Comedian Stewart Lee on Derek Bailey

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0:37People sometimes wonder how we choose our great lives. Do we find an interesting subject and then search for a guest to champion their life? That would be really tricky and difficult to make work every week. Or do we write to interesting guests and see if there's anyone they'd like to pick? That would be really tricky and difficult to make work every week. Surprisingly, that is nevertheless what we do. The producer writes to people we think are interesting, and sometimes they write back and tell us who the programme should be about. Take, for example, Sir David Attenborough, who wanted the life to be the first man who inspected a flea under a microscope and then drew the flea, Robert Hooke.

1:18And then there was Diane Morgan, or Philomena Kunk. She picked the head of fighter command in World War II. It's the unpredictability, really. From Mother Teresa to Mussolini, we don't have much control over the selection of our lives, but we do want them to be intriguing and our guests to be intriguing too. Today's guest, Stuart Lee, comedian and writer, is definitely in that camp. In his reply to the producer's letter, he said, I would like to do this if I can pick Derek Bailey. I spoke at his funeral before adding later, here's me winning Celebrity Mastermind. So, as a treat, here he is, Stuart Lee, and his edited highlights on Celebrity Mastermind back in January 2010.

2:05The first celebrity in the spotlight tonight is the comedy writer Stuart Lee. He answers questions on one of the most avant-garde guitarists in British jazz. Derek Bailey. In two minutes, starting now, Derek Bailey was born in January 1930 and raised in the Abedale district of which city? Sheffield. Absolutely right. No passes, 17 points. Stuart Lee, no passes and 17 points. But welcome to Great Lives and many thanks for your nomination. Thanks for having me. Tell us why. Well, I think my life and my approach to my work would be really different if I'd not encountered Derek Bailey. I think he's a really singular talent.

2:46I admire the fact that he walked away from a reasonably successful career as a commercial musician and a session musician to pursue his idea of what he wanted to do, often in the face of indifference. I found him a very personable man when I met him able to explain quite difficult things in a non-patronising way and his time will come. What was his music, just roughly? What sort of thing? Well he seemed to decide that he was never going to play anything that had been composed ever again and he didn't and he improvised everything he did for the rest of his life until towards the end where he made a couple of collections of beautifully played jazz standards as if to prove to everyone, which I really like, that he could have done it at any moment.

3:28Are there any parallels? I'm just kind of sensing there are between his approach to performance and yours. There probably are in that I've copied him. I mean, the one thing that I think about is I saw him at the Royal Festival Hall in the late 90s. It was part of a London Jazz Festival and the London Jazz Festival audience, they expect certain standards in a way that they perhaps wouldn't if in a little venue doing free improvisation. So he was walking around on the stage, you had a guitar plugged into an amp, not really looking where he was going because he had his head down and was concentrating on listening to the group.

4:00And he bumped into the back wall of the stage. He walked into the wall. Yeah, and the guitar made a big sort of clanging noise. And you could see some people of the London Jazz Festival audience thinking, oh, what a terrible mistake. But what Derek did was did it again and then made the clang of the guitar against the wall a feature and then everyone worked off that. So I think what I have taken from it is if something's... Cage says a similar thing, John Cage. If something's not working, do it again or double down on it and see what happens if you... Instead of trying to avoid the problem, make the problem work.

4:35If you're going down badly in a club, try and go worse and see what happens if you pursue it. You spoke at his funeral. Yeah. Can you remember what you said? I did a Chick Murray routine because Derek used to send me tapes of Chick Murray, the Scottish stand-up comedian, who he really liked, I thought that would be the most appropriate thing to do. I was surprised to be asked. The other speaker was Gavin Bryars, the composer, who Derek was in a trio with in the 60s, who obviously was fully qualified to do it. Reading between the lines, any musician that had been asked, it might have been quite problematic politically, so I think his widow pulled out the most inappropriate person, which was a stand-up comedian, which I think Derek would have liked.

5:21So I did my best to do justice to some of the Chick Murray routines that he likes. I don't remember them going down tickly well, but it was a few rounds. No, quite. You know Chick Murray's stuff, don't you? No, I don't. Oh, don't care. Well, Chick Murray was a very funny, like, 50s and 60s era Scottish stand-up comedian. He would establish a story that looked like it was going one way, and then it would contradict itself, and then it would double back and go off on a really long tangent and then get back to the punchline. So I think it probably spoke to his own sensibility. Derek Bailey was born in Sheffield back in 1930, and luckily for us, there's plenty of archive of him talking about improvisation.

