Phil Kay: "You get completely wasted and end up naked"

I start by asking Phil Kay to improvise a song about Christmas for The Skinny.

“I’ve just got an upright piano, and I’ve taught myself the chords, listen!” He wedges a bellowing child under one arm and starts bashing.  “This is a D!  This is a B!”

“You say you’re going to get fat over Christmaaaaas.
Don’t be a ninny! You’ll stay skinny! 
You say Santa’s going to bring all that fat in a sack.
He’s not mean. You’ll stay lean!”

He gives up.

“I can’t improvise on a piano.  I can do it a thousand times better on a guitar.  You get this muscle memory if you’ve practiced enough, and you can whack it out without thinking.  I'm like Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon.  Whoo-chah!”

Three Christmases ago Kay moved with his family from Inverness to the woods outside Brighton, and it obviously agrees with him because he’s wildly excited about playing his kid’s school concert. “I’m MCing and doing some songs.  Gary Numan's kid is at the school too, and we’re desperately trying to get him to come and sing something, but he won’t.”

Music crops up again and again in conversation, and I mention I’d read he’d like to give up comedy for it. “I’ve definitely got enough space to be a musician too. I’m in a band down here, we have three drummers and a flautist, and we play improv in local pubs two or three times a week. With comedy, people have to be in the mood for it, but music is much more accessible.”

Indeed, this year, Kay took an unlikely step for a former Perrier nominee, and opted to perform improv comedy songs at tiny free gigs rather than his usual big Edinburgh Festival venues.

“The Free Fringe was exactly what I needed, at a time when I felt like moving out of straight comedy. For the big venues punters have to pay £13.50 for a ticket and who wants to pay that? At the free gigs the crowd were locals, and frankly they were some of the most amazing gigs I’ve ever done. And you got paid there and then!  They hand round a bucket and it goes straight in your pocket, you don’t have to wait six months and get 10% deducted.

“The best gigs I’ve ever done were at places like the Dundee Rep or the Aberdeen Lemon Tree, in front of 300 people. In the interval they buy you loads of drinks, and you get completely wasted and end up naked pushing an imaginary Ryanair towel trolley around, like the loon at a party.”

Clearly this is a different Phil Kay to the dejected specimen visible on Dave repeats of QI.  I ask him if it was as painful as it looked? “I did get a show called How To Be Bad On QI out of it, but anyone with half a head could see I wasn’t into it.  I mean, it was handy to earn £3,500 each time, but it’s all about the context, and TV just wasn’t natural for me. In one episode they actually stopped filming and said, 'Could you be more funny, Phil?'"

By this time my hand is killing me from trying to keep up, and I tell him my biggest regret is not sticking in at shorthand. “You know, I don’t have any regrets.  People ask me about that a lot, but I don’t. There’s always time if you’re alive. You know there’s so much art in the world and I have three kids and my love, and that means everything to me. You just fit the gigs around it.”