Hicks

So I was going to interview Bill Hicks at Radio Forth. He was appearing in a tent on the Meadows as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, in a circus tent. Regular Music were taking a chance on the new enfant terrible of American stand up comedy. Because William Melvin Hicks was ferociously anti anti-smoking folks were confusing him with the better publicised “No Cure For Cancer” comedian Dennis Leary. The two having had a war of words not dissimilar to the early Eighties contretemps between Jerry Sadowitz and the Bing Hitler character devised by Craig Ferguson.
In fact Hicks was entirely magnanimous with regard to Leary. I watched the latter perform his impressive routine while UK producer Lisa Meyer (co writer of the Young Ones and then beau of Rik Mayall) ran a stop watch on his performance. Afterwards we adjourned to the Beau Brummel boozer on Edinburgh’s Hanover Street, where Dennis proved to be one of the most genuine and affable performers you could encounter on the Edinburgh Fringe. “I have kids, and just want to secure them a decent future” he said over a couple of beers.
Hicks was incredible. I had concocted a transparent Desert Island Discs rip off called Getting Personal, where guests would select their favourite tunes to play during an hour (commercial or course) or conversation.
He agreed to participate, and insisted that all his selections were by either The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, because, he said, everything else was shit. Including presumably his own band The Marbleheaded Johnsons. It was of course provocative.
Bill was captivating. Others participating in the pre-recordings often wanted the music to be cut in after the recording to save time. Not him. He leapt around the studio during every tune, playing air guitar as if his life depended on it. He was the courteous Texan gentlemen throughout, while expressing some of the most trenchant views to leave the lips of any stand up of his generation. He also refused to be drawn into any discussion or debate regarding Dennis’s act, other than arching his impressive eyebrows and smiling sweetly.
Up to that point all I had heard was a cassette of his live performance ‘Relentless’, and been captivated. Seeing him perform in that tent on the Meadows, incorporating the lurid carving on the poles that supported it into his act was unforgettable.
He launched into his splay thighed porno routine and the collective expulsion of breath from the audience could have launched the world’s first Jumbo glider.
They were seasoned ‘alternative’ comedy observers but nothing prepared them for such an uncompromising onslaught.
Two years later I was on a train from Edinburgh to London and read that Bill was dead. He had quit smoking but cancer sought him out through the pancreas.
That was 15 years ago yesterday. Few have been so missed and horribly misunderstood.