YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Bailey

lines on the record: 48
first: 2008-06-08
most recent: 2008-06-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Solitaire, you can build them up into a lovely pyramid, throw them into an old coconut shell, the possibilities are endless.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is some part of Foray's requiem, the in paradisum. It was the music we played at Mam's funeral, and rather like the Gamelan, actually. It's kind of music which for a while you're not aware of instruments being played or songs being sung. You're just aware of something else takes you to another place, and it was beautifully appropriate at that point.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think really to revisit the music side of my career. Just to go back and play more music. I've missed playing it to a certain level for so long. In comedy you can I just play little bits and pieces here and there. I mean it is part of the act, it's integral to the act, but I haven't really been that serious about it. I want to go back and actually go back to the piano and try and push myself a bit and actually try and improve it and try and learn more.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, you do change your priorities change a bit and it's great having him around actually it's less about you then you've done a gig and then he's the focus it kind of takes the pressure off a little bit”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it is a bit tricky. I'd like to do both. I don't like to just go off and go on tour and go into a bubble. I like to go home and do all those normal things. Keeps your head in the right place, I think, otherwise you just tend to thought you maybe think you are some sort of ludicrous cult figure.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Huge thing, yeah, and they have great orchestras of these things. Balanese Gamelan is on bamboo xyophone called Arindic, but the Javanese are sort of more haunting in a way, slower, more stately. It's otherworldly. My first time I experienced it was in Java. We were staying at Borobadur, and it just happens, it kind of flows over you. And for that I love it. I love its otherness.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is a piece of Javanese gamma which is quite unique in Indonesian music. The Gamelan is the name of the instrument. It's like a xylophone, a metallic xyxophone.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“walking longer grieving and when I got to, thank you very much good night I thought with you there of course we went we were hours away”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got very ill, yes, I got some sort of meebic dysentery. I lost two and a half stone. I started to get a bit delirious walking back from the city to the road where the van was going to pick us up, and the guides could sense I was actually losing it a bit and they said, how long? They said twenty minutes and so I, right, okay, what's twenty minutes long? I know my act. So I started to do my act with my 20 minute.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And luckily for us we bumped into a biological field trip from the University of Stuttgart, who had all the necessary medical facilities”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“we went on a jungle trip to the La Siudad Perdida, which is the lost city. You go from Santa Marta and the Caribbean coastline, and there's two ways of getting there. You either go on a helicopter, which takes forty five minutes, or you trek on foot, it takes a week. So we went for the trekking option. And we had no preparation for this at all. We didn't think we were going to go on a jungle trip and have any antimalarial pills, we didn't have any antibacterial pills, we had nothing. We had a packet of custard creams and a sports sack we bought from the market for three quid.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the pretended Chrissy Hind. I just thought I had a bit of a teenage crush on her, and I did a gig, and she was in the audience. I came off stage and there was a long corridor. and she entered the corridor at the top, and there was just the two of us in this long corridor. As I was walking towards her thinking Oh, I've got to say all these things that I've been thinking about for years. Oh, I loved him with great inspiration, the music. And she came up to me and she just, she looked up and she goes, Hi. She goes, I really enjoyed your set. And I just burst out, I think you're brilliant. This is ludicrous, high pitched voice. What goes twelve? And it's very st and laughed in this ludicrous way laughed and yeah thank you didn't go as planned”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's tremendously exciting. When you see people in large numbers that are into your stuff, the size of the gig is also very exciting. It's just another, it's the next level in a way. It turns into some spectacle. It's not me in a little theatre and a little club. It's a big spectacle. I suppose my ambition was always to keep moving. What's the next challenge? I don't know what the next one might be.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always am reminded of a bit of advice, a very fine comedian called Bob Mills once told me. It was one of those kind of what's it all about conversations? And he said comedy. He said, I'll tell you what it's about. He always remember this. What's that? What's that? And he said, Keep saying funny things. And it sounds like a sort of truism, but it's absolutely right. You can get distracted by trying to educate or trying to be too intellectual. Just keep saying funny things. As long as they're funny, then that's fine.