To celebrate his 80th birthday on November 24, Billy Connolly chatted to Clair Woodward
Billy Connolly has been a best-selling artist for a decade, yet he still can’t quite believe it. “For 50 years I've been confident in my comedy. Then suddenly, along comes this thing and I'm not confident in it because it's somebody else's field. But I'm getting used to it and getting used to people liking it, which took a lot of living with.
“I could much rather live with people not liking it – I think that’s due to a Glasgow upbringing. ‘What do you MEAN, you LIKE it?’, he laughs. “But the fact that other people like them and want to live with them in their homes blows me sideways. To have somebody who wants a part of your mind in their life - I thought my wife had been the only one to fall for that, but it turns out that she's not alone.”
Seizing on the theme that he’s now an artist, he muses: “Now it's only a matter of time before I buy the opera cape and the cigarette holder and launch through the scene, swanning through the theatre district, talking to dogs.”
The opera cape will have to wait, though, because today, taking stock of his collection in the Castle Fine Art gallery in London’s South Molton Street, he’s wearing dark denim and a pink shirt that rivals the attention-seeking colours of his new silkscreens, and sporting pigtails, leaving him very much at the non-swanky end of the art world, and loving bringing his art to a growing band of collectors.
He may have given up stand-up comedy in 2020 due to the effects of living with Parkinson’s, but his ability to conjure up a great story that comes alive in your head is still there, even though it’s now his art, on paper and in a series of sculptures,as well as writing (his autobiography Windswept and Interesting was a bestseller) that takes up his creative time these days.
Billy’s art career very much didn’t begin at school; it was his pals who did the drawing. “I sat next to Tony Fleming who was brilliant at art. He’d draw spaceships that looked like doughnuts, with a bit in the middle that controlled everything. And it was breathtaking; straight from a Superman comic. He loved doing it and he loved the fact that I loved it.
“And next to him was Tim McGlinn. He was funny and he could draw cartoons. And we sat at the front and I would put punchlines on his cartoons. And we were a gang. We used to explode with laughter and the teacher would say: ‘What's the hell's going on over here?’, but he liked it as well. So I got a kick out of art without actually being an artist and it waslovely being part of it.”
Billy began his career with the Born on a Rainy Day collection of drawings for Castle Fine Art; he started drawing whilst on tour in Canada and picked up paper and pens in a Montreal art store after he’d tired of looking at the animals in the window of a local pet shop. “I’d never drawn in my life until this point, but I just started drawing weird islands and carried on drawing. I asked my wife (the psychologist, writer and performer Dr Pamela Stephenson-Connolly) to tell me if they were getting better and she said ‘definitely’.”
So his manager sent the drawings in Billy’s trademark style of stripey elements drawn with a fine, black pen, to Castle, who launched his hugely popular Born on a Rainy Day collection in 2012, and is celebrating a decade with the gallery with new works – a range of eye-poppingly colourful silkscreens, plus a first for him, a full-scale 1.7m-high, limited edition sculpture of his drawing And on Monday God Created the World, whose subject is a Clydeside welder creating the planet.
“It means a lot to me because he's a welder, and I'm a welder,” says Billy, referring to his pre-fame career. “I keep thinking what welders will think when they see it. Welders on the Clyde will love it because it’s an angel, as they already think they're pretty much godlike”.
Connolly famously became a welder after getting in the wrong queue at the shipyard (he wanted to be an engineer), but never regretted his fate. “The welders were the stars of the shipyard, and it was a happy trade. My favourite was Friday afternoons playing cards. Every ship has a double bottom, so we used to get between the layers - I was a tea boy - and my job was to make welding noises with cards in one hand, the other hitting the wall with a piece of steel.”
Another work in Billy’s collection is Windswept and Interesting, a drawing of a joyous Teddy Boy cutting loose with some maracas, which have been rendered in a series of gloriously gaudy colours. The Ted reminds him of his own youth as a sharp dresser. “I used to wear those loud socks like him for many years. I had an Italian three-button suit and I can just see myself in the bathroom at the Locarno Ballroom in Glasgow fighting for the mirror, with the smell of Old Spice wafting through the place You’d have a skinny tie with a big tie pin to hold it down, and cufflinks that looked like eagles landing on a ruby. It was quite a posing game in the dancehall, with people choosing where to stand so they’d look best.
“I fancied myself as a dresser. You’d go to Jackson the tailor and have them your suits tailor made and pay for them week by week. You’d end up with a suit in tatters, but you’d still be paying for it. When I got more money as a welder, I got two more suits.
“I had basket weave winklepickers with a Cuban heel and was sat on the bus with my Eddie Fisher coat and my winklepickers with white socks. A woman sitting opposite me said: ‘You're very neat about the feet’.”
Meeting people who collect his art is something Billy enjoys, and he’s visited Castle Fine Art galleries in Brighton, London, Birmingham and Glasgow on his most recent trip to the UK from his home in Florida. “I have a lot of time for the fans because I owe them everything. And, particularly in Scotland, people speak to me and five sentences in they go: ‘Oh my God, it’s Billy Connolly! I thought you were my cousin!’. And that’s a lovely thing – not many people get that in their lives. When you get beyond the autograph stage, you become like a relative”.
Billy’s art practice is something he is relaxed about. “The things I choose to draw, I don't choose to do them before I sit down and do them - they come alive on the paper. It's always been like that, and it's very comfortable.
“I have lovely relationship with the people at the gallery. I was doing black and whites for four years, but they asked me to try colour; they really bought the pieces to life and they really took my breath away. Now I find myself signing hundreds of prints, and that's remarkable. I don't know what to think about it”.
As well as his tenth anniversary as an artist, this year also marks a milestone birthday. On November 24, Billy will be 80, and it’s no big deal for him. “It means nothing to me. I had a big do when I was 60. We had a ball - great friends, great music, dancing, getting drunk, smoking cigars and being stupid. And that'll do me for partying. I'll go to other people's parties, but to be 80 is very strange. When you're 65 you get to retire. When you're 21, you get the key to the door. When you’re 80, you get told to bugger off. What presents do you get an 80-year-old? A walking stick? A guide dog?
“So I haven’t arranged anything for my birthday, I’ll let it sneak up on me. And at 80, you forget it’s your birthday anyway,” says Billy with a laugh and more than a hint of that sharp-suited teenage peacock in the Locarno Ballroom way back when.
• The latest instalment of Billy Connolly’s Born on a Rainy Day collection, including new silkscreens and sculptures is available exclusively at Castle Fine Artwww.castlefineart.com
