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What do I think about actually literally dying
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on stage?
There are precedents for it.
It was Tommy Cooper.
It happened to Eric Morcombe famously.
There's this kind of like high table of your comedy
valhalla, where you're Tommy Coopers and Eric
Morcombes and Sid James sit,
that have died like the death of a Viking.
It's also kind of a fear
that you have that you don't want
that to happen in front of everyone because
people might think you're doing it for
a laugh.
Emergency, which service?
Erm, ambulance, please.
I was living in a rented council place
in Hackney. We just sort of started to
date - date, that's so old-fashioned - we just
started seeing each other. It didn't take long.
And I was in the theater and he was doing music.
He really wasn't in the comedy world at all.
Just playing music, playing guitar
in local pubs.
And it was in Bath University that he really
discovered his love of performing
and singing, a little bit of dancing.
So when I met him, the music was
a big thing, and he'd already done
a video of his song called
"Making Movies."
Seeing that he could be on his own,
not necessarily as part of
a theater group or with music around
it. That's when he
transferred from just pure music
through a theater group into
stand-up.
All right, I'm going to take you back to the mid-'80s.
People who went to comedy clubs were like
people who went to acid house
jazz. They were a very specific group
of people. People didn't wander into comedy
clubs by mistake.
Okay. So they knew what they were going to get.
Anybody could get up and have a go, it was a great
sort of post-punk atmosphere of experimentation
and excitement, and no one
really knew what they were doing.
It was the alternative comedy circuit,
and it was a reaction to traditional
kind of Bernard Manning-type comedy.
It had much more of a connection to that British
tradition of variety than what it's become.
A comedy club has changed a lot since the '90s.
For a start smoke, they're not smoky
rooms anymore. I used to smoke just to join in.
The punters weren't kicked out
if they were rowdy or if they were heckling.
And then throw in a lot of really weird acts
like someone that used to melt a block of ice.
They were male and female double act and one of
them used to play the nose flute.
I once went to the Tunnel Club and Harry Enfield
was on and he got booed off and a guy
went on after him and told a joke for ten
minutes in Serbo Croat and he
got three encores.
Randolph the Remarkable.
He was a great big guy whose act was doing
a belly flop dive into a washing-up bowl.
Chris Lyneham. He would finish his act by
putting a live firework up his
arse and setting fire to it.
Obviously burned himself quite a few times.
There was a paper tearer, there was a guy who
pretended to kill rabbits.
It was just a bit more broken
and people displaying their brokenness
without trying to fix it.
It was just brilliant.
It was a very different game than it is now.
I mean, you've got to remember the people who
were around then, Jack Dee, Jo Brand,
Jeff Green, Sean Lock,
Harry Hill,
Bill Bailey, Lee Evans,
the list goes on and on.
And he was up there with them.
He had a fairly anarchic, dare I say,
libertarian outlook on life, and this
was right up his street.
When you start stand-up, there's the headliners
who headline all
the big gigs, and he was one of them, that
whenever you did a gig, he'd be headlining.
Welcome to the stage,
the one, the only, the indisputable
Mr. Ian Cognito!
Ladies and gentlemen, there's an old saying in show business.
Leave them wanting more. You've been great,
thanks a lot, good night.
Well I'd heard about him, I mean, his
reputation definitely preceded him.
I've been warned that he was extraordinary on
stage and fearless and that
he had a fiery temper offstage
and there were always stories about altercations
with promoters and other comedians.
I first kind of properly got to know Cogs
doing the tour support for him in 2005.
He didn't really used to have publicity shots
back then, not proper ones.
They were things like drawings of him.
And there was that weird thing where he's doing
that and opening his mouth.
There's like a little miniature version of him,
so you didn't know what he was going to look like
either. So there's this kind of mystique
about the man.
He was the first comic I met that already had,
I'd heard so many stories about that I
was probably apprehensive about meeting him.
I met Ian Cognito first time at a Mirth Control
gig out West, and I was pretty new
and he scared the shit out of me.
It's me, your second act,
too risky to open.
Not good enough to close.
And you watch other people and you go, that's
what you do, oh, I see, that's what people are doing.
And then next thing you meet Ian Cognito and
he breaks every rule.
And I'd only just started and I'd seen a lot
of stand-ups going out, normal stuff,
and then Cogs come out with a shopping trolley.
And he had a dress on and I
thought this geezer's a lunatic. And he was
really aggressive, so...
But he really made me laugh.
He was like, naturally funny.
He was a bit edgy, and I would
imagine that would have been at his best.
That was sort of early '90s.
Watching him on stage and seeing
this utter freedom
and not caring.
Yeah. Come at me.
And he had that and I wanted that.
All with your mobiles eh? What's that all about?
There's a hundred thousand fucking people here,
is that not enough for you to talk to?
No, you've got to ring up your Mum.
The only reason you should use your fucking
mobile, is if you are OD-ing.
Then don't ring your Mum,
she don't want to fucking know.
I remember the first time I met him because I
didn't know I was going to meet him and I had a gig in
Guilfdord and I went in the backstage, sat
down and he started talking to me and I can't
remember what he was saying but I remember while
he was talking to me, he went over to a sink in
the corner of the room and got his dick out and
started pissing in the sink while talking to me.
I remember at that point thinking to myself,
"I think this is probably Ian Cognito."
I was very trepidatious about meeting
him, although I was also very excited about
about watching him
He said, "Yeah, I've heard about you.
I'll be interested to see what you're like."
And of course, that put the fear of God into me
because you want to do well in
front of other comedians.
And fortunately, I had a good gig.
I mean, thankfully, I didn't have to follow him
because I don't think I would have ever been able
to follow him. And he came up afterwards and
said, "Yeah, you're alright, you are.
Yeah, you're good. You're going to do well."
And I felt like I'd sort of been
touched by the Hand of God.
In 1994, I said to him, I
would like to manage him.
And he said, "Okay, let's come over to the house
and let's talk about it."
So, I went over to where he used to live,
which was in Walthamstow, East London,
and I went there with a view to talk about a
plan. How are we going to take this forward?
He said. "The thing is Klarfeld, I don't think
this is going to work."
And I said, "Why?"
And he said, "Because I want to fuck you in the
arse."
And I said, I think you're right,
this is not going to work.
And then he said, "Well, hang on a minute, hang on, hang on.
If I just get over this, that
I'm not going to fuck you in the arse,
will you still manage me?" And I said "Yes."
When I look back on it, I think that was just
the Cogs's initiation.
How was I going to react?
I just want to say if I've offended anybody out
there, grow up.
In fact, the jokes were so good,
they were just sort of stepping stones along the
way for him being him.
Never French kiss a leper, never try and
shove a turd back up your arse with a spatula.
Never trust an electrician with no eyebrows.
Now that's just common sense.
They're laughing behind the bar.
They won't be laughing by fucking Saturday
when they've heard it three fucking times.
I give it all that, it's all scripted, every fucking word...
As a new act all I'd be thinking about all day
was that gig and how it was going to go.
And then you met him and he still had that same
passion for it. And you're like, oh yeah, that's
why I do this. Incredible to never lose
that the whole time you do it.
