Billy Connolly

I watch Billy, surrounded by people who can’t believe their luck to be standing next to the man. Fortunately, many of them are also art lovers, eager to take home a slice of Billyness to hang in their living rooms. There’s a queue for his stunning drawings and prints, for which he has devised titles such as Extinct Scottish Amphibian, Pantomime Giraffe, Celtic Bling, Chookie Birdie, and A Load of Old Bollocks. He has been working on these for several years now, hunched over his drawing pad for many hours at a time. I especially love the darker, almost sinister ones, such as The Staff, which is a row of similar, expressionless people in gas masks, all facing the same way. Told you it was dark. But as Robert Stoller said, ‘Kitsch is the corpse that’s left when art has lost its anger.’ Throughout the afternoon, Billy tells me, a pointed question has been posed time and time again: ‘What does your psychologist wife think of your drawings?’ ‘Oh,’ replied Billy, ‘she just peers at them then walks away with a superior, shrinky look on her face.’ Rubbish. I take photos of this triumph and text them to our kids. ‘Your father is officially an artist!’ I crow, as if I had anything to do with it. Well, I probably did – especially those pieces that were born of fury or frustration.

Is it ever easy to be with the same person for more than thirty years? Sometimes I think I was not the right wife for Billy. I’m too self-determining, career-oriented, eager for adventure, and busy. Billy might even add ‘bossy’. ‘If you hadn’t been married to me,’ I asked him recently, ‘whom would you have wanted to be your wife instead?’ ‘Sandra Bullock,’ he replied, without a moment’s hesitation. ‘I think she’s lovely. There’s a wee promise in her face. Or maybe Sinéad Cusack, ’cause she’s fanciable, too. And that blonde woman on CSI Miami who looks like you Pamela. Well, she’s OK …’ Billy must have caught my horrified micro-expression, ‘… but she’s not as nice as you …’ Good to know.

Billy was wonderfully supportive when, against his advice, I took part in the BBC television show Strictly Come Dancing. He giggled uncontrollably at my first waltz, but was later caught looking misty-eyed when my dance partner James Jordan performed a routine that helped catapult us to the finals. I wondered if – even slightly hoped – Billy would be jealous of James, but my husband was far too self-assured for that. But he warned me: ‘I wouldn’t trust a man who wore such tight trousers.’ Billy now complains he’s a ‘tango widow’ because I take off after dinner to dance until midnight. ‘Why don’t you come along?’ I frequently ask. Billy has had one tango lesson, and there are black-and-white shoes in his wardrobe, so he is partly equipped for a milonga. ‘Think I’ll give it a miss,’ he says. ‘Watching snake-hipped foreigners molesting you on the dance floor has limited appeal.’

Would Billy have preferred a cosy, soup-maker type of wife? From time to time I’m quite sure he would, but that’s not me. Anyway, he’d hate to have a mate who intruded too much on his daily life. Yes, Billy has become more and more of a hermit. Sometimes I think he’s a budding Howard Hughes. If I visit him in a foreign city where he’s been working for a while I am usually appalled by the state of his hotel room; he just hates letting people in to tidy up. I dare not touch his stuff – his drawing materials carefully laid out, his crossword puzzle beside the bed awaiting inspiration about thirty-two down, his brightly coloured underpants hanging in the shower, his banjo leaning precariously against the bathroom door. I swear he’d let his fingernails and beard grow to disgusting lengths if the various make-up artists he works with did not intervene for professional reasons. He might as well buy some planes, design a bra, and be done with it.

