A review of Bill Bailey: Thoughtifier, Fringe 2025

How have I managed to get to almost 40 without ever seeing Bill Bailey live? I don’t know, but when I saw Thoughtifier was available on the media portal, it felt like a no-brainer to snag myself a tixsie early on.

Funnily enough, Girdy had actually paid for a ticket months before, but found himself upstairs in the circle of The Playhouse, whereas I had a more ‘premium’ seat in the stalls, not too far back – despite it being automatically allocated by the system).

Vibe

Bill was in good spirits for this show, and seemed particularly pleased to be back in Edinburgh for Fringe; the place where he initially launched his comedy career, and met his wife. It was good, wholesome vibes, music, stories and plenty of laughs.

There’s lots of arrows on the screen behind Bill, which all start rotating and giving the vibe that you’re maybe about to witness some sort of gameshow; you’re not.

The show

Call me an absolute n00b all you like, but I had no idea just how musical Bill Bailey’s comedy actually was – and it was a joy! There were songs about crabs, falling for a checkout assistant and buying loads of peas, and Coldplay’s Yellow performed in Turkish on a special type of saz.

In between the brilliant music (with full band) Bill’s also got some brilliant stories about things like taking hash gummies in Amsterdam, and how he reacted to seeing Gwyneth Paltrow with her baby whilst he was very drunk.

Two standout parts of the show for me were the laser harp (including a rendition of a popular song by KRAFTWERK), and a lovely song about a boy and a crow, performed in French (with subtitles so we could all follow along) – because Bill’s also multi-lingual!

I also really enjoyed Bill’s additional dancing – another unexpected delight!

Can we also just take a second to appreciate this intermission screensaver of Bill’s head? Just moving around the massive screen, bouncing off the sides, back into the middle… doing what screensavers do, but leaving a nice hazy trail behind it. Perfection.

Another thing Bill had a chat to us about was nuclear fusion, which he’s got high hopes for. Me too, Bill; me too. I’m sure the Norwegians in the room agreed (they just didn’t vocalise anything about from cheers for being Norwegian).

Overall

This was a strong comedic performance by the absolute powerhouse of talent that is Bill Bailey. It was a riot, with great songs and hilarious stories. I’d highly recommend this show to anyone – especially if they haven’t seen Bill live yet (like me) – and I’ll probably be back for his next now! Thanks, Bill.