You can relax, son, back to the cock jokes now.
It wasn't like any other comedian's act.
I mean he brought out a lute for God's sake,
and he would berate the audience,
and he had such rage in him,
but he was always funny.
You look at me as this God-like figure,
you think, you fucking do.
You think I have the answers. Well I don't,
I'm as bad as the rest of you.
Selfish, always buying shit I don't need,
shit I can't even use. Do you know, I can't even
play whatever the fuck that is?
You soon kind of got to realise that
actually he was a bit of a loose cannon.
And that if something didn't go his way,
run for the hills.
You! Don't fucking film me, you cheeky cunt.
Put it away.
There was something beautiful about his rants.
I can think of the sweat dripping off him and I
can see him there in his bandanna.
Estrogen in the water supply.
Yes you, we invent the pill so that
we can fuck you without having to
worry about it. And then as soon as our backs
are turned, you are pissing in the water supply.
Don't think we don't fucking know.
He was in a tradition of aggressive,
counter-cultural,
angry male comics. I mean he always took
the piss out of his anger, that was the thing, he
wasn't, you know, he would always undercut
himself, he would always pull the rug out from himself
He always had that sense of play.
Stand-up comedy was a weapon to him.
It wasn't, it wasn't a nice thing.
It wasn't a gift that he was giving the
audience. It was, it was a weapon that
he was using to make them see the error of their ways.
I mean, here we are, 2012.
We're still here, still fucked up.
One hundred and forty-seven armed conflicts
are going on in the world as I shout at you
and you're worried about me cracking a few
fucking silly little jokes.
If the audience were going for it, he would
really relish that and
storm it.
And if the audience weren't going for it, he
might be confrontational with them.
It's all right, darling.
You ain't going to like all of it.
He'd find a way of making it seem
like he had at least sort of
been shot down in flames as opposed to just,
you know, struggling to silence, that, that would
never happen.
Cogs was brave because he went on and went,
"I'm gonna say something that's gonna' make you hate me,
but then I'm going to say something's going to
make you laugh two seconds later."
That's actually proper brave because that's
bringing on an attack.
And it's cold out there.
You lot wrap up warm.
And all I'd ask you is that you spare an extra
little thought for the homeless people,
when it's cold out there and it's fucking cold,
a little extra thought for the homeless people, all right?
Fucking easy to trip over them when
they're covered in snow, I'll tell you that.
I've got two little, tiny little clubs and he
played them a couple of times and I'd be
so excited about him coming to stay
and he always nailed it.
But not without, at some point during his set,
just tearing it right down.
As a performer watching a normal performer
struggle, usually it's not fun, but
if Cogs was going down in flames on
stage, it was like, fucking hell, everybody get
around, have a look at this, because if
he decided he was going down, he was going down
and he was taking every cunt with him.
I'd book him in to come and do my gig, and he'd
just literally stand and shout in somebody's face.
And, you know, some people would think,
"Well, that's not what I've paid for. I've come to have a laugh."
Not, you know, be shouted at, and like
sort of cowering in a corner.
Because you get to my age Sonny Boy,
you fucking mock me with your hair
But what he gave the audience
when he was on song, like all great comedians,
he gave them an experience.
I said "Do you fancy another baby?"
She went "Are you fucking...
Are you mad?
I hate you."
We had a microphone in the bedroom in those days.
In the early noughties, live comedy was huge back then
and people were doing two three, four, five,
six gigs a night and that always perplexed Ian,
because he wanted to just put all
his focus into one gig and make that really special.
It didn't matter if the mic wasn't working
because he would ignore it.
He would just sort of boom his
voice out to, you know, a hundred, two hundred
people. Or if the sight lines weren't right,
he'd stand on a table.
Or if the lights were pointing in the wrong
position, he'd just walk around amongst the audience.
There were two thousand people in and if he'd
turned round and said, "Right, come on, we're marching
on Downing Street now," two thousand people would
have followed him, without a doubt.
What I remember is him
standing there, often in women's
clothing, but that doesn't really matter,
but him standing there, maybe on a table.
I'm the sixth bloke on this bill.
And I knew it was happening I could see them...
blokey blokey coming over the fucking wall.
Here they come, blokey blokey, no birds then.
So we had a little chat,
a little fucking - drew straws.
But there was like sort of chaos
in that, but underneath it all, he was
very much kind of like a man of poetry
and theater.
There was a young fellow from Tring
whose poems lacked one vital element.
He tried all the time to make the words fit
in the last line, but it was usually too long and didn't
scan properly anyway
It could go in any direction.
He could say anything to anyone at any point.
But also, when I saw him, he had this warmth
with the audience like he did with the comics.
So there wasn't like a thing of like, you're all
in the cross-hairs.
- What do you drive? - A Volvo?
A Volvo. Swedish. Got nothing funny to say about that.
Well done.
You've fucked me up now!
- It's to be trusted by an audience, to be taken
somewhere, where you're taken to the precipice
of what might offend you.
But that's the joke, of course, is that actually
there's going to be a reversal.
Meanwhile, down in South Africa,
that great man, that saint, Mandela,
could be dying soon.
I hate to think what's going to happen that country.
You've only got to look at Zimbabwe.
Look at Zimbabwe. Fucked.
Mugabe is shitting on his own people over there,
and you've got to ask yourself this question: how
can you trust that Mugabe, when his name
backwards reads "ee by gum"?
The way that he played with an audience's
expectations, the sort of stuff that he did, was -
was - was - cleverer than
it might be given credit for.
I'll tell you, don't lend anybody from the Third World
any money, you'll never fucking see it
again, okay?
Greedy cunts they are,
always got their hands out for something.
He came from the position going, "I'm the worst
person imaginable, but I've got your number."
I put him in a category of a comedian's
comedian, someone who
is so good at his craft that
other comedians, when we've got a night off,
we'd go to watch someone, if we heard that
Cogs was playing somewhere local to us we'd go
and watch him perform.
Because half I was laughing at what his
delivery was. But the other half was laughing
at the reaction of the crowd.
It has the effect where you instantly want to do
a gig that night, you know?
I mean, every time I was on a bill with him, he
was the compere and it didn't
matter how I felt that day.
As soon as he goes on stage and starts talking
to them and improvising, I was like, "Oh, I wanna'
I wanna' do a gig now."
He became this kind of figure, this kind of
Gandalf figure that a lot of young comics
were attracted to because he was like, you know,
the last vestige of the Wild West, the
kind of wild man.
He aggrandised himself and inflated his
contribution to comedy.
And it, and the surprise actually
was, oh no, it turns out after he died
he really did have that impact.
So he was on to something.
There have been, throughout history,
lots of brilliant but flawed
artists.
Beethoven, Van Gogh...
Ian was very much in that tradition.
Was he - was he sexist?
Was he racist or was he just a cunt?
If he was ever going to be sexist it was done
for a reason. It was done to get a rise out of
somebody.
You women giving it all this.
You men couldn't stand the pain of child birth.
Well yes we fucking can.
Yes we could.
We got broken noses, we got tattoos, we played rugby,
we're fucking hard. Here, you doubt me,
here's a man having a baby, right.
Whoa! Baby.
