Russell Brand on his love of West Ham and what he thinks of Fernando Torres and Wayne Rooney
Sometimes, Russell Brand said, he asks himself a question. He asks himself what's left.
What remains of his core after the transformation that celebrity has wrought upon his life these past five years? What's still intact after Big Brother's Big Mouth, Forgetting Sarah Marshall,
Hollywood stardom, hosting the MTV awards and Sachsgate? What survives? "What's left of me?" he said. "I don't live in Essex any more. I live in Hampstead.
"I don't go to the places that I would have gone to when I was growing up. I don't drink, I don't go to pubs. So what's left? What is it that I have got left from where I grew up and who I am and where I'm from? It's West Ham."
Outside, the driveway was filling up with cars. Russell's driver, Mick, was hosting a barbeque at his house on a quiet suburban cul-de-sac in Chingford.
Mick had turfed the kids out of the front room, where they'd been engrossed in their PlayStation. It was FC Porto against someone.
Russell said Mick was a Spurs fan. When Mick first started working for him, football was how they got to know each other, how they broke the ice.
What football means to us is a conversation that could occupy most people who love the game for hours on end.
For me, it's seeing something beautiful on the pitch that others only glimpse at the theatre or in an art gallery.
But I think football probably means more to Brand than it means to me. I think it means more to him than it means to most people.
Forget any idea you might have that his support for West Ham is an affectation or publicity vehicle.
You couldn't be more wrong.
His attachment to the club is rooted in the simple fact that his father, Ron, started taking him to stand on the North Bank at Upton Park when he was five.
His father who had walked out on him and his mum when he was still a baby in Grays, Essex.
His father whose absence set in train a youth of attention-seeking, bulimia, self-harm and addiction.
"You can never escape your formative and primary experiences," Brand said. "However sophisticated and different I'm going to be, I'm always going to want my dad to love me and be accepted as a man on a basic level.
"Sometimes, I think being highly analytical can expose one. Were I less open to analysis, I'd just go, 'Look at Torres' goal against Blackburn, it's f***ing amazing' or 'I love it when Junior Stanislas comes through at West Ham and suddenly we've got a new hero'.
"Both those things are true. But if you are someone like Edgar Allan Poe or Oliver Stone, you see the world as a poem.
"And you are forever looking for signs and for what your father has meant to you and your ongoing journey to be a man or to be a hero in your own life. And so, of course, this is one of the things I have clung to.
"I have said, 'This is it, I am normal, I am just a normal bloke from Essex, I am a West Ham fan'.
"There are positive elements to my fame, where I am worshipped and adored, and there is the glamour and the excitement and Hollywood and women.
"And I am not the vilified, shamed, demonic, crazed person that I am often portrayed as now.
"I am just like any other person that goes to Upton Park with a heavy heart, knowing that the bubble is about to burst."
In the back garden, the meat has started roasting on the spit. Mick's Greek so the hospitality is magnificent and there's even more talk about football than usual.
Whether United have got a chance against Porto, whether Arsenal could win the Champions League. Some of the lads seem surprised that Brand joins in so easily.
But he goes to West Ham whenever he can. And when he's abroad, he finds a TV set where he can watch the game or the highlights.
He has to sit in a box at Upton Park now because his celebrity means he is pestered a little too much if he uses his season tickets in the Dr Martens Stand.
"I have spent so long trying to distinguish myself from the crowd that it came as a slight shock to learn I cannot just rejoin it on a whim," Brand said.
"I have to sign the odd thing when I'm going into the ground but once the whistle has blown, there is a central focus and my celebrity is bleached out.
"As much as I want to get attention and be looked at, or appreciated - which is probably what it boils down to - I also do love football and the culture of football.
"There are not that many outlets for that desire to acknowledge a communal oneness, particularly if you are not religious. I don't have it anywhere else in my life.
"The other place where I found it was the excitement of being at a protest or a demonstration, particularly when it becomes confrontational and mad.
"When I was younger and a drug addict, I enjoyed that. But now that has gone, so going to West Ham has become more special to me.
"It is a pity the game has been sanitised but probably without that, it would be a struggle for me to go. I don't know how I would have survived in 70s conditions.
"I know there are working fans who have been priced out of being able to attend. But what I feel is that that ain't football, that's Earth. That's Planet Earth that that's happened to.
"Everything has become commercialised, commodified, sold back to people. The 60s got sold back to us as the 80s. That's just life."
Before we handed the front room back to the kids and the PlayStation, we played a couple of either/or games to gauge where his football loyalties lay.
Ferguson or Wenger? Ferguson, Brand said. Shearer or Keane? Keane, he said. Rooney or Torres?
"I like the minotaur quality lurching out of Rooney, but it would have to be Torres," he said.
"What I love about Torres is that someone that I know, a beautiful woman, once did a styling job for Nike.
"She went and styled Torres and she said he was really serious. He wasn't at all flirty.
"He always looks like he's going to cry. He looks like he's on the precipice of something emotional."
Brand was still in the back garden when I said goodbye, playing with the kids, making them hyper.
A film crew had arrived. They were shooting a documentary about him.
But he was still talking to some of the other men about United and Porto and West Ham and his favourite player, Mark Noble.
It's what's left.
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West Ham United !
