Noel Fielding: The Mighty Brush

If on 15 October you happen to glimpse a pointy-shoed painting imp, trapped behind the window of Urban Outfitters, don’t worry, you’re not hallucinating.  It is Noel Fielding.

“No-one does live painting any more – loads of people used to do it when we were kids, Tony Hart, Rolf Harris, all that.  It’s a cool thing to see,” he says.

Fielding is punting a book of his paintings, The Scribblings of a Madcap Shambleton.  And it’s not his first foray into commercial art. 

“I used to sell drawings at school – take orders for pictures of characters from Star Wars, and charge 10p for them.  Sometimes 5p.  And I’d do jackets too.  People would give me their black jackets for me to paint on.  And then their parents would come round and give my parents a bollocking for letting me ruin their kid’s clothes.”

Due to shonky phone reception, Fielding’s kindly standing outside BBC studios where he’s about to film an episode of Buzzcocks (“sometimes I haven’t a clue who’s going to be on”).  All day he’s been editing his new one-man show, Noel Fielding’s Comedy Deluxe, due to air in January.  Which begs the question, when exactly does he draw?

“All the time, like a compulsive mental patient.  I actually gave it up for about seven years after I left art school, but now I’ve started again and I’m getting regular exhibitions, and I have to do stuff for them – I like being forced to work, having something to aim for.  And it calms me down.  If I go out and party, I know I can’t cane it too much because I’ve got to paint.

“And it gives me ideas for the telly.  I have my own studio, and we also film part of the TV show there.  I draw characters for stand-up, costumes for the Boosh – I tend to draw before I write, then I write and that becomes the comedy, it’s all the same thing, really. I like to think my art’s funny, and my comedy’s arty.”

And you can see where he’s coming from.  The book’s bright and cheery, lots of thick primary colours, naive and imaginative.  Vince Noir in acrylics, via Elvis, Columbo and a whole load of Bryan Ferry.

“I’m into picking a character and inventing a weird fantasy world for them, completely fantastical – picking someone people know and making fables.  Bryan Ferry’s very charming.  I went through an obsessive serial-killer style phase of drawing thousands of pictures of him, like some sort of stalker.  I nearly did a whole Bryan Ferry exhibition.  But I didn’t.  And I wouldn’t go fox hunting with him either.  I like foxes.”

I ask if his house is festooned with his own paintings.  “No!” he says, “I’d hate that” (although the pics in his book suggest he might be fibbing).  “I’ve got pictures by lots of other people up, just things I like.  Actually, I’ve got one by Captain Beefheart.  That’s pride of place.  And a sculpture of two baboons in my hallway, Lord and Lady Muck.  They’re beautiful.”

“You know, eventually I’d like to have my own gallery,” he says, laughing at the thought.  “When I get too old for comedy.  Retire and turn into Lovejoy, rattle around buying and selling art.”