Stings a bit.
I never heard him be racist, I never, I never
seen that, I never encountered that.
And then they go, "Ah, but you haven't got any
black friends, have ya?" I go, "No, no,
but then I ain't got any white friends either."
Sorry, you're asking me if Cognito was racist?
Not for one second.
He could be equally hateful towards everyone.
Was he just a cunt?
Yeah, that was Ian, that was Cogs.
Yeah, of course he was a cunt.
In fact I lost it the other day in a car park,
one of those handicapped people trying to use one of our spaces.
I ain't having it!
I've called him over. "Oy, handicapped person,
have a fucking look down there, will you -
hey hey hey.
You don't see your outline down on that floor,
no you don't. That's more the outline of someone
who has fucked off."
Not nice, I grant you. But if you let them get away
with it, they will be in our toilets.
The problem with saying was somebody's material
racist or sexist is you have to judge it in
the context of the time.
The whole point of comedy is you go as far, as
close to the line as you can get without going
over. But if you change the position of the line
retrospectively, then -
- so it's bound to be somebody who could look at
his act and say it was sexist or racist
they're bound to be able to.
Hands up all the racists in the audience tonight?
It's not as popular as it used to be, is it?
Never have a great big spliff and
then go out shopping for shirts in the sales
The one about when they say,
"Coming to a cinema near you."
How the fucking hell do they know
where you are then, hey?
The one about driving into an empty car park.
I'll never know why it is when you drive into an
empty car park, you never know where the fuck to park.
Those are ingrained in your head and go nowhere,
they ain't going anywhere.
They're there for life.
You can't forget what
a jokesmith he was, that he was very
much a traditional gag man.
Took a girl home, went anal on me on the first night.
Put all my CDs into alphabetical order.
I'm half Italian, half Irish.
How fucked up is that?
We used to have stewed pizza for dinner.
I'm never doing that vodka Red Bull again.
I woke up doing press ups in the gutter.
I was in bed with my wife, she said, Where's
that man, where's that man who used to make love
to me round the house?
He used to make love to me in every room
in the house, what happened to that man?
I said, "I kicked the fucker out. He wasn't doing
his washing up. Why should I stand for that?"
Spider-Man was bitten by radioactive spider
And then become like a spider.
Well, I must have been bitten by a radioactive cunt.
Got me some of that extra virgin olive oil the
other day, took it home.
Someone's only fucked it.
Which is like such a route one joke.
Billy Connolly gave up drinking 'cause
he said it made him boring.
Wish I had that problem.
I've never come to in a police cell and found
myself there 'cause I'd been
fucking boring.
My street, it's a great street. We got Hindus and
Muslims and Jews and Catholics,
and we all get along great...
'cause we all gang up on the Eskimos
down the bottom of the fucking garden.
And then what he'd do is go,
"Any Eskies in?"
Any Eskies in tonight? Any Eskies in?
Fucking wankers they are.
"Any Eskies?" And it was
the utter conviction with
which he said it, it used to make me laugh every night.
I had mistakenly thought that one of his lines
was just like a sort of a little compering
technique. It was the one where he goes up to a
woman in the front row and says,
Opal Fruits or Starbursts, darling, what do you say?
Bath or shower?
Stones or the Beatles?
Dogs or cats?
Cadbury or Galaxy?
Marathon or Snickers?
Up the box or up the shitter?
He got me fucking
slung out of like one venue in Chippingham.
We're doing the nail trick. He got it
right through the projection screen.
I could have happily fucking strangled
him at the time, but, again, look back, and laugh.
He walked onto the stage and he had this
magnificent fedora hat on and he was carrying
a hammer and he went to the back of the room
and just banged into the wall and you realised he'd
banged a nail into the wall and you thought,
What's he doing?
And then he just took off his hat and hung it
on the nail. And you were just like, Oh,
brilliant.
And he went to the alpha male of the front row,
and he just went, "Two things you need to know
about me. One is I don't give a shit,
and the other is I've got a hammer."
It absolutely established him, okay?
This is who I am.
I'm going to be dangerous and
I'm likely to be violent.
And at the end of the set, got a big laugh and
he goes, takes his hammer out and pulls it off
the wall, removes half the wall, hence probably
being banned for most clubs because if he did
that to my club, I'd be pretty pissed off.
And I did actually ask him once, I said, "You know,
do you ever get in trouble for hammering a
nail into the wall?" He said, "I always ask them first."
And then he got his guitar case out and this
guitar case and the little pouch for spare
strings, he actually had a tube of polyfiller.
And he would actually fill the hole in after if
there was any problem.
Sorry, Cog, but it's true.
It's a fact and you fucking know it.
And you know why?
Because of you.
Yes you.
Let's be honest, it could be exhausting, we
all knew that. I think Sally Anne Hayward put
it best when she said, like we've all got,
we've all got an exhausting, mental Cognito story.
And I thought just one of those stories
would exhaust me. But Cogs was
in every single one.
We took him to the train station on Sunday and we
had an hour to kill.
So we had a pint.
So we took him to the train station on Monday
and we had an hour to kill.
So we had a pint.
Then we took him to the train station on Tuesday.
And Cogs just downs his drink
and slings the glass at him.
And then he ended up dancing on a balcony, but
he had no pants on, so it was not a particularly nice sight.
And when we landed, the South African police
boarded the plane and took him, took him away.
So he was arrested.
And he made her cry. And he was like, "Susan,
you're an old bird, you tell her", and I was
like, "You got yourself into this mess, you
get yourself out of this mess.
I'm not having anything to do with it."
I just heard otherworldly
yelps and groans coming from inside a car wash.
I opened the door and he's halfway down the
corridor with this tub full of piss,
right? And he's got a keycard in his mouth.
He's going, "Fucking hell."
He lost his balance and they both fell over
together.
And he's projectile vomiting out of the
passenger window.
And then Cogs came back in the fire exit,
slammed the door and went, "That's got rid of those cunts!"
So I said, "When did you get him on the train?"
He went, "Fucking Thursday, man."
And he started saying, "Where's Nigel Klarfeld?"
And we told him, "How are we meant to
know, it's the middle of the night."
And he just crashed into a tree.
He looked at me and went, "How'd you do that
fucking thing?
That fucking thing?" I went, "What
do you mean?" And he went, "Stop!"
Sixty percent Gypsy, thirty percent
pirate and about twenty-two percent
nut job. You know, I think I got the maths right there.
The main ingredient you need to be a comic,
and this is, this is, this is all you need, is
really, really low self-esteem
with a massive ego.
I think with Ian, he was so sensitive
and so vulnerable, I think he
formed his own skin as it were, his own barrier
to the world by using jokes and alcohol.
He just like, was quite a
sensitive bloke.
He had sort of, he'd admit himself, kind of
mental health difficulties.
As do I.
And it just, sometimes it had a bad
effect on him. It just made him a bit paranoid
and defensive and just made him think that
people had it in for him and that kind of thing.
A lot of it was him being upset rather than
trying to upset people himself.
There was a fragility about him as well.
You know, there was a lot of bravado there and
conviction in him.
But that usually does hide
a soft center, doesn't it?
