The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

Kerry Gatti, 30, comedian. The first thing Kerry tells me is that he’s a bloke, not a bird, though with his large frame and deep voice, I can see that for myself. His name, he says, has embarrassed him since childhood. ‘My mum thought it was a unisex name, like Hilary or Lesley-frankly, either of those would have been just as bad.’ He laughs. ‘Boys’ names for boys, girls’ names for girls, that’s my manifesto.’ So why’s he never changed his? ‘My mum’d be hurt,’ he explains. Kerry has done great things since he wrote his Freudian analysis of Blake’s Seven while studying drama at Plymouth University. One of the stars of ITV’s recent hit comedy series The Afterwife, written by the makers of Father Ted, he has just finished touring with Steve Coogan. On the road since September, with an extended run in the West End, Kerry is surely entitled to look exhausted. ‘I’m knackered after doing the show,’ he admits.

‘Your entire day is geared towards those two hours. It’s easy to go a bit mental afterwards, but the work schedule’s pretty gruelling, so I can’t indulge myself too much, unfortunately!’ Kerry tells me he’s always loved making people laugh. ‘I used to do it at school, when I should have been working. I was one of those irritating kids who never apply themselves, but the teachers can’t come down too hard on them because they’re funny-they make everyone laugh. Yes, even the teachers. Even the headmaster, sometimes, though he’d have been a challenge for even the most talented comedian!’ On the available evidence, that most talented comedian is none other than Kerry himself. While at university, he honed his comic skills in stand-up clubs with the likes of Jack Tabiner and Joel Rayner. Signed up by his agent after a show-stopping open-mike slot at Laugh? I Nearly Died at London’s South Bank Centre, Kerry secured a bit part as Nero the Nerd in the ITV sitcom I Thought You’d Never Ask. The show won an award, and shortly afterwards Kerry found himself touring in Australia and New Zealand with Side-splitters. ‘There we were, paddling in the sea with cans of lager in our hands, saying to each other, “So this is our job? F***ing brilliant!” ’

Born in Ladbroke Grove, at the age of eight Kerry was part of an ILEA (Inner London Education Authority) programme for gifted children. ‘At the weekends I wanted to play football with my mates, but instead I had to go to workshops with Ted Hughes,’ he says. ‘I absolutely hated it.’ Kerry’s mother has never worked. His father was a security guard throughout his childhood, and is now a partner in a firm called Staplehurst Investigations. ‘You mean a private eye?’ I ask, impressed. ‘Yeah,’ Kerry laughs, ‘but it’s all boring financial stuff, corporate and dull. It’s not like you imagine: sneaking up on illicitly bonking couples with a camera-that’d be much more fun.’ Kerry’s parents never had much in the way of educational opportunities themselves and were determined that their son should. ‘They wanted me to go to university and study English literature, but there was no way I was doing that.’ He left school at 16, only to return a year later when he realised unemployment wasn’t the dream of a perfect relaxing life he’d imagined it to be. ‘All right, so I caved in,’ he laughs. ‘I went to university-but I didn’t do English effing literature, though I suppose there was quite a lot of it in my drama degree-but there was also stuff that felt practical and real, which is what I loved about it.’

So what’s next for Kerry? A cameo role in the new BBC sitcom, The Reclining Avenger. Other than that, too many things to list, he tells me lazily. ‘Everyone is going to hate me next year, because I will be everywhere.’ Ask him where it’s all leading and he grins. ‘I’d like to play Blake in a remake of Blake’s Seven. That’s my number one ambition.’

Pippa Dowd, 23, singer. Limited Sympathy is the only exclusively female band ever to be signed to Loose Ship, the ultra-cool label run by Nicholas Van Der Vliet, who also signed Stonehole and Alison ‘Whiplash’ Steven. Pippa Dowd is Limited Sympathy’s lead singer. ‘Don’t ask me who we’re like,’ she says tetchily, when I dare to open with this no doubt predictable question. ‘I don’t care if it’s bad for marketing to say we’re not like anyone else. We’re not. Listen to our album if you want to know what we’re like.’ I already had, and plucked up the courage to tell the formidable Pippa that, in my humble opinion, Limited Sympathy’s music has some things in common with The Smiths, New Order, Prefab Sprout, and other bands of that ilk. ‘What ilk is that?’ she asks. ‘You mean good bands? Yes, I hope we belong in the category of bands who produce good music.’ Already photographed for the front cover of Dazed and Confused, Pippa and Limited Sympathy are expected to be huge when their first single ‘Unsound Mind’ is released next March. Has Pippa got her eye on the number one slot? I ask, hoping it’s less controversial than my last question. ‘It’s important to separate your performance goals from your outcome goals,’ she tells me. ‘The only thing you can control is your own performance-after that, what happens will happen. I want to be the best singer-songwriter in the world. I’m ambitious, and proud of it. I’ve always wanted to be the very best. Being the most successful too would be nice, though that’s less important to me than the quality of my work.’

