Russell Brand - evolution of the 'Sex Insect'

Russell out on the town with Hollywood starlet turned rock singer Juliette Lewis
11 April 2012
The Weekender

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With the help of Big Brother and Kate Moss, Russell Brand has emerged from a swamp of debauchery to become the hottest thing on TV. But his battles with heroin, bulimia, his absent father and his raging libido still hang over him.

In a hotel room at dawn, the young Russell Brand gazed out over the Hong Kong skyline. Next to him lay the girl with whom the 16-year-old had just had his first significant sexual experience. Snuggled against his chest, the girl told Russell that she would have to leave before she fell in love with him.

More here...

• Brand under fire over cancer joke

Scroll to the bottom of the page to watch one of Russell's first TV appearances - when he took his father on in the boxing ring!

Suddenly, the romantic hush was split by a loud groan from the other side of the room. "Oh, bleeding hell! I'm going to be sick!"

Ron Brand, Russell's father, lay on the room's other twin bed, entwined with two Oriental prostitutes of his own. The Filipina girl in Russell's bed was Ron's gift to his son, his desperately misguided attempt to initiate the boy into the adult world.

The father who had walked out of the family home when Russell was still a baby, planting a seed of unhappiness that would ultimately tip his son into a spiral of depression, bulimia and titanic drug abuse, had introduced him to yet another of the compulsive habits that would colour his life: an addiction to sex.

This, then, is the real story of TV's newest star: a foppish, louche but richly talented comedian who came to prominence via Big Brother but now finds himself with his own Radio 2 show and the showbiz world falling at his feet. When 31-year-old Russell Brand takes the stage at the Brit Awards on February 14, he will stand before the nation on the crest of a wave.

Compulsive womanising

His dizzying rise to prominence was propelled last year by an affair with Kate Moss, accompanied by several further kiss-and-tells, which saw him labelled as 'a legendary swordsman', 'a sextraterrestrial' and 'a sex insect'.

In recent months, he claims to have kicked his compulsive womanising too, declaring he would have no more sex until he got married.

But inside, Brand still wages a war against the same sense of anger and hurt that started him down the path of self-destruction in his late teens. He has never reconciled himself to his early feelings of abandonment, and stardom, while initially fulfilling his deep-seated need for love and attention, has brought only fresh problems of its own.

As he told radio listeners only a few months ago, he still felt 'rage' dating from his childhood which success could not erase. "That keeps bubbling up," he said. "I think it's a sense of sadness. And I think that the pressures of becoming more famous are making me deeply unhappy."

Profound unhappiness has been a feature of Russell Brand's life for as long as he can remember. He was six months old when his father split from his mother, Barbara, an immaculately groomed secretary, leaving her behind in their modest home in Brentwood, Essex.

Ron Brand was a charmer himself, an Essex boy before the term was invented. A talented sportsman in his youth, he once attracted the attention of West Ham football scouts. Ron and Barbara's only child was born on June 4, 1975, at Orsett Hospital in Grays, six years into their marriage. But instead of bringing his parents together, his birth drove them apart.

When his son was born, Ron was running a photographic studio. Ron later blamed the failure of his marriage on the stress of working long hours as he tried to make a success of his business. Over the years, he was to try his hand at everything from selling water filters to market trading.

Yet as soon as he became successful at one thing, Ron got bored and moved on. After Barbara, he was to marry twice more, each time to a woman more than 14 years his junior.

The end of Ron's first marriage was acrimonious and after he left he did not see his son for a year.

Lonely and difficult

In the ensuing years, Ron tried to see Russell at weekends but he often did not turn up at the time he had promised and Russell was, in his own words, "set out in my little coat, waiting for a man who never came". For Ron, turning up late was no great crime and he was oblivious to his son's torment.

To add to Russell's despair, his mother underwent treatment for cancer three times and he felt trapped and powerless at the prospect of losing her.

"My feeling about my childhood was that it was lonely and difficult," he said. "Of course, I have been through lots of therapy. But I do feel a sense of "you poor little sod"."