I said to him once, "You're quite nice bloke
aren't you, Cogs?" And he'd go,
"Yeah, don't fucking let that get out."
Because I ain't nice.
I've got two kids, nine and eleven, which are
odd names I grant you, but you've got to call
them something.
Yeah, this is where he lived, where we lived for
a lot of it as well.
The boat's just down that way.
It had like bind weed like coming in, coming in
the windows. Actually at one
time he had the fucking plastic. - And he just had a mattress -
Yeah, because it leaked so much.
He just had tarpaulin over a mattress.
He didn't put the plastic, he didn't put the
plastic over the, over the outside.
He was sleeping in this kind of like Bedouin
tent made of like, like crime scene
plastic. It was weird.
We all said to him, "Dad you've got to,
come on, you've got to sort this out."
"I like it like that.
Does the job, I'm only sleeping in there."
There's a lay-by up on the on the
bypass. I think people were always quite
alarmed and probably also quite
"Well, that makes sense" about it when they had
sort of drop him off on this completely nondescript
lay-by with absolutely, seemingly nothing around.
No buildings. Yeah, just drop him off there.
And then he'd sort of waddle off.
Yeah, with a guitar.
Yeah, always with a guitar.
And then up and over and down, disappearing
into the woodlands till he next appeared.
You are going to kind of romanticise it and
fantasise it a little bit because it fits so
well with what he was. Almost like the troll
under the bridge, because that's essentially what it is. He goes
down, down the
little path, under the bridge to parts unknown
that nobody knows and then lives there.
The way they describe it is a lot more sort of
"He wanders off and
disappears and like melts through the bushes.
And then, and then that's him gone and next time
you see him is in some comedy club in
Leicester." But yeah,
it's completely different for us because, you know,
we lived it.
After he died, it became clear that so many
different people thought that he was quite a
special friend of theirs.
I did, but the more people that
described the feeling they felt they had with
him and the connection they felt they had with
him, the more I realised it wasn't unique.
And that's not to say that he was disingenuous.
He was just really good at making people feel
that he was their friend.
He would speak exactly the same tone to
everybody he spoke to. I think that maybe that,
maybe that's why it made people feel special,
because it's quite a relief when someone's not
trying to be somebody else.
He didn't care whether you'd been going for
twenty years or it was your first gig.
He wanted to know about you and give you advice,
some of which probably not welcome,
may have been to stop.
He accepted you as a comic just like he
was, which I think is rare
in a comic who's been going as long as he had
at the time, to see newer
acts and be
that gracious and welcoming to them.
If he saw something in you or
he liked a joke, he was very supportive
and very complimentary, and it meant a hell of a
lot when he said, "That bit you got,
that bit about the toothpaste.
I mean, I seen it coming, but that's a good
bit". So he'd always want to,
he'd always make it clear that he was like top dog.
As things went on for him and as people around
him started to progress, there were times he
would be bitter about that and feel that he'd
been stolen from and taken from.
So if you talked about a new act you'd seen,
he'd be like, "Yeah, I've heard they've seen Cognito."
I've been in the dressing room and somebody's
come in who's not done well and he's told them
they were shit.
All right. You're not expecting that because
normally what happens is people go, "Oh, they're
a bit of a tough crowd, aren't they?" He'd go,
"That was shit, weren't it?"
You go "Fucking hell mate, Jesus Christ, he's
probably crying inside."
Get used to it, get fucking used to it!
I mean, he was larger than life on stage.
Offstage, he was quite an unassuming guy.
I did a gig with him once, I think I was
compering, and I introduced Ian Cognito
and there was a very, very posh Kensington woman
in the front row and Cogs zeroed in on her
straight away.
But he was incredibly funny, brilliantly funny
that night, and he was slagging her off, so
rude to her. After the gig, he gets offstage
and we're sitting in the backstage area.
This woman walked in, steaming,
I mean, I thought she was going to hit him and
she goes up to him and she goes, "Do you work here?"
And he goes,
"Yeah" and she goes, "That last
act - he was disgusting."
And he said, "Well, madam, that is outrageous.
That is outrageous. I'm going, we're going to
talk to the Booker and we'll make sure that act
never comes here again." And she goes, "Okay, thank
you." And she storms out.
And I thought to myself, Wow,
how has she not seen?
But the reason she's not seen is because he
looked like he was six foot five on stage.
But the truth is, he was a little five foot four
Italian Irish guy, and it was such a difference
that people couldn't tell.
I found out his actual name
when the policeman was trying to identify
who he was on the night.
I knew his name was Paul, but it just
felt weird. Like calling your fucking
Dad by his first name, innit.
I have some vague recollection that he talked
to me about, you know, about being
a play on "incognito."
I don't want to be known.
I want to be out there, but not known.
I only knew what his name was after he died, and
I read it in the paper.
I never knew. Why would you want to know?
He used to be quite guarded about that,
about his name, he used to hate the idea of
people knowing that was his actual name.
He once told me that "Ian Cognito" was just an
anagram of "gin and tonic" apparently.
If he was really pissing me off I would call him Paul.
But if he wasn't I'd call him Cogs 'cause Cogs was
like sort of like a fond name,
you know? So obviously I called him Paul a fair bit.
'Cause he came from that early alternative
comedy scene where almost all comics
had a stage name.
And, you know, the subsequent twenty-five
years, hardly anyone does.
But they all had funny names, didn't they?
Back in the '80s.
So Ian Cognito, right? It's a gag.
I found out his name because on the
the VRN form, you have to write down
the information of the person who's buying the
car. And I said, "Cogs, I need your name and the
address for this" and he went, "Who are you, the fucking
tax man?"
I said, "No, I just - I need your real name and
your address." So he said, "All right.
I'll write it."
So he wrote it down, "Paul Barbieri,
P.O. Box 1, Bristol."
I will just say it's nice to be back here, I
had to take a couple of years out of the comedy
game 'cause I was worried that the late nights,
the adulation, the drug
taking, the drinking, the - let's not deny it -
the sex, I was worried it was turnng me into a
bit of a cunt,
so I took a couple of years off to get to know
myself and it turns out I am a bit of a cunt so
fuck it, might as well earn a few quid, eh?
Whoever it was wrote about him that he was a
sheep in wolf's clothing.
Absolutely nailed it.
Paul was very warm and
very accepting, and he made
you feel good about what you were doing.
And he was really fulsome in his praise for
people, and he was a real fan of people, not
just comedians, but he was a fan of his friends.
He, he enjoyed his friends very much.
Ian Cognito was a cunt.
Okay, I'm here today with the wonderful legendary
Ian Cognito. How are you doing, Ian?
I'm all right, hot and bothered at the moment but
other than that, yeah, good.
So you're in Edinburgh for the first time
in a long time doing your own show, yeah?
Fifteen years since I've been doing my own show,
I mean I've been up here on and off other than that,
but you know.
So what's your show about this year?
It's called Trouble With Comedy.
It's about the fact that after twenty-eight
years, nobody knows who the fuck I am.
- I've never seen you, but I've heard about you.
They know me in the business, but I'm having trouble getting
across to the general public.
But I feel this is gonna rocket my career.
Why do you think that is?
Because I've never been on telly.
