Two for Joy: Spencer Jones on his debut tour

Picture the scene: you’re making your way up the M74, taking it easy in the left hand lane. You look to your right and see you’re being overtaken by a 20-year old car driven by the man pictured here. The back seat is piled high with what looks like random junk: spoons, ping-pong balls, and – is that a chicken mask?

But this is not just some hoarder, this is Spencer Jones, on his way to Glasgow for a gig at The Stand. He’s driven all the way from Torquay, so at this point he’s been alone with his thoughts for seven hours. Anyone who’s seen the way he uses loops onstage can imagine what that would sound like.

Incredibly, given his TV and live comedy successes, Jones has just set off on his first ever national tour ten years after his Edinburgh debut. His appearance at The Stand Glasgow (19 Oct) will mark not only his first performance there, but his first time setting foot in the city.

Before Glaswegians take offence, know that Jones is as shocked by that as anyone. He’s a big fan of the city’s comedic output and is particularly excited to perform at The Stand, given the big names who have come up there and continue to do so.

Jones’ career took off around the time he had his two kids, hardly the time to go gallivanting across the country for two months (“wouldn’t have been fair on the missus”). Since then, the kids have gotten older, started school, and the whole family has moved to Devon, where they didn’t know anybody. The move, fresh out of lockdown, took Jones from a period of state-enforced isolation to self-imposed loneliness. The ensuing mental breakdown and quest for male friends form the basis of his show Making Friends, which he brought to the Fringe last year.

The show continues his move towards more narrative-driven shows (he describes his early work as “like throwing a hedgehog at a dartboard – you’re just looking for as many hits as possible”). It’s a winning blend of his trademark songs, goofs and good old fashioned storytelling. You get the impression that the performance is pretty fluid, changing from night to night depending on when he feels a segment has run its course. The way he describes it, there’s a second monologue playing in his head: he chats for a bit and then decides “I've been talking for long enough now, time for a song.”

Jones is bringing himself on tour with him, too – he’s doing his own warm-up set. Like The Eras Tour, it brings together all the best bits of material from his last ten years into one half hour set. He says it’s like rewarding the crowd in advance for coming to listen to an hour-long story of his mental breakdown. It’s also a good way of warming up the half of the crowd who know him from Ted Lasso and have no idea how weird the show is going to get.

So that explains the car full of odds and ends accumulated over the course of a decade. This magpie-like tendency to collect and repurpose manifests in his interactions with people too – he finds mannerisms and intonations get stuck in his head like the human equivalent of a catchy guitar riff. “I just love the human animal,” he says.

So much of the colour of his act comes from small interactions he’s witnessed over the years, often from the myriad jobs he worked when he was first living in London – on a building site, at an ad production company, or, his all-time favourite, as the singer in a wedding band.

“If I'd had parents who lived in London, the fridge was always full and there was a bed, then my experience would have been very different – but life’s good isn’t it? All those different experiences helped.”

Take yesterday, when he was on the way home from the first night of the tour in Manchester. He was alone at a petrol station in the middle of the night when he heard a noise. A man spilled hot coffee over himself at the pump and was cursing at the top of his lungs. Now Jones has the man’s musical squawk of “oh faaaack – fackin’ ‘ell” stuck in his head. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll see it as part of a set one day. 

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Spencer Jones, The Stand, Glasgow, 19 Oct, 4pm, £16; Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh, 21 Oct, 8pm, £17.60