At his local comprehensive, Grays School, Brand started out as the swotty boy who always had his hand in the air. But as he grew older, it dawned on him that being clever would not make him popular. Instead, he poured his energy into being the class clown, as if shouting the loudest at school would help him cope with the insecurity at home.

Just as it does today, Brand's humour met with mixed reactions. While some of his peers thought he was hilarious, others felt intimidated by him. His vocabulary was advanced for his age and already he was all too aware of the power his words could have. "He would target whatever weakness you had and expand on it," recalls classmate Clare Sage.

Brand was not short of insecurities of his own. By his mid-teens, he had increasingly started to look critically at his own body. Though by no means obese, he had always been a chubby child, and when he compared his podgy frame to the athletic builds of his father and Colin, his mother's long-term partner, he felt fat and weak.

When he discovered he could eat and then vomit it all up again, he was euphoric at having found a way to exert some control over his body. It was also an extraordinary cry for help, as bulimia is extremely rare in teenage boys. It was to be the first of many obsessions in his life.

At Grays, Brand also met his first serious girlfriend. Melanie Gillingham was the leading lady in a school production of Bugsy Malone, in which the 15-year-old Brand shone as Fat Sam. She remembers Brand being somewhat tentative about sex. "It was all very innocent. I remember going to the cinema with him to see Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and him nibbling my nose."

But the future Lothario's most unforgettable early sexual experience came courtesy of his father, not long after his 16th birthday. Flush with cash from his latest business venture.

Ron had taken the boy on a luxury trip to Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand.

Badly depressed

The morning after their seedy shared experience, Ron casually looked up from his newspaper and asked his teenage son if he had used a condom. When Russell said he hadn't, Ron's only response was to bark gruffly: "Well, you should have," before returning to his paper. Ron's conduct as a father had been inappropriate.

Yet it was one of the few ways he knew to try to reconnect with his son. On the flight home, Ron proudly remarked: "I went away with a boy. But I am coming back with a man."

Impressed by Brand's show-stealing performance in Bugsy Malone, Ron and Barbara decided to send their son to the Italia Conti performing-arts school. But after a year, the school suggested he leave on account of his poor attendance.

A period of odd jobs left Brand badly depressed, but when he found a place at London's prestigious Drama Centre, he applied himself for once, excelling to such a degree that he earned the nickname 'Golden Boy'.

Brand was also beginning to acquire a reputation as a womaniser, but it was drink and drugs that were to divorce him from his responsibilities. After a day at Drama Centre, he would head back to his grandmother Jen's house in Barking, where he would openly roll a couple of cannabis joints as she cooked him an omelette. When Jen smelt the smoke, she would ask him: "They aren't funny cigarettes, are they, Russell? I was watching Kilroy and they said it leads to worse things."

As his grandmother had predicted, marijuana led him to LSD, Ecstasy, amphetamines and ultimately heroin, which he first tried at 19.

Many of the drugs made him feel ill. Amphetamines made him nauseous. Crack made him feel as if he was "breathing through plastic". All of his experimentation was aimed at blotting out the misery he had carried with him since his fractured childhood. "I thought I felt better with it than without it," he recalled.

At the Drama Centre, however, his main intoxicant was alcohol, in ludicrous quantities.

"Russell was an alcoholic," said one friend and contemporary. "He was a madman. He would turn up to rehearsals drunk and then just slash his wrists for the attention."

Nonetheless, no one could deny his charisma and talent for improvisation, and at the end of his three years at the Drama Centre, Brand was given the lead in the school's production of Ben Jonson's Volpone. By now, however, he was out of control, drinking around the clock. He failed to learn his lines, was fired from the play and dropped out of the course with a week to go, deciding instead to try his luck as a stand-up comic.

As Brand later said: "You don't need anyone to give you a job in stand-up. You can just do it above a pub, or by a pub, or near a pub, or under a pub. I was good at it, so it was easy to get a foothold."