6:01There's also the sound of him playing, which you'll hopefully hear if the producer can sort the copyright later on. Derek Bailey's instrument was the guitar, and he collaborated widely. An implacable enemy of commercialised art, said a critic in The Guardian. Improvisation has a curious distinction. It is, at the same time, both the most widely practised musical activity and the least understood. The date here, 1974. Improvisers themselves often show some reluctance to try and consciously examine something which clearly involves so many subconscious elements. Words like mood, feeling, reaction, instinct, intuit, are used a lot.

6:47And for this subject, they're obviously the best words available. You're nodding sympathetically. Well, I was just thinking how he's explained that so well. Is that the voice you remember? Yeah, yeah. But also, when you listen to his music, each new second is in a constant state of being born again, so that it continually is forming itself in the moment. and it's so exciting to listen to when it's working and he's able to explain it as if it were the most natural thing in the world whereas when I used to write I used to review and interview music and interview musicians for The Times for about 10 years and often the people doing the most straightforward music felt obliged to really talk it up like they were doing something incredibly complicated whereas Derek just spoke about it in the way like he was getting on with a job like building a wall or something.

7:35He does sound a bit intense. Was he actually fun? to be with? Well, I only met him a small amount of times, but I found him really funny and entertaining, and I don't recognise the description of him when people say he was a difficult interviewee, but again, it may be that I wasn't in his world, you know, so there was no competition or issues, you know, relating to that. I was from Light Entertainment. I listened to a very lengthy interview he gave, and he did strike me as a difficult interviewee, because he wasn't actually trying to help his interviewer in any way. He was just musing in his own way.

8:09I would naturally put myself in the position of the interviewer and think, what do you do with this? Yeah, but if you are, sometimes when you're being interviewed, you almost don't want to give too much away. I mean, I understand that. But, I mean, there's loads of... He started putting out CDRs himself, which were just him talking whilst practising, and he was very good at talking when he wasn't required to, when he wasn't being asked to, yeah. I should add that the recording we just heard was from the beginning of a series on Radio 3, which no longer seems to be available in the archive, but which we were kindly sent by somebody you put us in touch with, Tim Fletcher, and we'll be hearing from Tim a bit later on.

8:48First, I want to play a bit of you talking on a pop-up radio station a few years ago about Derek. He explained to me that he used to like sitting in his little hackney flat, practising, improvising to whatever sources he could find to play along with and if you remember the mid-90s there was suddenly a pirate radio explosion of drum and bass and Derek Bailey started playing along to these drum and bass records on the radio without really knowing what they were but loving it, loving the challenges that they threw up to him and so from the album we made as a result of that guitar, drums and bass this is Derek Bailey N slash JZ slash BM remix

9:38What's happening here? Well, he's using that as a sound source, and one of the things that's good about it for him, I think, is he has no emotional relationship with it. He doesn't know what it is historically. That was sort of an important thing to him, to try to take himself by surprise. I suppose what I get from that is when I'm doing stand-up, I don't do anything like Derek Barry. I mean, there are people like Daniel Kitson or Janine Garofalo who could build a stand-up show in an hour from the ground up and keep all kinds of improvisations in play. I'm not like that. But I keep little bits in that will surprise me.

10:11At the moment, I've got a stool that's on stage that I have to sit on, and if the rake of the stage is anything other than flat, it will spin to places that I don't know where it's going to stop, and I like having to respond to it. So I think he was trying to create situations where he was taken by surprise. whereas with a lot of jazz people tried to put people together that they feel will be compatible or sympathetic but he was trying to work outside that I've been reading a book Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation by Ben Watson and it begins Derek Bailey is a guitarist a guitarist's guitarist a guitar fetishist's ultimate guitarist a player whose playing proceeds from his instrument in a way that hasn't been done with such unswerving devotion since Hendrix amazed London by sleeping with his instrument, which is lovely, but doesn't really tell me what he was like.

