With his unique style and approach to comedy, Andrew O’Neill has built himself quite a cult following. Jamie Walker talks to him about his Black Magick Fun Hour tour...

Hi Andrew, how’s everything going?

Hi man, generally I’m really good, I’ve just had an explosion of various projects. I just filmed my History of Heavy Metal show and I’m currently meeting with someone who is going to animate one part of it. I did a Kickstarter and raised £14,000 to make the show.

I was going to ask about that. The show was so popular when you were touring it, were you surprised by how keen people were to getting it made?

Yes. I had no idea how it would do, I’d never done anything like it before. I’m friends with Amanda Palmer, who did the biggest Kickstarter ever [Amanda’s Grand Theft Kickstarter raised over one million dollars] so I knew that there was potential in it.

Basically I wanted to circumvent the need for asking someone to commission it. When you ask someone to do that they tend to ask who it appeals to but it’s just for Metalheads. It was a pleasant surprise and shows I’m on the right track.

So how did the show itself go?

It was great. My friend, who has seen the show about ten times, reckons it’s one of the two best he’s ever seen. We packed out the Camden Underworld and it was a really good time, it was special. Now I’ve killed the show and I’m ready to get on with everything else. I’ve given myself a clear few months to work on it and hope to get it out in early-mid December.

You’re bringing your Black Magick Fun Hour to Komedia this month, how much are you looking forward to bringing that show back?

This is by far the best thing I’ve ever done. It feels like me finally perfecting the type of comedy I want to do. It’s very silly, but it’s the boldest show I’ve ever done.

The opening is a very serious and direct invocation of Hermes and Mercury, the god of the spoken word, who is the patron god of stand-up comedians. I started writing the show about three years ago, so it had a long gestation period, so I perfected a lot of it. It’s a show I’m massively proud of.

Originally it was called Andrew O’Neill is trapped down a well, which was a show about just that, and after I finished writing my book I did a ritual invocation of Mercury and thanked him for the help he was giving me. I did this big thank you ritual and I had a profound and life-changing experience with Mercury. He bonded with my physically and told me that everything I did was an expression of him.

Then my life became unrealistic for a couple of weeks; I met Jimmy Page and asked to perform in a show I was trying to get tickets for. If you were to write those two weeks as a sitcom nobody would believe it happened.The biggest coincidence of that was finding out that someone in Australia was also doing a show about being trapped down a well, the concept was exactly the same.

My initial thought was that he’d copied me, but then I realised it just wasn’t a very original idea. Then I realised it was Mercury intervening telling me to make a more original show.

There’s a fine line in entirely believing something and acting like you believe something, and so I chose to act like it was a direct intervention from Mercury, to make the show about him.

Then weirdly it’s become the most successful thing I’ve done. There’s something very pure about the approach to the surrealism.

And do you think that gestation period you mentioned helped craft this show into what it’s become?

Oh absolutely. To be on a cycle of doing a whole solo show a year you have to work your butt off. So having a couple of years of not needing an end product you can be a lot more playful and work round things. You achieve things you wouldn’t otherwise achieve.

There are things I do in this show that needed to be tried in order to make it work. So having a really long time to work on a show is like tuning and engine, and now it’s in the best it’s ever been. This is its last outing too and it’s something really special.

You’ve played in Brighton a fair bit over the last few months, if you exclude the month in Edinburgh, what do you like about the city?

Brighton’s an interesting one because on the one hand it’s full of groovy, vegan, hipster, anarchists, and on the other hand it’s really spoilt with culture. So audiences in Brighton can be hard to please, in the same way London audiences are.

They’re smart and people who consume a lot of alternative culture. I feel very lucky that in gigging in Brighton constantly I’ve built my crowd, and have a dedicated audience who come to see me. It’s a delight to play to a smart audience. What Brighton doesn’t have is something you get in the weekend clubs, particularly in the north, which is a much more working class, night out, kind of feel.

You do a gig in towns in the north and they leave the house wanting to have a great time, and you are part of their night out. Do a gig in Brighton and London and there’s more of a sit back, chin-stroking, we will take this in kind of vibe. Having said that, I’m lucky enough that I now have a crowd so that energy seems to be there.

I just did Bent Double, which is a beautiful show, and Zoe [Lyons] seems to have built her own little world there. They’re people who are generous with their laughter and with people who make outsider art.

I’ve always created stuff that I want to see and people resonate with that. I’d rather be 10,000 people’s favourite comedian of all time than 100,000 people’s “There’s that bloke off the telly.”

So what does the rest of 2018 got in store for Andrew O’Neill?

I’m pitching a new book, I’m finishing my DVD, and I’m writing the next show. I’ve also just made a music video with Amanda Palmer, which is currently being mixed and edited.

So why is the Black Magick Fun Hour the show to see before you take it away?

I think this marks the high point, the show that everything I’ve been doing has been building towards. So once this is done I’m probably going to take a whole new approach to how I do stand-up comedy. So if people like what I do now they need to see this show.