On the Road with Adam Riches interview

Written by: Si Hawkins
Published: Thursday 18th April 2019

The Edinburgh Award-winner on Fringe freedom, West End dreams, and his long-awaited tour.

Anyone aware of Adam Riches' award-winning output might be surprised to learn that the classy character comic has never toured the UK before, even after his Edinburgh Comedy Award win in 2011. But now The Adam Riches Experience is about to set forth, which throws up some interesting selection decisions, given the impressive back catalogue he has to pick from.

Riches' live career has progressed from multi-character sketch shows - notably the award-winning Bring Me the Head of Adam Riches - to epic longer-form efforts, such as 2015's Coach Coach, and last year's eagerly-awaited Coach Coach 2: Coach Harder. The latter was actually one of three shows Adam debuted at the 2018 Fringe; most acts find it hard enough doing one. We'll get to why he took on that arduous challenge.

The tour is a solo affair, but Riches also benefits from a talented ensemble nowadays, at the Fringe and back in London. He recently launched a new regular happening at the Battersea Arts Centre with Ben Target, The Courtyard Collection (this month with a gritty Lord of the Rings flavour). There's also a regular session at The Bill Murray called Night of Nights, with Target, Stevie Martin, Daniel Cook, and added John Kearns - we should mention here that Stevie Martin has just started a run of her debut show, Vol.1, at the Soho Theatre, until Saturday.

Riches may even be launching a proper West End show, at some point in the future. First though: the he's on the road.

Why didn't you ever tour before; after the Edinburgh award for example?

Oh, a mixture of everything really. After I won the award I wanted to take a break from my own voice for a while. Then other things came in that appealed to me more. Life got in the way for a period so travelling and staying overnight was out of the question. Top that all off with the simple aspect that I'm quite lazy at heart and don't like to gig that much, and here we are eight years later with my debut.

It's such an effort to put a tour together, there's a lot that goes into it, the planning etc, and it was only really chance that this period here opened up for me. So when the offer came in I thought why not? Let's see what damage I can do nationwide!

I also think I'm a far better performer now than I was back then, with a far bigger back-catalogue to curate from, so it's just good timing all round I think.

Which bits will you be doing? And is it all nailed down already, or likely to change from show to show?

Well there's two big challenges that lie ahead. One is that the tour is two acts of about 40 minutes each, with no warm-up. So shaping those halves to open strong, build, hit hard at the interval, hit harder straight after the interval and then hit hardest right at the end asks a different question of what I might do and when. It's not just a question of picking the best sequences from each of the six solo hours I've done. This new show has to blend together and work on its own terms.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it won't all be wall to wall bangers. It will - relax. I'm just saying that there has to be some album tracks in there just to hold it all together. To help take you on your journey. God Only Knows was a B-side. As was Unchained Melody and Hound Dog. You think those guys were phoning those in? No. So neither will I.

Why did you do three shows at last year's Fringe; it seems a heck of an effort?

Yeah it was, it was generally to give myself a bit of a kickstart on things.

I'd had quite a difficult few years, for lots of different reasons, over the last five or six years, and I think I'd lost a little bit of the love, or the interest.

So I almost wanted to do something preposterously huge and demanding, that would require me to fall in love with it. If I didn't get back into it with all of these [shows], then I'd know. They were all very different from each other, and that really helped, gave a fresh zip to everything.

Having already won the Edinburgh award, do you have more freedom? A lot of shows at the Fringe - then beyond - seem quite restricted by the award criteria.

Edinburgh, that's a place I clear the pipe, have an idea and perform it. There's something very refreshing about that. You may have something that's taken years to get to the script stage, but I can balance that by releasing some ideas into the wild.

In saying that, I absolutely agree with the hour being an absolute wrong curve ball in terms of your career... actually, saying it out loud I've just changed my mind. It used to be that there weren't many opportunities to do an hour, apart from Edinburgh. That's changed.

I suppose with three shows, you've got three chances that one will touch a nerve.

Or you have three shows that aren't working - you've just tripled your agony! But when I first went up there years ago, I never saw Day 1 of the festival as the day that the show had to be ready.

You've always got to keep writing. There are very few shows where I haven't kept an eye on it, looking at it, tinkering. I think you should as well, try to find a way to continually keep improving it, on the stage, then latterly on the page. There's no reason not to, if you can make it better, and can see areas where it could be better, don't suffer in silence.

