sayle - Sophie Haydock

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ALEXEI SAYLE
‘I feel at home in
Liverpool in a way
I don’t in London’
Writer and comedian Alexei Sayle left Liverpool for London when he was
a teenager but still feels a sense of belonging in the city where he was
born – as his new memoir reveals. He tells Sophie Haydock about his
happy childhood and the creativity inspired by being brought up with
an unusual name in a Marxist household
Funny man Alexei Sayle has performed his unique
blend of stand-up on stages around the world and
made his name as one of the most iconoclastic
comedians of the UK comedy circuit in the 1980s.
But his connection to his hometown of Liverpool is
still strong. Liverpool takes on a central role in
Sayle’s latest book, the amusing and
autobiographical Stalin Ate My Homework.
The book follows Liverpool from the 1950s to the
present day. It starts in Anfield in 1952 with Sayle as
a child. “Back then, it was this perfect city in my
mind,” he says. The memoir ends, more than 300
pages later, with Sayle surveying miles and miles of
the city’s rubble. “The book isn’t just about me – it’s a
memoir of Liverpool and the paradise that was lost.
I was very angry about that loss, even when I was a
kid. I could see it was a catastrophe, even at the age of
nine. I do still love it; I think it’s great. They’ve made
the best of the new Liverpool. But it’s not what
I would have wished for. I would have wished for
them to have left it alone – for it to be as it was when
I was a child.”
The northern city is obviously a space Sayle loves –
where he admits to “feeling at home” despite having
lived in London for the majority of his life.
Nevertheless, he also had to earn back the respect of
the people of Liverpool after he flippantly described
the place as “philistine” when it was awarded
European Capital of Culture in 2008. “That’s all in the
past,” he says now. “I’ve been forgiven. I’ve been
carried shoulder high in the streets...” But on a more
serious note, he adds: “It taught me a lot. Sh*t like
that happens. You can either get defensive or you can
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learn a lesson from it, and I think I did learn a lesson.
You have to think about what you’re saying.”
Stalin Ate My Homework – Sayle’s first foray into
non-fiction – is a recollection of his early years and
adolescence spent in Anfield with his parents Molly
and Joe, whose far-left political beliefs meant he grew
up listening to the Red Army Choir rather than the
Beatles and watching Ivan the Great at the cinema
rather than Bambi and Pinocchio like his classmates.
This heightened sense of political awareness in his
early years shaped Sayle’s sense of humour and his
approach to comedy later in life. “In a sense I got into
comedy to deal with the absurdities of my
upbringing,” he says. “I developed a very dry kind of
sarcasm. I saw the humour in it all – saw that it was
absurd.” At school he stood out because his first
name was so unusual. “All the other boys were called
Stanley or David. My father, who was called Joe,
wanted to call me Joe – which wasn’t very
imaginative.” It was his mother – who has Latvian
and Jewish heritage – who decided on Alexei. She
was reading a lot of Maxim Gorky while pregnant.
“His real name was Aleksei something or other. So
she decided that should be my name.”
That decision had a big influence from an early age.
“It’s not something anyone can understand now. Now
there are schools where no child has the same first
name. But in those days, it was weird having a funny
first name. I never got picked on, but it made me...
different. It was another nail in the coffin of me not
being one of the crowd. But I made a virtue of being
different. God granted me the strength to accept the
things I could not change.”
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The impetus to write Stalin Ate My Homework
came after Sayle made a BBC documentary, Alexei
Sayle’s Liverpool, in 2008. “When I first met with the
producers I said: ‘I want this to be a rigorous Marxist
analysis of the growth of the city. You know, nothing
personal.’ And they said: ‘OK… but can we have your
mum in it – and your wife? I realised then that those
ideas I’d had of wanting to avoid the personal had
vanished. It then seemed to me an interesting project
to write about oneself.”
For somebody who readily admits there are two
distinct personalities in his head – the man and the
comedian – was it hard to get himself down
accurately on the page? “No,” he says. “It wasn’t hard
to create myself. Essentially, it’s a piece of fiction, so
you decide on an idea of who you are – there’s two
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He had to earn
back
Liverpudlians’
respect after he
flippantly
described the
place as
“philistine”
distinct mes in there – the wide-eyed little boy and
the obnoxious teenager. I’m still closer to the
obnoxious teenager, I think. I wanted it to be a happy
book – I didn’t want to write some misery memoir.
