By the autumn of 2013, UK politics had settled into an uneasy calm. The waves of unrest that had started in London with student protests and the invasion of Conservative Party HQ in 2010 had carried through into the rise of direct action movement UK Uncut and the Occupy LSX camp outside St Pauls Cathedral. In August 2011 five days of destruction and looting by disenfranchised youth, who trashed high streets across the country, was followed by a wave of commentators seeking to explain this outbreak of violence. This followed a pattern of similar protest and unrest across large parts of the world, co-ordinated through social media but acted out in the streets and squares of world cities (Gerbaudo 2012). There was rioting in the suburbs of Stockholm, ‘Take the Squares’ occupations across Europe, the spread of the Occupy movement from Zucotti Park to financial districts across the world and most significantly a tide of revolutions that swept the Middle East and North Africa known collectively as the Arab Spring.

After the economic crash of 2008, austerity politics had imposed a solution to a problem originating in the deregulation of the US banking sector on those least responsible for it – the young and the poor (Little 2014). It seemed to create a shift in the nature of protest, aided by the organisational potential of social media. Indeed French philosopher and Maoist political commentator Alain Badiou declared that history had been reborn after lying dormant following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and a new revolutionary politics was emerging (2012). By 2013 a similar pattern of unrest was rumbling on in Turkey, Brazil, Hong Kong and in the growing strength of the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the USA. But the civil wars and military coups that unfolded from the Arab Spring, particularly in Syria, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, saw the hope that had accompanied these digital-era revolutions turning to anger and despair.

It was into this mix in October 2013 that Russell Brand, comedian, film star and media celebrity, emerged as a key figure on the British political scene. Bursting into the nation’s political consciousness with an incendiary interview with Jeremy Paxman on the BBC’s flagship current affairs show, Newsnight, Brand seemed to reinvigorate the faltering revolutionary sentiment – for a while at least. With a passionate rejection of the politics of austerity, and offering a sustained critique of the political establishment and the banking sector which had caused the crash, Brand was seen by some as a latter-day William Cobbett (Hine 2015). Yet, shortly after the 2015 general election victory of the Conservative Party, he withdrew from political life, with his only lasting legacy an important and instructive victory in the East London housing campaigns to whom he lent his fame, and his continuing involvement in drug rehabilitation and policy reform that predated his ‘revolutionary’ turn. Brand’s political activities offer a fascinating case study to explore how a celebrity of global stature can transform public debate and become an established symbol of activist politics, and then seem to vanish almost without trace.

This book about Russell Brand contributes to a range of disciplines, from the sociology of culture, to celebrity and comedy studies, political theory and media and cultural studies. We ask how Brand made the transition between the fields of entertainment and politics and across different media genres, to develop the sort of flexible celebrity that enabled him to take centre stage in some of the biggest political debates of our era. We assess the manner in which his political activism took shape, what influenced its intention and reception and how, and to what extent, Brand’s celebrity identity determined the outcomes. In order to do so, we look at how his comedic and performance skills were adapted to political ends and develop a method for assessing the effectiveness or otherwise of his activist interventions. We use a mixed methodology to inform our argument, including: interviews with activists and politicians; close analysis of his media and stand-up performances; exploration of his reception both in published reviews and on social media; and biographical study using published interviews, autobiography and his comedy performances.

Our aim in writing this book was to explore the contradictions that emerge through the study of such an eclectic and engaging public figure in order to offer insights into the nature of contemporary celebrity, the contemporary political moment and the interactions between the two. When we started this research project in 2013 we had no idea where this ongoing media spectacular would lead. After all, the second-largest party in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, M5S, is led by an idiosyncratic comedian, Beppe Grillo, with considerable similarities to Brand. It has been exciting and challenging to account fairly for how his story unfolded, and to think through where and how Brand’s accomplishments as a performer and celebrity had been made to work for political ends.

Political commentators in the media have regarded Brand as either an entirely trivial distraction of no consequence, merely interested in boosting his own celebrity, or worse as a harmful influence. Conversely, he was seen by some activists and left-wing journalists as a potential political leader and conduit to reengaging a wider section of the population with politics. Brand was even described by an influential political magazine as the most charismatic figure on Britain’s populist Left (Prospect Magazine 2015). Charismatic leadership is a form of affective power which the sociologist Max Weber identified as a creative force in history (1947). In unsettled times, charismatic leaders can bring about revolutionary change by using the irrational forces driving human action to challenge the rationality of existing bureaucratic institutions before another stable set of structures and routines is established (Marshall 2014, p. 53). The limits to Brand’s mobilisation of this potential are now apparent in hindsight.

