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 journalist who takes advantage of the controversy surrounding his star client, a pop star whose drug habit has driven him into recovery. Allen appears today modeling the look of the character: orange shades and a silver Bernie Ecclestone wig. “Keith got it at a joke shop,” says Kevin, the show’s PR, from the next table. As a stand-up, he threw darts at fans and once peed in a mug of coffee beans and dropped the lot “It wasn’t a funny shop,” quips Allen. “What are you talking about? That cost two hundred pounds!” He removes the comb, revealing a soft scalp, and gently rests it on a small box.I expect the drooping horseshoe mustache to come off as well, but it turns out it’s his. Rehab is Allen’s first musical, although his career has always been close 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 raucous Fat Les singalong Vindaloo, and cut a gay reggae record called Sex Boots Dread. He admits that 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 wrote for England’s 1990 World Cup campaign. The show is a lively piece, but the pre-internet portrait of celebrity seems sketchy, perhaps irrelevant. Why didn’t the writers – Grant Black, Murray Lachlan Young and Elliot Davis – put it up today? “You know what? I don’t. Why is it set in the 1990s?” I assumed it was because of Allen’s own associations with that decade. You can hardly include a show-stopper called Simply Everyone’s Taking Cocaine and not ask Keith Allen to perform it. “Don’t be crazy!” he laughs. “It wasn’t written for me. But I like the idea.” Allen got his first line in the late 1980s when he was pitching a script for 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 merges, The Fly-style, with a football hooligan . . “I had never had a Coke before. I remember thinking, “Damn, that’s expensive.” I cut those lines, then Ali Campbell started and I panicked: “I’m going to call an ambulance!” He said, ‘What are you doing?’” Allen… “Was it worth it? Career-wise, it probably wasn’t.” Photo: Sarah Lee/The Guardian This naivety didn’t last long. In Allen’s autobiography Grow Up, he notes that the drug “entered me in the hours between 4 A.M. and 10 a.m.” He did a “massive” line before ending with “En-ger-land!” track from World in Motion. Did coke help his creativity? “No. All of that goes out the window. Cocaine is great for talking to yourself, but it stops you from listening.” Does he still get it? “Not so you’ll notice. If I do it today, it’s for the right reasons.” Which are they? “Well, why not?” Being 68 makes a difference, he says. “As you get older, time flies. A hangover can cost you a day. It’s not worth it.” He is now based in Stroud with actor Tamzin Malleson, whom he met in 2004 on medical drama Bodies, and their 15-year-old daughter. Is he prone to look back on his wild years fondly? “I stop doing that because there’s always a voice, ‘Was it worth it?’ In career terms, it probably wasn’t.” Allen claims he doesn’t even think about what he has as a career. “I’m surprised when people go ‘I remember you in…’” It’s often the BBC’s Robin Hood, where he was a jolly Sheriff of Nottingham, or The Comic Strip, for which he wrote a handful of raucous episodes and starred in many others along with Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Rik Mayall, Robbie Coltrane and others. But “most of the attention I get is from Vindaloo,” he says, rolling his eyes. “My reputation is weird and that didn’t help. Producers who don’t know me won’t touch me. They think I’m just this guy walking down the street singing about curry.” Lairy pioneers… Allen, far right, with the Comic Strip gang. Photo: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy There are no official figures on the number of children Allen has fathered, although actor Alfie and singer Lily are among them. He has described him as a “self-saboteur” who “couldn’t channel his comedic gifts into a career”. It’s not an assessment he questions. “That’s true, yes. I couldn’t 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 about a lot of things. I presented one of the first ‘yoof TV’ shows. I was one of the first performers at the Comedy Store.” He left that inappropriate space when he became “more average,” but stuck with live comedy for a while. He rarely knew what he was going to say until he stood before the audience. He threw darts at the fans. Often, he was naked. “Yeah. I’m not sure why.” One night she walked to the front of the stage brandishing a mug of instant coffee beans, peed in it and ate the batch. “Oh, I only did it because my parents and my aunt were in that night,” she says, as if looking forward to it. not to be misinterpreted. Comedy was never a career. “I saw myself becoming a David Niven figure. 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 his roots. As a child he lived briefly in Malta, as the family moved there due to his father’s work as a submariner. “I saw myself becoming a national treasure. But I couldn’t commit… to Glastonbury with daughter Lily. Photo: WENN Rights Ltd/Alamy In the UK, he bounced from state school to public school before a penchant for stealing led to borstal. Either these setbacks honestly didn’t bother him or there was no one to complain about anyway (his father wasn’t someone for whom affection came easily), so he learned to back down and press on. “I was always on the go,” he says. “That creates a take-it-or-leave-it attitude to things.” At least not his career. He has built sets for Ken Campbell, organized a club night with dancer Michael Clarke, helped launch the Clash and the Strangler, curated the comedy stage at Latitude and directed a pair of credible documentaries – one celebrating Muhammad al. -Fayed and the other, funded by the former owner of Harrods, promote theories about the death of Princess Diana. Allen is like a hedonist Zelig, always emerging around prominent or formidable figures without ever becoming himself. Take his carousing with Hirst and James. “People have said, ‘Oh, it’s that guy who was hanging around with the others.’ I always liked to think he was with me.” “Harold liked me. It’s amazing because I was loud… Allen in Pinter’s The Homecoming in April. Photo: Manuel Harlan At what he did, he excelled. He played Hogarth on stage (Michael Billington praised his “dirty fortitude”), one of Tolpud’s film witnesses in the gem Comrades, and Jonas Chuzzlewit for the BBC. When the Joe Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears was first presented, he auditioned in Alan Bennett’s front room and won the lead – although it ended up being with Gary Oldman. In 1991, he was in David Hare’s Murmuring Judges at the National. Soon after, she began a long relationship with Harold Pinter. “Harold liked me. It’s amazing because I was just this skinny guy with strong words.” If he had concentrated more on acting… “Yeah, what would have happened?” he wonders, finishing my sentence. It is likely that he is just now reaching his peak. Earlier this year, he was masterful as the patriarch Max in a wildly funny revival of Pinter’s The Homecoming, while he showed impressive control as murderer and rapist John Cooper in the recent Bafta-winning ITV drama The Pembrokeshire Murders. “I always knew I was good at it,” he says. “I didn’t think, ‘Fuck how did I do that?’ But maybe I could have done it earlier.” It’s been a crazy life, so what does he want to be remembered for? “I think I’ve always been good company,” he says quietly. And it is. I can vouch for that.
