Keith Allen wants to meet me at the Groucho. Well, of course it is. “I haven’t been here in 10 years!” she protests as we find a corner table. That’s all very well, but no one is more connected to London’s media hub than Allen, who spent quite a bit of time here in the 1990s with artist Damien Hirst and Blur bassist Alex James. Allen’s life membership was a gift from the owners, who felt guilty when he was sent to prison for three months after trashing his previous joint, Zanzibar. It’s an irony that hasn’t been lost on him that the reason he started it was because he was opposed to membership clubs. Now here is synonymous with one.
The 1990s are on his mind because he’s starring in a new musical, Rehab, set at the end of that decade. He plays a publicist who exploits the controversy surrounding his star client, a pop star whose drug habit has caused him to recover. Allen appears today modeling the character’s look: shades of orange and a silver Bernie Ecclestone wig. “Keith got it at a joke shop,” says Kevin, the show’s PR, from the next table.
Standing, he threw darts at hecklers and once peed in a cup of coffee grounds and drank the lot.
“It wasn’t a fucking joke shop,” quips Allen. “What are you talking about? That cost two hundred pounds!” He takes off the wig, exposing a scalp, and gently places it in a small box.I expect the fallen horseshoe mustache to be removed as well, but that turns out to be his.
Rehab is Allen’s first musical, although his career has always been adjacent to music. In true punk style, his band The Atoms broke up after their debut single, Max Bygraves Killed My Mother. He co-wrote New Order’s football anthem World in Motion, as well as the buzzy Fat Les singalong Vindaloo, and cut a gay reggae record under the name Sex Boots Dread. He admits he can’t sing (he failed an audition for the musical Waitress) but points out that this never hurt Ian Dury.
Watch Allen in the video for World in Motion, the New Order song he co-wrote for England’s 1990 World Cup campaign.
The show is a lively piece, but its portrayal of pre-Internet celebrities feels quaint, possibly even irrelevant. Why didn’t the writers, Grant Black, Murray Lachlan Young and Elliot Davis put it in today? “You know what? I don’t know. Why is it set in the 1990s?” I assumed it was because of Allen’s associations with that decade. You can hardly include a show called Simply Everyone’s Taking Cocaine and not ask Keith Allen to perform it. “Don’t be mad!” he laughs “It wasn’t written for me. I love the idea, though.”
Allen blew his first line in the late 1980s when he was pitching a script to UB40. He wanted the band to star in The Yob, a comedy he had written for Channel 4’s Comic Strip Presents… series in which he played a pretentious beret-wearing video director who accidentally fuses, The Fly-style, with a soccer hooligan . “I had never made cake before. I remember thinking, ‘Damn, that’s expensive.’ I cut those lines, then Ali Campbell blew the lot and I panicked, “I’ll call an ambulance!” He said, “What are you doing?”
Allen… ‘Was it worth it? In career terms, it probably wasn’t’ Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
That naivety didn’t last long. In Allen’s autobiography Grow Up, he notes that the drug “introduced me to the hours between 4 and 10 in the morning.” He made a “massive” line before he got to “En-ger-land!” a bit of World in Motion. Did coke help your creativity? “Noooo. All of that goes out the window. Cocaine is great for talking to yourself, but it doesn’t listen to you.” Does he still take it? “Not that you realize it. If I do it nowadays, it’s for the right reasons.” What are they? “Well, why not?” Being 68 makes a difference, he says. “As you get older, time flies. A hangover it might take a day. It’s not worth it.”
He is now based in Stroud with actor Tamzin Malleson, who he met in 2004 in medical drama Bodies, and their 15-year-old daughter. Are you prone to look back on your wild years fondly? “I stop doing that because there’s always a voice that says, ‘Was it worth it?’ Career-wise, it probably wasn’t.”
