John Dowie: Before Comedy Captured the Edinburgh Fringe

In 1972 there were two comedians at the Edinburgh Fringe. One you will have heard of, while the other is as important to comedy as anyone else in the UK – but you may not know his name.

The comedian you know is Billy Connolly. In '72, the Big Yin performed in a production at 41 Waverley Market. The audience was arranged on wooden benches, facing each other like at the Tattoo, to see what The Scotsman called "a pantomime of songs and sketches around the loose theme of the bankrupt Wellington Boot Factory". The Great Northern Welly Boot Show was the hit of the 1972 Fringe; a "rollicking satire" which appealed to "the populace" and captured a "carnival spirit", according to The Scotsman's unusually jubilant reviewer.

Meanwhile, less than half a mile away, across the rail tracks at 142 High Street, John Dowie had sublet a venue inauspiciously called The Un-Named Theatre. And though Dowie doesn't appear in the Fringe programme, he is listed in The Scotsman with a curious description. It reads: 'Mr John Dowie presents which he describes as "knockabout comedy of a low and vulgar nature."'

Dowie was at the Fringe eight years before pioneers Alexei Sayle and Tony Allen, which eventually led to comedians establishing stand-up as the dominant art form in August. But Dowie didn't feel he was doing anything remarkable. "My contemporaries at the time were theatre groups and there were quite a lot of them. And most of them would do a straight play and then a cabaret show in a bar. I was hanging around with those types of people... Every town had a theatre group who would do plays and comedy shows. I just considered myself to be doing a solo version of what they were doing."

It could be argued Edinburgh came to Dowie before Dowie came to Edinburgh. Those groups in every town wouldn't have existed had they not been inspired by the Edinburgh Fringe. Or more precisely: the founding of Traverse Theatre. The Traverse's beginnings take place in discussions and performances in Jim Haynes' paperback bookshop in 1960 before a year-round venue was found two years later. It was launched as a club and was able to circumvent theatre censorship, and it heralded numerous Arts Labs around the country. The one in Birmingham was a notable success and attracted Dowie.

He continued coming to Edinburgh as a solitary figure on the comedic landscape. The next year you could catch him at midnight for 35p at Nicholson Square Theatre. His show's tagline from the 1973 Fringe Programme is apt for a comedian that's hard to pin down over the following decades due to his varied interests: 'A Midnight of Madness – impossible to describe successfully on paper.'

Dowie was one of the original artists for Factory Records, writing the tracks Acne, Idiot and Hitler's Liver for the label's first release A Factory Sample. In 1984, he played the Swedish playwright Strindberg in a play at The Assembly Rooms as the leading man opposite Nica Burns, although that was not a happy experience. "God almighty that was a nightmare!" he says. "The people that staged it – one was Colin Watkeys who subsequently married my sister – used to run the cabaret at a place in London called the Finborough. I thought it was going to be funny. I went along and read for them and made it as funny as I could. But when it came to the actual thing it wasn't funny at all!"

Dowie's desire to inject something of Spike Milligan into Strindberg led to tense performances with Burns, whose side of the story is recounted in John Connor's Fringe history Comics. Walking off stage mid-performance, blaming Burns for the way she read the lines, Dowie immediately apologised and took her out to buy a birthday present. Burns added that it made her cautious of working with stand-ups, but as she is still chair of the Edinburgh Comedy Awards over three decades later the feeling doesn't seem to have lasted.

While directing solo comedy shows seems a very recent trend, Dowie is again easily missed for doing so years before anyone else. He directed Roy Hutchins' acclaimed Whale Nation and Pete McCarthy's The Hangover Show, both of which were nominated for the Perrier Award. "I went to see Whale Nation when it was first being performed and it was all over the place. Afterwards, as I always do, I gave the actor a bollocking and he said, 'Well, why don't you direct then?' And because I've done so much stand-up, directing a solo show wasn't difficult for me because it's the discipline of stand-up. You have to stand in front of the audience and tell a story. And all the actors in the world, and I include myself in this, always want some kind of safety net – but there isn't one."

Yet, by the end of the 1990s, Dowie seemed to have grown disenchanted with Edinburgh. Indeed, the title of his 1990 show was Why I Stopped Being a Stand-up Comedian. And any reader of Connor's history, where 'everyone has a John Dowie story' but he's the one comedian who didn't want to talk, would assume he desired little to do with the Fringe. "I don't know if I absolutely hated it," he disagrees. "What I used to find tedious was that there were so many people taking themselves so seriously. For god's sake, this is not life-saving stuff: this is just walking on stage and doing a bit of showing off. Let's try and treat it with the contempt it deserves. Everywhere you went all you could see were bars full of people talking about themselves, and their acts, and other people's acts, and how much better they were than them. But the actual experience of performing I always enjoyed."

For anyone wanting to know about comedy history, Dowie's memoir The Freewheeling John Dowie isn't quite the book you'd expect. A comedy fan picks it up thinking it'll provide all the evidence for the missing link, but instead finds themselves riding alongside Dowie as he sells his possessions and goes off cycling and camping around Europe. On the other hand, the comedic memories are woven through the book and it's a striking portrait of a man who likes to go off and do his own thing. In that sense, the memoir explains a great deal about Dowie. Rather than boasting about his place in comedy history he prefers to write about applying liniment to his legs and buying an electric bicycle. The comedic voice is there on each page. It's an effortlessly funny and engaging read.

His comedic instincts will be hard to shake when he reads from it at Fringe by the Sea. "The hard thing for me," says Dowie, "is when I'm reading from the book, I have to remind myself I'm not doing stand-up comedy. It's very hard to suppress it because when you're doing something like reading you can get a little nervous and your instinct when you're nervous is to say something funny."

He also offers an alternative explanation for him distancing himself from stand-up: he wrote a children's show, Dogman. In his sleevenotes to Dowie's CD An Arc of Hives, Stewart Lee describes Dogman as "the story of an alien Dog who ends up running a lighthouse that appears, the more I read it to my own children, to be a kind of autobiography."

"It's my best work," says Dowie. "I enjoyed it more than anything. It's one of the reasons why I stopped performing because once you've done a kid's show nothing compares to it. One of the nicest things that happened was when one of the technicians at the Pleasance said that after Dogman, during the turnaround, when usually everyone is fed up and knackered, they were always bursting full of energy and happiness."