Bill Bailey, Wyndham's Theatre

By chance, two comics with a penchant for rock‘n’roll have been strutting their stuff at opposite ends of the capital in the same week. First, Bolton funnyman Peter Kay was giving it his all on stage at the O2 on the Greenwich peninsula, and now Bill Bailey begins a two-month-long residency at the Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End. Music buffs both - but in Bailey’s case there are no air guitars as he’s an accomplished musician, and the stage is filled with stringed instruments and keyboards.

But it would be slightly misleading to describe Bailey as a musical comic, as a large part of his act is stand-up, pure and simple. Or rather, subtle and complex, as this is a man who has a taste for the surreal and can discuss particle physics in the same breath as the failings of the Catholic church. One moment in Dandelion Mind he is lambasting the Pope as the “sultan of paedophiles”, the next he is describing the Large Hadron Collider as “a very expensive microwave”.

Bailey is one of the most erudite comics around and his act is full of jokes about religion, zoology, politics and creationism. But it’s never didactic or dull, and certainly never preachy, even when he is laying down his rationalist, Darwinist principles, which is a cue for one of the evening’s several slow-burning gags: “Thank God for Darwin,” he says, waiting for the laugh to roll across the aisles. And his humour is rarely predictable; when a comic starts a gag with “I was in Australia recently” it’s usually followed by a trite line that you’ve heard many times before about those incorrigible colonials and their funny accents. When Bailey says it, it’s followed by some very astute gags about the new Coalition Government there as well as fond and original observations about the Aussie character.

In the second half of the show, Bailey concentrates more on his music as he spoofs various genres such as hip hop, James Blunt, Kraftwerk and “girly” singers whose material is full of meaningless phrase-making about gossamer wings, dandelion minds and other such nonsense. His lament for the death of punk (Johnny Lydon doing butter commercials, oh the pain of it) and Gary Numan’s hit "Cars", given a wholly original retread with Bailey’s unique horn section, are particularly memorable.

There’s a rather baffling section about art (complete with a slide show on the huge onstage video screen) but it’s an evening with a high laugh quotient and Bailey fans will lap it up, although those new to his act may hanker for something more pacy or energetic. But the musical finale, in which Bailey goes fully into rock-god mode and piles on the silliness, makes up for any preceding weaknesses.

• Bill Bailey at Wyndham’s Theatre, London WC2 until 8 January
  
• Find Bill Bailey on Amazon

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