Presenting: Ben Chancellor

Words: Michael Leader
Photography: Hamish Jordan

With a mod mother and a beatnik father, Ben, 30 has a knowledge of music and passion for the culture that surrounds it that shines through on screen.

When I meet Ben in a Central London pub, he greets me with a bear hug, and indicates his ‘hair of the dog’ bottle of beer with a wink. I admit that I couldn’t find much about him online, apart from his showreel on YouTube, so where did he come from?

He takes a sip and replies: “I was the front man in a band until about a year ago, called Dirty Cuffs. But I got really bad tinnitus in the long run. I’ve been doing stand-up for the last eight months, but my first love has always been music and culture: talking about it, and communicating it.”

“I studied performing arts,” he continues. “But I could never see myself leaping into a pair of tights and going, ‘Alas, poor Yorick.’ I wanted to either be myself, or to play larger-than-life characters. For me, presenting and jerking around being comical was always natural.”

It shows. His video, a mash-up of an interview, a gig report and a stand-up routine, is anchored by his personable nature and an evident passion for and knowledge of music. “I come from this very liberal, hippy, background,” he explains. “Well, my Mum was a mod and my Dad was a beatnik. Because of that, they had a hell of a lot of music, and I was flicking through old copies of Melody Maker and NME when I was knee-high.”

Ben’s obviously an educated fellow: he peppers his speech with references, and within our short chat manages to quote Confucius, going on to relate an anecdote about David Bowie’s PR stunts in the 1970s. Does he feel the need to tone himself down for presenting gigs?

“I don’t want to come across like a snob,” he admits. “I dig a lot of commercial stuff that’s out there. Everyone has tastes, but when you go to work, you go to work. If you’ve got a love of music, you’ve got to embrace it and know it all. You could be an art dealer and particularly like Jackson Pollock and Picasso, but you’ve got to know all your masters as well, even though they may not be to your taste.”

Personality will only get you so far: Ben describes his jokes as “good… for a working men’s club in Bolton,” and is quick to insist that knowledge of your field is just as crucial. “If you don’t know that particular genre or interviewee, you come well-equipped, so you’re not just a pretty face. You take the facts, then imprint your personality on it.”

benjohnchancellor@hotmail.com