Come Flyer With Me: Dead Cat Bounce

Before we became the global comedy rock sensation that is Dead Cat Bounce we were part of a larger, student comedy group called H-BAM. (An acronym for How Babies Are Made... As in, "Come see How Babies Are Made!". Very definitely a student group...)

Fresh-faced, cocky and cheerful we hit the Royal Mile hard those years. Our first Edinburgh we brought a sketch show was called, if I remember right, "Stop Fistfighting-You're Pregnant", and the ten of us yelled at and bullied passers-by and other student groups until they either took a flyer or moved onto quieter parts of the Mile. We were those assholes.

The sad thing is, it worked: as an unknown student group we managed to drag in pretty full houses just through sheer bastardly behaviour and superior energy expenditure. We had a song that loudly embarrassed and berated anyone who didn't take our flyer and how that probably meant they were an selfish and insensitive lover. We climbed bare-legged inside large poster-covered cardboard boxes and chased and butted people down the street. We tied people to a chair- all that unforgivable and, sadly, effective stuff.

Our crowning triumph was probably the slots we were allotted on the podiums along the Mile. We wrote an extremely catchy and repetitive song that went something like "We're just standing, standing on a podium, for 20 minutes or so..." And then "for 19 minutes or so..." It blurred the line between noise pollution and performance art - and holy hell did it work.

So now, being older, bitterer and a lot less energetic I tend to avoid the Mile during the festival now, although I will dip in once or twice. I'll quickly spot the loudest, rudest and most obnoxious young comedians out there and hate them immediately with that kind of loathing reserved for those people who remind you of yourself. But I will take a flyer. And fair play to them for that.

Dead Cat Bounce are performing nightly throughout the Edinburgh Festival at Pleasance One at 10.30pm