To begin at the beginning, Russell Brand was born in 1975 into a working-class community in Grays in Essex as the only child of a single mother, a childhood that was disrupted by his mother’s recurring hospital treatment for cancer. He left school at 16 with a strong aspiration to become a famous actor, but his drama school training was ended by an increasingly debilitating addiction to heroin and cocaine, a habit he overcame after ‘rehab’ in 2002 at the age of 27. By this time he had performed stand-up in small venues in London for several years and had presented a television show Dancefloor Chart for MTV (2000) and his own show Re:Brand for XFM (2002).

After securing the management team that has supported his success ever since, he achieved critical acclaim and a sell-out show Better Now at the Edinburgh Festival (2004) which led to a role presenting the talk show Big Brother’s Big Mouth (E4 2004–2007), a spin-off of Channel Four’s innovative reality show, Big Brother. This higher profile, combined with press photos of his brief sexual liaison with supermodel Kate Moss, resulted in tabloid celebrity. By 2006, he had won awards for his new stand-up show Shame (2006) and had developed a unique comedic image that would make him easily recognisable to his growing audiences (Fig. 1.1), was presenting a show on BBC’s digital channel Radio 6 (2006–2008) and writing a football column for the liberal quality newspaper the Guardian (2006–2009). In 2007 he wrote his first highly acclaimed autobiography, My Bookywook, and performed before the Queen at the Royal Variety Performance.

This rising trajectory was seemingly interrupted when he provoked a media storm after leaving an ‘obscene’ answer phone message for Andrew Sachs during his BBC radio show – by this time broadcast on the mainstream BBC Radio 2 (2007). Instead, his celebrity status was enhanced by the publicity, and he used the resulting fallout as material for a sell-out stadium stand-up tour Scandalous (2009). It also precipitated his move to Hollywood where he had already completed shooting a small role in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008). The success of this film was followed by leading roles in Get Him to the Greek (2010) and the remake of Arthur (2011) and marriage to global pop superstar Katy Perry. His rising status brought ‘edgy’ hosting gigs at the MTV Music Awards (2008–2009, 2012), but his divorce from Katy Perry (2012) and the critical panning of his acting ability in Arthur brought a close to his Hollywood career.

On his return to London he turned to campaigning for reform of the drug laws. This included his giving evidence to a Home Office Committee in Parliament; making the first of two television documentaries on the subject (BBC 3 2012, 2014); being interviewed on the daily current affairs programme, Newsnight (BBC2, 2012); and joining the panel on the weekly discussion programme Question Time (BBC1, 2013).

His political aims broadened in a call for a ‘revolution’, initially presented in comedy form in his new stand-up show Messiah Complex (2013). He was then invited to guest edit an edition of the left-wing weekly political magazine The New Statesman (2013). This resulted in his interview with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight (BBC 2, 2013) which subsequently attracted over 11 million views on YouTube. From that point on, he engaged with a series of grass-roots activist groups, including the People’s Assembly coalition of anti-austerity campaigners and the Focus E15 and New Era housing campaigns protesting the rapid gentrification of working-class neighbourhoods in East London. In 2015, he opened the not-for-profit Trew Era Café on the estate, run by recovering drug addicts, and with any surplus going to abstinence-based addiction programmes. Its launch drew on profits from his 100,000-word book Revolution (2014a) in which Brand had elaborated his political goals.

Media coverage of this book and his new daily YouTube channel The Trews (2014–2015) brought him an increasingly high political profile. This culminated in the run up to the May general election with his interviewing the Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband (The Trews 2015: Episode 309), who was widely expected to be the next prime minister. In July 2015, after the Tory Party’s election victory, Brand stopped making The Trews, and, other than initiating a book group on Instagram (2016) recommending spiritual texts, he has withdrawn from public life and is reported to be expecting his first child in September 2016 in his new home in affluent Henley-on-Thames.

In focusing on Brand, we are not attempting to find out what he is really like. Our interest is in the performance of his constructed celebri...