Emma McAlpine talks to the irrepressible Scottish stand-up about some of his craziest stage stunts and why he wants to quit the comedy business.
I used to think improv was a bit crap. Once you’ve been to a few gigs you start to recognise the stylistic mechanisms and games are all essentially the same and there’s usually a weak link cocking it up somewhere along the line. But then I saw Phil Kay and my opinion changed. He doesn’t do classic improv of course, there are no games or themes with him and the spontaneity is far from organised. As he puts it: “For me it's more a case of what you must do at the time. Some of it makes my show rubbish because I should have more material but being alive in the moment involves going with the flow.”
When Kay is on stage anything can happen. He might tell you about something he just read in the Metro. He might make a song up about someone in the front row. Or he might strip naked, dance around the stage and give himself an enema with a beer bottle. “Do you ever surprise yourself?” - I have to ask, “Do you ever think ‘this is a bit odd, even for me’?”
“Sure.” answers Phil. “Once I took the whole of the second row backstage and left them there. I came back to start the show and they had to find their own way out. Well that's what the reviewer said anyway.”
Originally from Scotland, Kay moved to Brighton a few years ago and is now a regular on the London circuit, commuting most nights to anywhere from the smallest pub to a 500-capacity theatre: “It's a night out, you have a few drinks, meet new people and you come back with more money than when you went out with! Being a comedian is a magical job and a great thing to do with my head. London is like an orchard that I've been growing for 20 years and now that rare Japanese pine has fully grown.”
Kay is also a familiar fixture on festival line-ups where his silly antics are given full throttle: “Crowds come with a re-contextualised head at festivals. They don't sit around going 'do things we already want'. That said, I was at a mad working men's club in Norfolk last night and they loved it! I was throwing pot plants around and drinking their lager...so you can be in any crowd really and it just comes down to the moment and the mood.” 
Phil, backstage at Up The Creek in 2008.
Most comedians are proficient in a bit of improvisation but a whole set or show with no bankers to rely on? How does he do it? “Everyone's brain is that fast,” says Kay. “It's just that doing it on stage gets noticed a bit more.” Does he ever go blank? “I do go blank if I don't want to be there; I was on QI the other day and went blank because I didn't want to do it. Generally speaking you can always think of something even if it’s silly but sometimes the quality goes really low. There was one song last night that I was making up that wasn't my usual magic but I can't worry ‘what am I going to say, what am I going to do next?’ – it doesn’t help.”
Kay has been in the comedy business since the late '80s. Nominated for the Perrier in 1993, he then won the British Comedy Award for ‘Best Stand-Up’ in ’94 and landed his own TV comedy series called Phil Kay Feels on Channel 4. For his debut episode he ran on stage stark bollock naked - for audience and viewers alike. Watching him perform live, it seems like making people laugh is his number one goal, it’s hard to imagine him doing anything else.
But what’s this? He’s quitting the comedy business? “I am a musician at heart. Comedy is just something I can do. In the back of my mind I've always thought you need to do about 10,000 hours of practice to be a good musician so I've spent the last 20 years doing about half an hour a day and now I’m good enough. I want to stop comedy and start doing festivals. I’ve had 18 years mucking about with crowds so that will go in my favour. Comedy's great but music is where it’s at.”
Cripes, no more Phil on the circuit then. But there is some hope for fans - his new band’s style sounds mightily familiar... “We go off at tangents and make up lyrics based on what we can see.” Hmmm, so it sounds like you’ll be getting a bit of comedy with your music instead of a bit of music with your comedy from Phil in future. If you’re at Glastonbury in a year or two and you find yourself hearing strains of ‘folk thrash with massive drums’ emanating from a nearby stage, go and explore further; because you might just be about to witness some improvised magic.
See Phil Kay at the Camden Head at 6:10pm on Sunday, performing for The Fix.
See more London stand-up
See more London comedy
Photo credits: Mat Ricardo and Steve Best
Add an event