Craig Ferguson: "I still think the West End of Glasgow informs everything I do"

Now, decades after leaving Scotland and building an international career, Ferguson is bringing his latest stand-up show back to the city that first pushed him onto a stage. And if there’s one audience he knows you can’t bluff, it’s a Glasgow one. “If anyone goes to Glasgow and doesn’t treat the audience with a wee bit more preparation,” he says, “then they’re making a big mistake.”

Despite decades in television, film and writing, Ferguson describes stand-up as the core of everything he does. “I think it’s because it’s your original thing,” he says. “If you’re a guitar player you might play in a band or an orchestra, but really what you do is play the guitar. For me, stand-up is that.”

It’s the form he started with and the one he keeps returning to. Even during the height of his American late-night career, he continued touring. The two mediums fed each other: the demands of stand-up sharpening the spontaneity that defined his talk show interviews.

These days, his material is intentionally stripped of one modern staple: politics. Ferguson made a conscious decision around 2016 to leave it out entirely. “Everybody’s doing it,” he says. “For an hour and a half there’ll be no politics. All the stuff you’re angry at will still be there when you get out.”

Ferguson’s route into comedy was anything but carefully plotted. Born in Springburn and raised in Cumbernauld, he drifted toward Glasgow in his late teens after falling in with a group of art-school musicians, including a young Peter Capaldi, who pulled him into the West End creative scene.

“They were all about five or six years older than me and they were at the School of Art,” Ferguson recalls. “They were very hip and they kind of dragged me into the West End.”

At the time, Glasgow’s cultural energy was expanding at pace. Bands recorded at studios like Hellfire Club, artists gathered in bars around the city, and ideas bounced between musicians, actors and comedians. “It was very creative and there was a very collegiate environment,” Ferguson says. “Everybody got drunk together and talked about how much they loved the Velvet Underground.

Craig Ferguson in talk show host mode. | Supplied

“It was Peter Capaldi who said to me, you should go up and try stand-up comedy. I'm like, that doesn't even make sense. But Peter had albums from Steve Martin and Richard Pryor and stuff like that. He understood and he knew about it and he talked to me about it and he played me these albums and I was like, these guys are hilarious and this is fun. So it pushed me.”

Comedy itself barely existed as a structured scene. Ferguson remembers performing in clubs where the music would stop mid-set and a compère would simply announce him. “They’d stop the music and say, ‘Here’s a comedian, he’s funny.’ Then I’d walk out,” he laughs. “So you developed a sort of aggressive style, it was throw-down time.

“I mean when I started it was me and Fred MacAuley. I think that was it. Billy had transcended and gone into the stratosphere and Billy's a good bit older than me, but there was me and Fred MacAuley, he was doing golf clubs and I was doing Maestros punk rock clubs on Sauchiehall Street.”

Still, even after decades in America, Glasgow remains part of his life. “My family are all still there, I was over last year for my godson’s wedding in the Southside. I’m always in and out. It’s Hotel California, you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.

“I still think, by the way, that the West End of Glasgow informs everything I do, even to this day. I mean it's like that late night show I did with the dancing pantomime horse and the talking skeleton and all that stuff. That's just pantomime. I just nicked all of that from Gerard Kelly.”

When Ferguson returns, he finds a city both changed and familiar. The West End, particularly Finnieston, has transformed since the 1980s, he notes, becoming more cosmopolitan and vibrant. But other corners remain suspended in time. “On Byres Road it’s always about 1984 or 1985,” he says. “You go into the shops and it’s Depeche Mode or Deacon Blue playing.”

He likes walking about that part of the city, going for a curry at Chaakoo or taking a wander down Ashton Lane. Ferguson was a barman upstairs in the Ubiquitous Chip in the 1980s, where he met Michael Boyd who was the first person to invite him onto the stage of a real theatre. “I have fond memories of The Chip. Michael Boyd from the Tron theatre, he was the first guy that invited me in, that was the first time I realised it was about the stage, the first show where people would sit down and face the front and they’re not all drunk. I was amazed by the difference of the feeling and how much I loved it. A bunch of TV and theatre people used to drink in The Chip bar and I got to know them because of that.”

For all his international success, 2018 brought a career highlight closer to home with a guest role in Glasgow’s favourite comedy show Still Game. The origins of that appearance were in Los Angeles with writers Greg Hemphill and Ford Kiernan. “What happened was that Ford and Greg were at my house and my youngest was just a baby at the time, and when he found out that Greg was married to Miss Hoolie from Balamory, he was like, this is the real thing. But we were kicking around some ideas, and I think it was Ford that said, come and do a bit on the show.

“We've got an idea for you to play an American that comes back, they said, it'll not be much. All you'll have to do is put some talculm powder on your hair and wear a tweed jacket. You'll be in and out in 10 minutes. And then I get there and they've got me with a prosthetic willy and wearing a fat suit and jumping in the canal and crashing my car and falling down the stairs and all this stuff. I loved doing all that. It’s a fantastic show that represents a sort of whimsy, a lovely, weird, surreal Glasgow humour that I’m very fond of.”

Craig Ferguson: Pants on Fire is at the O2 Academy Glasgow on Sunday 26 April.