For the Love of Brand: Messiah Complex

Two nights ago I found myself only meters away from Russell Brand.

Before I start about the Messiah complex and Russell's public persona, I have to say that I have loved this strange skinny, fearlessly and carelessly sexual, extravagant man since I was about 12.

 I used to listen to his radio show every week alone in my room and laugh and learn. It was a time in young adolescence where I was probably quite impressionable, maybe that's part of the reason I still feel like he's still a loveable constant in my life.

 I read Booky Wook when I was a bit older and was dumbfounded and entertained and appalled and excited. Then Russell got quite famous and married a pop singer with massive boobs who got famous with a song about doing things many sexually curious girls may do.

The BBC let him go and he sang weird songs in corny American films that you watch once and then forget the plot forever.
Recently his interview with Jeremy Paxman caused more than a slight cyber stir. Russell had disappeared slightly from my radar, but suddenly he was attracting attention for something I hadn't really expected.

Image courtesy of Frankfurter Neue Presse, Sajak

I appreciate everything Russell says in this interview. He seems so confident that humans are all connected, that political problems can be solved by us. He's so hopeful, he reminds me of an indignant child. He's wild and weird and somehow ridiculous.
He's brave enough to make statements he knows intellectually confident men and women will pick apart and oppose.  I can't say I am behind every political idea he has ever voiced, but I just appreciate him utilising his opportunities to appeal to the masses in such a reckless, hopeful, human manner.

In my thirteen-year-old fantasies Russell Brand would visit this bleak spot in Germany and I would see him in the flesh. My nineteen-year-old self was able to realise this fantasy on a Sunday evening after being at work for too long.

Mr Gee opened the show with two poems that made my heart and soul melt together and stop time and space for a while.
Later Russell did the same in a different way.
He was over the top and filthy and atrocious, but it felt like he was loudly proclaiming thoughts individuals have occasionally and silently, sometimes shamefully keep to themselves.

You know that feeling you get sometimes when anything seems possible and you realise everything could change and you're not the only person who feels a specific way? I get that at concerts and I get that with Russell Brand.

Yes, he is sexist sometimes and he defends this only by crudely claiming he can make any female orgasm first. He also has a filthy mouth and currently insubstantial administrative plans necessary to entice a revolution BUT how nice, how refreshing to have someone on stage making hundreds of people laugh. How refreshing, to hear someone say things out loud you think to yourself when you're the only one awake and wrestling with problems you had forgotten the world had.

Listen to one of the poems Mr Gee performed: