"I'm 27 at the moment and that's the famous age for rock stars dying - Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison," says Tom Bell of his second solo show, The Age Of Rockstar Death. "That was the starting point, to imagine how I'd be remembered if I went the same way.

"But it's upbeat. I want people to leave thinking, Yeah, it's better that we don't kill ourselves'. That's the minimum I'm looking for. There are those who say it might have been better if Bob Dylan had died. But not for him. That's the point I make. He's probably a lot happier not being dead."

Bell will be taking the show to the Edinburgh Fringe next month, where he will be appearing for the sixth time. The inspiration for his solo debut, last year's sleeper hit The Lost Tapes Of Tom Bell, came when he found some audio tapes he'd recorded when he was seven, which he then used to "interview" his younger self.

"It was a reaction to a really bad gig I'd had at the Comedy Store in London. The owner said, Well, that's it, I don't think you'll make it'. I wanted to prove everyone wrong," he explains. "I wasn't expecting it to be a hit at all. It was a side project. I wrote it in a week."

In addition to The Age Of Rockstar Death, Bell will again be performing at Edinburgh with Ed Weeks in the double act Tommy & The Weeks.

Described by The Guardian as "gloriously surreal", the pair were vice president and president respectively of Cambridge Footlights from 2001 to 2002.

After appearing on BBC Three's new talent showcase Comedy Shuffle in 2007, they are currently working on a pilot for a BBC sitcom.

He says the show sees the duo "playing our own characters to an extreme", with Weeks cast as a bolshy public shoolboy with a penchant for rock music and blondes, who dismisses waif-like indie kid Bell's comedy as "p**s whimsy".

While Bell enjoyed "having another show to fall back on if one went badly" last year, he found the process exhausting and lost his voice after a fortnight.

"The trouble is, you do the show and you're buzzing so you go out until about 5am with your friends. It doesn't keep you that healthy," he says. "So this year I'm going to drink a lot more water and maybe take my bike with me.

"Otherwise I might die at the end of the show, which would be slightly ironic."

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