What Taylor Swift and the Mighty Boosh taught me about fandom
Is it cringe to be a fan?
Back in the late 2000s I dedicated quite a bit of time to being a fan of the British comedy duo The Mighty Boosh. One minute I was watching their videos after a friend recommended them to me, the next I was spending hours on the duo’s forum (eventually becoming a moderator, which I’ve written about in my book), making friends with fans abroad and travelling to the UK for their live shows.
Early on they were a scrappy DIY group who crafted bizarre and niche jokes, but their fans really wanted them to become better known. It seemed criminal that they weren’t getting the praise they deserved, and there was huge hope that their zany brand of comedy would be seen as the genius we believed it was.
Eventually the wider world fell for the Boosh’s discoball comedy. Their TV show production values went up, they sold out massive tours, and Noel Fielding and Julian Barrett became the quirky new stars of the British comedy scene.
Because the Mighty Boosh fandom was dedicated but relatively small and even intimate at the beginning, watching them become newly famous people who appeared in the tabloids felt strange. It turns out that when you get what you wanted, you might feel odd about that.
It’s obvious now why things got a bit weird. The Mighty Boosh was no longer ‘ours’, as we saw it, and in general once artists go mainstream they have to broaden their work to appeal to more people. Sadly the DIY, underdog vibes that drew us to the Boosh were swiftly - and perhaps inevitably - swept away by fame.1
In the years since then I’ve felt pretty cringe about this period of my life. There’s more that I want to write about it, but I’ve been thinking about this cringe lately because of two things: another comedian whose work I’m into called Chris Fleming, and the Taylor Swift gigs at the end of June. They’ve had me reassessing the cringe, and feeling more understanding about why I dived so hard into a fandom in the first place.
Part of the cringe is because going into journalism made me feel like fandom was something I had to be a little careful about - as if the two couldn’t mix. Plus, there can be many toxic sides to fandom. Some fans’ deluded sense of ‘ownership’ over their idols can lead to some truly messed-up behaviour. Being a fan can mean forgetting that the person you adore is a human just like you are.
Yet the reason I started writing music reviews at 16 was because I was a huge fan of people like Elliott Smith and Jeff Buckley, and wanted to write about my newly burgeoning love of music. My fandom went beyond them as people, and more into what their music reflected back to me about the world, my emotions, being a person. In those early days I didn’t really know what I was doing, and my access to music was fairly limited compared to today. But I felt that I had to write, emboldened by the love I had for music. Somehow, I had the confidence to keep going, and today I’m even more enthusiastic about writing about the culture that impacts me in some way.
So when I think about it, it’s fandom that led me to the career I have now.
While writing Social Capital I looked back at those Mighty Boosh days and saw that the fandom offered more than I had realised: it gave me an escape during a time that I needed it. After college I couldn’t figure out a way to get into journalism, and spent a year working in retail in Galway. It was a hugely formative time in many ways, and meant achieving my teen dream of working in a music shop (god how I loved it!), as well as falling in love with eyeliner while working at the Body Shop, a relationship that endures to this day. But it was a time of transition when I knew I wanted to be doing something else, but couldn’t figure out how to do it.
Eventually I got a place on a journalism postgrad course and ended up working at a newspaper in Co Kildare. In Kildare Town, I shared a house next to a GAA field for over a year with strangers with whom I had little in common. I broke my arm one day at the train station. On another day I was mugged. My colleagues were really lovely, but on reflection I see that outside of work I was quite lonely that year. As a result, I spent a lot of time in my bedroom watching comedy videos and going on the Boosh forum. I can see over a decade-plus on that this escapism was really necessary at that particular time, giving me plenty of distraction as well as a new community to belong to.
Meanwhile, the Boosh’s humour was very music-influenced and quite absurd and surreal. There was a common language they and I spoke, and getting into their work helped me to find out more about my own taste. Because of them I watched dark and often bonkers shows like Nighty Night, Big Train, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, Spaced and Nathan Barley. These helped me see patterns in how British comedy evolved, which could only help my journalism.
