BTJ: Tell us about your show. Why is it called Instrumental?
VS: I play around 20 instruments onstage. Piano, flute, piccolo, bassoon, accordion, glockenspiel, lots of percussion, floor toms, cello, violin, tambourines, egg shaker. I had this feeling that a lot of people don’t get rid of their instruments that they played when they were kids so I went onto Facebook and asked if anyone had them and loads lent me their instruments for a year. I’ve got Steve Furst’s spare bassoon and Al Murray’s daughter’s trumpet. The piano is electronic, but I'm having an old upright gutted and will fit it into it so it looks like an upright. There’s a story in the show about my first piano. My dad’s pub was throwing out their piano and my dad pushed it home, so I wanted it to represent that.
BTJ: This is different to your usual song-based shows then isn’t it?
VS: I think of musical comedy as being one sort of thing and I wanted to do something different. There are only one or two songs, it’s underscored. The show is about my family. In a nutshell my dad died, he had cancer of the oesophagus and liver failure. He was an alcoholic and a bit of an idiot. When I was a teenager growing up in Rugby and trying to be cool my dad would turn up at the skatepark and try to skateboard in his cords and polo neck. He’d fall over and I was mortified and wanted the ground the swallow me up. And then he tried it again.
Dad died last October, so it’s still quite raw, but it triggered this show. I spent a long time going backwards and forwards taking him to AA to make him see what he was doing to himself but it didn’t happen. He thought he was invincible and it would never catch up with him. Even when he had cancer he blamed it on asbestos. Every Wednesday I would not gig. I’d go to AA and sit with him, I felt I had to try. When it came to an end there was absolutely nothing else I could write about. But it’s not a boo hoo show, it’s funny.
BTJ: Do you drink?
VS: I can drink because I’m not addicted to it. You’d think seeing it would put me off, but it has only put me off doing it morning, noon and night. There are comedians who can’t get onstage without some kind of crutch. It’s different for everyone. I never drink when I’m working because I’m always driving because I’ve got a blooming piano in the back of the car! And I don’t drink in Edinburgh much because I have to protect my voice and it’s so easy to end up drinking all night.
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Picture © Andy Hollingworth
