The Arrival Of Merton

FADE IN. We are in a generic airport arrivals lounge, brightly lit and full of weary passengers wheeling suitcases across a polished floor. To our left is a bright pink piano, sat behind which is a man wearing a green hoodie, pulled tight around his head, revealing just snippets of a face, the majority of which is covered by a pair of thick-rimmed, black glasses. The man is playing to the arrivals, serenading them with personal messages flung across a sea of jetlagged travellers. Some approach him, tentatively. Others merely smile and walk on. This may sound like the quirky opening of a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film but is in fact a day in the life of newfound internet sensation, Merton, who’s been touring the arrival lounges of UK airports, ambushing unsuspecting travellers as part of T-Mobile’s latest advertising campaign.

In an age where the internet has changed the ways in which we both make and acquire music, the public is no stranger to stars born from sites like YouTube. We’ve had the baby-faced, big-voiced Tay Zonday, we’ve had the unintentionally hilarious Antoine Dodson and his bed intruder and of course, the ever-expanding horror-show that is Justin Bieber. All of these people have had their fifteen minutes of fame, and in all honesty most deserved no more than that. The difference with Merton, then, is that he has stood above the rest by creating the most popular five-star-rated video in the history of YouTube. And as unlikely as it sounds, it’s all thanks to a few late nights sat serenading strangers on popular webcam site and refuge of lonely nudists everywhere, Chatroulette. In just a few short months, the enigmatic hooded figure has gone from singing to strangers from the comfort of his own home, to being imitated by a world-famous musician and shipped around airports on the company dime so he can play live to thousands of tired, confused people. No small success considering this all began by fooling around on the internet. “I’ve always done improvisational music and in March there was this huge press wave about Chatroulette thanks to the story on CNN. I went on there with a friend and we were kind of talking to people and joking around and just seeing what it did. I was thinking ‘this actually would be a perfect opportunity for me to do some strange piano improvisation.’

“What I had in mind at the time was to do song requests – that’s a big part of what I do, I can play almost any rock song. If someone requests The Beatles or Van Halen or Radiohead, if I’ve heard the song I can play a believable version of it.”

Although his ability to play almost any song by ear shouldn’t be overlooked, it’s a quickness of wit that has captured the public’s attention and formed a connection with his randomly selected audience. He’s part Ben Folds and part Tim Minchin, a naturally talented pianist with deceptively sharp humour. But it took some persuading for him to combine humour and music and present them to the online world.

“My friend came over the next day and said ‘you have the right idea with the requests, but that’s going to be very boring because people are going to assume that you’re just a wedding pianist who learnt all of these songs.’ Where, in fact, most of them I’ve never played before. He said, ‘I think you should just sing songs about the people. Just open it up and start singing about the first person you see. And let’s see what happens.’

What happened were songs covering subjects ranging from big purple dragons falling in love with cats to Monika Lewinsky’s fondness for oral copulation, and a handful of YouTube videos that instantly went viral. “We immediately knew we’d stumbled upon something really special. I was ecstatic. I could tell that I’d really connected with something and people on the other end really loved it. I just had very warm responses from everybody.”

For those of you who don’t know Chatroulette, it’s probably worth mentioning that these days the site is mostly known for displaying a wide range of men who like to expose their genitals via webcam. It’s turned into a balls-out clubhouse and the fact that Merton was connecting with people in an interesting, genuine and fully-clothed way was enough to make him an instant success. One magazine even went as far as calling him “the saviour of the internet”. Although he argues that the website that first brought him success quickly became stale.

“A lot of different kinds of people were on it for the month of March. And it really went through a decline after that where I have film of me from night after night after night from April and May and June and July and there’s just very little magic happening. And even if it wasn’t naked guys it would just be like college students blankly staring at the camera and not doing anything, so there wasn’t much I could do with that.”

