Born in Bromham, Bedfordshire, in 1974, Matt Berry studied contemporary arts at Nottingham Trent University before getting involved in comedy sketch shows. He stars in a number of TV comedies including Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, The Mighty Boosh and The IT Crowd; he co-created and stars in Snuff Box and Toast of London. In 2004 he and Richard Ayoade co-wrote and starred in AD/BC: A Rock Opera, which aired on BBC3. His film roles include Moon (2009), Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) and One Day (2011). Berry has also released six albums; his latest, The Small Hours, came out last month and he tours the UK with his band, the Maypoles, starting in Birmingham on 25 October.
1 | Book
The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1660-69)
The 350th anniversary of the great fire of London has pricked my interest and I’ve reread Pepys’s diary, which I hadn’t looked at since my early 20s. As soon as he found out London was on fire the first thing he did was bury his cheese, a big wheel of parmesan. The fire didn’t come anywhere near him. He was quite an unpleasant bloke: he fancied himself as a bit of an actor, so he’d learn Shakespeare and get his wife to test him. But when he got something wrong and she corrected him, he’d bite her fingers, which is ridiculous.
2 | Film
Bone Tomahawk (2015)
This was recommended to me by Mark Morriss, who’s in my band, and was the lead singer of the Bluetones. It’s a western with Kurt Russell but has a slightly unearthly, supernatural bent, which is all I need in a film. It’s one of the most violent films I’ve ever seen, but unlike other recent westerns, the violence is very much part of the story and is completely necessary – it makes you frightened of the characters rather than just punching people for no reason. It’s a very simple plot: a man’s wife gets abducted and they say it’s Indians, but what they find is something they would never have expected.
3 | Museum
I’m a huge fan of this place and it’s been an amazing year for it. First it had the Crime Museum Uncovered, which was disgusting and terrifying but one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen. Since Victorian times, Scotland Yard has had a museum [solely] for policemen – containing artefacts from well-known crimes, ropes that were used to hang criminals etc – and for the first time the public were allowed to see it. It was really macabre. Then its latest exhibition is Fire! Fire! [about the great fire of London]. It was a bit of a reminder of when I was an actor in the London Dungeon, where you had to learn a lot of London facts in case anyone asked you and you looked like a fool.
4 | Art
Terry O’Neill exhibition at Ransom Art, London SW1
I’ve just been to this and there were some amazing photographs which I kind of knew but didn’t know he’d taken. There’s the picture of Faye Dunaway relaxing by the pool, which was my ex-girlfriend’s favourite photograph of all time; there’s one of Sean Connery playing golf on the moon; and there’s Raquel Welch on a crucifix. I don’t know how that would go down in this day and age but I would imagine it caused a lot of interest at the time. His Bowie photographs were fantastic too: the most famous one is where he’s sat with a dog in the foreground and it looks like it’s four times the size.
5 | Restaurant
I’m a big fan of this seafood and oyster place. I’ve been to the branches in Spitalfields and Borough Market and I love them both. It’s a real spectacle when the food comes out and there are all these things you didn’t even know existed. It seems like there’s always something new and odd-looking that makes you think, “How the hell do I eat that?”. Then you look over and someone just puts it straight in their mouth, the whole thing. I like to experience new things like that.
6 | Music
Miles Davis, Bitches Brew (1970)
I’m getting back into a lot of the 70s electronic kind of jazz, Bitches Brew and some Herbie Hancock stuff. At this present time I’m not seeking out new things – I’m not not doing that on purpose, it’s just I’m revisiting old things that used to excite me and I’d forgotten about. So I’ve gone back to all that free-form stuff which a lot of people hated at the time, and Bitches Brew, which was slated by purists but ended up being Miles Davis’s bestselling album. It hasn’t aged: it’s so free sounding, and it’s all played by humans, which means there’s a real sort of human contact. It’s when things are put together artificially that you can tell exactly when they were made.
7 | Documentary
The Six Degrees of Helter Skelter (dir Mike Dorsey, 2009)
I’ve just watched this documentary about Charles Manson – it’s very in-depth and it blasts away any sort of “cool” aspects of the Family, the rock’n’roll aspect, because there really weren’t any. It outlines how Manson noticed that the young girls were starting to get bored – talking about things like ice-cream and what was on television. Up to that point he’d tried to convince them that things like that didn’t mean shit, that they didn’t need them. So he knew he was in trouble, that hewas losing his grip on them, and that’s when he decided to get them to do terrible things.
