Set lists are like movies. They need a great beginning, a dynamic shift in the middle, and bang at the end.
It never became an act in the sense of an act. It was always, no matter where we worked, little revues.
As a viewer of TV shows, I always like shows more when I just feel like the people in charge have a plan. You can just tell sometimes, 'Oh, there's a plan there. They have an idea for how this is going to unfold.'
The music is the emotional substance of the show; the book just sets it up. Nobody goes to a musical to hear the book. That's the way it works.
For the second series of 'Luxury Comedy', I tried to drop the 'Noel Fielding' from it. I thought that would make it less like a solo project and more like a show. Also, it would probably have been easier to take the reaction to the first series if it had been a project rather than my name and face!
Oddly enough, even though our show is structured around women, our target audience is women, I get more calls from men every night than women.
Deciding what is to be sung and what is not to be sung is really what writing a musical is about.
It's not a bad problem to have because a lot of classic acts are known for one or two songs and in their show they basically hold those songs off until the end and you sit through an hour or so of lesser known material but in our case most of the songs are well known.
We'll get material in there and all of a sudden I'll switch the material around or the order of the show.
I go to see some big shows of other bands, and I feel like I'm so bombarded and over-stimulated that I lose interest in the music. There has to be light and shade, and less stimulating moments. There has to be an arc to the show.
You can't just sort of come with, say, 'Yesterday,' or 'A Hard Day's Night,' and it be in the wrong place in the wrong show, and expect the song to work theatrically.
I don't want to do 20 minutes on Donald Trump. I want to do 10 minutes and move on. I wouldn't even do that with a live show, because I don't want it to feel like "An Evening Of Political Comedy."
My shows are not narratives.
BoJack' is a very much a format-based show. The story should always match the format, but I don't necessarily think the story has to come first.
Normally, when I write a tour show, it's got a title that means something - a beginning, a middle and an end - and some kind of storyline and ideas going through it over two hours.
The reasons I never set out to do a talk show is they're formulaic. People come out, tell jokes and read questions. But that's not what I do, and we built the show around my skill set.
