwood, he doesn’t need one anymore.
Over the last few years he’s built up a solid reputation on the comedy circuit for crafting clever, inventive songs peppered with his trademark dry wit. He used to be known for his more topical stand-up (developed from several years of writing jokes for the likes of The Daily Fix, Sky News, BBC Radio and Private Eye), but after the musical aspect to his second solo show went down so well with audiences, he decided to make it his main focus. There's still a bit of topical and political material in there but now there's singing, pianos and a healthy dose of absurdity as well. This year’s show has an added twist: you can bid for the piano he uses on stage and the profit from the auction, if there is one, will go toward a registered charity of the highest bidder’s choice. “We might have to police that,” muses Sherwood. “They might want the money to go towards Eton College!”
Sherwood first got into stand-up eight years ago, after one particularly bad month working in PR led him to quit his job and try a few other careers. Stand-up was the one that stuck.
“My first gig was terrific. I entered the Telegraph Open Mic competition. It was pure ignorance. It hadn’t occurred to me that stand-up is almost entirely about working your socks off for several years. I had a lot of faith in innate genius and thought people were either funny or not. So, where better to start than a competition where you would be told fairly quickly whether you were good enough to be a comedian or not!”
His set went down well with the audience, but, had he not been given some handy post-gig advice, he might have abandoned his stand-up career soon after. “I met these other guys on the bill – Silky and Dan Antopolski – who I shared a car journey with after the show. They gave me some advice and told me to gig constantly, get the stage time and practice so I could translate what I had done once into a consistently good set.” It wasn’t until three months later that Sherwood was contacted by competition organisers and told he hadn’t made it through, but by that time, he was gigging five nights a week and had begun to realise his ‘innate genius principle’ was somewhat naive.
Although he only worked music into his act much later on, Sherwood has played the piano and sung in public for years: “My Dad is a retired vicar and I spent a year playing the piano in church when I was younger which was formative in several ways. I became more comfortable sitting at a piano in front of a crowd and I noticed I was comfortable having something to hide behind.” He still sings in his church choir every Sunday and tests out new songs on fellow members before taking them onto the circuit.
We get back to discussing Edinburgh, which, from Sherwood’s end sounds like a whirlwind of gigging and flyering. On his two days off, he’s catching friends’ shows that clash with his own. “Will you be taking a much-needed holiday in September?” I ask. “I will have a holiday in September but I’m working for a week immediately afterwards. It’s not that wise to disappear after Edinburgh in case someone in the industry wants to get in touch with you about your show.” Clearly a shrewd and diligent person, it strikes me that he could have made a success of many different careers and I wonder what he would have ended up doing, had he listened to his innate genius principle all those years ago.
Happily for comedy punters, Sherwood is not a man to stand by a duff principle.
Read Sarah's review of James Sherwood: One Man and His Piano
Click here to see James Sherwood's upcoming London gigs
Photo credit: Joe Brown
Return to Spoonfed's Edinburgh Fringe homepage.
.jpg)
Add an event
Review: Byzantium
20 years after Interview with a Vampire, director Neil Jordan cooks up the theme on a ...