‘I think he is probably the devil,’ said the work experience boy when I was going to meet Derren Brown, the magician, mindreader, ‘psychological illusionist’, what-have-you. ‘Because he does exactly what I’d do if I was the devil, which is pretend he can’t really do magic and that it’s all just a trick.’
Brown turns out to be an extremely nice man, so his evil telly presence must at times be a bit of an albatross for him. The thing is that, meeting him, you can’t help being aware that he is a genius puppet-master with strange powers of perception and the ability to manipulate people into doing the most extraordinary things. His most recent show, Hero at 30,000 Feet, had him hypnotising a man into seizing the controls of what he thought was a plummeting plane. In 2005 he placed another man in a real-life recreation of a computer game and made him believe he had to shoot zombies. Using the power of suggestion, he had a bunch of middle managers decide to rob a security van. His next stage show, due to open in the spring, is called Svengali, suggesting more of this sort of thing to come.
In the mahogany-panelled, book-lined sitting room of his beautiful London pad — two apartments recently knocked through to form one — I’m watching a scaly sea monster in a tank choke down a small blue fish that happened to swim past, and feeling a bit like that fish. What if I suddenly wake up in a warehouse wrestling the walking dead? This flat is quite something. Freakish taxidermy — a mother and infant monkey ensemble, a two-headed goat creature on the wall. There’s a baby chimp pickled in a jar. An enormous giraffe skull and vertebrae in the corner. Every time I lean forward on the sofa, a small stuffed Yorkshire terrier is asking to be petted.
Brown is huddled in a leather armchair wearing a checked shirt and jeans. The sandy goatee is present, although he shaves it off from time to time when he’s not working and wants to go unnoticed in public. I wonder if it gets tiring, his line of work. Does he find meaning in people’s every glance or gesture? ‘It’s more about switching it on, and it almost comes with putting on a suit and having a bit of makeup... In the rest of life it would be too exhausting. On stage it’s also a game you get the other person to play with you and that’s not always appropriate for normal life. And I find it kind of antisocial. I make friends and find out it took them quite a few weeks of knowing me before they realised I wasn’t constantly sizing them up. I might be more persuasive or whatever than the next person if I need to be but…’ His light tenor voice trails off.
Brown specialises in debunking his own trickery (and that of psychics and quacks) by showing its workings, the psychological calculations underpinning it. He exposes the pitiful malleability of the human mind. In a way the best stunts are the simplest, like when he buys stuff in New York with blank strips of paper, makes tube commuters forget the name of their stop, or gets bookies to pay out on losing tickets (‘Let’s go and collect our losings’). It’s bliss watching his victims mouth blankly like goldfish.
But we are here to talk about his autobiography, Confessions of a Conjuror, in which he sets about demystifying himself. It’s a mental perambulation taking in a history of magic, childhood memoir and a forensic look at his own foibles. The book makes a mortal of him — and admittedly there is an aspect of this that is disappointing for those of us who find him the most intriguing of celebrities. There is an openness that may stem from his private life now being happy and settled (he lives with his boyfriend of the past few years).
He claims to have been a solitary child with behavioural tics verging on the obsessive-compulsive: in adolescence he decided always to miss out the top step in a flight of stairs, and if he forgot this rule he would have to find some excuse to retread and correct. At school he was an arty misfit whose father was the sports teacher (in later life he has made his peace with jocks because it turns out that they are easily manipulated on stage). At Bristol university he became a Christian— he says that was in order to not have to confront the fact that he was gay. He also got into conjuring: ‘I was a bit geeky and probably avoiding relationships really, which magic seems to go hand in hand with,’ he says now. He spent the next ten years as a jobbing restaurant magician.
So on paper he gives a lot away. But doesn’t his success rely on his being a bit enigmatic — isn’t the spooky image useful? ‘Well, maybe in some ways. But I think there’s only so long that can hold for… With magic you can’t talk about the stuff that makes it really interesting to do, so there’s a tendency towards posturing and developing a mysterious persona that can only last so long before it becomes insulting. That’s never really interested me. I don’t have that sort of ego, I suppose. Some level of honesty — as much as is appropriate for someone who deals in deception — is important.’
How about the ethics of his shows? Do they vet people before sending them into battle with zombies? ‘I think that was the first thing I did with that element of… trauma.’ He laughs. ‘He was fine, he was exhilarated by it. The things that can look a bit reckless like that on screen, the reality is that so much care goes into it that the people in them have always found it fascinating.’ And the better known he becomes, the easier it gets. ‘There’s an element of trust. Doing the stage shows now, people come up at random and I just click my fingers and they fall asleep. Their expectations are raised and it makes it easier. With hypnosis it’s all to do with people’s experience, you’re not putting some sort of power on them, you’re working with their own sense of hype or belief. A hypnotist is just another sort of authority figure.’
In the book he writes about going to see a hypnotherapist because of his teenage tics — sniffing, knee-knocking, step-skipping — but says it had no effect. Does he employ his skills on himself? ‘I’m not a very good hypnotic subject, but things like… I used to be a very fussy eater and I’d play a little mind trick. I was having a pizza with salami on it and I was eating it and going mmm, this is lovely, in my head, and then realising I could eat it fine and then I quite enjoyed it and I started doing that with everything... It’s a way of understanding how the mind works. I do do a little bit of that kind of thing but just in that it makes sense to think in ways that are helpful.’
He always emphasises misdirection as intrinsic to what he does. In the light of this, during some of the long passages in the book that dwell on minutiae, I couldn’t help wondering if he was distracting the reader with detail. This notion he dismisses: ‘I think the most trivial things about people are the most interesting and also give that Wildean idea of the mask behind the man, that it’s the surface things that actually betray the character more than some sense of deep personality within.’
I leave the flat feeling utterly beguiled. What a lovely chap. It is only several hours later that it sinks in that I didn’t manage to pose a single tricky question, or in fact prise out anything. Probably it was innate cowardice, but I prefer to think he put a hex on me.
Confessions of a Conjuror is published by Channel 4 Books, price £18.99.