11:04So let's start with that. Describe what he looked like when you knew him, when you met him, and also this hazy image of him, which I'm showing to you now as a younger man. Yeah, well, to me, you look like Samuel Beckett. And I think they were kind of similar in that as much as they pursued an idea to its logical end point, sort of features of an eagle. Quite cadaverous. Yeah, that Samuel Beckett has. Didn't look like a star, but he looked like he'd turned up to get on with the job. Yeah. His father was a barber in Sheffield. He grew up in Abbeydale, area I know. In his autobiography, he says that it was a four-roomed house in a yard which was reached by a passage.

11:44Outside toilets, no bathrooms, no hot water, all the staples of working-class law, law spelt L-O-R-E. There were worse places, he continues. All the adults were keenly aware of that. Did you ever ask him about his early life? No, not really. I've only read about it. But whenever I'm in Sheffield, I'm sort of aware that I'm moving through his historical footsteps. When I've done a gig, I try and get out of the venue and have, like, one pint in a pub. And I found myself in The Grapes in Sheffield. And I went, this is the pub where they invented free improvisation. improvisation. Appropriately, it refuses to take credit cards and is only taking cash.

12:24So it was a quirky sort of place. So I'm really aware of the geography of his life. What about the geography of your life, Stuart? Tell us a bit about your own background. I was born in Wellington in Shropshire, but I only spent about 10 days there. Then I was in care for about two years. And then I grew up in a fairly normal suburb of Solihull in the Midlands. And then when I got to London, in 1989. That's when I used to see the people from the generation that Derek came through who aren't around anymore. So I was really lucky that it was such a vibrant scene. You once started a book, I Never Wanted to Be a Comedian.

13:01Did I? Yes. Right. Bailey's uncle, and this is perhaps where he started with music, gave him a guitar, his first guitar. Here's something I'm hoping you'll read. It's Bailey himself speaking. At first, Shall I do an impression of him? Yes, do. At first, guitar was not, as how you might say now, sexy. It wasn't attractive to me. It was just this thing my uncle played. I never played piano, really. My mother played piano in the house and I used to mess around. All the people I admired didn't play the piano. They didn't play guitar, come to that. They played drums or they played clarinet. Someone who played with him quite early on was Gavin Bryars, who he met in Sheffield, and together they formed a group called the Joseph Holbrook Trio.

13:49Why were they called the Joseph Holbrook Trio, Stuart? Why give them that name? I don't know exactly, but Holbrook's an interesting figure. When I walk around North London, I'm confronted with places that he lived. He wanted to be a classical composer, but he was working class. So he wrote for the musical and he wrote a lot of comic songs. So I wonder whether they related to him in that way because free improvisation was necessarily shut out of the established canon. Let's hear Gavin Bryars talk about these early days and the trio's name. It was a way of being sort of slightly anonymous. None of us would be the band leader.

14:24We couldn't call it like the Derek Bailey trio or Bailey Bryars Oxley or something. It was too pretentious. So we just thought something we could sort of hide behind as a way of almost neutralising the group without making it a strong personal statement from one person. but I think that he found jazz as a term very limiting and he wanted to do more, a wide range of things and he felt jazz was a kind of a circumscribed word which was too narrow for what he wanted to do. You know, one of the funny things about playing guitar, especially in relation to jazz, is that there hasn't been a major jazz figure on the guitar for 50 years, I suppose.

15:04I mean, a major figure in the way that Charlie Parker, John Coltrane or Miles Davis or Bill Evans are an influential figure, a guy that makes a difference to the music. He comes along and everybody plays differently. A guitar player can come along and the other guitar players might play a bit differently, Wes Montgomery. But nobody's changed the music since Charlie Christian. Now that, combined with the fact that I don't collect records, I suppose has left me being influenced by just the people I play with because I am heavily influenced by people I play with, both new players and old players.

15:36It's been like that for years. And they, of course, don't play guitar. And they're influenced by these people I've just mentioned who, again, don't play guitar. And then, of course, there's the whole music, isn't it? If we're talking about jazz, that's... There's very little music that's made by kind of guitar players outside of, like, flamenco guitar players. I like flamencos. There's a guy called Tomatino currently. His recordings are very difficult to find. but then again I haven't looked I realise what am I saying? What am I saying? He says I'm not sure it's a lovely freewheeling improvisational way to the way he talks it's kind of a stream of consciousness it's really funny isn't it as soon as he asserts a point he doubles back on it and changes it I mean a lot of it is a put on a lot of it is a dry northern humour to pretend to me that he didn't understand why I would listen to his records and yet to manufacture them and distribute them It's kind of a joke to see what happens.