At least Billy and I don’t have a relationship like that of a friend’s grandfather who, when asked how many sugars he liked in his tea, replied irritably: ‘Och, I don’t know. Ask your granny.’ No, we spend too much time apart to become that enmeshed. But despite the travelling both our jobs require, we stay very much in touch. Yesterday afternoon, sitting in New York, I phoned Billy in Manchester. ‘I had the concert of my life tonight,’ he crowed. ‘What exactly made it so?’ I asked. ‘Oh, I just walked on, strode downstage, faced them, and just went for it.’ No one can analyse what Billy does, least of all him. Turned out the crowd at the Manchester Apollo had been treated to a favourite story of mine, about the time he went with a couple of mates to visit a friend in Glasgow. This no-frills bachelor cooked them breakfast, but there were no plates or eating utensils so he proffered food on a spatula. When one of them reacted uncomfortably to being expected to take a hot, dripping egg in his bare hand, he rebuked him with ‘Oh, don’t be so fucking bourgeois!’ Well, that’s the bare bones of the story, but Billy tells it in his idiosyncratic picturepainting style that brings the house down. ‘They loved it,’ he glowed. ‘Of course they did,’ I replied admiringly. ‘And how many times in your life have you felt you’d had the concert of your life?’ ‘About a dozen times,’ he replied. ‘Where?’ I asked, knowing full well I’d never get an exact answer. ‘Don’t know. It’s very difficult to tell. Tonight I was just in great shape with a great audience. Changing my mind. I suddenly thought to tell them about when you’re vomiting having had a curry, you find you’re an expert in African folk music. Then I did a thing about a drunk guy singing. He’s been thrown out of the pub and he’s standing on the street practising ordering drinks. But he gets fed up so he sings a song. Then I sang a new country song I wrote called “I’d Love to Kick the Shit Out of You”.’ See, it doesn’t sound funny when you put it like that, does it? Even Billy himself finds that a problem. He never writes down ‘material’ like most other comedians, but just before a show he tries to think of a list of things he might talk about. This only makes him more scared. ‘I think, “Fuck, I’ve got nothing!”’ he says.

Billy continues to be as nervous and anxious about going on stage as he was when I first met him. But, as he counselled me years ago when I was doing something similar, ‘You need your nerves.’ Once he gets on stage it’s a different story. He is still at his happiest under the spotlight. I still marvel every time I see him perform, watching the delicacy and ease with which he struts the stage. It’s truly magnificent. He would hit you if you used the word ‘technique’ to describe his comedy style, but the fact is he has one, and it’s genius.

Billy’s approach has altered little over the years, but there are some minor differences. Nowadays, he feels rather less tolerant of hecklers than he was when he first started. I believe this reflects the fact that he has matured as a performer to the point where he understands how annoying interruptions of any kind can be for other audience members – especially when they emanate from someone whose had a few too many. I remember when people used to stroll in and out of his show, to buy drinks or take a toilet break any time they felt like it, and it was enormously distracting for both Billy and audience alike. Fortunately, Billy has seen fit to slightly shorten the length of time he stands on stage – it used to be a marathon three and a half hours, so I suppose people needed to move around a bit. But even today, occasionally someone will start to shout incoherently. ‘Pick a window,’ Billy would say. ‘You’re leaving.’ Other deterrents included: ‘Keep talking so the bouncer can find you!’ or even ‘Does your mouth bleed every twenty-eight days?’ But backstage, Billy’s attitude is usually surprisingly benign. ‘Och,’ he shrugs. ‘They’ve heard CDs of my old shows. They think I like it.’

Over the years Billy’s performing style has become refined to the point where you think he’s simply talking to you in your living room, over a cup of tea, and making you howl. It’s effortless, seamless. He paints magical mind-pictures that force every last bit of air from your lungs leaving you gasping and sore of stomach. No one else in the world can do that. I’ve been watching him for thirty-odd years and I’m still a fan.

Billy says the best thing about being nearly seventy is not thinking about it. ‘But there’s something good about it when you’re upright,’ he confessed, ‘and when you look like me rather than one of those guys who’ve gone for the saggyarsed trousers.’ An anti-beige campaigner for many years now, Billy is proud of not looking like his father’s idea of an old man. ‘It’s nice to have hair,’ he boasts. ‘I’ve been very lucky with my genetics.’ One of Billy’s life ambitions was never to act his age. ‘Acting your age is as sensible as acting your street number,’ he says. ‘Acting the goat is much better.’

‘And another thing,’ says Billy, on a roll about the ageing process, ‘I seem to have gone off Indian a bit. Curry’s still my favourite food but I can’t eat it at night after a gig now.’ But he still keeps the toilet paper in the fridge just in case. Billy is also off Liquorice Allsorts. ‘I can’t stop until I’ve eaten the whole packet, so now I don’t start.’ He’s like that with Cadbury’s Chocolate éclairs and Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers, too, while understandably, broccoli remains the bête noir of his gastronomic realities. Oh, and he has never made friends with wobbly food. ‘Anything gelatinous is not to be trusted,’ he insists, ‘like aspic in pork pies. It’s a close cousin of snot. You shouldn’t be eating things you find in the wee corners of your body.’