I had a very happy childhood. It was odd, very
eccentric, but happy.”
Sayle now lives in London – he moved there at the
age of 18, in 1971, to attend Chelsea Art School. “I’ve
lived in London a lot longer than I lived in Liverpool.
But I still go back a lot. I was there recently for my
mother’s 95th birthday. I don’t think I‘ll live there
again but – and I didn’t know I would feel this – I do
feel at home there, in a way that I don’t feel in
London. I feel a sense of belonging.”
But that sense of belonging, it emerges in the book,
was elusive during Sayle’s childhood. “It was a
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ALEXEI SAYLE
“I didn’t want to write some
misery memoir. I had a very
happy childhood. It was odd,
very eccentric, but happy.”
classic kind of outsider upbringing that I had –
everything was mysterious in a way. So that never
allowed me to be one of the mob.” And was being an
outsider a disadvantage? “It was a gift in that sense. It
gave me the impetus to constantly attempt to
reinterpret the world, make sense of it in my own
way.” Sayle isn’t the first person to say that true
creativity comes from outsiders – the ones struggling
to interpret the world. “People who are at peace with
themselves, or at peace with society, don’t have the
need to analyse it.” But Sayle is self-aware enough to
add that he doesn’t feel much like an outsider now.
“Once I was in, I was in. To say I don’t live a
privileged life – that would be absurd.”
Does this new-found sense of belonging and
privilege mean he’s no longer passionate about the
left-wing political issues he was brought up on? “No.
I’m still very passionate about causes like Palestine,
animal rights and homelessness. Lefties can be
attracted to the sexy foreign causes but it’s important
to put your weight behind domestic issues like
homelessness. It’s a stain on our collective
consciousness – the fact that 25 per cent of homeless
people served in the armed forces. When they have
problems, they’re cast aside, and shouldn’t be.”
Would he do it all the same again? “Comedy has
treated me very well. But my comic persona can be a
nasty piece of work. Someone was telling me the
other day that they’d watched a documentary about
Phil Collins and it was revealed he’d been upset
when I’d said I’d said: ‘Another Day in Paradise? It
Sayle grew up in Anfield,
Liverpool. “I developed a
very dry kind of sarcasm.”
Photos previous page and
cover: John Falzon
would be if you were dead, you baldy bastard.’ I felt
terribly bad. I thought, what a horrible person I am, to
say that about him to make people laugh. I did think
about ringing up to apologise but that’s going a bit far,
really. But that’s my persona. He’s horrible. He’ll say
anything to get a laugh.”
Does he have high hopes for Stalin Ate My
Homework? “I think it will get good reviews. It’s a
really good book. I’m very proud of it as a piece of
work. I did it to write an interesting book – it’s not a
vanity project at all. I think I’ve painted myself as a
bit of a dick, to be honest. Which is accurate.”
Alexei Sayle will be launching Stalin Ate My
Homework with a signing at News From Nowhere
in Liverpool at 2pm on 11 September.
Time of his life
1952. Alexei David Sayle was born in Liverpool on 7 August, to
Molly and Joseph Sayle.
1958-69. Attended Anfield Road Junior School and Alsop Grammar
School.
1971. Moved to London to attend Chelsea School of Art.
1974. Married Linda Rawsthorn.
1979-80. First MC of London’s Comedy Store. He quit in summer
1980 after attempting to strangle one of the owners.
1980-81. Became MC of the Comic Strip Club in Soho. The regular
line-up was Sayle, Arnold Brown, French and Saunders, Rik Mayall
and Ade Edmondson, Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson.
1982. First series of The Young Ones. “We knew right away that it
was a hit.”
1995. Final UK Comedy Tour. “By now I’d had enough of stand-up.”
2000-01. Wrote two collections of short stories, Barcelona Plates
and the Dog Catcher.
2008. The BBC2 three-part documentary series Alexei Sayle’s
Liverpool is broadcast. He says: “There are so many poor
documentaries around these days, full of false jeopardy and fake
emotion, so I thought it was important to tell Liverpool’s story in
an honest and genuine way.”
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