Interview: Dan Lees

Sometimes the best ideas spring from absolute bloody desperation. Two years ago Dan Lees had booked a few solo work-in-progress shows alongside his main Fringe hour, with clown trio The Flop. But as those extra dates neared, he still had nothing to fill them. A flop was distinctly plausible.

“I was just wandering around – I like going to the charity shops in Edinburgh – and sort of tearing my hair out,” he says, “thinking ‘what am I going to do for these three shows? They’re getting closer and closer.’ It was about three days before, I was looking through some albums, and the idea came to me; so I went round Edinburgh and collected a bunch of them.”

Eureka. The eccentric joys of old LP artwork threw up a format so fertile that those once-troublesome WIPs have spawned two proper Fringe runs. Last year’s show – The Vinyl Countdown – caused joyful mayhem at Banshee Labyrinth, one of those glorious late-night word-of-mouth discoveries, and now he’s back with Vinyl Reflections. Same schtick, different sleeves, essentially. Odd album covers are a comedic goldmine, it transpires; they’re already pretty funny, then dapper Dan brings these forgotten musical figures to life.

“I think the 70s is the golden age,” says Lees, “the older covers. Obviously they didn't have digital photography then, so you basically did a shoot and were stuck with the photos you got. Some of them are absolutely bizarre – how was this actually trying to sell this record?”

Not that Lees is ever overly led by commercial concerns – he’s a clown prince nowadays, co-founder of the London Clown Festival and director of some memorably absurd Fringe moments. He had a big hand in Legs, then Logs – with Julia Masli and the Duncan Brothers – in 2019 and 2021, and the latter duo’s opus last year, Jeremy Segway, A Life Out of Balance, plus notable work by Viggo Venn and Zuma Puma. Which is quite a leftfield departure from his original plan: to become a guitar legend. “Someone said that all comedians want to be rock stars,” he says, wistfully, “playing songs to thousands of people.”

Musical comedy happened instead, initially via the duo Moonfish Rhumba. “That's when I started to meet people who’d done clowning,” he says. “My first impression was: it sounds like a cult.” He eventually took the now traditional clown pilgrimage, training with Philippe Gaulier near Paris, but only after some revelatory classes with Phil Burgers, aka Dr Brown.

“He asked me to do it, and it was a real moment of ‘ohhh, this is actually what I'm trying to do!” Lees recalls. “Which is, essentially, ‘be the butt of the joke.’ Rather than telling clever jokes, let people laugh at you.”

He can’t resist a music analogy. “With stand-up, you want that golden, bulletproof 10 minutes. Whereas clowning, who knows what will happen? ‘I'll do more of that, we'll see where that goes.’ It becomes more like jazz.”

The actual sleeves Lees embodies remain relatively secret – googling the real albums could kill the magic, he suggests. And the idea isn’t entirely new. Joseph Morpurgo interpreted neglected LP covers in 2015’s Edinburgh Award-nominated Soothing Sounds for Baby, but while that was an ambitiously scripted multimedia mash-up, Lees’ vinyl versions are more freeform. He literally riffs, mixing guitar licks with his vocal hijinks, conjuring his characters’ weird sounds live, drafting the audience in on backing vocals. Anything could happen.

“It's really bringing together everything I enjoy,” he says. “I get to use all of my different skills, the music as well, which I love. I get very excited about doing them.”

And, of course, the many charity-shop LP purchases also help some worthy causes. They must have made at least a tenner out of him so far.