Back in the '90s, if you went on telly, it
was seen as completely selling out.
Stand up was about the alternative to telly.
Now it is, you know, rightly or wrongly,
it's a part of telly, isn't it?
That's what stand-Up is.
But he was still that, "No, no, no, you don't go
on telly. Stand-up should be in a room above
a pub. It should be dirty and grotty."
And he was still like that right up to the end.
But he was never distracted by
trying to impress TV people.
In fact, he wore it almost as a badge of honor
that he didn't work in television.
He didn't want to compromise.
Jack Dee - teetotaler - does an advert
for John Smith's. Peter Kay -
teetotaler - does an advert for John Smith's.
Johnny Vegas.
I've never seen that fat cunt have a cup of tea
in his fucking life.
He believed that if you were going to do comedy
and you were going to do comedy on TV, it had to
be who you were.
Why would you change?
And so very quickly on
all the offers that he got, they came
up against a brick wall.
I think the reason why he wasn't on TV is
cowardice from the industry. That's what it was.
And also the other side of it is, television
didn't really want him because he was
very anarchic. He was unpredictable, and
sometimes there was carnage at the performances.
Once you stop being compliant with, with
TV people and they realise they can't manipulate
you, they're not interested in you because
they're not interested in the sort of out of
control wildness, they're interested
in kind of controlled, we want you to do
this for our show.
I've had the reviews.
He's exciting. He's unpredictable.
He's, he's, funny. I had that once.
I had one in The Guardian that said, "Ian Cognito is
dangerously explosive," which is all very well,
but nobody turned up to the fucking Belfast gig.
In the late '90s, 2000s, this new
breed of comedian started
turning up, who were very professional
suited and booted, had material that was
not necessarily controversial,
but was very TV friendly and they
were on a - they were on
a kind of path - to some sort
of success, whether it's getting their own
series on Radio Four or something like that.
And I think he really thought
people like that were wankers.
Here I am twenty eight years in the business,
never been on fucking telly.
Never won an award.
No awards for me.
Imagine how I felt when I went to the Chef
and Brewer pub the other day, picked up the
menu, which said, "Try one of our award-winning
sausages." I thought, "Oh, that's fucking great.
I can't get fuck all but there's a fucking
sausage out there."
Could you imagine at the time, at the peak of
his powers, particularly in the early '90s, when
there's nobody better than him in the country as
a live performer and there are fucking a lot of
weaker acts getting all over TV.
That would fucking piss you off, wouldn't it?
Don't care. Never been on telly. Fuck it.
Never been on telly.
I ain't lucky, that's my problem.
Oh yeah. There was Lloyd, he's been on the fucking
telly. Me never.
Never been on telly, never fucking once been on telly.
I think he actually did want to be on telly, but
actually he wanted to hate the people
that were on telly and not identify with them.
I could say that: "Hollywood don't want me.
No, Hollywood won't have me."
Well, Bob, if you went over and auditioned and
learnt to act. "No, no, no, I'm not
playing their game, they don't want me.
I don't care."
But when we started off in alternative comedy, I
didn't know it was all gonna go quite as telly as it has done.
And do you kinda rail against that type of comedy?
I suppose I do a bit yeah, you know,
and then maybe it's my own fault because I need
someone to kick against so if I didn't have that
I wouldn't be the comedian I am, really.
You can't just blame the
sensibilities of program makers.
I mean, what we say live on stage
compared to what we're allowed to say on
television is extraordinary.
What we protect the viewing public from
that actually then if they go and see it in, in
a live circumstance is perfectly acceptable.
The gulf between those two things is extraordinary.
You know you're getting old, right, when the
president of the United States is younger than
you. Mind you, you know you're getting old
when the president of the United States is
blacker than you.
Now let's analyze that.
You think I didn't know that would get a little
bit of a. It ain't even fucking racist,
is it? It's what we call in the comedy business - a fact.
And you can't boo a fact.
He's one of the comics who reminds you how
important and how much better live comedy is a
lot of the time. You've got the jeopardy that it
could go wrong and that the comic could have
a bad gig.
It's alright darling, I'm a professional.
Through the years doing telly
comedy, I have witnessed
a massive snobbery
towards the circuit
that Cogs ruled and in
fact, "circuit comic" being used as a
dismissive term about someone.
And I'm like, "Damn it, they're the foot soldiers.
We are the foot soldiers of the entertainment industry."
So there was always talk all the time that
Cognito could break through.
But what happened was through his anarchic ways,
he would always make sure that
he did everything possible not to achieve the
best he could.
So yes, he could do it on stage, but then all
the antics offstage would ensure that it
never went forward any more.
He had a real self-destruct button.
When things were going great, if there was a
button in front of him he'd bang it just
to see what happened.
Why did Cognito blow it?
I think he hated the whole idea
of being famous.
I think he'd like to see himself as a sort of
wandering troubadour.
I actually cycled to Bristol
Templemeads, got the train to Bristol Airport,
flew up to Newcastle, got
the Metro into Newcastle, got
the fucking train to Wylam
and then a bus, one pound fucking ninety-five,
up the hill.
I'm staying in a farmhouse up the road,
room number one, have a wash, see me back there.
If you'd given him like a shiny floor,
lights and sound studio,
I don't know how he would have
made sense in that world because he doesn't.
There's some footage of him at a, like a benefit gig,
and it's great, but
it's not quite right.
I did it about a month ago.
And I'll tell you what me six options were,
right? Option number one if it came up on the
dice, I was going to have a nice cup of Earl Grey
tea in a co, carpet, co, oh fucking,
fucking hell. Look at that, hey?
Cause they're all back there, they've all done
all this before and they're all going, "No I'm not
nervous at all." I'm going, "Fucking arseholes!"
The last time I had a good chat with him, we were standing
in one of these festivals, behind one of these
tents, I hate them gigs anyway.
"Ian," I said, "that was really good what you've
just done there." I said, "I know you've probably
heard it a million times, " I said, " but
you know what mate you could have cracked it and
you probably still can."
And you know what he said to me?
"Have a guess what Rick?" He went, "I don't wanna
crack it." And I got what he meant.
I got what he meant and what he meant is,
he didn't want to play their game.
If option number six came up on the dice, I was
going to agree to do that gig in Islington
that's full of TVs stars where
you're not even on the fucking poster
and you're on second.
This is when I first got to know him, because he
went, he says, "I don't know which room I was in
but I've pissed in somebody's room and it wasn't mine.
I go off to Singapore to see a friend of mine.
And I come back and Cogs has been up north doing
shows. I come back and he went, "Oh, I
might have got into a bit of trouble." He always understated
what had happened - quite sheepish.
And then I got seven summonses
through the post, all in my name.
Oh no. I didn't say that.
Oh no. Didn't tell you you...
But they say once you admit you're an
alcoholic you've got the problem beat.
I'm an alcoholic, cheers.
There's a certain drink may be three in or two in
where you feel good and
that comes with all addictions.
And I think when Ian drunk when he was on stage,
he was trying to get that good moment to work with...
And of course, like all addicts,
you can't stop.
That's my problem. Like a drink, don't I, like a drink!