In March 2000, after just five gigs, Brand entered the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year contest, one of the toughest talent shows in the business, and finished joint fourth. With his dandyish air and slightly manic, nervous energy, he stood out immediately, if not necessarily for the quality of his material.

Blossoming career

But that soon improved, becoming edgier and more confrontational. After a triumphant gig at the Edinburgh Fringe in August, he was already being spoken of as a star-in-waiting.

Brand's unhealthy appetites were not yet getting in the way of his blossoming career. With his ad-libbed humour and rock-star looks, he rapidly attracted the attention of MTV, which recruited him as a presenter for Dance Floor Chart, a weekly show filmed in the clubs of Britain and Ibiza, and afternoon show Select.

When he started at the station in early 2001, he was drinking heavily and smoking cannabis but now he could regularly afford Class A drugs as well. Wherever he went, he left a trail of destruction. Rashers of bacon were left behind pictures, and a pig's head he had been using as a puppet in a comedy sketch got dumped in a hotel bath.

In his personal life, Brand had been enjoying a rare period of stability with a new girlfriend, Amanda, who lived in Spain. But he found it impossible to be faithful. Now he was on MTV, it was easy to pick up willing partners, with lap-dancers a particular favourite.

Brand's MTV bosses were also beginning to suspect their charismatic new presenter had a serious drug problem. He would fail to turn up for shows, and when he did it was increasingly difficult for his interviewees to get a word in.

"Hear-Say, Liberty X, Mel Blatt from All Saints - I interviewed them all through a fug of crack and smack," he later confessed. "Half the time, I didn't understand what they were saying. I didn't even try to chat any of them up."

The final straw came on September 12, 2001. The day before, Brand had watched the unfolding terror in the United States, and with his reason decimated by drugs, he decided to show up at work dressed as Osama Bin Laden. His MTV bosses were not laughing. He was taken aside and told he would no longer be presenting Select.

Later, Brand would claim he was too high on drugs at around that time even to notice that Amanda had left him. "My flatmates and girlfriend had given up trying to talk sense into me and would find me most mornings hunched over my silver foil like a deranged Gollum," he recalled.

Drug-taking out of control

His father had also noticed his drug-taking was spiralling out of control. "I lost my temper with him a couple of times," said Ron. "We had one furious row after a gig. He'd died a death on stage. He'd what he called 'one ounce of cocaine and no material'. He was awful, and I shouted at him, "What the f*** are you doing? Get a grip," and we didn't speak for a couple of weeks. As he got into harder drugs, his behaviour became more extreme. It was upsetting to see."

Ron had always boasted that his son's success with women was 'in the genes' but by now Brand's appetite for sex was becoming almost as overpowering as his chemical addictions. His flirtatious manner, combined with disconcertingly direct eye contact, allowed him to pick up two or three women a day - usually strangers off the street.

"Russell was very democratic when it came to women," recalled one friend. "There were all sorts - black girls, white girls, Eastern European girls. Generally, though, he preferred curvier women with big breasts."

Yet Brand also wanted a quicker fix. Ever since he had slept with the prostitute in Hong Kong, he had not just enjoyed the convenience of prostitution, he had positively revelled in its sleaziness. Now, he needed sex in the same way he needed a hit of heroin.

Brand has since claimed that at this point in his life, he often slept with five or six women a day. "One in the morning, maybe two for lunch and three for tea," he later said. "A good week would be at least 20 in various configurations."

Nonetheless, even at the start of 2002, his career prospects looked bright. Despite the Osama Bin Laden debacle, he was still regularly presenting Dance Floor Chart for MTV. He had also negotiated his own documentary series on fledgling cable channel Play UK, in which he would go out on the road and "discover things".

But for Brand, the show, which became the confessional documentary series Re:Brand, was an excuse to sink to new levels of depravity. Most episodes had a sexual theme but one stunt shed a light on Brand's complex past.

In an instalment entitled Dadfight, Brand set out to deal with his simmering resentments towards his father by challenging him to a boxing match. Shoulder to shoulder with Ron on the canvas of an East End boxing ring, all the rage Brand had bottled up came out in a brutal flash of loathing.

