Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Feature [published May 2001]
Bill Hicks: Bad Mood Rising
Even though he’s been dead for seven years, the savage political satire of
Bill Hicks makes more sense than ever. Chris Hall spreads the word
If you mention to any intelligent individual under the
age of 25 that you saw Nirvana and The Pixies live
you’ll get a response along the lines of “you lucky
bastard”. However, if you say that you saw Bill Hicks
live, the reaction is qualitatively different. There is a
crestfallen look. For those fans who have come to worship
him from his albums and videos, it only reinforces
the knowledge that they will never see this late and
very great comedian for as long as they live. He died in
February 1994 from pancreatic cancer at the pitifully
young age of 32.
I only saw Hicks play the once but the memory of
that evening is as seared into the cerebral cortex as so
much steak on a griddle. I still have the fading ticket:
“Bill Hicks. Brighton Festival. Sun 10 May 1992. 8pm.
Comp”. Complimentary because this was also my first
review for the university magazine I wrote for. The expectancy
of that evening was immense. There had been
a Channel 4 programme on him and we had picked up
snippets from time to time from the NME and Montreal
Comedy Festival clips. Here was someone taking an
interest in the outside world again, not ploughing a fur-
BUY Bill Hicks books online from and
row of flim-flam – Is It Me Or Is Airline Food Really
Bad? For my friends and me, just on the evidence of
that evening, Hicks was the greatest comedian there
ever had been, or ever would be.
For some, humourless PC types, his ‘goat-boy’
persona threw them off track. It was the side of Hicks
that mined personal, rather than political, obsessions
(of course, not necessarily his own obsessions). It was
difficult for some to square the Marxist, sub-Chomsky
perspectives with a man who would talk about renting
Clam Lappers and Anal Entry volume 500 from his
local video store. Live, Hicks was more extreme in all
directions. The time I saw him, people in the front row
must have been deafened by his screams of admonition
to boy pop bands of the day to “Play with your fucking
heart!” (How perceptive I was in noting in my review,
with what I obviously thought of as devastating understatement,
that Hicks was “more Lenny Bruce than
Lenny Bennett”). He also had a peculiar air of physical
omniscience over the spatio-temporal coordinates of
the room, where he cadged a Silk Cut from someone at
the front of the audience and dropped it only to catch it
266
More
Spike
email
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z