16:34You're listening to The Great Life of Derek Bailey, and in a moment we'll introduce a few more voices into the show. But first, here's the man again, talking here to the great Spanish guitarist Paco Peña. Well, of course. I mean, if somebody would show me a bar or something, I could play it all over and over again, and that's it, without doing anything with it. Whether I would get bored or not, it's my own personal... But to some extent, the improvisation is a reflection of the quality of the music. That is, you will play more improvisation the better it feels. Yes. So in the case of a musician who doesn't or can't improvise, he's got no way to follow that.

17:14You might find some very accomplished musician technically who can imitate what other people have done or what he himself invented and technically played better and better, if you like. but yet there wouldn't be much substance in the music. I think he himself couldn't really survive as a musician because he would always feel the drawback that he's not creative. It sounds as though improvisation is essential to flamenco. Absolutely essential. And being creative within flamenco is even more essential. There's something in that interview suggesting he wasn't going to give up until Paco Penner gave him the answer he wanted.

18:00I don't think Paco was that interested in improvisation. No, no. He realised there was no way out. He realised there was no way he was going home to Spain until he'd given the right answer. Also joining us is Ian Greaves, who's been digging into some of Derek's earlier work. And you, Ian, found examples of him working for various TV big bands, including the BBC Northern Bands Orchestra. That's correct. I mean, he was kind of an itinerant musician, so he had a home in Manchester in the 60s and also digs in Fulham before he fully moved to London in 67. And for a good decade or so, he was in big bands, small groups, Malcolm Wise at Blackpool.

18:37He did weeks and weeks with them, I think. He was in the band on the Ken Dodd show. Shirley Bassey? Shirley Bassey, oh, well, indeed. But, you know, he was in a lot of these orchestras that would just play on for Les Dawson walking out. And by the way, you sounded a lot like Les Dawson when you did that reading. Well, that probably tells you something, doesn't it? Because he's got an entertainment sensibility that a lot of the free improvisers don't have. Was it an important route of the career that followed? What did he learn from it? I think very gradually he realised that money wasn't everything.

19:10It was a lucrative job. He got a lot of session work. But he realised that gradually over time he realised that the entire centuries-long era of composition was some sort of apparition in the history of music and actually it was in the way of improvisation. Play is quite an important part of what they do and it's something that's sort of drummed out of us when we're children and, yes, we might learn an instrument, but by adulthood it's very frowned upon. But he kind of really kind of said, no, that should be the whole of it because the first music would have been improvised. When did you first hear him?

19:42It was the concert that Stuart was describing. That Purcell Room, I'd been very embarrassed in front of 300 people walking into a wall, but he didn't seem to faze him. But they did broadcast that on Radio 3. To me, growing up in the North East, where I saw Derek once when he came to Newcastle, but actually it was very difficult to access this music where I come from. And buying a CD was an enormous risk. It was£15 for a CD in those days, and it might be rubbish. And there were a lot of them as well, and you didn't really know where to start, but there were useful programmes at the time where you could hear this stuff, and they transmitted that concert at the Purcell rooms, and I just thought it was astonishing.

20:20I thought it just rewired my brain, really. Everything else sounds quite stupid after it. Laborious. And it's the same, and it goes on in the same way. It's kind of quite difficult to drop in and out of it. Yeah, it's also music that I think it does require you to listen. It's not background. Because everything's sort of happening in the moment, and the musician doesn't know where it's going necessarily, and nor do you. You're sort of hearing someone thinking. He moved to London in 1966 and a few years later helped set up a small label, Incas Records. An early release was called The Topography of the Lungs, followed by Derek Bailey's solo guitar.

21:01Here he is again, talking much later about where his recording sold best. I don't know, over 80 % of the records are sold abroad. More than half of them are sold to Japan. Oh, really? And more than half of the remainder, I think, go to the States. I'm not quite sure. You were saying earlier, you don't really listen to your own material after it's been... Well, not out of choice. No. I have to if it's... Of course, I'm putting a record out. But out of choice, no. No, not very often. That's not right to say I don't. Is that for a technical reason? Has that got something to do with the way you play guitar?

