Gig review: Bill Bailey at First Direct Arena

“This is my Eurovision song, people of Leeds and the surrounding areas,” Bill Bailey intones as he ambles forth, guitar strung across his sternum, tickled by the end of his wizard’s goatee. He plucks a note, then gives an approximation of a deadpan shrug. “It’s in French.”

It becomes readily apparent only a few lines in that what words are emerging from the veteran Somerset standup – spoke in fluent Francophone tones, of course – do not match up with the subtitles behind him, projected in big block letters. Ostensibly entitled The Ballad of the Crow and the Child, the lost-in-translation skit devolves into further farcicality with each progressive new stanza, capped eventually by the declaration HE WENT A BIT MAD AT GREGGS illuminated behind him.

Bailey has always been a performer who has found refuge in absurdity, but his exploits as a pure funnyman have taken a back seat in recent years. Unexpected success during the peak of the pandemic years on the ballroom floor helped him become one of Strictly Come Dancing’s most popular winners to date, and a slew of light entertainment gigs and travel shows have since helped expand his reputation as something of a renaissance man; indeed, with a shock of flyaway hair, the 59-year-old could have stepped out from a Da Vinci painting himself.

His latest tour, Thoughtifier, arrives at the First Direct Arena after the success of another jaunt down under to Australia and New Zealand. It is predominantly business as usual; Bailey riffs on his musical skills as much as his comedic chops in a show that bounds from nuclear power to Berlin cabaret and back again with brief passages included for him to lambast the Government and the advent of AI, haphazardly rendered by a botched coterie of digital shantymen.

Song remains as much of his show as anything else; a self-composed hymn called I Punched a Grey Squirrel in the Face for Jesus draws a stream of giggles, while an alleged rendition of Coldplay’s Yellow in Turkish is dryly brilliant.

An attempt to replicate the drum riff to Phil Collins’s In the Air Tonight using bluetooth-enabled rubber balls has predictably disastrous results once the audience are involved, but by the time a bagpipe-spewing finale brings the house lights up, the mood is positively festive.

“People of Leeds and the surrounding areas, you’ve been wonderful,” Bailey cries. Indeed, so has he.