Robin Ince has endeared himself to me before his show even starts.
First he hands out cards and asks us all to write down any books that have helped us be more empathetic, to understand how someone else thinks and feels. I love lists and I love recommending books. We’re going to have things in common.
Next, he points out that the music being played pre-show is by The Specials.
‘The Specials and Terry Hall were weapons of empathy for me.’
Oh yes. We’re on the same page here Robin.
The show, when it starts (although it’s not entirely clear when it does start, Ince’s pre-show banter segueing as seamlessly as it does into his in-show banter), is a paeon to books, or at least that’s what it appears to be at first. Ince loves books and he’s brought a stack of them along to talk about (many found in local charity shops, some in independent bookstores like Tills and Company in Portobello and Lighthouse Books in West Nicolson Street – and Lighthouse is actually here, running a post-show stall outside the auditorium) and he’s generous in handing them out.
But it soon becomes clear that what Ince really, really likes is people, especially the kind of people who like books.
‘The people who come to my shows are, like me, non-threatening. None of us got picked first for games. Except in error.’
Books, he explains, create empathy, connections between strangers; he’s had many such encounters, and as he recalls them we can laugh at his jokes while at the same time appreciating the truth in what he says. The stranger on a train whom he wants to help but fears may be offended, until the ice is broken by his Cressida Campbell badge. The man in the book signing queue who bought a graphic novel on Ince’s recommendation and wants to talk about how it’s helped him understand his son.
‘People who read know doubt is OK.’
In 2021, when Covid had thwarted plans for a stadium tour, he instead did a tour of one hundred British bookshops. He loves them, the more eccentric the better.
‘It’s like walking into the minds of the people who curated them.’
He can’t resist helping people who’re looking for certain subjects in the stacks, and is delighted when his advice hits the spot. People often take him for a member of staff, and he’s happy with that.
(That tour, by the way, led to Bibliomaniac, his fifth book; The Times Literary Supplement called it ‘joyous, irreverent and more than a trifle eccentric,’)
He’s been to Hay, Wigtown (cue hilarious story about the unfortunate effects of Green Room Chardonnay) and Sedbergh. No town or city is boring to him, and he has little time for those who mock places like Wolverhampton or Birmingham – he’s found something interesting in all of them, and rejoices in the knowledge that it’s Noddy Holder’s voice talking to him in Walsall’s art gallery lift.
When he finally gets round to his pile of books, he mentions Tove Jansson as one of his favourite authors. Why? Well at least partly because her writing is so positive. She finds joy in the small things. Negativity, he says, is far too prevalent just now, which is why he also loves Olivia Laing, Ali Smith and Raymond Postgate. Sue Townsend gets a special mention because “she went into the mind of a teenage boy” – in other words, she showed immense empathy.
Ince’s other big passion is science. With Professor Brian Cox (of whom he delivers a very funny impression) Ince presents Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage, and last year he had a two part radio series, Robin Ince’s Reality Tunnel, in which he explored the internal and external aspects of reality. So it’s no surprise that another favourite author is the late Douglas Adams;
‘His absurd ideas were actually physics.’
Ince loves second-hand books, and library books, because he likes to think of the people who’ve been there before him. A list of date stamps conjures up thoughts of all the people who waited patiently for their turn to borrow a popular novel; marginalia, he says, tell us so much about the previous readers (and he’s got some brilliant examples of that too).
‘Write in your books!’
He’s all for breaking the so-called rules, not only by annotating books but also by not finishing any that don’t bring you happiness;
‘if a book is wonderful, you will find joy in it.’
Books speak to us down the ages, dead writers speak to us in our imaginations, so he wants us to write as well as read;
‘To leave behind some of the archive of our minds.’
To illustrate this he tells touching stories about the poet and activist Lemn Sissay, and also about his own parents, things he found out about his mother after her death from her old letters, and ways in which books helped him communicate with his father, who came from a generation that rarely expressed emotions.
Ince has little time for what he calls the”‘cutting edge” style of comedy, and it’s easy to see why. He’s someone who believes in kindness and understanding, the kind of person you’d love to chat to on a train (and perhaps you will – or maybe even in a bookshop.) His manic, quick fire delivery can’t conceal his real sensitivity, his love for people – and books. There is a lot more to his show, and the content may well be completely different when you go to see it anyway. He didn’t get on to half of the topics he’d mentioned, so good is he at the ad lib, so easily drawn into the fascinating rabbit hole.
He first appeared at the Fringe in 1990 and according to him it did not go well. Thirty-three years later he’s still coming back, and he’s brilliant. I laughed and laughed, and recognised myself in so many of these bookish stories. I only wish he’d got onto his 1985 copy of the Smash Hits annual – maybe next time he will. You need to go to find out.
Robin Ince: Weapons of Empathy is at the National Museum of Scotland (Auditorium), Chambers Street, at 1pm every day until 27 August. (NB – you might want to allow extra time to find your way to the auditorium as the museum is very busy.