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to go into a bit of a zone before you do something like that. You have to kind of look yourself in the eye and say you can do this because it's very hard to do. Do that if you'd just been doing something very mundane, taking the bins out.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is David Bowie, rebel rebel. I won't see David Bowie at the Milton Key's Bowl in nineteen eighty three. I was eighteen. This was the first big gig I've been to. It was fantastic, hot, terrific atmosphere, and when he came out when he appeared on the stage in this white suit and just walked from the back of the stage, it was like some kind of religious experience. People just Overwhelmed by it, it was a kind of rite of passage, I suppose.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like to go along to a show and hear something I've never heard before, and then ring a bell in my head and think well what was that? That's interesting and go and find out for myself. That's what I'd try and do in my shows.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, of course. Exactly right, and that's why I've never been overtly political, because I just think if I go along to it, I don't really preach that Barnaby entertained. And that's always been the purpose of the show to make people laug”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of things. It is there. It is. It always has been, really. It's always been a strand of it because I was drawn to it because I think naturally I was drawn to the morality of it, of fairness, of writing injustice, and if that's kind of socialist ideal, then I suppose then that's what it was.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in this play that Corinne Redgrave wrote or the printers about the history of the print unions, and it was to raise money for the printers who had been sacked after the whopping dispute. And it was fascinating, it was kind of what I expected London to be like in a way.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes. Then Toby subsequently went on to do other things. And then the fellow was at college with Martin, and he took over. We just toured constantly. We would gig constantly. We took three hundred odd gigs a year for years and years”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first time I did a gig that was part of a show that would sell tickets to was in Edinburgh at the Edinburgh Festival eighty four, eighty five then. I was in a duo called the Rubber Bishop's. It was me and a guy from school, Toby Longworth. We'd been doing this double act around Bath and Bristol since we left school. And one of those things where a show pulled out and the venue became available, one of those sort of happenstances”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I chose this piece because this was my first proper recital that I gave to the public. Mozart's coronation concerto the first movement it's very technically demanding lots of long sparkling runs and it's just a milestone for me of performance so it always has a quite a special place”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“who in the first week of college they had a thing called a balloon debate. I took on the role of WHO because I love the poetry, and I've took on his persona and I won this debate. I was getting laughs off strangers, that again intoxicating.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was kind of restless for the next thing, the next thing. I was at college, I went to a lecture for goodness sake, we've done all this in two years ago, and that I just didn't have the patience to go to the next lecture.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I took the A level music and I got an A for that, so I had the right qualification. Tell me about the courses was just so academic that I didn't appeal to me.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scrutinizing you. I did actually, yes. I think I probably enjoyed the fact that it was more of a performance than it was just an exam.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, very much, yes. I was very lucky inasmuch as I had a terrific teacher, Linda Phipps, who was my piano teacher and my tutor for my A level music. So it was just one-on-one teaching, which was fantastic. And I totally thrived off that and went through all the grades, and then I went to the next stage of performance examination, which is associateship at London College of Music, which involved preparing and performing a recital to a board of examiners. Incredibly daunting.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is, of course, the band I should have joined, really, when I was fifteen, talking heads. It's a track of once in a lifetime. I often listen to the keyboard part and think perhaps I could have”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had it all worked out that David Byrne and his representatives would turn up at the house one day and say yes, we've been listening to boys playing, it's great, we'll enjoy the technical proficiency and also the improvisational style and we'd like him to go on tour with us and that would be it. Thanks very much and he'd be in the car in the drive.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just the thrill of performance, I think that's what it was. And I think once I had that, that was it, really. The school was it lost its appeal.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were quite frustrated by it. They didn't quite know what to do either. But they were very understanding and they were very supportive and perhaps thought that it would be better off to let me do what I wanted to do. I think they were quite liberal in that regard. They weren't disciplinarian at all. And it caused quite a lot of tension in the house.