None of the North West towns make you work at all says comedian Jason Byrne ahead of new tour

The Irish comedy legend, Jason Byrne, is gearing up to start his next major UK tour at the end of the month.

His new show ‘Head in the Clouds’ is coming to the North West three times across the tour: first the Southport Comedy Festival on October 18, followed by Salford Quay Theatre on October 27 and finally the last stop of the tour is the Liverpool Hot Water Comedy Club on November 30.

When we caught up with Jason, he was just coming to the end of a month at the Edinburgh Fringe festival so we were grateful he could take a break from the madness to chat to us!

Take a look at what Jason had to say about his show and the North West below..

How are you Jason?

“I don't know how to answer that. I'm just in the fourth week of the festival in Edinburgh, I’ve done 21 shows, and so I've just come out of Pilates and swimming to try and keep my head straight. But it's okay. This show, when it's in Edinburgh, it's like you come here with -because it's a lot of people's new show you see for the year- you come to Edinburgh and it's all full of splinters and dents and bumps, and then by the time it comes out, it's all polished and shaved and nice and carved and ready to go. You gig every night. It's insane so that's why it's good to go on tour, because I get three days or four days off a week. So that's grand. Back to normal instead of this, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.”

How are you feeling about sending your new show off on a national tour when it is all polished?

“This is so difficult because every single venue, every single town, is a different show every time I do it. Every year. So what happens is, I don't bring a support act. Instead, for the first 25/30 minutes of the show, I'll talk to the audience a lot, find out what's going on, mix in a couple of bits of stand up, and in the second half of the show, then ii’s all kind of pre written, they still join in with stuff, but that's why I can't really say, it's like walking a tightrope.

“So my show, I have loads of stuff ready. I may not get to it or I might get to it right. And it just floats. I called it Jason Byrne ‘Head in the Clouds’ because I was sitting thinking about it and it's just how my brain works. Do you know what I mean? When I was in school in - well, I finished in 1989- my God, our teachers were rubbish, like awful teachers. So they used to say stuff to you, you know, ‘you always have your head in the clouds, you’re always daydreaming’ but that's because I was creating stuff in my head! I was that type of child. I wasn't good at maths and good at geography and stuff, I was good at just creating stuff, like art and doing things. So now schools are amazing at that, they help now. A great guy called Sir Ken Robinson said that we get our imagination educated out of us in school - that's bad, right? So I say to my room ‘we're all gonna lock ourselves in here for an hour, and we're just gonna lose the head, right, in a good way. We're gonna forget about all the - just for the hour - all the conflicts, relationships, stuff that's going on. You can even change your name if I ask you, or you can make up your job if I ask you.’

“So I ask a guy - he was in a suit and Irish people don't like people sitting in suits or coats, it makes us feel hot when we're looking at them. I was going ‘are you hot’, he goes, ‘No, I'm okay’. I said ‘Are you in finance?’ and he went ‘No, I'm a pilot.’ And the crowd, all - you know because the Scottish crowd, they don't believe anything, they're pretty street wise- they were going, ‘No, he isn't!’ I went "Are you?’ And he goes ‘No, I'm not a pilot’. I said to him ‘Do you want to be a pilot in this show?’ And he goes ‘Yeah, can I be a pilot for the hour?’ And then I spoke to his partner, and I said ‘What do you do?’ She went ‘I'm a pilot as well’.

“So it’s just been great fun and the crowd, when people get up, oh my god, they've been just absolutely amazing. We had a guy called Mo from Delaware, America, and I kept asking where he was from, but he kept making the shape of Delaware, not the D, the state. ‘I'm from Delaware’ and making this movement with his fingers. So Mo got on stage, and he was maybe late 50s, it was hard to tell, maybe early 60s, but he was able to hip hop. So that was it, he started to hip hop! And another night, I had a guy in a long Mac who was able to do Frank Spencer impersonations, a lot of young people don't even know who that is. I had another guy, I asked him to do animal noises, and he basically started singing ‘The Bare Necessities’ from Jungle Book instead of doing animal noises. So look, all I'm trying to say is we have no idea what's really going to happen in this show. We throw it out there, and then the audience, you know, they'll join in, good or bad.”

So people should expect to be picked on in your shows?

“No, that's a dreadful word. I do not pick on anybody in my show, so I make sure they're okay and they're okay with it. I don't tease them. I don't say horrible things to them. Everything is kept on the nice side of the fence, and that's why they get up on stage and do stuff with me, because they'll go ‘oh, he's not being mean’. The crowd are more mean than I am! I go, ‘No, don't do that, don't say that’, I'm like their teacher, you know? Also I know the body language, I'll never talk to anybody who doesn't want to be spoken to. Here in Edinburgh. I've been recognizing people in the front row and I go ‘were you here last year?’ ‘Yeah’, I said, and ‘were you on stage?’ He goes ‘Yeah’, I said ‘and you're sitting in the front again?’ He goes ‘Yeah, it's okay. I don't mind’. So yeah, there's no picking on ever. It's just fun. I make sure everybody's safe, it's the safest audience participation you'll ever, ever come across. We have clouds in the show for god's sake, that people are putting their heads on. I've got an anxiety blanket that I use as well. It's just insane, the whole thing.“

And you're coming to the North West three times with it, Southport, Salford and Liverpool. How are you feeling about your trips to those places?

“No stress at all. None of those towns make you work at all. The Southport Comedy Festival when I was there last year… a woman came up to me on a Zimmer frame, an old woman, while I was on stage, and was offering me a chocolate bar, because apparently, the year before, I said, I needed sugar or something. And nobody stopped her,this woman just starting crawling- they all thought she was part of the show. So Southport is stunning. The only thing I tease them about is that the tide is never in. We've never seen the sea in Southport. It's like 500 miles away from the edge. And I said ‘Has anybody here ever seen the tide in?’ and I think one person put their hand up.

