JULIAN BARRATT

I've done interviews in the past where, apparently, I didn't give the journalist any eye contact. I'm a bit shy, yes. I've thought about refusing to do any press at all.

I was in a band called Groove Solution. Because there was a groove crisis, and we solved it.

I ran off stage at my first gig. Halfway through it, I forgot my lines and didn't know what to do, so I just ran out of the building down towards a lake. I was going to throw myself in, but the compere came out and said, 'No, it's going well, come back and finish the gig!'

Comedians are not well people. Well people are not drawn to creating.

We should send a load of bad celebrities to colonise Mars. They would have to mate in space, and then their children would be sent back to Earth in 50 years' time.

Life without music would be a mistake.

I like the countryside. I like chopping wood. I'd like to be a carpenter.

Most stand-up is incredibly boring. It's time for people to do something else.

If the 'Boosh' was a bit more of a specific thing, or less multi-limbed, we would probably have done it and moved on.

I find the pressure to be funny when you're being interviewed live - quite intense.

For me, there's no dichotomy between being shy or a performer, because I think it's more a way of slightly presenting a version of things to the world.

Most comedians are borderline psychotic. It's what makes their work interesting.

We're so insecure, comedians. 'Did you laugh? Do you think I was funny?'

The secret of comedy is don't grow up. That's why some comedians are a nightmare, because they never grow up.

I'm not a natural comic, I don't think. That's why I gave up stand-up. It was hard. It involved a lot of death. Dying. Dying on stage. But it's one of those jobs you can only learn by doing it.

I think with performing, initially I was terrified on stage, absolutely terrified. And I did it again and again and again, and I learned sort of how it works, and then I was able to do it.

I was going to be a jazz-fusion guitarist. I came to London at one point with my mate, and we were going to make it. We spent three days there and went back home to our mummies.

People can see that we are part of a tradition of absurd comedy, stretching from Spike Milligan and Peter Cook through to Monty Python and Vic Reeves. We're not like Ricky Gervais's hyper-real cringe comedy. We're at the other end of the scale, but there's room for the sillier stuff, too.

We just thought of 'Boosh' as an extension of our childhoods in a way, the stuff we had grown up on and loved: 'Monty Python,' The Goodies, Frank Zappa. It spoke to a certain type of person, and we just carried on doing it.

I'm always trying to do anything between comedy and horror.

Writing can make you feel a bit psychotic. You create a world, and you're sitting inside it all day long, talking to people who are not really there.

I want to do things or write things that make people feel a bit more beautiful or tragic or something because there are so many other things than just funny.

It's not immediately categorisable. I don't know what to say when anyone asks what the 'Boosh' is.

I can act with either eye, but you've got to be twice as good as an actor to act with one eye. You need to put all your emotions just through one eye and really punch it out of that eye. I found it quite difficult to do at first, and then I found a technique that allowed me to act with one eye, which I patented.

I write tragedies and things when I'm alone. Chekhovian dramas.