The Boosh undoubtedly influenced many comedians, but there aren’t many who’ve really come close to capturing what made them so special. Someone who does have some of their outsider spirit is the American comedian Chris Fleming.
There’s of course the visual element - like Fielding, he has that androgynous glam-rock elf thing going on. There’s also the way he looks at the world through a skewed lens, finding absurdly specific ways to talk about universal experiences.
I mean, watch his videos WUG and Polyamorous and tell me that he hasn’t captured a certain human feeling while also seeming like he’s come from another planet.
At the end of June he played two dates in London, and when my pal Anna told me she was heading to see him with her sister and would I like to come along, I was on it like a hot snot.
The gig was an absolute tonic - I hooted laughing from the first joke (about British men always looking like they’re on their way to bully Billy Elliott) and spent the next hour or so blissfully cry-laughing through the whole set. It showed me how much I love idiosyncratic comedy that’s free of machismo.
The same weekend, Taylor Swift played in Dublin. Now, I’m not a Swiftie at all, but I am fascinated by her fandom and how it’s evolved around the tour - like people swapping friendship bracelets, making outfits that evoke specific Swift eras, and how gangs of pals and family members go together while festooned in glitter and covered in ‘13’ stamps.
There were news reports about young girls sitting outside the Aviva making and distributing bracelets, and I saw posts from male music journalists who went with their daughters and got fully and joyously wrapped up in the fan experience. It felt like there was very little cynicism present, which in today’s world is like a soothing balm being applied to your withering brain.
It felt to me like the discourse around fandom shifted a little with how these gigs were talked about. For that weekend it was necessary to show your fandom. Not in an exclusionary way, but in a way that made the gig feel like a collective experience rather than a collection of individuals gathering together. The fact that Swift’s fandom is mainly female was significant too. There’s are many books in how female fandom has been depicted over the years, particularly since the Beatles era, but suffice to say it hasn’t always been positively.
It all made me feel a lot more generous towards my past fangirl self, and also happy to lean a bit more into the things I’m a fan of without feeling too cringe. When I think about the big cultural obsessions of mine over the years, they’ve always led me to somewhere interesting personally and professionally. For example, becoming a late-blooming Joni Mitchell fangirl has benefitted my writing and given me songs to lean on when experiencing life’s harder moments. (I was on RTÉ Radio One talking about her recently too while on holiday, which surely gets me fan points...)
Another Mighty Boosh fan back in the day was Chris Fleming. And if he hadn’t been inspired by how they melded glam rock aesthetics with comedy, perhaps he wouldn’t have leaned so hard into the 70s vibes and offbeat attitude that makes his work like The Korean Spa and Benny and the Jets so appealing to us fans.
For the last five years, his comedy has been providing a lot of respite for me. And as his sets and jokes are - no matter how cutting they get - built on a bedrock of tolerance, bafflement at how the world works and gentle self-deprecation, they’re even more appealing as the world continues to lurch around monstrously. Turns out I’ve a lot to thank fandom for.
Just to add: some of the Boosh’s work really hasn’t aged well and some of the language they use around gender is outdated now.
Your story about being in a Mighty Boosh forum reminded me of how I was a regular on a JJ72 forum back in their heyday. We had planned meetups in Dublin and London around their shows. There were also various other festival meetups. The forum sadly died around the same time the band broke up. There's many a sordid tale around all the happenings in that group. If you ever find me twisted, I might reveal the ones I can remember.
Loved this Aoife and oh man I was also a huge Boosh fangirl back in the day. Went to the live shows, the book signing, quoted Rich Fulcher riffs from the DVD commentary with pals, learned all the little rhyme songs, (I never liked that they named it, and felt like it lost something when they made crimping a plot point rather than a funny thing that happens and is never addressed) the whole shebang! What a time. I even met my now-husband because of Boosh!