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think where it caused a rift between me and the teachers was the fact that they could see that I was academically very gifted or I had a propensity for these kind of subjects. And so they could see a kind of arc of success leading off from this. And so when I started to just fall behind and not actually do so well and get distracted by playing in bands and going off and doing other things, they got very frustrated and they didn't quite know what to do about it. Threw them off a bit.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I found it easy. I found it very easy. It sounds arrogant to say so, but it was just that was the truth of it. I did find it easy.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I won all the prizes. I mean, I didn't win all the prizes, but every year win a substantial number of them. And that was, say there were twelve subjects, I'd win nine of them. and that went on for three years, for the first three years of senior school. I was an academic, really, I'd be very attentive, I did all my homework.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“up as Bill because I had a geography teacher at school who decided this was my nickname. It was because of this song, you know, the classic won't you come home Bill Bailey? I just got stuck with his name, Bill Bailey.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teenage Kicks by the Undertones I loved Ganesy Punk when I was a teenager and this was the classic punk track I've very vivid memories of going to see them at the Colston Hall in Bristol and thinking this was the greatest the greatest gig I'd ever seen and what was made it more exciting was the St. John ambulanceman told us to sit down. We were”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I certainly would play when people came round. I remember once an aunt died, a very elderly aunt, and everyone came to the house afterwards for a cup of tea and sandwich, and I did a routine of Les Dawson's because he was on the TV and he did this thing where he played the opening for the eighteen twelve overture. And then he'd get it wrong. You know, he'd play the first few chords and then he'd go, I can't think of anymore. That's all I know. I think he said something. He swore or something. He said, that's all I can do that I'm naked. And I said this, but I was like a kid. And I remember my dad, he had half a cup of tea and he was drinking a cup of tea looking very serious at somebody talking about it. And he spat all the tea out. I said, So I can do that and spray this tea all over this. And then my mum went oh like that and she swore she dropped a cup like smashed and someone else.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just accepted it as part of the fact that they lived with us and I really enjoyed it because my granddad is quite funny and he's quite forthright opinions and he was quite a socialist. He would have great debates with him about this. and my grandmother was so sweet, so proud. I suppose I thrived and enjoyed the attention.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, yes, I did. I mean, my grandparents would wait for me to come home from school for the full report of what had happened at the school. Now any test, do you have any tests or any essays, marks? What did you get? And so it was kind of a routine, a ritual.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My grandfather, my mother's father was the builder, a stonemason, and he built the end of the house, so they lived in this little annex on the side of the house.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At one stage, yes, there was obviously a great deference to my dad. A lot of the area is countryside, a lot of farmers, and so we get these fantastic things given to presents at Christmas. I'd go to the door, and then there'd be a bloatstone there with a brace of pheasant. They hope for the doctor.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The front of the house had two rooms, and the front room was the waiting room, so that was the reception area. Then there was my dad's surgery. I was occasionally allowed in there to sort of have a peek at it”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could play the drums. I can play the electric piano, I can play the organ, I can play the congers and the bongos. I'm quite good on percussion. Can't play the Saxon now. Play the clarinet. I've got grade six clarinet.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a piece of music called Mevisal Stew by King Curtis, who was a fantastic saxophone player, part of a concert which he gave at Filmore West this legendary San Francisco venue. I just love it because it's just a joyful celebration of musicianship. And it just makes me smile every time I hear it. I just need to put it on and I just get a kind of surge of adrenaline.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do this idea that you look quirky. Because what it is is that you start getting responses like that and you think, well, I might as well just acknowledge it. I've never made any effort to look like this”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, this is good. Oh, yes, yes, definitely. She's a great sounding board for all this stuff. I get a very, very concise and quite harsh critique, which is good.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“certainly neurotic in the way that you can get quite obsessed by it. And you get so obsessed by it that It sounds mad to a normal person. What do you mean you can't sleep because you can't think of this way this punchline is going to work or you can't think how a bit of routine is going to work or you're up till three o'clock in the morning trying to make this routine fit with another bit of routine? It sounds inconsequential and mad and a bit neurotic, but actually that's what we do.”
2008-06-08 · Desert Island Discs · Bill Bailey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source