Emma McAlpine speaks to Steve Pretty about attending his own wake, busking with Amy Winehouse and dressing up as a giant insect on stilts to play rock 'n roll in Amsterdam, amongst other things.
Steve Pretty has a rather unusual keepsake. A mixtape of songs that were played at his own wake. This year, the musician, comic, composer, actor and writer is taking a show to the Edinburgh Fringe based on his unlikely story, compiling a virtual mixtape of the world's favourite tracks and using a blend of inventive musical skills and audience interaction to analyse them. I spoke to Steve about his upcoming show and some of the most surreal moments of his career to date (which is quite a few, it turns out).
Your show this year has a pretty incredible back story. Can you tell us a bit more about it and what else you have planned for the show?
I don't want to give too much away, but essentially I went to my own wake after a national newspaper reported that I was 'missing, presumed dead'. The night of my wake a friend of mine gave me a mixtape that he'd made to be played there, and I sort of deconstruct this tape in the show. Attendance at my wake was respectable, but not as good as it could have been, if I'm honest.
Were you a prolific mixtape maker when you were younger?
Yep, though my teenaged taste was somewhat questionable. For some reason, girls I made tapes for just didn't seem to want to listen to 90 minutes of obscure Norwegian nu-jazz. And I can't think why. I mean, Stian Carstensen is one of the finest accordionists that country has ever produced.
Were you a C60 or a C90 man?
More of a C90 man. 90 minutes is long enough to tape your favourite album (what in fashionable circles these days is called music piracy) and still have room left over for some choice cuts taped off the radio, if you can avoid Pat Sharpe or DR Dr dr (dr) Fox talking over the intro to 'Deeply Dippy'.
Did you fully embrace the move from tape cassette to compact disc?
Not for ages: the first CD player we had in the house was a CD-ROM drive in the computer, and it wasn't much fun listening to What's the Story? (Morning Glory) through some 1watt computer speakers. Actually, I was an early adopter of Minidiscs, though they're not quite such an effective medium for sharing music, since only me and the school library monitor actually owned a minidisc player.
What is the most unusual instrument you own?
Hmm, tricky one. I can't decide between the slide trumpet (a kind of mini trombone), a toy guitar from Rock Band on the Wii which I've painstakingly (not to mention pointlessly) adapted to play like a real guitar, the MIDI trumpet, which is basically a poncy electronic kazoo with valves or the customised yellow teapot, which I play like a bugle. The important thing is that they're all valid and important forms of artistic expression.
You used to be full-time musician. What drew you to the comedy circuit?
I've always done other performance stuff (I also work a bit as an actor), but there's not that many things out there that combine all the things I like doing - writing, performing and playing music – so I thought I'd better create something myself. A lot of the work you do as a musician is quite solitary; practicing, recording, working in a dark pit with a bunch of music nerds while Melinda Messenger makes weak double entendres on stage (the ever-glamorous Bromley panto last year), but I'm addicted to the buzz of interacting with a live crowd. This is the third show that I've written and brought to the fringe, and I've got the bug...
Is it true that Amy Winehouse once hijacked one of your gigs?
Yes, it's true. She came to see a Hackney Colliery Band gig at the Jazz Café in Camden, and there was some confusion backstage when the sousaphone player saw her in our green room. He didn't recognise her, so asked her to get out (what later got back to the rest of the band was 'take a mini Snickers and **** off', though he assures us that's not true).
During the set, he mentioned this and she came up on stage. We weren't sure if she was going to punch him or sing... Luckily it was the latter. She wanted to do 'Round Midnight', but we vetoed it on the grounds that a 10-piece brass and drums band busking an incredibly slow (and difficult) jazz standard would be like the Velvet Underground trying to busk some Debussy. So we busked our way through 'Valerie' instead. RIP Amy – a terrible waste of an amazing talent.
What has been the most surreal moment of your career to date?
There's an alarming amount of competition. Was it when I was dressed as a giant insect on stilts playing rock 'n roll in Amsterdam? Accompanying Robin Ince and Stewart Lee in an improvised free jazz musical about giant crabs? Or was it playing the Internationale on Marx's grave in Highgate Cemetery while Tim Pigott-Smith read from Marx's letters? Organising a world record-breaking pillow fight? The time I dressed as a giant pie to promote my show The Big Filling: This Time it's Pie-sonal a few years ago? Or leading a 700-person Hokey Cokey at Latitude last year? I hardly ever do any 'normal' gigs these days, so frankly, if I WASN'T dressed in bacon doing the can-can or something, that'd probably be the most surreal gig.
You seem like a fairly multi-talented guy. Do you also happen to be Steve Pretty, the infamous braid-weaver?
Wow, that's some of the best braiding I've seen this week! Excellent work, Steve Pretty. Nope, I'm not him, nor am I Steve Pretty the expert on VPNs and Enterprise Networks. But I think my next show might try to draw on these strands; in many ways Enterprise Networks and braiding have a lot in common. Combine that with playing a teapot and I spy fringe gold for 2012.
Steve Pretty’s Perfect Mixtape is at the Underbelly Cowgate, Edinburgh at 1:25pm from 4 – 28th August.
Photo credit: Aidan Harris
Return to the Edinburgh Fringe homepage.
Add an event
Scoping Out London’s Coolest Historic Bingo Halls
London’s bingo halls were once a bustling part of many of the city’s communities, but as...