A womaniser, a liar, a thief, a junkie, a sex addict, a pervert, a bulimic, a self-harmer and a manic depressive. In his soul-baring autobiography, British comedian Russell Brand certainly paints himself as the kind of guy only a mother could love. Only, after reading My Booky Wook – Brand’s uproarious journey from suburban banality to debauched, drug-fuelled fame – you’ll love him too. Truly. Madly. Deeply.
Brand clearly has a way with the ladies, who he sees as a “Disneyland for my Dinkle”; The Sun newspaper didn’t name their Shagger of the Year award after him for nothing. Fittingly, My Booky Wook opens with a 29-year-old Brand languishing in a sex addiction clinic in Philadelphia, forced to share a room with a paedophile.
But life wasn’t always this glamorous for the wild child of UK comedy. Before MTV, before Big Brother, before BBC radio, before Hollywood, and before the Sass & Bide-clad stems and backcombed halo, was a very dismal childhood in Grays, Essex. “Fortunately, both for you and me,” writes Brand, “I grew up to become a comedian and will make [my upbringing sound] as jolly as possible. In the words of Morrissey - I can smile about it now, but at the time it was terrible.” His mother - who spent much of her son’s formative years in and out of cancer wards - was Brand’s only ally in a bleak universe orbited by poverty, an absent father, a hostile stepfather, a tutor with wandering hands, peer rejection, school expulsions, police run-ins and a “filthy clan of murderous, sex-crazed” pet gerbils. Brand recalls that when his philandering, porn-obsessed father finally decided to dabble in parenting, it was to take him (aged 17) on a trip to Asia to have unprotected sex with prostitutes.
From the get-go, Brand seemed destined for a life of unemployment, social dysfunction, crime, drug addiction, mental illness and, inevitably, reality TV. Embracing every one of these clichés with ludicrous gusto, Brand metamorphosed from awkward teen to “wild, Dean Moriarty crazy man, an octopus-limbed loom, a human Catherine wheel of vibrancy and excitement”. As he tells it, he spent his 20s living “a life of whores and heroin”, his sporadic acting, presenting and comedic achievements on a constant collision course with his complete lack of social mores.
Brand’s ability to sabotage every career opportunity was remarkable. Stand-up performances disintegrated into drug-induced chaos. An MTV presenting job was lost after he introduced his drug dealer to Kylie Minogue, while dressed as Osama bin Laden - on September 12, 2001. He was booted off a BBC comedy show filmed on a Mediterranean cruise ship after pissing off cast and crew with his sordid, drunken, womanising exploits. In fact, the only job he managed to pull off, so to speak, was a documentary series in which he masturbated a homosexual in a gay bar toilet. Over the course of his 400-page confessional, Brand’s misadventures go from outrageous to totally, side-splittingly out of control. At which point, his agent packs him off to rehab, where Brand finally realises his driving ambition is far stronger than anything he can score from Camden Lock.
For all his foibles, Brand is glaringly self-aware. When he cheats on girlfriends, spits on a stripper he’s just had sex with, throws a prostitute’s mobile phone against the wall, tells his employer he has AIDS to get out of work, hides drugs up his posterior on international flights, we can’t judge his actions because Brand has already done it for us. He knows he’s a “right arsehole”, and we forgive him because his candour is so darn refreshing. And for a man who has lived his entire life as if it were a stand-up act, perhaps this is the ultimate punchline.
- Janine Israel, deputy chief sub-editor