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It is, of course, an easy mistake to make. The Hollow Men have a web identity crisis of sorts. Any good search engine will point you straight to hollowmen.com, an interesting site charting the rise and fall - mostly fall - of the famed sixties phenomenon that wasn't the sound of the Hollow Men.
They are not to be confused with David Armand, Nick Tanner, Sam Spedding and Rupert Russell, the foursome that make up comedy group Hollow Men, who brought the live event of the Fringe to the Edinburgh Festival 2000, Live At The Lounge. comedylounge caught up with David, Nick and Sam as they had a quiet drink in the Three Sisters Courtyard.
They met at Cambridge University while they were all doing straight plays. They began writing and performing together in university, finding that they had a shared interest in the same styles of comedy, and more importantly, the same sense of humour. They also bonded through mutual rejection from the Footlights, the traditional route that most Cambridge trainee comedy performers take to break into the scene. "We didn't really like them," says David. "And they didn't really like us…" The Footlights are the Cambridge University Revue, where Monty Python and Peter Cook began writing, and more recently have spawned the likes of Fry and Laurie, David Baddiel and Simon Munnery. In the past few years, the quality of writers and performers has declined somewhat, and the Footlights have reverted to trying to imitate their predecessors - resulting in safe and often banal performances. "A lot of the time Footlights are still stuck trying to be Fry and Laurie. We found they were doing that kind of stuff and we didn't have any interest in that kind of thing at all. I think that's the great thing about the four of us finding each other. It's because I don't think anyone else wanted to do the kind of sick things we used to do."
After graduation, they brought a show to Edinburgh 1999, with a another hollow man who has since departed the group. "There was a fifth man, who was our Stuart Sutcliffe, who is now teaching small children. Which is worrying if you know him, as you can well imagine." Since last year's festival, they have gained residences in clubs in London such as the Canal Café and the Hen and Chickens and, says Sam, have been "basically improving the show to the state it is now."
There is a high content of scatological humour in Live at the Lounge, along with some of the most surreally twisted characters you will find this side of Reeves and Mortimer. Comparisons in this year's Festival press stretched from The League of Gentlemen to the Doug Anthony All Stars. Certainly, the melancholy and pathos of the stage productions of the League of Gentlemen are present in Live at the Lounge, but the characterisation of the Hollow Men is more down to earth.
Live at the Lounge is not so much a sketch show as an unravelling story of a night in a seedy cabaret club, peopled by some terribly tragic and perverted acts and performers. The club is owned by ass obsessed Buddy Croccoli (played by Armand), who ceaselessly bullies morose compere 'Oily' Mike Wrong (Tanner), a comedian whose observational comedy rambles down some fantastically bizarre avenues. The House Manager is scout leader Nigel Parks (Russell), whose obsession with the Cuban maintenance man Enrique Fernandez (Spedding), not to mention small boys, is horribly played out through the show. Along with these four characters, the Hollow Men play the large array of recurring acts, interlopers and gate crashers that make up the Lounge experience. It is a breathtaking journey, with the change between characters timed to perfection and some amazing musical performances. The dedication to the in-depth character development can be seen in the Official Souvenir Programme handed out to audience members at the beginning of each performance, which includes a brief history of the Lounge, as well as biographies of Wrong and Croccoli.
The show has been seven months in the making. They began re-working an idea performed a year and half previously, which already contained two of the main characters. "We loved that," says David, "basically because of our obsession with crap light entertainment and crap cabaret acts, and we wanted to do something more with the idea." By the end of June, they had over two hours of new material to chose from. "We have a lot of affection for a lot of the characters, and it was really hard cutting a lot of them down because we'd spent so long developing them. Rupert wasn't especially keen to loose chunks of Mr. Parks, which I find really worrying that he wants to be seen as a paedophile, but such is life."
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The affection that they hold for their characters is what marks them apart from other, more basic, sketch based comedy groups, something that David is quick to disassociate them from. "When you go and see sketch comedy, and you can tell it's just four or five people standing on stage just saying words… they've obviously just gone, right, we've written this, let's go on stage and say these words now. I really hate that and I hate watching that. But when people have got real affection for their characters and have got real confidence in what they're doing, and really almost don't care and just want to go out there and do it, then it's really fantastic to watch." Sam nods. "It's really important to a) enjoy what you're doing and b) find yourself really funny." David laughs. "And we find ourselves fucking hilarious!"
The difficulty and discipline required with cutting a show down to a fifty five minute Fringe performance has obviously lead to some sacrifices, as Sam explains. "There are other characters that have worked that we've had to cut out as well. There was another character, which was particularly enjoyed by the head of Hat Trick productions, which due to the workings of some twisted democracy got chucked out." The controversy surrounding the omission of Mr. Kazoo is rearing it's ugly head… "Oh no, will you fuck off about this?!" shouts David. A heated debate follows.
David - "Mr. Kazoo?! You still maintain that Mr. Kazoo was comic genius?! This was Sam coming on stage and playing a kazoo whilst falling over."
Sam - "That's a simplification of it."
David -"No, it's not. It's condensed certainly, but it's true."
Nick - "That's sort of expanded if anything."
David - "Yeah, I think I've embellished it actually. I think I've given it more worth than it's due."
Sam - "You've left out the pathos and soul."
This kind of exchange reveals the origins of most of the characters that finally make it into the average Hollow Men show, as David explains. "There's a lot of stuff that happens like that. We frequently come up with stuff when we're very drunk the night before we're about the go on stage, and somebody goes 'oh this would be a really good idea to do it on stage', and we all go 'Yeah!' not thinking that Sam usually means it, and then he turns up the next day with a cloth cap and a kazoo going 'I'm all ready!' and everyone kind of goes 'What?! Oh shit!' which is frequently how most of it comes about unfortunately."
In actual fact, all four write the material for the shows with Rupert and Nick taking up the bulk of the writing. All material is then taken to rehearsal where "it all gets put through the mangle," says Nick, "and then our director cuts it."
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"I feel I ought to point out" interjects Sam, "that there's a lot of filth, which gets put in my mouth that's not from my mind. I've come to be identified as the person who kind of comes out with all the filth." David laughs. "You inspire the filth in all of us, and then it returns to you in a kind of glorious circle." Sam concedes. "I'm not saying I don't deserve it."
David has a theory about the reason for the success of such characters as Sting Ray Walker, the cabaret singer played by Sam with a unique view of what constitutes a romantic gesture. "I like that idea of being able to flip something from being a bit edgy and you don't know where you stand with it to just pushing it around to it being completely funny and it's the ways in which you do that." He uses the example of Buddy Croccoli. "I think the thing is that he's just so shit, and so helpless and so obsessed with arses that when he first comes on and starts telling people to stick things up their arse, you can see a few people in the audience just recoiling. But then when it gets to the end and basically everything is going up the arse, and arse is every other word, pushing it so far into the realms of absolute ridiculous, that in a way it stops being offensive and you just realise it's ridiculous. One way is just to say the word arse a lot I have found, in my time."
As for ambitions for the future, the Hollow Men have some bigger plans. In the next couple of years, they aim to put a show on television - not unlike any other sketch act, then? "Yeah," says David, "we'd like to get our stuff out there as much as we can. To the world. Through a loud hailer. On a street corner. Through puppetry, perhaps. Shadow play. I don't know. Whatever medium works."
The Hollow Men. Shouting at you from a street corner. Soon.
www.hahabonk.com
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