Ian Cognito was a self-confessed alcoholic.
So we don't need to judge him.
And the first pint of Guinness, he'd be
charming, funny,
complimentary, debonair.
And then the fourth pint, look out, you know, he
would turn and he would turn like that.
You could be having a perfectly normal
chat with him, and he'd just
turn on you for no reason.
My relationship with Cogs came to an end after
he headbutted me one night.
He was totally out of it.
He didn't even remember that he did it.
But for me personally, I just thought, this has
now gone the wrong way.
You can't manage somebody that headbutts you.
It usually involved red wine or whisky about one AM.
Out of the blue he goes, "What's all this fucking
cake shit you do then?"
But the next day it was, "Oh,
sorry darling, I was a bit of a cunt last night,
wasn't I?"
Shall I get you a breakfast?
Next morning I get woken up by my phone and it's Cogs and
he just goes, "Sorry, boy, I'll
buy you breakfast."
You could never fall out with him for longer
than about three or four hours
Hundred pound a week on booze and
if you multiply that by the fifty two
weeks that are in the year, I don't need to tell
you lot that is five thousand two
hundred pounds a year on booze.
And when you say it like that, don't sound so
fucking bad, does it?
We didn't see him all the time, and sometimes
you would come over and you'd be like, "No, can't go down there,
got a bit pissed the other night."
He would always say just don't
shit on your doorstep.
So if he'd come down here, maybe had a few too
many, offend someone, that's your neighbor, isn't it?
Or, just - he didn't like people being that familiar
with him. Even his neighbors, he
didn't want them to know who or what he was about.
I think Paul's relationship with the booze
totally came out of his need
to relax
in company. I think he cultivated
a persona which obviously became
Ian Cognito that could
deal with people and
that persona needed drink.
And that happened something like five,
six years into our relationship. I started
noticing this.
And yeah, it was pretty uncomfortable.
Eventually I did see a doctor who told me
straight he said "If you carry on drinking,
you're going to die." I said, "Why's that then?" He said,
"'Cause that's my fucking pint."
But I think it was all down to the fact he was
trying to numb the pain of life really, like
most people who have trouble with drink.
He didn't have trouble with it, it was very good at it.
Myself and Pierre Hollins went to visit him on
his boat. Cogs was drinking can
after can and I counted them, it was eighteen,
eighteen cans of beer and
then he got started on the red wine about four
thirty in the morning.
So I've gone into the doctors. I said, "I can't
sleep at night. I'm paranoid.
I can't keep my food down and I can't get an
erection." I fucking can. It's a joke.
He said to me, "You drink too much."
I said, "How can you tell?" He said,
"This is a chip shop, you drunk cunt".
We used to do the Glee Club in Birmingham
and they would put you up at quite a nice hotel.
And then one day Cogs threw a telly
out the window, and then after that,
we weren't allowed to stay in that nice hotel
anymore. We had to stay in like a B&B.
And so everyone was really pissed off with him
because he'd ruined that little sort
of nice hotel kind of treat that you
had when you went up there to work.
Oh, you know the one about the TV?
He threw the TV out the window at the hotel.
I mean that's the ultimate rock and roll thing
to do. But Cogs, he's had a good weekend, he's
earned a few quid, and he's in his
hotel room and just rings up reception.
"Excuse me, these televisions, how much are they?"
Guy's going, "I don't know, they're about one
hundred and eighty quid, is there a problem with it?"
"Not yet."
Puts the phone down.
Thinks, "Yeah, I can do that, launches the TV out
the window because he'd always wanted to do it.
I did ask him, "Did you look down first?" He
went, "Nah you can't do that darling, that's cheating.
Do you think Keith Moon would have done that?"
He would never have done that damage to
somebody's property without having the money to
cover it. That would never occur to him.
He just wanted to throw a TV out the window
because he'd never done it.
That was big of him to replace the telly.
He didn't pay for us all to go in a nice hotel though.
Sorry, I don't really bare any grudge against him.
Because I am banned from more clubs than
any other comedian in this country. Yeah.
I am banned from more clubs than any other
comedian. And you know what happens to you when
you're banned from as many clubs as I am?
Yeah, fucking Heddon-on- the-fucking-Wall that's
what happens to you on a fucking Tuesday night.
Tuesday fucking night.
Standing on a fucking table with your bollocks out, that's what
fucking happens.
Cogs has been the so-called most banned comedian
on the circuit. I think that was only partially
true. There were so many venues that wanted him.
The only times that people would ban
him, he was totally unruly
at the gig. And him being unruly would be that
he sometimes turned up pissed.
And that's just the fact.
And other times he would turn up where he was
just so on the money, and you would just go,
"Wow, that's incredible."
I asked him many times to try and dry out.
And he would often say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."
And then he would say, "I'm not
fucking doing it," and he used to say, "This is
what people expect from me.
I'm Ian Cognito.
They expect this."
And I said, "They don't.
No one cares." Personally, I think that his
addiction to alcohol, he would say it's because
he's Ian Cognito, he has to be as he has
to be and he needs to drink.
I think he could have been Ian Cognito without the drink.
Both drunks, pair of drunks to be quite honest
with you. My Dad, fucking hell, Chianti, Frascati, Valpolicella.
And at the end of the day, you
could get pissed on my Dad's breath.
He'd kiss me good night, I'd try and start a
fight, throw up a curry, go out like
a light, I was only eight years old.
Now the big thing I want to say on this
film: you have to separate
the person from the alcoholic.
Because any addict are
two people.
I say two people. One of them is a person, the
other one's like the devil.
You know, I understand him being an addict, I
was a food addict at the time.
I think we're all addicts of some sort,
especially comedians.
Who I wouldn't pick a fight with on the comedy
circuit? Definitely one.
Ricky Grover is one.
Nobody's going to start a fight with Ricky
Grover. You'd have to be fucking stupid to start
a fight with Ricky Grover, wouldn't you?
Ricky Grover is a lovely bloke and got
a big heart, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't
cross him.
Our first social meeting
was in Edinburgh all them years ago.
I've heard all different versions of what
happened myself, but I'll tell
you straight now what happened. I was standing
in the Gilded Balloon at the bar
and Ian Cognito's coming.
And he's boozed up
and he's not falling all over the place, but
he's really angry.
And he had really piercing eyes, really sort of
piercing blue eyes, and he was like looking
round.
And as he's come up to the bar, I thought this
is my chance to meet him and get to know him,
see how you are, and I thought he'd like my bit of
background, boxing and coming out of the East End.
And I went, "Hello Ian, alright mate?"
And he went,
"You're a fat cunt".
And the atmosphere changed.
And I'm standing there and every now and then
he's looking at me, but he's looking at me with
fire in his eyes, so he's looking
at me like he's going to hit me.
And he keeps looking round at me.
Now where I'm from, if someone looks at you
like that, they normally follow up.
So I'm watching his hands, I'm watching his,
he's got a glass in his hands, is he
going to try and glass me?
And I thought I'd better defuse the situation
Ricky's like an old fashioned East End
gentleman. If he's got a problem with you,
he'll give you a warning.
He'll tell you he's gonna, tell you to behave:
"You fucking behave yourself or you'll get a slap."