For Billy, the worst thing about turning seventy is its transparency. ‘People feel duty-bound to remind you about it because your birthday is in the paper,’ he complains. ‘And my eyebrows seem to have taken on a life of their own.’ It’s true. Recently, Billy told me his spectacles were out of focus and that he thought he needed a new prescription for his lenses. Being a bit of a fashion maven, he has an impressive wardrobe of eyewear and he was exasperated at the thought of having to change all those glasses. Now, I’m no optometrist, but I did have the answer for this one. ‘Trim your eyebrows,’ I said. They were so unruly they were pushing his spectacles askew, thus blurring his vision.

Billy has come to love crossword puzzles. ‘What do you get from them?’ I asked. ‘The fact that I’m not dead yet,’ he replied. ‘It’s proof that my brain’s still alive. When I get a clue I go, “Yes! I don’t have dementia!”’ Word games were not so appealing to him in his earlier years; he had more sanguine passions. ‘What was your favourite decade?’ I asked. ‘When I was a teenager they invented rock ’n’ roll, so the Fifties were very good. The music was unbelievable – Little Richard, Fats Domino, Lonnie Donegan, Jerry Lee Lewis. We knew something had happened, and it wasn’t for your parents. It was for you. So I was listening to all this brilliant stuff and fancying women – wonderful.’ ‘What was the most fun you ever had?’ I asked, in vain hoping for some warm and fuzzy anecdote about the children and I. ‘Scoring a goal for a team called St Benedict’s Boys’ Guild,’ he replied, unabashed. ‘It was the only goal I ever scored playing for a team. I was an outside right, against a team called Sacred Heart. It was a real fluke – I shot at the goal and would have missed but the ball hit one of the players, bounced off him and went into the net. But I got it; I don’t give a shit how.’

Our conversation turned to religion. In the Epilogue of this book, Billy expounds his theory of the universe, and I was wondering if he had revised it at all. ‘Does the teacup theory still hold up?’ I asked. ‘Yes, more so than ever as a matter of fact,’ he said. ‘I really think I’m on to something. After I’m dead they’ll discover I was a seer. It’s perfection. See, the earth’s a virus or a disease, a wee cell in the scheme of all the greatness that surrounds it. That’s why I don’t believe any other planets are inhabited.’ The theory seemed to have become so complex, only Billy’s very special brain could comprehend it. I decided not to ask him to expand. Better just suspend disbelief and move on. ‘What do you think heaven’s like?’ I asked. Billy smiled happily. ‘In my idea of heaven there would be great music playing all the time,’ he said, ‘and Sandra Bullock would be wandering around, showing great interest in me. And that wee newsreader who used to be on breakfast TV in New York – the one whose husband died – she’ll be there.’

‘But, say you go to hell,’ I said sweetly, with only a soupçon of passive-aggression, ‘what would that be like?’ ‘Hmmm,’ he frowned. ‘A lot of my school teachers are there, and you have to do the nine times table every day.’ ‘And what would you do if you discovered the end of the world was in three days’ time?’ I asked. ‘Oh.’ Billy actually looked mildly excited about that possibility. ‘I would put on my favourite records – Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, John Prine, The Rolling Stones, and Loudon Wainwright – and have cups of tea and just … wait for the end. Now, if you were any kind of wife you’d realize that I’m horny and get your arse over here …’ Interview over.

Although Billy has long since turned his back on organized religion, he recently had the most profound spiritual experience of his life in a ‘sweat lodge’ when he was filming in northern British Columbia among the Nisga’a tribe. ‘The lodge is igloo-shaped,’ explained Billy. ‘It’s many layers of leather and canvas, and there’s a hole inside where the fire goes. The fuel for the fire is lava rock, which you have to gather yourself along with the medicine man. They make a big fire outside the hut, then carry in the rocks when they’re red-hot and place them in a pit. The medicine man sprinkles water on them to make the steam. First, you smoke a pipe of some herbs and waft sage over yourself. Then you have to crawl inside the small door to the lodge on your hands and knees. The idea of this wee door is that when you leave you’re like a baby reborn. The sweat lodge is your mother. Then we all sat in a circle around the fire pit. You can’t see a single thing. There’s a faint glow in the pit of lava, but you can’t see the others. You can only hear them, like spirits. It’s a bit like confession. The medicine man plays the drum, sings, and chants, and one at a time people unload things that are bothering them, or things they think they’d be better off without. I joined in. I was talking about being ungrateful. I felt that amazing good fortune had come my way over a period of many years, but that I took it for granted. I was not suitably grateful. The whole thing took around three hours. I didn’t think I could stand it after the first fifteen minutes, the heat was so intense, but I managed to regulate my breathing, and got to like it. It was a truly deep emotional experience. Afterwards, I found that I cried more easily than before. Tears would easily run down my face and I felt closer to myself. I recognized myself. They made me a member of the tribe. My name is something that sounds like “hissacks”, with a bit before that that sounds like alphabet soup. It means “Prince of Comedy”. And I’m a member of the killer whales. In the tribe there are wolves, salmon, killer whales, and bears. I’m a killer whale, an orca.’