“Liverpool-they're great. You know what, there's no problem in Liverpool because they're already kind of Irish. And I actually had -oh my god, the Liverpool story is amazing! I only did this for the Liverpool show, this particular fact. So Hitler's brother, Alois Hitler, he lived in Ireland, and he went there, to Ireland before World War Two started I think it was, and then Hitler was rising up as he was there, and he wouldn't have anything to do with him, but he was a porter in the Shelburne hotel in Dublin, right? This gets insane. He then met an Irish woman, and he lied to her and said that he owned hotels. She thought this was great, but then soon found out that he was lying. But it didn't really matter. They stayed together anyway. They then had a baby called Willie Hitler. You can look all this up. This is absolutely true. William Hitler, he was called Willie Hitler, and they moved to Liverpool, the three of them. This is why I did the story in Liverpool. And so he was called Willie Hitler. You can watch footage of him on YouTube, and he goes ‘I have nothing to do with my uncle at all’.

“So I do that show, tell them, it's pretty funny, you know, whatever, mad fact and I didn't know, but there was a historian in the audience in Liverpool, and he Instagramed after, he said ‘sorry, Jason, I didn't want to say I was a historian, I’d sound like an arse and all but you won't believe this’. He says ‘the venue that you're in, Willie Hitler lived 100 meters from the venue you were in’. I couldn't believe it, like it was an amazing fact. So this is it, I'm always amazed at what I bring out of people”.

And what are your thoughts on Salford?

“They're just as good fun. I remember -this just flew into my head now- doing a gig there, and I had a kind of like dance routine, or some sort of funny little simple step thing, and I kept asking this guy to get up. He was going ‘no’ and I was going- he seemed all right- ‘ come on, come on’. He goes ‘I've only got one leg!’ So he had a prosthetic limb, but he got up anyway, and started to twist and turn it while he was on stage, like, absolutely freaking us all out.

“And the last time, Ed Byrne came to see me. You know, Ed Byrne, the comedian. Ed Byrne came to see me. He was in the audience, and a woman stopped me while I was talking and said ‘Sorry, Jason, can I just ask you something?’ I go ‘what? and she goes ‘Is Ed Byrne your brother?’ Like unbelievable. So we certainly settled that. I went ‘what are you talking about? Do you know that Byrnes are basically as popular as Murphy's or O'Donnell's? There's millions of us in Ireland’. I said ‘Ed lives on the opposite side of Dublin to me. He's called Ed Byrne, and I'm called Jason Byrne, but there are millions of Byrnes’. And then ‘Ed’, I said, ‘Are you my brother?’ And he goes, ‘No!’. And I said,that’s that settled then. So, yeah, God knows what's going to happen next at the old Salford, near the Old Trafford- I'll have to go over there. I'll go on in and watch a match, if that's on as well.”

Will you get up to anything whilst in Liverpool or Southport as well?

“I never know what I'm going to do. My tour manager, Luke Malloy, often has surprises for me. I've gone skydiving on tour, but indoor skydiving, when I nearly killed the instructor, I actually planted her into the glass really hard because I didn't do anything that she asked me to do. We are obsessed with National Trust houses. We go to all of them so if there's any near there. What else do I do? Oh yeah, Southport, we just hit the slot machines hard in Southport. We love the bucket of two ps. I love doing that, so we do that as well. And yeah, Manchester: shops and football. And Liverpool, if my mate John Bishop’s around, I'll go to Anfield with him. I will not sit in my hotel room on tour. I will see everything or anything. So if anybody has any advice, we can go and see stuff, because I've been playing golf here, pilates, swimming, cycling, you name it, I'll do it.”

Obviously your Southport performance is part of a festival, will that make it any different to when it's your standalone tours?

“Yeah, it's much easier being in a festival because they've been to different comedy during the week, so they're already kind of geared up. It's not a huge difference, it just has a different feel about it, because Brendon and Val that run the Southport Comedy Festival, they're just so good at it, and it's in a marquee, and it's in a field, and it's just like we're all in it together. Last year, the marquee nearly took off, the breeze was so loud so that was quite funny, we were all enjoying that but it was fine, no problem at all. It's a great festival.”

Regardless of where people are, why should they get tickets to come see your stand up show?

“Because it’s a break from the norm, absolute total. Everybody's always said that. I've had so many compliments here, going ‘oh my god, Jason, I so needed that’ so they get fulfilled in the show. Literally, I've had somebody go ‘ thank you for putting my head in the clouds for an hour’.”

If people haven't come across your comedy before, what can they expect from it?

“Well, you'll be more entertained watching the crowd! It's the same people who come back every year. I have to know their names, what's going on, it's like a roll call. And, yeah, I don't really know. I've explained all that earlier, like, the whole show just takes its own kind of course so it's great to watch it unfold. Look I always say this, but it isn’t, it's never the same show. I've had people here in Edinburgh already come back for the third time to see what's going to happen. It's like insane. No pressure, huh!”

Is there anything else in the pipeline for you to mention after this tour?

“I'm working on animation and a possible podcast that's coming up. I obviously can't say about the podcast, because we haven't nailed it down yet. But I've done loads of different people's podcasts, I'm always the guest, and so me and the other person in my podcast, we both do really well as guests on podcasts all the time, and they sometimes use our appearance for awards. I've won awards for other people's podcasts as a guest. So I went, ‘right, that's it. We're finally going to do our own’, and it's going to be like a YouTube, podcasty studio thing. So I'm really looking forward to that, because I'm always on my own. You know, we all work on our own, but when you work with another comic, or whoever it is, it's just such a relief. It's great to just shut up and let somebody else talk.”