about my musical comedy. you know, the kinks, remember, they were writing dedicated follower of fashion and i want to be like david. like, they were doing musical satire, and the beatles were winking and nodding and giggling through the whole thing, until they got super serious. but so much of it was sardonic. and ben folds definitely, with rockin the suburbs and all that, and one angry dwarf and all that, was right on some sort of cusp between pop and satire. 0ne angry dwarf and 200. solemn faces. ..solemn faces, which is the opening track on this album. great title, isn t it? forever and ever amen. yeah. # now i m big and important # 0ne angry dwarf # and 200 solemn faces # and you # if you really want to see me, check # the papers and the tv.# that s a revenge song, isn t it? yeah, i guess. you have written your own revenge song in the past, haven t you? i have written lots of revenge songs, yeah. there s one in particular. who is phil daoust? 0h, phil.
oh, god. yeah, i feel bad about that. it s one of those interesting ones. when people ask about giving yourtime again, what would you not do and say? and with me, given that a lot of my comedy was sort of flirting around the edges of offence, they expect me to talk about that stuff, but actually when i regret. i don t. i regret hurting individual people. phil was a journo with the guardian in my first year at edinburgh. when i wasjust. it s not like i had spent years being lauded. i had spent years getting nowhere and years with closed doors. and i finally had an open door and everyone was being very generous in edinburgh. all right. so, anyway, i ve been here for a month playing funny songs on a piano. i m not a standup. i thought, why not, now i m feeling a bit cocky, do a bit of standup? and he was the firstjourno to kind of do the sneer,
who is phil daoust? 0h, phil. oh, god. yeah, i feel bad about that. it s one of those interesting ones. when people ask about giving yourtime again, what would you not do and say? and with me, given that a lot of my comedy was sort of flirting around the edges of offence, they expect me to talk about that stuff, but actually when i regret. i don t. i regret hurting individual people. phil was a journo with the guardian in my first year at edinburgh. when i wasjust. it s not like i had spent years being lauded. i had spent years getting nowhere and years with closed doors. and i finally had an open door and everyone was being very generous in edinburgh. all right. so, anyway, i ve been here for a month playing funny songs on a piano. i m not a standup. i thought, why not, now i m feeling a bit cocky, do a bit of standup? and he was the firstjourno to kind of do the sneer,
that, of course, comes whenever anyone gets any popularity. there s got to be an equal and opposite reaction. and he wrote in the guardian, which was the paper i read and which had, what, in 2005, five million readers? it was pretty big because it was before it alljumped off the page, and he wrote this just utterly sneering review, one star review, really snobby in that sort of guardian way, like, quoting shakespeare. i was like, how dare you quote shakespeare at me? i ll quote shakespeare at you! and just incredibly sneering and ungenerous, a thing that just says i m terrible at myjob. it really, really threw me. and so, like, a year later, when i had to come up with a new show, i thought, well, i m going to take that guy down. so i wrote the song for phil daoust. # ding, dang, ding dang dong # this ends my phil daoust song # everybody sing along # la la la
that very soon after i wrote that song, i could slander anyone and really have an effect on their lives. because youtube was taking off and my little 150 seat, 50 seat cabaret rooms where i was doing this dark comedy, i suddenly realised that anything i said could spread. and that is a profound change, because you re no longer some little guy in a cabaret room punching up at some meanie. you re someone who can really hurt someone. and i think that song probably hurt phil. i think probably his name. do you know that? have you talked to him? i tried to. we did a little online. we talked and sort of displayed that we had forgiven each other. but i d got the video eventually taken down, but not soon enough. the irony, of course, is that if you hadn t written that song and hadn t performed it publicly, nobody would have remembered. very few people would have remembered the original review. probably, except that it was the number one hit on my name for a year when i was trying to make a care