The Noise Next Door were hits at last year’s Big Mouth Comedy Festival – now they’re returning to Portsmouth

The Leigh Park triplets rode the coat-tails of Busted and McFly to a couple of top 20 singles in 2004, but their fortunes faded and they split up.

This is not about that Noise Next Door – this act of the same name is a comedy improv group.

The four-piece formed in 2008 and have carved an impressive reputation for their improvisational skills.

But as member Tom Livingstone explains: ‘We get this bump every new and again and people go: “Wait aren’t you those triplets?” When we started and we thought let’s be the Noise Next Door, we had a look and back then Google just wasn’t as powerful as it is now… But we are now legally currently the only Noise Next Door working,’ he laughs, ‘We did once have someone come to a gig and say: “You didn’t do any of your old songs!” And we were like, what do you mean? First of all there’s four of us, secondly we’re quite clearly not triplets. They’d watched the whole show thinking it was the same band – but there were four of us now, and we’d decided to do comedy instead.’

The guys were all at the University of Kent, but are now based in Brighton, and on their last visit to Portsmouth they proved to be one of the hits at the first ever Big Mouth Comedy Festival.

‘It was great, we had an amazing time. We’ve gigged in Portsmouth over the years, but that’s the first time where it was just: “Hey, we’re going to do an hour”, and the audience was so appreciative, and given that there was so much on, we were lucky with our audience. We were in the main room just after Alistair McGowan, so I think a lot of people came to see him and then just stayed on for us!

‘That was the great thing about the festival and the way they put it on – here’s lots of things, some you will have heard of, some you won’t.

‘It was a bit like a music festival in that respect. But it was a bit more civilised and there was less chance of getting wet. This time we’re in the studio which is a bit more intimate, which really suits what we do - the audience is so involved, we’re interacting with them the whole time.’

This time out the boys are bringing their Remix show to the Guildhall. As Tom explains: ‘The quick pitch is, we take suggestions from the audience and make up themes and songs and jokes based on their suggestions. It’s different every time, the audience can ask for what they want to see and they’ll get a bespoke experience. We’ve developed lots of new and interesting things – lots of different ways of getting suggestions and using the audience members, it’s a really exciting process.’

But if each show is different, how do they rehearse? Do they rehearse, even?

‘It’s a strange one,’ Tom laughs. ‘We don’t rehearse suggestions like: “Ooh, what if someone said labrador?” There’s no point in doing that.

‘There’s two things we do. Firstly, it’s training, like we make our brains fitter. Like if you keep running, you’ll get better at running, so if you try to come up with jokes quicker, you get better at it. And then we have format games. For example, we’ve got a new opening song for the show – it’s about things that aren’t normally sexy. So we kind of write this song, with no words to it. We ask these questions of the audience, and we know this is the sort of angle we can take. For a scene or a game, we have to play with mechanics, like everyone can only speak one word at a time, or we play with language. It’s about finding the right way to twist a song or scene to try and make it interesting.

‘It’s kind of hard to explain if you haven’t seen the show! It’s about working on the construct and concepts of the show within which we improvise.’

THE NOISE NEXT DOOR: REMIX

Portsmouth Guildhall Studio

Thursday, January 31

portsmouthguildhall.org.uk