Luckily Merton’s improvised antics had already captured the public’s attention and if the interest of the online community wasn’t enough, Merton soon popped up on the radar of Ben Folds, thanks mostly due to a case of mistaken identity and an internet conspiracy intent on adding fuel to the fire. Before long, a large portion of people who had exhausted their 9/11 theories and were in need of a new scheme to uncover had decided that Merton was actually Ben Folds himself, a turn of events which you’d expect to come as a surprise to the elusive musician. “This story actually starts much earlier than you’d expect. In about the year 2000 I went to see Ben Folds with my girlfriend at the time. As soon as he walked out on stage she turned to me and said “oh my god, it’s you.” The following day I was in town and another friend of mine walked up to me and said, “oh my god, I saw this concert last night and this guy could have been your brother”, and I said “well yeah, I think I was at the same concert.”

“So then I did the Chatroulette thing and I put my first video up and a few people said “this guy sounds like Ben Folds, this guy looks like Ben Folds.” I think really what it is, is that a lot of myself was covered and I wear those glasses and because I was a white man playing the piano, people drew the connection. Once he heard that people were mistaking me for him he thought it would be sort of a funny media prank if the real Ben Folds dressed up like the guy who people thought was him. And it was a great media confusion device.”

It’s easy to see how such a misidentification could be made. Both are outstanding pianists, both sing with a similar drawl and, from a distance at least, both look virtually identical. In an attempt to put the rumour to bed, both Merton and Folds decided to make a video together in order to silence the gossip.

“We actually communicated quite a bit back when it first happened, he sent me an email explaining, “Hey I’m not ripping you off, I’m just having some fun with it,” so he was very gentlemanly about it. We sort of stayed in touch throughout the month and he was playing nearby where I live in America. I contacted him and said I’d love to meet you if you get an opportunity. And so we met and just on the spur of the moment we decided to do the video. Although you know a lot of people were not convinced by that video and so it almost made the rumours worse.”

Hot on the heels of his online success have been a string of endorsement offers and opportunities for Merton to leave the confines of then internet behind. In the last month alone he’s done a slot on Absolute Radio with Ian Lee – “People would call and they’d say ‘can you do a song about my gay fish who died yesterday?’” – followed quickly by the T-Mobile funded advertising campaign, an idea he grabbed with both hands. “I like playing in unorthodox situations. So, not so much the traditional piano on a stage with lights and the audience sitting in their seats in the dark. I prefer to sort of ambush people and get them when they’re not expecting it. I do improvisational songs about people, observational things, so T-Mobile had this great idea of putting me in a location where I would just deal with thousands and thousands of people over the course of the day and try and welcome them as they got off their long international flights.”

Although it’s been under a year since Merton’s internet shenanigans first hit the public eye, the sound of doors opening must be becoming ever familiar. The real question then, is how does someone who thrives on improvisation move forward? How does improvisation evolve?

“It’s a really good question. I’m interested in so many different things. I love comedy and one thing that’s nice about what I do is that people give me a lot of leeway. They are very willing to listen as I play very long exploratory piano pieces and are also very willing to let me just stand up and walk away from the piano and do straight up comedy or story telling or interact with the audience in different kinds of ways, so I feel really lucky that I have a really wide variety of things I enjoy doing and people seem to be willing to hear all of them. I like strange things like what we were doing in the airport. The thing that we were doing on the radio last night was a blast, so I can almost see maybe trying to do something like a call-in show in the future. Because it’s not so much about me, I think I’m a really good facilitator and moderator for other people, and so I like involving others that way.”

And that one sentence in many ways sums up Merton’s appeal. It’s the way in which he directly speaks to his audience – making them as big a part of the process as he is himself – that people find irresistible. It’s something fun, something frivolous, and I can’t help but think in the days of the internet’s inception, bringing people together like this may well have been the goal.

Merton was in the UK to welcome people back with T-Mobile and visited airports around the UK last week, playing his made up musical medleys to passengers as they came through arrivals. You can see more of Merton’s T-Mobile videos and follow his journey around the UK at youtube.com/lifesforsharing or http://www.facebook.com/tmobileuk