‘We talk about grief and loss in the most joyful possible way’
Battling Covid and depression has put Jonny and The Baptists through the wringer – so why not turn it into a laughter-filled show?
At least if you’re going to scrap most of a show and rewrite it, it’s nice that you can almost keep the same name for it. Musical comedy duo Jonny and The Baptists – Jonny Donahue and Paddy Gervers – were preparing a show in early 2020 under the title Dance Like 2019 Never Happened.
The pair have put out seven albums and been on several tours, where they have picked on subject matter such as stopping UKIP (in 2014 their song Farage went viral on YouTube), social inequality and the end of the world, all dealt with in their satirical, hummable way.
Over a Zoom call, with Jonny and Paddy together on the sofa, the former tells The Guide: ‘We had a version of this show that would have been very different.
‘We had this idea because 2019, if you think about it in terms of things we lost – we left Europe, and then that election right at the end of the year, that meant the Tory party had a proper majority, so any hope that we were moving left was skewered and gone. We're socialists who supported Jeremy Corbyn, but whatever your politics, if you're a rational person, you've got to feel sad about Boris Johnson winning a majority – even if you didn't like the opposition, which we did!
‘So we were dealing with those two things, and then we lost a dear friend in 2019, so we talked about grief and loss in the most joyful way we possibly could.’
As they began preparing the show for a run at that summer’s Edinburgh Festival and a subsequent tour, Covid hit.
‘The show is still about all of those things, but it's also about the whole world stopping as well as just the bad things happening to us and in our little political bubble,’ says Jonny.
‘It's quite fortunate,’ Paddy deadpans, ‘we didn't actually have to change the title.’
And then Jonny caught Covid – something he blames on the ‘bougie’ nursery he sends his daughter to.
‘It's not that we'd lost our roots – all childcare is expensive if you live in Hackney, and there's not really a lot of options. This nursery is quite expensive, but it meant we could at least do our jobs, and basically everyone else who goes there apart from us is a millionaire.’
‘The parents – not the children,’ Paddy interjects with a laugh. ‘I’m imagining all these 55-year-old millionaires in the nursery now.’
Jonny continues: ‘The reason I got it that early is because all of those millionaire parents were off holidaying, and then they brought it back.
‘So I got Covid on day one, which feels hugely appropriate, because I always imagined if there was a world war I would die on the way to it. I'd trip over en route to the first battle and die of my injuries.’
While ill with Covid Jonny suffered from vivid fever dreams.
‘I was so ill, I've never been that ill – I thought I was dying, and I am a hypochondriac.
‘Some of the show is very like those Covid fever dreams. The show is actually about the grieving process and we ended up using the Kubler-Ross model, the five stages of grief,’ denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
‘We go through those, and in the bargaining section in the show, Paddy has a duet with the devil, which does feel very much like my Covid fever dreams.’
Jonny endured months of long Covid, something which was only recently alleviated when he had his first jab of the vaccine.
‘That seems to have ended it. I went from being so ill and so fatigued, I genuinely have all of the energy of an overweight 38-year-old dad, which doesn't seem like a lot, but it is huge compared to what it was!’
At the same time, Paddy’s mental health went into decline. ‘During that Covid spiral, Paddy's mental health fell of the charts – I nearly died and you lost your mind. But it is a really funny show!’
So how did they decide to tackle this? By starting a podcast called Making Paddy Happy, which they began doing daily last April.
Jonny says: ‘We thought we'd start doing this podcast about mental health and men and talking. Paddy was really struggling, he was in a shared house unable to go out.
‘You were doing really badly,’ Jonny says to his friend, ‘and I didn't have very much energy, so I was like, I’m going to check in with you every day for 15 minutes, but we'll record it.
It's quite fortunate, we didn't actually have to change the title
PADDY ON REVISING THE SHOW
‘For two reasons, firstly, it will give it a real impetus to do it, and secondly we're going to have to monetise things or my kid's going to starve!
‘It was born out of love and practicality.’ Paddy says: ‘The podcast was great. I think it became far too easy to bury our heads in the sand – not to deny what was going, but like: “It's all right, it's all over, everything's gone, we've lost everything”. Not being able to gig, losing all of our work, and money, and the ability to see each other, which is usually how we deal with things, you can very quickly fall out of contact.
‘Not to do down any of our friends or partners, but the two of us are largely more in contact than anyone else.’
‘It's a weird...’ Jonny starts, ‘symbiosis,’ Paddy finishes.
‘It's that thing with a double act, that team of people who work closely together,’ adds Jonny, ‘it's a huge thing to suddenly strip it away.’
Paddy takes up the theme: ‘It's a codependence – not only from a friendship and mental health point of view, but a financial point of view and a timetabling point of view where every day has at least to be discussed with the other one.
‘As soon as that's stopped because our industry shut down, you'd be surprised at how quickly...’ he trails off.
‘Then at the same time we're getting emails from the government telling us to retrain, says Jonny, ‘which, I'm not going to lie to you, didn't help.’
Paddy: ‘So we started doing this daily podcast almost as a sort of cloak and dagger way to have to maintain contact and therefore prop up each other's mental health, and it turns out that works.’
The pair kept up the daily schedule for 11 weeks, but have now cut it down – more than 70 episodes are available free on the usual streaming platforms.
Jonny explains: ‘We're doing two a month now, one that’s completely free for everyone, then we do one on (online subscription platform) Patreon that's subscription only.
‘One of the nice things about it is that it allows people to feel like they're paying for the other one as well. ‘So some people really feel like they're supporting you in a patron-ly way, and then the people who can't afford it aren't shut off.’
Paddy is wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the word ‘Zero’, which The Guide – being a fellow fan – recognises as a Smashing Pumpkins shirt. This sends the conversation down a weird tangent on frontmen who've gone a bit off the rails, like the Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan.
This then leads to former Smiths vocalist, Morrissey, who it turns out Paddy has a very personal reason for disliking. By the time Paddy’s finished his tale of woe we’re all giggling conspiratorially.
Jonny and The Baptists: Dance like It Never Happened is at The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea on Sunday, July 25, 7.30pm. Tickets £15. Go to wedgewoodrooms.co.uk.