Allen says he doesn’t even think about what he has as a career. “I’m surprised when people say, ‘I remember you in…'” Often it’s the BBC’s Robin Hood, where he was a lip-smacking Sheriff of Nottingham, or The Comic Strip, for which he wrote a handful of riotous episodes and starred in many others alongside Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Rik Mayall, Robbie Coltrane et al. But “most of the attention I get is from Vindaloo,” she says, rolling her eyes. “My reputation is weird and that didn’t help. Producers who don’t know me won’t touch me. They think I’m this guy who walks down the street singing about curry.
Pioneers of Lairy… Allen, on the far right, with the Comic gang. Photograph: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy
There are no official figures on the number of children Allen has had, although actor Alfie and singer Lily are among them. She has described him as a “self-saboteur” who “couldn’t channel his comedic talents into a career”. It is not an assessment that I dispute. “That’s true, yes. I haven’t been able to channel anything. You could say I wasted a lot of years. You could also say I had a great time. I was in the beginning for a lot of things. I presented one of the first programs of ‘yoof TV’ I was one of the first performers at the Comedy Store.
He left that tough spot when he became “more middle class,” but stuck with live comedy for a while. He rarely knew what he was going to say until he stood in front of the audience. He threw darts at the interlocutors. Often, he was naked. “Yes. I’m not sure why.” One evening he walked to the front of the stage brandishing a cup of instant coffee grounds, peed in it and drank the batch. “Oh, I just did it because my parents and my aunt were there that night,” he says, as if anxious not to be misrepresented.
Comedy was never a career. “I saw myself becoming a David Niven figure. A national treasure. But I couldn’t commit. You have to focus, and I didn’t.” The die was cast early. Born in Llanelli, Wales, Allen never settled anywhere long enough to put down roots. He lived briefly in Malta as a child, the family having moved there because of his father’s work as a diver.
“I saw myself becoming a national treasure. But I couldn’t get engaged… at Glastonbury with daughter Lily. Picture: WENN Rights Ltd/Alamy
In the UK, he bounced from public school to public school before a penchant for thievery led him to the borstal. Either these upheavals didn’t really bother him or there was no one to complain to anyway (his father wasn’t someone for whom affection came easily), so he learned to get down and carry on. “I was always on the move,” he says. “This creates a take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards things.”
No less important his career. He’s built sets for Ken Campbell, run a club night with dancer Michael Clark, opened for Clash and the Stranglers, curated the comedy tent at Latitude and directed a couple of gullible documentaries, one of them a celebration of Mohamed al. -Fayed and the other, financed by the former owner of Harrods, advancing theories about the death of Princess Diana.
Allen is like a hedonistic Zelig, forever appearing around prominent or formidable figures without becoming one himself. Catch his chat with Hirst and James. “People have said, ‘Oh, there’s that guy who stayed with the others.’ I’ve always liked to think they were with me.”
Harold liked me. It’s amazing because he was a big-mouthed fool… Allen in Pinter’s The Homecoming in April. Photography: Manuel Harlan
In what he did, he excelled. He played Hogarth on stage (Michael Billington praised his “unpleasant vigour”), one of Tolpuddle’s martyrs on film in the art gem Comrades and Jonas Chuzzlewit for the BBC. When the Joe Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears was first mooted, he auditioned in Alan Bennett’s front room and won the lead, though it eventually went with Gary Oldman. In 1991, he was in David Hare’s Murmuring Judges at the National. Soon after, he began a long association with Harold Pinter. “I liked Harold. It’s amazing because I was just this big-mouthed idiot.”
If he had concentrated more on acting… “Yeah, what would have happened?” he asks, finishing my sentence. It may just be peaking now. Earlier this year, he was masterful as patriarch Max in a wildly funny revival of Pinter’s The Homecoming, while he showed mesmerizing control as murderer and rapist John Cooper in the recent Bafta-winning ITV drama The Pembrokeshire Murders .
“I always knew I was capable of this,” he says. “I didn’t think, ‘How the hell did I do that?’ But maybe I could have done it sooner.” It has been a life of gaffe, why does he want to be remembered? “I think I’ve always been good company,” he says softly. And it is. I can vouch for that.