Before the final headliner Bill Bailey came on on Sunday evening the compere David Morgan asked everyone to stand up so that more people could get into the tent. There were probably more people in the comedy tent for Bailey than there were at the entire first few Latitudes a decade ago.
It wasn’t the only thing that made Bailey’s set feel like a rock gig. It was also one of the few comedy shows that was delayed. We had to wait 15 minutes while the roadies and techies tuned up his instruments, checked the mics and plugged in his various keyboards.
Fortunately it was worth the wait. Bailey started his set with a furious almost Alexei Sayle-ish post-Brexit rant about how the country had traded in one knackered automatic transit van for a slightly newer manual geared vehicle with disastrous consequences but at least we had taken back control. Bailey confessed that he was so discombobulated by the vote he had recently knocked on his own door from the inside.
From there Bailey segued seamlessly into an edited version of his return-to-form Limboland set. At least it would have been seamless if the audience had been a bit sharper. In one section he picked up his guitar and offered to play any songs in a metal style. The loudest suggestion was Motorhead, which, as Bailey benignly pointed out, was already metal and maybe they were missing the point.
He was on a surer footing when he didn’t rely on the audience, turning the Iphone ringtone into a symphony or performing a dark, sinister version of Happy Birthday or taking the piss out of Adele’s break-up hits.
Despite looking increasingly like a kindly uncle there is a streak of anger to Bailey. When he wasn’t directing it toward the pro-Brexit campaigners who, he suggested, made us think that Stonehenge would be moved so that it faced Mecca if we stayed in Europe, he was having a pop at pop stars. Elton John was on the receiving end of a particularly bilious and very funny tirade.
In a way Bailey was the perfect act to close the comedy tent on the final night. Mixing comedy and music he was the ideal bridge between the two things that dominate Latitude. Nobody symbolises the multi-genre crossover of the Festival better than this angry, surreal, middle-aged man playing death metal and making jokes about customs officers at Tallin Airport miming the breast-rotating prostitute robot scene in Black Books.
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