Bookmarks with Bill Bailey

Musician, singer, actor and side-splitting comedian Bill Bailey is one of Britain's most beloved performers.

He's conquered nearly all corners of showbiz, from stand-up to musical performances (he's a classically trained musician), to his appearances as a panellist on shows like QI and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and his work as an actor on shows like Skins and Black Books.

He's mid-way through his comedy tour of New Zealand and popped in to the studio to talk to Jesse Mulligan about his favourite books, films and of course music.

Books

He says he's been reluctantly converted to e-books. 

"Our lives are, whether we like it or not, we’re beholden to technology, so I'm no different," he says. 

"I’m a bit of a tech-head anyway so I’ve always got a few gadgets around, I’ve got my iPad or a phone and I tend to use that to read books and listen to music on. 

"I love a book really … I used to take a lot of books away with me and then I realised my luggage was mainly books and it was starting to annoy me that I was lugging these things all over the world."

Wallander series - Henning Mankell

"Just for a bit of fun I really like the Norwegian crime genres, the Jo Nesbos and suchlike and having read a lot of Wallander … it was wonderful to actually perform in the area where the crime novels were set. 

"I became a bit nerdy … it turns out you can do tours, you can do Wallander tours, visit all the places. 

"It’s really nice, it doesn’t look like any crime has happened there for hundreds of years, it looks more like a Volvo commercial." 

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

Bailey says he very much enjoyed the first book by Harari - Sapiens.

"It was a sort of history of us, of humans and how we are the way we are. It was densely written, packed with interesting insights.

"How we moved from being small groups of tightly-knit tribes and then agriculture came along … we lost a lot of skills and became less mobile. 

"This new one is very much an extension of that about a projection into the future and how he sees human development panning out. 

Empire of the Sun - JG Ballard

"I was prompted to read it because I actually did a show in Shanghai … an extraordinary place - this is the second time I’ve been and the first was seemingly only a few years ago but it’s changed beyond all measure; it’s a vast sprawling megalopolis, and it’s 26 million people. 

"It’s a very personal account, it’s his own account of growing up as a child in colonial Shanghai, and then the subsequent war and how that affected him. 

"Having just recently been there, it's a great way to connect to the city’s past. 

"It’s a place of great energy, and of naked capitalism, there is no attempt to even portray it as communism - it’s just money. 

"We were in a hotel and I said to the guy ‘I really want to explore a bit of the local area, what’s to see round here’ and he said ‘well if you go down the end of the road there, there’s the world’s biggest Starbucks." 

Music

Bailey is a classically trained musician and received an Associateship Diploma from the London College of Music as well as being made an honorary member of the Society of Crematorium Organists.

He also performed with a boy band The Famous Five, has perfect pitch, and uses music as a main feature in his comedy shows.

“I love the idea of the combination of old and new - traditional instruments and electronica,” he says. 

"One of the things that I’ve explored a lot over the years, and it’s almost become a feature of my shows ... is how music engenders in us an emotional reaction. 

"What instruments? Why do they make us feel like this? What is this sound? This is just air moving around."

'Once in a Lifetime' - Talking Heads 

"It came off the album Remain in Light, and I was a teenager at the time and it had a great effect on me because it was very different to a lot of the other music that was around at the time which was punk, post-punk. 

"It sounded clever and intellectual and strange and mysterious and in fact it is still all those things to me. 

"It’s become a companion with me my whole life … now the words he says ‘and you may find yourself in a beautiful house, and you may ask yourself how did I get here?’ Those are the questions I ask myself even now. "

Adios - Glenn Campbell 

"Again, something which I’ve really listened more and more to it over the years, only because I like the quality sometimes of the songwriting, the production, the simplicity of it. 

"It’s deceptively simple, I think that’s it: it’s hard to get these things right. 

"He’s got one of these incredibly evocative voices."

This song was from Campbell's last album, which was recorded when he was struggling with Alzheimer's disease. 

"He was increasingly in poor health, and he recorded this album in the last few years of his life and in fact it was released I think a week after his death, so it’s got a sort of poignancy to it as well." 

Films

Sicario

He says it's the soundtrack in Sicario which gets you. 

"By an Icelandic composer, Jóhann Jóhannsson, who writes these wonderful soundtracks, he combines electronic recording techniques with traditional instruments. 

"It’s incredibly powerful, threatening, extraordinary sinuous sounds and there’s this kind of pulse through the whole thing. 

"Very very sad to hear he passed away earlier this year." 

Ready Player One

"I didn’t quite know what to expect when I went to see it, but it’s an amazing film, incredibly ambitious, visually stunning realisation of something which has been attempted and probably had very poor results in the past. 

"This is a film all about a future, dystopian future … where people are living in very sort of like crowded and cramped and very poor squalid conditions and they escape their humdrum daily lives by entering this vast virtual world. 

"The typical Spielbergian magic, but what I think is great about it is that it’s almost a film for our times - it’s about us living online lives and escaping our world."

Podcasts

99% invisible 

"I came across it sort of just by recommendation and I think it started out sort of purely about architecture and about the built environment and it’s expanded now to be about a lot of other things. 

"It’s a very well put together, interesting, well observed half an hour of the information about the modern world." 

The Adam Buxton Podcast

"Adam Buxton is a British comedian and he and his partner Joe Cornish used to have a show ‘Adam and Joe’.

"Joe Cornish has gone off and done lots of wonderful films and such like and Adam Buxton records these brilliant, funny, quirky, conversational podcasts where he sometimes talks about his own life and then he interviews someone about a particular subject. 

"He’s a very good interviewer, he’s very well researched and so on and he also does these very funny live shows where he talks a lot about interactions with the internet, about the way that people use it, about the online world. 

"It suits me very much, it’s quite nerdy, quite obsessive but it’s very, very funny."