Pippa has slogged hard for every inch of her success. Born in Frome and raised in Bristol, she has been trying to get her foot in the door of the music industry since the age of 16, when she dropped out of school. ‘Things happen in such a crazy way,’ she says. ‘I’d been plugging away for eight years and was starting to think about giving up, I was so sick of it. Endless student union gigs do nothing for a person’s morale. I was on the point of calling it a day and doing something sensible with my life when I met the girls. By “the girls”, she means the other five members of her band: Cathy Murray, Gabby Bridges, Suzie Ayres, Neha Davis and Louise Thornton. Pippa met them during a recording session at Butterfly Studios in Brixton. Gabby Bridges, who was already signed to Sony and had her foot in the door at Loose Ship, was impressed by Pippa’s voice and asked her to join her fledgling band, which at the time was called Obelisk. The name Limited Sympathy was Pippa’s idea. ‘I thought Obelisk was stupid,’ she says. ‘What is it? Just some random tourist attraction in France? I didn’t want to be part of a band called that, and it turned out none of the girls were keen on it. One day I was bitching to them about my parents, who have never encouraged my music career. I told them my dad said to me when I was really broke that he had limited sympathy for me, because he believed I’d brought it on myself for choosing to pursue my unrealistic dreams instead of becoming a dull-asditchwater accountant like him. That phrase had stuck in my mind-“limited sympathy”-because it was so dishonest. What he really meant was that he had no sympathy at all, so why didn’t he say that? Anyway, I suggested it as a band name and the girls loved it.’ A couple of months later, Limited Sympathy had a three-album deal.

As well as being lead singer, Pippa, astonishingly, manages the band. ‘We had a manager originally,’ she says, ‘but it didn’t work out. He wasn’t as efficient as I am, and I ended up doing the bulk of the work myself. Eventually we decided to let him go.’ Limited Sympathy’s first album, out in January, is intriguingly entitled Why Didn’t You Go When You Knew I Wanted You To? Pippa says she can’t tell me why it’s called that-it’s not the name of any song on the album. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to tell you the story,’ she says. ‘It’s based on something that really happened with our ex-manager.’

Though Pippa resolutely refuses to talk about where she wants to end up-‘outcome goals’, as she calls them-I put it to her that the ultimate accolade for anyone in a band is to have one of your songs playing as background music in EastEnders. ‘I don’t think so,’ she says dismissively. ‘Not until they upgrade to a more salubrious setting. Have you seen the hideous wallpaper in most of those houses? I don’t want my songs associated with that.’ That’s me told!

Martha Wyers, 31, author. Fiction writer Martha Wyers has more awards and accolades to her name than most people twice her age. She won first prize in a children’s short story competition at the age of 11, and has been bagging prizes ever since. How many in total? I ask her, and she looks embarrassed. ‘I don’t know, maybe thirty?’ she says, blushing. These include the prestigious Kaveney Schmidt Award and the Albert Bennett short story prize. Now she’s branched out into full-length fiction, and her first novel, Ice on the Sun, was published in hardback last year by Picador, and is now out in paperback. Editor Peter Straus describes the book as ‘A stunning debut, the best novel by a young author that I’ve read in a long while.’ ‘I suppose it’s a literary novel, but I hope it’s readable too,’ Martha says. ‘I was gripped by the story while I was writing it, and I want readers to be gripped too.’ She is keen to talk about the book, and admits she became ’comprehensively obsessed’ with it while writing it. It’s the story of 27-year-old Sidonie Kershaw, who falls insanely in love with the enigmatic Adam Sands at an interview for a job they’re both after (a job Adam eventually gets). Sidonie can’t get him out of her head, even though she doesn’t know him from… well, Adam! She pursues him relentlessly, ends up