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When Graham Fellows first performed in character as amateur singer-songwriter John Shuttleworth, Margaret Thatcher was PM and A-ha were storming the charts. Fellows was 25; his beige vocalist and organist alter ego was in his late 40s. “I started doing it when I was very young,” recalls Fellows, not a little wistfully, when we meet at his agent’s office in London. “And I had to put makeup on: crow’s feet, white stuff in my hair.”
He goes on: “I remember doing a Lily Savage special in Blackpool for TV. And in the dressing room I was sat next to the lead singer of Showaddywaddy.” It never takes long for a Fellows/Shuttleworth anecdote to tend towards bathos. “He looked at me a bit askance and said, ‘This is odd. You’re there being made to look older, and I’m here being made to look younger.’” But the years roll around, and on the eve of his 40th anniversary tour as Shuttleworth, Fellows says: “I might have to start doing that now too.”
By now, of course, the character has attained “national treasure” status, his BBC Radio 4 show being, by some measures, Britain’s longest-running radio sitcom. And there’s a new book – John Shuttleworth Takes the Biscuit (“a crumbly collection of songs and stories”) – out too. Fellows has become one of those few comics (hello Steve Coogan and Steve “Count Arthur Strong” Delaney) whose personae age with them over decades – albeit at a slower rate. “John has aged at about 30% of the pace I age at,” calculates Fellows. “He was 46 when I started, which was the age of Paul McCartney back then. But when I turned 60, he was still about 57.”
At any rate, the conflation of comedian and alter ego is complete enough to make interviewing Fellows disorientating. He slips in and out of Shuttleworth – all those little “oofs!” and banal asides – without noticing. The two have grown closer, but only having first grown further apart. Look back on Fellows’ public statements over the years and there’s a lot of: “I can’t keep doing Shuttleworth for ever.” Covid brought things to a head. “After lockdown, when everyone started getting back to normal, I got uneasy,” says Fellows. “Because I’d enjoyed doing nothing, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe it’s time to retire.’”
He continues: “I got panicky, really. I’d hit my 60s. I was finishing my film Father Earth – which you gave a nice review to, thank you. Or,” he corrects himself, “we managed to carve a nice review from your words.” Father Earth was Fellows’ DIY documentary about driving to Orkney with his dad, to convert a tumbledown church into an eco-friendly recording studio. Fans latched on to its dialogues in the dressing room mirror between character and creator, which offered a piercing glimpse into how the split personality operated.
“I became aware around that time that they were separate people,” Fellows recalls. “My psychiatrist would love this. But there was one gig in Kendal where I was very cross. I was genuinely not happy about being on tour, because my dad was about to die. But John was there for me with an, ‘Are we getting some Kendal Mint Cake?’ From a technical point of view, I was pleased with those dialogues. But what it means emotionally and psychologically, I leave to people like yourself, Brian.”
Happy to oblige: after an hour in Fellows’ company, it wouldn’t take Freud to fathom his love/hate relationship with Shuttleworth. Fellows became a star when he was still a teenager, after his novelty single Jilted John reached No 4 in the charts. “That definitely unsettled me,” he says. “It suddenly put a pressure on me to succeed and stand out.” He had trained as an actor but now felt obliged to be a musician and singer. The creation of Shuttleworth helped square that circle.
The character felt niche for a while, plonking away at his Bontempi organ, hymning bus stops and bars of soap. “I did gigs early on where people were just baffled,” says Fellows, who even now sees himself as more cult act than mainstream. But soon Shuttleworth soared to Jilted John levels of popularity, with TV and radio appearances featuring his wife, Mary, and manager Ken, a near-miss in the Perrier comedy awards (“I lost to Steve Coogan by one vote”), and a suite of timeless comedy songs that includes Pigeons in Flight, Austin Ambassador Y Reg (“It’s the car that I revere!”) and my personal favourite, I Can’t Go Back to Savoury Now.
But the reprieve from angst was only temporary. Fellows introduced new characters to his repertoire – musicologist Brian Appleton, concreter Dave Tordoff – before abandoning the latter after stage fright led to the cancellation of a fringe run. As the years and decades passed, he worried whether his output – ever more Shuttleworth tours and radio series – was sufficient. “I still beat myself up that I haven’t done very much,” he tells me. “I was thinking today, ‘What am I going to say to Brian about other things that I’m doing?’”
There are bits and bobs: a short film here; a sitcom cameo there. Fellows sighs. “I always remember hearing Morrissey on Desert Island Discs saying, ‘If a man doesn’t know himself by the time he’s 50, God help him,’” (Fellows and Morrissey were born on the same day.) “And I thought, ‘God help me. I’m 65 now and I don’t know myself. I’m still struggling to work out what’s what.’”
And here Fellows pauses. “I’m just going to pop an aniseed ball,” he says. “I stopped vaping recently. But I’ve got an oral fixation. Which is apparently a sign of autism. My girlfriend’s convinced I’m autistic – and also narcissistic. She’s always asking me to rein it in. ‘Just rein in what you said there.’” He turns to me. “Are you asked to rein things in all the time?”
Still, amid all this existential – and oral – restlessness, Fellows has made his peace with Shuttleworth. “People come to see him because they want that comforting mix of songs they know and some daft chat about John and his cosy little world. And I like it too, I’ve realised. I still get emails and letters talking about how [my songs] changed people’s lives, and how they repeat the lyrics to their wives every day. Count Arthur Strong can’t say that, can he?”
Fellows’ new show, Raise the Oof!, will include a new number about a bizarre – but very John Shuttleworth – incident at a gig in the “Devil’s Arse”, a cave in Derbyshire, two years ago, when an audience member got lost en route to the show and tumbled off a cliff above the venue. The performance was abandoned while emergency services rescued the punter as he clung to a protruding tree. “He turned up at another gig about three weeks after the incident,” says Fellows, “with a big bruise on his head. Not from his fall. One of the rescuers had dislodged a rock above him and it landed on his head.”
And so The Ballad of Dangly Man will join an oeuvre rarely rivalled in the annals of musical comedy. Is that enough to still Fellows’ nagging sense of underachievement? “I think I care a bit less now,” he says. “I don’t really have ambition any more. I just think, ‘Write this book, do this tour, then go and do some volunteering for the local canal.’”
But he will keep relishing the simple pleasures. “To be able to play a bossa nova beat programmed by a Japanese engineer is a wonderful thing,” he says. And if, as he ages, he hits the occasional bum note against that backbeat, or forgets a tune – well, playing a scatty character provides ample cover. “Rather than panicking I just go” – cue John’s voice – “‘Oof, what’s the words? Come on, lad, keep up, what is it? Thank you.’ Then I carry on.”
In that space where ageing performer meets ageless character, Fellows is at his happiest – and, perhaps, most creative. In more than one instance, Shuttleworth has absent mindedly ad-libbed a killer new lyric decades into a song’s life. Like the climactic pun on his track You’re Like Manchester, which Fellows says sheepishly, “only came to me 15 years after writing the song. There are comics out there much quicker than me, who would only have taken a month, or a week, to work out that ad lib.”
But you’re operating, I say, on an entirely different timeline. “Well, maybe I knew on some level that I was going to be doing it for 40 years,” he says, cutting himself some slack. “Maybe I knew I was in for the long haul.”
