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Camden’s very own – Russell Brand
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Won over by an idiot who’s interesting
My Booky Wook. By Russell Brand
Hodder and Stoughton £18.99
MAYBE I wasn’t perhaps the best person to review the Russell Brand autobiography, My Booky Wook. I once waited an hour-and-a-half in the rain for the great man at a charity bash, only to be told at the last minute by a cringing organiser that Brand had banned all press.
A Sunday evening wasted, and such a miserable fellow not to allow the press to report on an event held in a good cause. What an ego!
But then once I started reading, I couldn’t stop: it is one of the most readable books I’ve picked up all year – I finished it in a day.
Brand takes us through his difficult start in life, from turning down offers from a range of perverts (including his babysitter) to the present day with him holed up with his beloved cat Morrissey in a Hampstead pad.
Brand has been a Camden resident for some years, having gone to the now defunct Drama Centre in Prince of Wales Road, before living above the Queen’s Arms pub in Queen’s Crescent and moving briefly to a luxurious pad in Camden Town with his then doctor girlfriend.
But the most infamous scene – the day Brand introduced his dealer, Gritty, to pop princess Kylie at MTV, where he worked as a presenter – really leaves the reader in wonderment at the cajones of the comic.
“What were these two gonna talk about,” Brand muses. “It’s September 12, Kylie and Gritty are having a sort of awkward chat, with Gritty trying to be polite and Kylie asking ‘what do you do?’…And there’s me standing beside them, still dressed as Osama Bin Laden.
“I thought, ‘It doesn’t get any better than this.’
“And it didn’t, cos [MTV] sacked me about two days later.”
In a low-key admission at the end the book, he says he was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder – manic depression – after he kicked the drugs for good in 2002 which goes some way to explaining his almost superhuman indifference to the chaos and catastrophe that almost lead him to obscurity in a toilet somewhere smoking crack for good.
Some of the most poignant moments in the book centre on his tales of going cold turkey at a drug retreat in Bury St Edmonds in Suffolk.
But, as usual, Brand doesn’t let the dark mood linger. As he says at the start of the book: “this bit of my childhood might be a bit of a downer to read; it was a bit of a downer to live an’ all,” before telling the readers we’re lucky he went on to be a comedian so he can make it funny.
Revelations that may surprise readers about Brand, nowadays a vision of untouchable, cocky mania, is that he was bulimic, used to cut himself, and became vegetarian at 14.
But his ambition remained. He describes himself as a “tourist” in the underworld of drug addiction, homelessness and prostitution.
What would TV have done without him? Or at least the WH Smith bestsellers list.
Once an idiot always an idiot, but at least Brand is more than an interesting one.
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