21:35It's to do with the effect on subsequent playing. I mean, if I was going to play tonight, I would not listen to any music today. Maybe this is just a personal thing. I don't know if it applies to anybody else, but I find it some way taps into the energy that you might use playing. It's some kind of detraction. So the listening and playing somehow draw in the same internal resources? There's something like that. If we were to sit and talk about this subject, this is the way it affects me, before we recorded it. When we came to record it, I'd find almost certainly that the second discussion would not have something that maybe the first one had.

22:12And I think it's the loss of energy that, well, you spend time remembering things instead of trying to make things. Something like that. So, Stuart, do you rehearse? Would you rehearse? No, I completely relate to that. Not at all. Even a really big show? You just walk on and... No, look, what I do is, over a series of gigs, I'll work out the material and the story of it and where it's going. But the problem I have, I'll have a show that has a story and a through line in particular bits, and I have to do it 250 times. But I do use strategies I've ripped off from these people to try to keep parts of it alive.

22:45Ian, Bailey set up something called Company. Can you tell me anything about that? Well, Company comes along as a regular thing from the mid-70s, but it was a week in the year where he would gather together musicians he regularly worked with, musicians he'd never met, and they were very popular, I think, yeah. He would have set up duets with people that he didn't even know who they were or what they sounded like to surprise himself. He'd go in completely blind or pick Will Gaines, who was an old hoofer, a tap dancer, who was a light entertainer, really, and he just used him as a sound source. He was always trying to find a new source to inspire him.

23:22Someone we spoke to who was involved in company from the age of 13 was the musician Alex Ward, who said that without Derek's initial encouragement and help, he might not be doing what he's doing now. Another person we heard from is Tim Fletcher. He's been helping to organise much of Derek Bailey's material for Huddersfield University, their archive. The producer spoke to him on a line. There was a huge amount of material at Derek's, an enormous amount of unreleased recordings, huge amounts of written material, particularly a lot about, you know, the company weeks. 85 archive boxes, very avant-garde dissident music in many, many ways.

24:06It does not give people what most people want in music. Dissident music. Yeah. I like that term. It is very different, particularly these days, where it's music which really warrants attention. Back in the day, you did record him yourself. Yeah. I think in a plastic bag, you told me. You put a recorder in a plastic bag. That's the very original. I was a teenager then. But later on, I mean, the CDs have come out of my recordings, Derek. it you know professional recordings as well oh yeah very very very very much so yeah do you think he did what he did because he had to or he did what he did because he didn't want to be like everybody else bit of both bit of both i'm sure there was that not being like everyone else i think i mentioned you before i can see him as that northern dissident bloody-minded voice like brian clough marquis smith their own men absolutely i've come from the northeast i I realised I know that character and it is absolutely individualistic.

25:06And that was Derek. Stuart, do you think there's a type of person who likes Derek? Could he be defined by his audience, so to speak? Well, one rarely sees enough of them in a place to get a picture of who they might be. Yes, yes. I mean, he was from the era where people playing that kind of music talks about the audience being three men and a dog, you know. but now there is a large audience for improvised and experimental music to the point where it almost feels fashionable old, upper class, middle class lower class I suppose you'd have to have maybe listened to enough other music to have realised what he wasn't doing but I don't know I don't meet enough people I don't meet enough people there's money to organise a convention or something like that well there is isn't there in the autumn in December there's a three day celebration of Derek's work with a day at the Barbican and two at Cafe Otto in East London I'm comparing those, so we'll see who comes then I'll get back to you and tell you who they are.

26:10You said a moment ago that there have to be people who'd listen to the other kind of music and decided they wanted something that wasn't the other kind of music, I think he'd rather like that definition. Yeah, well I think you have to know what he's choosing not to do you have to know what he's choosing not to do I mean, the fact that he was this successful session musician, you know, this wasn't someone fumbling around. He'd mastered music and then had chosen to reject the aspects of it that most people considered to be important. Let's hear another piece of music, if we can. This is from 1997, and it's called To Be Arranged.