It can be very hard, I know, if you're not having a very good time up at the festival, which I've experienced as well; it can be hard to have a clear head and delicately look at your work and go 'of course, move this here and that there' - you're climbing up a sand dune and desperately trying to get something to grip onto.

It's stressful, because often a comic's whole year is built towards it...

It's completely imbalanced, you know you're going to lose money, the chances of you being seen and being plucked are slim. So you try to stack that deck by working hard on the show, having a good agent and production team around you, check the venue and the slot - but it's all guesswork, you're really just hoping that your show will have that magic dust that will catch fire.

But the chances are against you, because there's so much stuff up there, and more and more people are shouting about it, with bigger billboards, earlier on in their career. I noticed the difference last year, compared to previous years. The year I won might not have happened now, with the show I had. It was very much a word of mouth thing, that's almost an old-fashioned thing of the past, word of mouth in Edinburgh.

Doing three shows, you competed against yourself last year!

Yeah, it was a calculated risk really, but there was something bigger going on for me, so taking a bit of a hit financially in one year was going to give me something bigger at the end, I think.

It was interesting, but it seemed to work, I had people coming up to me as a badge of honour, 'we've seen all three shows' - which really is over and above: it was an effort for me to be there for all three shows.

But what helped, they were very different hours. One was in the afternoon and was a character piece, one was a sequel so we hoped that would get an audience, and The Lone Dueller was this crazy batshit experiment - a concept album almost.

So I felt as a comedy fan, you always try to write stuff that you'd be interested to see, and all three shows almost felt like a love letter to the fringe, the things I've loved seeing, that have influenced me: big batshit ambitious concept stuff, I've loved seeing those over the years. You walk in and suddenly you're somewhere else, in this terribly kitted out room, suddenly they manage to transport you somewhere else.

One of my favourite bits is in Coach Coach, where they go to the stadium comedy show...

That's right, they went on a date to see a stand-up comedian, who was a Star Wars figure - they just walked into where the audience were sat, and I put a Star Wars figure on the stage to show how far up in the gods they were.

Your cast in Coach Coach and The Lone Dueller is like a traveling rep company...

Yeah, that was something I was very much influenced by, the stuff I read growing up. I remember reading a Michael Caine biography, he'd talk about being in Horsham, doing 50 shows or whatever, and I loved that.

That's how I started out, I gathered together a company, strictly with the idea that I would write tonnes of plays, and the same company would perform them, over and over again, and I did that for I guess the first eight years of being away from university. With differing success.

It was only when I started taking the characters out of those and putting them individually into comedy club scenarios that my career moved on. But always with the hope that I could come back to having a company again. So when I did that with the first Coach Coach, it was such a great feeling.

And people then hopefully see the cast's solo shows too?

Definitely - Ben, Stevie and Dan, their new shows were really great, and really different - it was Stevie's first one, I think it was Ben's best one, Splosh, and Dan's was a very good show this year. So that's what you want, it's like a satellite community.

So what's the plan, longer term?

My goals and ambitions, they've all changed. It's always been an ambition of mine to create stuff that exceeded its budget, and exceeded audience expectations when they walk in. I love the fact that I can do these batshit ideas, and hopefully people will come to see them.

The idea with Coach Coach now is to take everything I've learned from one and two, and turn it into a West End show, have a go at that as a challenge now.

Crikey.

It's like the apex of live performance, creating a show that could play to a hugely broad audience on the biggest canvas possible, with an idea that I think is one of my strongest, in terms of reaching an audience but retaining me in the middle.

Coach Coach has something rare in the West End: a genuine sporting element, as the audience end up shooting for glory...

Definitely, yeah, I love sports films, and the kernel of that was 'how do I get that feeling?' - the audience, characters and actors all experiencing a live moment. That'll form the skeleton structure of a West End show. It'll be fun to write.

Cracking a big show, like the guys in [The Comedy About A] Bank Robbery and The Play That Goes Wrong, it must be so satisfying to birth that at the Fringe and see it playing globally, that's a wonderful accomplishment.

Coach Coach himself is a great character, the grumpy college coach.

And the older I get, he's better. I won't ever outgrow him.

So that's the next kind of aim for me. That's the next carrot I'm running towards.