"I hate myself, I hate myself," he spat. "I hate being alive. And one day, mate, you are going to get a phone call, 'Russell's killed himself. Russell's dead.' And that is going to kill my mum. But you are going to take it on the chin, because I don't think you've ever really given a f*** about me."

Pornographic letters

Ron, caught on camera and unable to take responsibility for his son's emotional scars, barely blinks. Weakly, he responds that marriages inevitably break down, and that he didn't leave Russell, he left Barbara.

"B*******, Dad," Brand snaps. "That's not the f****** reason you left. You left because you didn't want to deal with it."

Brand goes on to floor his father and then remarks smugly that he has "dealt with some issues".

The show went virtually unnoticed and about a month after the series finished in September 2002, UK Play folded due to poor ratings. At about the same time, Brand lost his radio show on London station Xfm after just four months for reading out pornographic letters on air. He was also sacked from a BBC comedy special, Cruise Of The Gods, after getting into punch-ups in an Istanbul lap-dancing club and an Athens brothel.

No one was more pleased to see Brand leave the show than Little Britain star David Walliams. Years later, he told Brand: "I hated you when I first met you. I was so pleased when you were sacked. I thought, 'Good, because you are ruining the whole production.'"

Soon Brand was sacked by his agent too, and word began to spread that he was a junkie heading for a meltdown, or worse.

"Russell was only 27 but he had already burned virtually every bridge in the business," a fellow comedian recalls. "At that point, there seemed no way Russell was going to see 30. There was nothing anyone could do about it. You were seeing him self-destruct. But you had to stand by and watch it happen because you can't help anyone until they help themselves."

Only one agent, John Noel, was prepared to take a chance on him, and when Brand was caught smoking heroin in the lavatories at Noel's Christmas party in 2002, he frogmarched his new client straight into rehab. He was told that if he didn't stop taking drugs now, he would be dead, in a mental asylum or in jail within six months.

It was a very different Brand who walked out of rehab in March 2003. Finally free from the grip of drugs and alcohol, he threw himself into yoga and religion, becoming involved in the Hare Krishna movement.

Soon afterwards, he went for an audition for a new show, a spin-off from Big Brother. He got the job on condition he continued to attend Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and that he would not sleep with anyone working on the programme. If Brand relapsed or misbehaved, he would be fired.

Launching in May 2004, Efourum, later renamed as Big Brother's Big Mouth, was a verbal free-for-all that could have descended into chaos had it not been for Brand's quick-thinking repartee. He presented the show again in 2005 but it was during the 2006 run, thanks partly to a new, gothic image, complete with wild hair and unfeasibly tight trousers, that Brand really captured the public's imagination.

And when it emerged that he had had a fling with Kate Moss, he was propelled into the celebrity stratosphere. Within a few months, Brand landed his own shows on Radio 2 and Channel 4 - and the job of presenting the Brit Awards.

He claims to have abandoned womanising and has apparently settled down with 19-year-old girlfriend Laura Gallacher, sister of TV presenter Kirstie.

Yet fame has not completely chased away the depression. Now he is a public figure, he is a target and he often feels unfairly judged.

He has been candid enough to confess that he misses drugs and still feels it necessary to attend support groups. His relationship with his father is also far from easy. Russell is currently not talking to him after Ron gave a newspaper interview. "I'd specifically asked him not to and he said things that upset my mum," he explained.

Summing up one of the prime causes of a lifetime's unhappiness in a single sentence, Brand was ruthless in his evaluation: "He was not a good father and he is now not a part of my life."

Russell Brand, by Tanith Carey, is published by Michael O'Mara on February 15 at £16.99. To order your copy for £15.30 with free p&p call the Review Bookstore on 0870 165 0870.

WARNING: These video clips contain occasional strong language which some users may find offensive...

PART 1 - CHALLENGING DAD TO A FIGHT

PART 2 - IN TRAINING

PART 3 - THE BIG FIGHT - BATTLE OF THE BRANDS

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