Bill Bailey ranks his performance on the main stage at Sonisphere as second only to playing with an orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall.

“It changed me,” he says of headlining the touring metal festival at Knebworth in 2011.

Beforehand, the idea that comedy could work in a music context and not be a side show in some hippy tent behind a noodle van for those who’ve overcooked it in the main stage pit was inconceivable.

“I realised from years ago that the set-up wasn’t representative of what comedy had become. Outside of festivals comedians were playing arenas.” He calls the show a watershed.

“Doing that gig was the promoter saying, ‘Oh, all right, call yourself a comedian, doing arenas, Charlie Big Potatoes, you headline a metal festival then’.”

That we are talking at all says Bailey – animal lover, gentle accountant Manny in Black Books who absorbed The Little Book Of Calm – proves its success.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a metal mosh pit but if you fall into the front then you’re not coming out.

“There were 65,000 people there, most of them wearing Slipknot masks, and if A: they didn’t like you and thought B: you were making them late to watch Slipknot then that’s it, I’d have been torn apart like a donk, like a thing – I’d have just been a bit of hair at one end and a bit of boot at the other.”

Being ripped apart by Slipknot fans would at least be quick. Better than being slowly eaten by ants.

“Or torn apart by Coldplay fans,” proffers Bailey, in that ruffled literary manner he’s made his own. “They’d be stopping every five minutes feeling guilty: ‘Oh no, what have we done? Oh… probably things will pan out all right.”

Finding new ground

We’re talking Qualmpeddler, his newish show which he translates as “worry- monger”. Bailey will attempt to find new ground – or at least put old ground to new music – in celebrity and politics.

The show is heading to Estonia and Eastern Europe as well as Brighton.

“Language is no longer a barrier. There is a whole new generation watching and listening to English and British comedy through YouTube. They’ve seen all my shows. I played in Sweden, in a small town in the south, and they got all the jokes.”

He was so busy he didn’t even have the chance to do a literary tour tracing the steps of his Scandinavian crime drama hero Wallander who is from Lund.

Bailey didn’t escape recognition in Indonesia either when he filmed Bill Bailey’s Jungle Hero to mark the centenary of explorer and naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace’s death.

“We were in the jungle on this tiny island near Papua New Guinea and there were a couple of local guys shinning up a tree. They’d lived in the forest in the middle of nowhere forever, and one of them says, ‘Oh you’re that bloke off the telly!’”

Bailey cracks up: “I’ve seen you playing the piano.”

Eddie Izzard is another English surrealist whose popularity abroad is through the roof in part thanks to YouTube. His French and German tours are often in arenas. The difference being that Izzard performs in the native language.

“Eddie is a total one-off, a one-man Babel fish phenomenon. I’d love to be able to do that, to see how comedy works in another language.”

Still, Bailey has music.

“Music is universal. It introduces a different dynamic to a show. I remember when I first did my stand-up solo show in Edinburgh. I thought, it’s a long time an hour. It sounds like an age with just me, standing there, talking in a microphone. That’s why I wrote songs.”

He got a keyboard and pod and a weird spaceship to hold it all together and make a spectacle.

He had wanted to be a musician. An early band had a record deal. But he loved the spoken word.

“There is something about words, particularly in English, where you conjure up things in your imagination you cannot do with music.

“Music is more abstract. Words are more immediate and precise. They take you somewhere and I need both.

“If I’d been a musician I’d have been a frustrated comedian.”