He's one of them guys, you know.
So you've got a chance to rein it in if you've been
a bit naughty.
So I said, "I'm going to give you a chance now."
I said, "Did you mean that, what you said?"
And he said, "Oh yeah, your wife's a fat cunt as well."
As I looked at him, I see him sort of half
come forward, like go like that, like he was
gonna do something. I don't know if he's
gonna go for an headbutt or what he's gonna do.
And I clipped him with a little left hook.
His feet went right up in the air.
I thought, fuck I've killed him.
And me and Rhona Cameron ran
over and got hold of him and pulled
him up, and he was like,
he was smashed anyway.
He went, "Fuck it, I'm going home" and
off he went.
I thought he meant going back to the flat he was
staying in. But what he meant was going home.
The general sort of chat on the circuit was he
sort of asked for that, you know,
because Ricky's actually a lovely
guy and kind of a big teddy bear
in some ways. And he - he wouldn't do
anything like that apart from in certain
circumstances, and one of them
would be if someone insulted his wife.
And I just said to him, "Look, in Edinburgh, it's
all about how you react to success
and how you react to failure.
Admittedly, it hasn't gone well for you so
far because you've been knocked out on the
Monday night, you're going home on the Tuesday
and the festival doesn't start til the
Wednesday."
So I phoned him up.
I said, "Ian, I
think you need to meet me this morning."
So he said on the other end of the phone,
"I think you've done enough, haven't you?"
And I went, "What?" He said, "I can't move my jaw.
I think you've done enough."
So I said, "Oh no," I said,
"I haven't done enough."
I said, "It's only just begun."
I said, "Meet me outside the Assembly Rooms."
So he's turned up.
And his jaw was black.
His whole jaw was black. I thought, "Thank
God I never hit him hard. I definitely would have
killed him." So we start
going for a walk, walking along,
and I say, "Ian, look," I said,
"You've really, you've dug me out and
from what I'm hearing from other people,
the reason is, is that your show ain't going
great and you want a way out.
And you used me as a scapegoat.
And I think it's a liberty."
He said, "What it is, Rick," he said, "I
can't do comedy unless I have a drink.
And then when I have a drink, I lose it."
So I said, "Don't do comedy, then."
Me and him ended up cuddling
in the middle of the street, both crying.
There was two choices.
You can either go and stand in the middle of
track two at Waverley station, or you
can insult Ricky's wife.
Either way you're going to hospital
and you can't do your show.
And I said to him. "I'll see you soon," and he
went, "No you won't."
I've heard he'd said that to quite a few people.
He was one of the big headliners at any gig.
To see him slowly getting older...
And you know you're getting old when
you look at the wheels on a suitcase and go
maybe that ain't such a fucking bad idea after all.
And the comedy circuit changing a bit
and it becoming about emails, him not getting
quite as many gigs, seeing him compering gigs.
I remember just thinking, "He shouldn't be
compering. He's Cognito, he should be headlining this."
As time went on and as he got older
and I worked with him a lot, you know, you would
sense something was changing and
that people were no longer, they were no
longer offended in the way that they used to be,
in a kind of fun, sporty way, they were
just, they just didn't trust
him as a performer, you know, not always, but
sometimes some audiences - you could see them
thinking, "Well, I don't think I'm comfortable with this."
I mean look at you young people, fuck sake, I'm
old enough to be your Dad. In fact I
am your fucking Dad.
I'm sorry to tell you that darling, but your
mother wasn't easy to live with and you were a
right little cunt when you were younger.
As comedy became a bit more of a business,
I think people thought, "Listen, I love him and
he's a great guy and he's great to hang about
with, but I could get closed down, somebody
could get hurt, somebody could get offended, who
knows." And they decided not to book him.
I think in the end, a lot of the bookings he got
were from comics who used to run clubs.
Promoters understand or thought that, you know,
younger audiences, the audiences that they
were getting don't want to see an old man
doing comedy, saying the kind of things that he did say.
I think the doctor had also found out
that there were some serious things wrong with
his heart and so on and so forth.
So he gave
up drinking, and it was unbelievable
how it happened, because one minute he's a
drinker, the next minute
he stops drinking.
And he never drunk again.
Ever.
And I think it did worry him that if he didn't
drink, he wouldn't be as good a comic but
once he stopped, if anything, I think he picked
back up from where he'd left off.
I think it did actually make him a better comic.
And this is a guy who has drunk
all his life.
And what a different man.
He was kinder.
He listened.
He was humble.
He was reflective.
So when he was drinking, his emotions
were really either anger or
crying or depressed
or, but his emotions calmed down.
Three or four weeks after he'd given up the
drinking, it was a really, really
lovely moment, and I'll never forget it. So we
went for a walk this time.
And he said to me, "I don't understand.
I'm just so fucking happy.
I've never felt this happy."
He was sorting himself out
and he was happy, and it was an amazing thing
when he said that.
And that was about a year and a half
before he died.
I go and see the doctor, he ain't got a clue,
some sort of tropical disease as far as he's
concerned. All I know is after he finished
examining me, he set fire to his hands. I went, "Oh bollocks,
this is serious." I said, "You got any advice for me?"
He went, "Yeah. Don't buy any long life milk
and don't fill up your freezer.
Next!"
I heard that he'd come upstairs and he'd had a
bit of a dizzy spell.
So he had to have a lie down.
So I thought he might have had like a cold or
flu or something like that.
I texted him saying, If you're not good,
you can go on first, do shorter
and just get off.
You know, Cognito, being the way he was,
he weren't going to have that - he's gotta headline,
so he's going, "No, no, I'll be fine.
I'll close, I'll close. I'll be fine."
I just remember the first act coming off and him
saying to me, "He was good, weren't he?"
So always right to the end complimentary
and nice to other acts.
I said to him, "If you want to do a bit less,
you know, just do a little bit less
if you're not feeling good."
And he goes, "How long do I need to do?" I said,
"Well do, you know, do about thirty" and he went,
"Well, forty feels better.
Doesn't matter if I overrun, does it?"
I was worried for me whether the gig
would be good. I was worried for him.
Is he going to be alright and have a nice gig?
And like when you see someone walk on stage
and within seconds, you think, "They're
in the palm of his hand already."
I introduced him as "your final act"
or "second act to the evening," something like that,
and his opening line was "I'm the fucking headliner"
and started slagging me off.
And he was doing all the things you want him to
do, all the brilliant performance that he does.
He was grabbing someone by the head
and shouting in their ear, walking off stage.
He did have a stool on the stage like a high
stool with a short back on it.
And he was doing a wonderful thing, sort of
sitting down every now and again and just
with his legs crossed and just do bits to the
side, just throwaway lines to the side and that
and I thought, "That's brilliant."
Probably about five minutes in he said to the
audience, "Imagine if I fucking die here
in front of you lot."
They loved him immediately.
You could sense - you know when you sense, "Oh, they love
it, you could say anything now."
I think he'd done about twenty, something like
that. I just remember him sitting down
on the stool.
Just touching his shirt like that.
And I remember thinking
that he'd remembered a bit of the material,
remembered a bit that he'd missed and he was
going to go back to it.
