This charming man
He survived an unhappy childhood, a heroin and crack habit, a public tongue-lashing from Bob Geldof and being sacked from MTV for dressing as Bin Laden. Not to mention the Kate Moss connection and his supposed sex addiction. But that's what makes the stand-up and star of Big Brother's Big Mouth so compelling...
Barbara Ellen
Sun 18 Jun 2006 00.05 BST
It would probably take an entire issue of The Observer to fully explain Russell Brand. He's hugely 'hot' at the moment on quite a few different levels. Some people will know him from E4's Big Brother's Big Mouth, where he bounds around, a loquacious gothic vision among a live studio audience, getting their opinion on the housemates. Others from the tabloids, who adore 'oddball' Brand for spending a night with Kate Moss (after she saw him perform stand-up), for generating amusing kiss-and-tells ('He said: "I'm a sexy wildman!"'), and for being a 'reformed heroin and crack addict' and 'sex addict', who is quite open about a druggy degenerate past that involved bulimia, mental illness and sleeping with prostitutes (you can see why Brand is considered such good copy).
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The night before we met I saw him perform at the Hen & Chickens comedy club in north London, and Brand was articulate, scathing, surreal and strangely vulnerable-looking in his bare feet (nothing like his uber-zany BBBM persona). Later Brand tells me his central themes (for stand-up and for life) are authenticity, honesty and revolution ('triumph over conformity') but at the Hen & Chickens he mainly cheekily dissected that day's kiss-and-tell on him. 'I'm fascinated by tabloid culture,' he tells me later. 'Out of sheer narcissism it's interesting to see yourself abstracted from yourself.'
We meet on a sunny afternoon at his publicist's office. Just to look at, Brand is quite extraordinary - tall (6ft 2in), thin, bearded, kohl-eyed, with a camp Victorian look that partly suggests he should be holding a hanky to his nose complaining about the smell of the poor (Lord Byron slumming it). 'Black on the outside because black is how I feel on the inside,' says Brand easily. He turns out to be great company - imaginative, playful and, considering the ups and downs of his life, open to a fault. About most things anyway. Ask about the fuss surrounding him and Moss, and Brand clams up. 'I'm embarrassed about it. She's a lovely person. I've only met her a couple of times - I should be careful what I say.'
Like a lot of ex-drug addicts Brand can also get a bit 'cosmic' at times - there's quite a lot of guff (albeit self mocking) about being in tune with the 'universe', along the lines of: 'I believe that everything is one thing and time is infinite, time is cyclical, and at one point we've all been each other.' Quite.
However, there's a genuine intelligence there, and literacy. Brand's conversation is peppered with references from people as diverse as Oscar Wilde and Lester Bangs. At one point he paraphrases Schopenhauer: 'That thing of how you're scared of the storm because nature is much bigger than us? Well, I am the storm.'
The thing you get most of all from Brand is the strange cocktail of ambition and vulnerability, which could spell danger for this battle-hardened self-saboteur. 'I've always had this impulse to be destructive,' says Brand. 'I'm more on my guard now. But I've always had this thing in me, a Bacchanalian impulse. The thing that says there's only this, there's only now, there's nothing else, so fuck everything. I still have little explosions of it, but I have to say to myself, remember, you've got all these things to do - don't ruin it just for the moment.' [...]
From early adolescence Brand was suspected to be bipolar and hyper-manic, though he was only treated for depression. Around the age of 11 he started binge-eating and vomiting. 'It was really unusual in boys, quite embarrassing. But I found it euphoric.'
As an adult, when he was in rehab, the bulimia briefly returned. 'It was clearly about getting out of myself and isolation. Feeling inadequate and unpleasant.'