For the first edition of Billy I asked my husband for his bucket list of things he wants to do before he dies. It was a terrible mistake to ask him for an update this year, because unfortunately he’s now got it into his head that he’d like to do a free-fall parachute jump out of an airplane on his seventieth birthday. But I’m afraid that would probably make his Route Sixty-Six mishap a walk in the park, so I’m hoping to dissuade him. He is also threatening to reinstall his nipple rings, which were removed for a shirtless scene during the filming of Mrs Brown and never replaced. ‘I kinda miss them,’ he says, ‘and I’m tempted to put them back in. But then I might have to wheek them out again …’

In fact, nipple rings would have been perfectly appropriate for some of Billy’s movie roles, especially the ‘hard man’ characters. He does love playing violent scoundrels, and particularly enjoyed being the gun-toting Irish crime family patriarch in The Boondock Saints and its follow-up, The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day. He gave each one of our children the T-shirt of him with his bushy white beard, in his trench coat, cap, and shades, smiling wickedly with a smoking nine-millimetre Glock in each hand. The caption reads, ‘Daddy’s Working!’ Sick bastard.

Aside from playing savage Antichrists (to the point where really weird people approach him in American shopping malls to offer him silver bullets and Doomsday packs), Billy’s life ambitions, as revealed in the Epilogue, are largely unfulfilled. For example, he says he ‘might be a bit pissed’ that he has not yet made it to Eric Clapton’s fridge door (see page 411). But Billy’s main fantasy-ambition in life was to be a tramp. ‘I still look with great fondness on the idea of becoming a kind of colourful, American, country and western kind of hobo,’ he explains. ‘Most of my musical heroes were like that: Derroll Adams, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Alex Campbell, and Utah Phillips – he’s the one who said America is a big melting pot, but like all melting pots, the scum tends to rise to the top.’

Billy is still desperately hoping to wake up one morning and discover he’s Keith Richards. When The Rolling Stones played Glasgow as part of their most recent world tour, Billy and I drove down from the Highlands to see them. Before the concert, we were ushered to a backstage room where most of the band was engaged in a lazy game of billiards. Billy and I chatted to Keith for a while, and I embarrassed myself by being the only person on the planet who had not known the man had fallen out of a palm tree on some exotic tropical island. ‘What, you fell out of a tree?’ I echoed, when Keith referred to it. ‘Well,’ he muttered sheepishly, ‘it was more of a … shrub.’ At this point Billy was giving me his Evil Eye, which is the no-contact version of a Glaswegian kiss. ‘Well, anyway,’ said Keith, ‘I better say goodbye. Gotta go to makeup.’ Billy and I looked at each other. ‘What the hell are they going to do to him?’ I wondered aloud on our way to our seats. ‘Lip gloss?’ ‘Dunno,’ said Billy. ‘Forty years of heroin use can’t be powdered over … Does something irreversible to your skin. But he looks brilliant, doesn’t he?’ Billy glowed like a seminary novice who’d just seen the Pope. He had taken care to wear his skull ring just like Keith’s and, the second they met, they clicked rings together. ‘He was the first to wear those rings,’ said Billy, ‘well before they were trendy. And he liked my python cowboy boots! When he said that, my heart danced a wee jig!’ Seriously?

Regarding Billy’s fifth life’s ambition, to learn to sail, his manager Steve Brown presented him with a lovely boat called Big Jessie. Billy has had a few lessons but has yet to tame her. And as I discovered when I tried to engage Billy in my personal dream of spending the rest of our days aboard the sailboat Takapuna (on which I had many adventures from 2002–07, some of them shared by my husband), Billy is really not too fond of boats. ‘They’re like prison,’ he complains, ‘with the possibility of drowning.’ He recently learned to scuba dive, but considers being under the water with sharks (a favourite pastime of mine) ‘the best laxative known to man’.