But I remember him going like that and just
looking up like this,
but very, very slowly then putting his arms out
and leant back on the stool.
And it looked very theatrical - this might
sound overly dramatic, but it really looked like
he was sort of lapping up his last
round of applause in a way.
And for ages he was like this on the stool.
For a while like people were
laughing because it felt like it's definitely
part of a joke.
And slowly it died down to the point people going...
"Um... Uh."
And then people were looking at me like...
And I'm like, "What? I don't know."
I don't walk on stage in the middle of somebody
else's set. It's just, that's something you don't do.
And it got to the point where, yeah,
someone had to do something.
So I walked on stage with one of the audience
members and to the point where I put my hand on
his arm, I still fully expected him to go, "Boo!"
And, erm, but as soon as I looked at him,
looked at his face, I knew it was serious.
There was two A&E nurses in the audience
who immediately started trying to resuscitate
him. The people who couldn't do anything
filed out as soon as they could to make space
so the people who could help could help.
Everyone in that audience did everything they could.
And the ambulance arrived.
I do remember the policeman
picked up his bag and he's unpacking
it to try and find out his name.
And he pulls out a bag of hash like that, that
looked like a small green pillow.
And he just went, "Well, let's not concentrate on
that now" and then he said
to me, "Do you know the gentleman's name?" And I
realised I don't know his actual name, so I got
to say to a policeman, "Ian Cognito?"
He'd have loved it if there was a headliner on after him.
That's what, that's what he would have
fucking loved. If there was another act on after
him: "Somebody been paid a bit more fucking
money? Well, you're better than me, you cunt, are
you? Follow this."
After we learnt it was, it wasn't a
heart attack, it was a ruptured aorta, and that
means the heart fills full of blood.
And you kind, of in a way, you kind of faint
and it's a most, the most peaceful way,
heart-wise, you can go, apparently.
And it did look weirdly peaceful.
He did. It wasn't a grab your chest and groan in agony.
He put his arms out like he was lapping up
applause and slowly slipped away
in front of an audience.
An audience, it needs to be said,
who absolutely loved him.
And I know that your last sense to go is your hearing.
And I think we, we've all taken comfort from the
fact that the last thing he would have been
aware of was laughter in his ears,
which is just such a poetic way to go, isn't it?
If - who knew it would be global
news the next day?
And then he was everywhere, and I think that
would have been very strange to him because
that's not something he ever courted.
I said this a few times. "A mate of mine died
over that time and he died on stage."
And people - like everyone I said it to -
"Oh, that guy, I've read about that guy."
Everybody knew about this.
Oh, he'd have loved that, he was in Hello
magazine. When it's these things sometimes
the first person you want to tell about
something and hear their reaction is the person
that you can't tell and you
can't hear the reaction of.
People say it's what Cogs would have wanted.
He never would have done that,
knowingly done that to Pat or Andrew.
He'd be absolutely mortified.
Just fucking cried in the street.
Erm, yeah. It was a...
All I wanted to do was to be
in a room with loads of other comics.
I just wanted to be with comics because they
were the only ones that would get,
you know, how important
this man was.
I think we all collectively
thought, you know what,
if he wanted to go any way?
That would be the way.
Ian's home was on the stage.
You know, if you'd scripted the legend of
Ian Cognito, that's how you would have written it.
He'd obviously put his body through a lot, a lot.
I spent a few weekends with him
and it took me weeks to recover.
It was quite amazing that he actually lasted
this long when I think about all the amount of
alcohol and drugs that he took in the '90s.
Then to go to the wake and seeing all the people
there, all the old faces, people I hadn't seen
for years. Hundreds and hundreds of
comics. And everyone going up and telling
stories about him.
I said, people will say it's what he would have
wanted. And he related to me, "Well, for the
record, Pat," he said "what I would have wanted
was to die in a Bangkok brothel, face down...
and a bag full of cocaine but not on the
money these cunts are giving me this evening."
It's because you knew whatever he was saying,
there was something about his performance and
his style and the light in his eyes
that you knew he didn't mean it.
And ultimately he was the
person with low status.
He was the person with frustration.
He was inviting you to find him ridiculous.
A part of me doing this, is I feel in
a room full of comedians, it should be noted,
his last gig, he ripped the fucking arse out of it.
So how he will be remembered, I think, is probably
in ten years time, primarily through a vehicle like this.
How many greats must they have been throughout
history that just never got recorded and we'll
never know about these amazing performers.
They only live in people's minds and people's memories. And
Ian, because he was never on telly, is out of that tradition.
If he was well known, it would have taken
something away from him.
He's supposed to be just one of them comedians
you saw in a gig once and you tell your mate, "Oh
fuck, we saw this comedian last night, he was
mental, he threw a pint of Guinness over someone."
He was the most purest representation
of outlaw comedy.
And, it kind of,
an era went with him.
And when he was on it, just as good a performer
as I've ever seen, ever.
If you've never been to a live comedy club,
this weekend, go to one.
Okay, go to a live comedy club for the first
time because Cogs won't be there.
But if you're very lucky, you
might just catch just a
sniff, just a passing
vision of that kind of anarchy that
only live comedy can do.
But I think he belongs to a tradition of
performers that go back,
like, centuries.
I can imagine him in a troupe of
players touring inns
in the sort of 15th century, or I can imagine him
in like a mead hall
in the 11th century.
I can just see that tradition of performance
in so many different settings in him.
And that's something that I think we've lost
a bit in stand-up.
I think he was undoubtedly an inspiration to
a lot of comedians.
There were many comics who you could have seen
over the years, who - you know that they've
seen him. You know that they've been inspired by
him as well. When you were on a bill with him
and when you were chatting to him, you really
felt like you'd made a good decision in life.
People won't forget him, as some sort of
epitaph, that's not a bad one, is it?
People will talk about Cogs for years to come.
On the surface, he'd just kind of go, "Oh, fuck
it, forget about me. It doesn't matter.
I don't matter."
But then the little part of him that kind of
really wanted to be loved and wanted success
and wanted all the things that he professed to hate, I
think he would be genuinely touched that we love
him so much.
Yeah, he was a legend and this is a bit of a
legacy for him, and he'd love that.
I think Ian would be quite pleased that
everybody saw him in this light.
He'll probably also think it's a load of old bollocks.
I think Paul will be sitting thinking,
"I've inconvenienced quite a lot
of comics who worked with me, they've had to be
dragged out when they've had better things
to do and talk about me on some documentary."
Yes, that will be his legacy. Once again, Ian,
I'm here doing something for no
fucking money, all because of you.
It feels like his whole life
was like a set up, and his
death was the punchline to a joke.
That in his own head, he was this
comedy rock star legend,
and now he is.
The man who shocked audiences and he gave
them one last shock didn't he?
The fact that he died on stage, it adds
to the myth, doesn't it?
But it is just a myth.
A lot nicer if we weren't making this film right?
One day the world might be a better place and
we will love each other and we will share things
together and it won't be a something for nothing
world or everything for some, it will be
everything for all of us shared out
equally. One day we just might live in a
world where there is nothing to be gained from
making people look small and taking the piss
out of them. And when that day happens, I am fucked.