After first coming to Edinburgh to perform at the age of 17 in 1995 and coming back most years since, after performing in pubs and clubs and once, when he couldn’t find a venue, on top of Arthur’s Seat, after officially changing his name to Lionel Richie for a few years just for the laughs, after running up some £45,000 in debt and having to declare himself bankrupt, and after starting again and getting back on his feet, Barry Ferns has finally decided that maybe this year at the Fringe he can talk about himself for once.
It’s not something he does naturally. “Even though I’m on stage a lot I don’t go round with a massive ego thinking, ‘Everyone needs to hear about me,’” Ferns suggests. But of late he has realised that his own story might be worth the telling.
After all, his sense of humour has “dragged him” into situations that he really wouldn’t have chosen for himself, but seemed to make sense at the time.
“And that,” he admits, “leads to quite an interesting life story.”
One he has chosen to tell in Edinburgh this August. My Seven Years as Lionel Richie sees Ferns talk about debt and disaster, silliness and success. (Oh, I forgot to mention the fact that he was once offered a £500,000 TV contract, didn’t I?)
My Seven Years … has already won a nomination for “Best New Show” at the Leicester Comedy Festival. “I think the story really resonates with people,” Ferns suggests. Because ultimately it’s a story of resilience, of getting knocked down and getting up again. It is basically, he points out, a Chumbawamba song in action.
Ferns first performed at the Fringe in the semi-final of the So You Think You’re Funny competition in 1995. By 1999 he was putting on a sketch show, The Leisure Virus, at a pub and played to audiences of two (on a good night), apart from the evening the Scotsman reviewer came in and Ferns called in every favour he could to fill the room. The subsequent good review earned the show a place at the Gilded Balloon the following year.
But the economics of Edinburgh were already apparent to him by then. He ran up a £5000 debt on that first Edinburgh show, worked all year to pay off some of it, then went back and ran up more debt. And he did it again and again and again.
“There’s that whole sunk cost fallacy,” he tells me. Come again, Barry?
“It’s like when you’re waiting for a bus. If you wait for a bus and it doesn’t arrive within a minute you might go. But the longer you wait the less likely you are to leave. You’ve sunk a load of time into it.
“There was an element of that. But, also, all the shows were good. We got good reviews, so it felt like, ‘Oh, I can do this.’ And therefore there should be a point where somebody goes, ‘we’ll give you money to do that.’
“It always felt very tantalisingly close.”
And so he kept coming back and in 2007 things took off. That was the year he’d renamed himself Lionel Richie – largely on a comic whim. But it struck a chord and he found an audience.
But that success couldn’t overcome the financial hole he’d dug for himself and a few months later he was in the Royal Court of Justice in London declaring himself bankrupt.
“As Lionel Richie,” he points out. “I had to put my hand on the Bible and publicly say, ‘I, Lionel Richie, solemnly swear …’
“And the court laughed in my face. The clerk of the court and the other witnesses all laughed at me. Which is, you know, what I did it for, but all I can say is, context is everything.
“In some ways,” he adds, “the bankruptcy wasn’t as bad as putting my heart and soul into something every Edinburgh and it not going anywhere. Year on year, that took part of my heart or my soul.”
He was left homeless for a while as a result. And yet he was back at the Fringe in 2008. Why? “It’s intolerable not to live the life you’re meant to live,” he says, simply.
And if you are a comedian, where else are you going to go where you can perform for a solid month, he asks? Maybe he has an answer to that. In 2010 he set up the Angel Comedy Club in a pub in London. It meant he could guarantee himself somewhere to gig once a week. But it’s grown into a “behemoth”, with 50 shows a week and the likes of James Acaster and Kevin Bridges regularly coming to play. But at heart, it’s a venue for new and neglected comedians, and for the last 10 years Ferns has been bringing an Angel Comedy Showcase to Edinburgh every August.
As for Ferns, he is coming to terms with his own past in Edinburgh. “A big part of the learning over the last 20 years has been that a career is a marathon, not a sprint. I know so many comedians who were the talk of the town 15 years ago and now they’re struggling. Or they struggled for a bit and now they’re back up.”
What I wonder has he learned talking about the younger version of himself? “It feels a bit egotistical but I’ve been really moved that first of all people have really related to that kid and can really understand why that kid made those decisions. That it doesn’t seem an insane thing to do.”
After everything, it turns out that Barry Ferns is where he wants to be.
Barry Ferns: My Seven Years as Lionel Richie is on at Just the Tonic at The Caves (Just Out of the Box), until August 24 (except August, 5, 12, 13 & 19)
https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/barry-ferns-my-seven-years-as-lionel-richie
