Stand up and be counted
One Ben Elton is peering via Zoom from Canberra. Another Ben Elton is peering, much more moodily, from the cover of his 1987 live album, Motormouth. The LP gets held up to the camera for a reaction.
“Oh my god. You own that?” Elton says on seeing his debut record, which wraps up his early years as a stand-up in the decade in which he first made his name as a writer on The Young Ones and Blackadder.
It didn’t sell very well, that album, chuckles Elton. Well, it was two sides of a one-sided shouting match involving a boozed-up audience in Dundee. A guess-you-had-to-be-there experience. Still, quite the time capsule of Elton, the left-leaning angry young man. What would he say to his ’87 self about that show now?
“I think I would say, ‘Shout less, swear less. Trust your material more.’ I always did have good material.