The final item on Billy’s list is a strange one, because I believe he fulfilled that ambition from the moment he walked out of the shipyards: to change his mind as often as he damn well pleases. Perhaps Billy is unaware how self-determining he really is, although his family and work-mates certainly know. There’s hardly a person on this planet who would dare try to stop him doing something he’d set his mind to. Perhaps this was really a way to articulate his essential single-mindedness in a user-friendly fashion, a kind of Glaswegian gauntlet-throwing couched as a plea from a helpless dreamer.

I suppose it’s natural that, at this point in his life, Billy might reflect more and more on his time on earth. ‘What do you think your life would have been like if you hadn’t become a comedian?’ I once asked. ‘I think I would have been a welder,’ he replied. Then, as an after-thought, he said: ‘But I would have been a drunk one. And I would have been unhappy, because I always nurtured a wee dream I’d promised to myself.’ It is remarkable that Billy had a secret belief, even in his darkest days, that he would eventually find a way out and become successful. I suppose idiodynamism, the tendency of an idea to materialize into action, is what actually kept him going.

Although Billy sometimes complains about being on the road too much, I can’t see him retiring. He once foresaw his final years as those in which he would ‘sit on a porch playing the banjo and telling lies to his grandchildren’, but he is not really the type to settle into his rocker. He adores both his grandchildren (Cara’s son Walter has been joined by Babs since Billy was written) but, rather than lying, prefers to tell them truths – including ones their mother would rather they didn’t hear just yet. His five thriving children – Daisy, Amy, Scarlett, and (my stepchildren) James and Cara – are all old enough to laugh at their parents and remind them how ridiculous they are.

Since Billy was written, quite a few beloved pals have gone forever. The biggest loss for Billy was his long-term close friend Danny, whom he had known since their folk-singing days. ‘He was my best friend and I miss him,’ says Billy. ‘But he’s still in my show. I try to make a point of talking to the audience about travelling on the train with him, and playing practical jokes – like the time we started singing “Green Door” to a guy who was sleeping. We sang, “One more night without sleepin’ …” Danny was pretending to play the drums. “What’s that secret you’re keepin’ …” And when we got to “There’s an old piano, and they play it hot, behind the green door …” we screeched it at the top of our lungs, so the sleeping guy wakes up suddenly and takes off like a rocket, then collapses in a heap. “What’s going on?” he cried. We got uppity. “You gave us the fright of our lives! We were just about to summon a constable!”’

Several of Billy’s chums from his welding days are gone, too, including his pals Mick Quinn and Hughie Gilchrist. Billy’s long-term sound engineer Mal Kingsnorth died a few years back, and Billy sorely misses him. ‘I still wait for him to come to my dressing room after a show and give me a report.’ Billy’s Uncle Neil died in Scotland after a struggle with prostate cancer, while Billy’s former babysitter, Mattie Murphy, passed away a year or two ago in London, Ontario. Mattie had turned up to see Billy in concert in London several times over the years. He had always been so happy to see her sitting in the front row with her pal, all dressed up, smiling, and eager to see him.

Billy’s ex-wife Iris died in Spain in 2010. Their children Cara and Jamie had been sporadically in touch with their mother over the years. Billy had felt great compassion for her struggle with alcoholism and, although he had not seen her for many years, he was greatly shocked and saddened by her passing. ‘It didn’t really strike me till this summer when I put her ashes in the River Don and little Walter saw me crying,’ he told me. ‘Iris’s father had given her a wee book about Russia called And Quiet Flows the Don so I thought it might be nice to actually fl oat her there.’ Personally, I had not understood that Iris had suffered from a serious ‘hoarding’ disorder (we all learned this after her death), and felt very sorry that she had struggled so much without receiving the kind of psychological treatment that might have greatly helped her.

Billy’s former stage mate, the singer and songwriter Gerry Rafferty, passed away in 2011, after a long struggle with illness and alcoholism. Having been more or less alienated from each other for years, Billy was in touch with him throughout his final few months. He tried to help him in a number of ways, and felt enormously sad and helpless when Gerry’s decline proved inevitable. Those two were unstoppable in their day, a couple of highly talented pranksters with matching ambitions to make it as solo artists. According to Billy, they had enormous fun travelling around the country, womanizing, playing practical tricks on each other and navigating the unfamiliar landscape of show business.