Russell Brand's Orgy Experience

Being all holed up in the aptly named KeyStone clinic (while the facility did not have its own uniformed police force, the suggestion of bungling silent film cops is appropriate) was an all too familiar drag. Not that I'd ever been incarcerated in sex chokey before, Lord no, but it was the umpteenth time that I'd been confronted with the galling reality that there are things over which I have no control and people who can force their will upon you. Teachers, sex police, actual police, drug counsellors: people who can make you sit in a drugless, sexless cell either real or metaphorical and ponder the actuality of life's solitary essence. In the end it's just you. Alone.


The necessity for harsh self-assessment wasn't the only thing I hated about that KeyStone place. No, that vied for supremacy with multitudinous bastard truths. I hated my bed: the mattress was sponge, and you had to stretch your own sheet over this miserable little single divan in the corner of the room. And I hated the room itself where the strangled urges of onanism clung to the walls like mildew. I particularly hated the American grey squirrels that were running around outside - just free, like idiots, giggling and touching each other in the early spring sunshine. The triumph of these little divs over our noble red British squirrel had become a searing metaphor for my own subjugation at the hands of the anti-fuck Yanks. To make my surrender to conformity more official, I had been obliged to sign a contract promising that I would refrain from masturbation, porn, "seductive behaviour" and "sexual contact with another person". I should have been photographed signing it, like when a footballer joins a new team.


Sex is recreational for me, as well as a way of accruing status and validation (even before I attained the unique accolade of "Shagger of the Year" from the Sun. We all need something to help us unwind at the end of the day. You might have a glass of wine, or a joint, or a big delicious blob of heroin to silence your silly brainbox of its witterings, but there has to be some form of punctuation, or life just seems utterly relentless.
And this is what sex provides for me - a breathing space, when you're outside of yourself and your own head. Especially in the actual moment of climax, where you literally go, "Ah, there's that, then. I've unwound. I've let go." Not without good reason do the French describe an orgasm as a "little death". That's exactly what it is for me (in a good way, obviously) - a little moment away, a holiday from my head.

So why would a fella who plainly enjoys how's yer father as much as I do go to a so-called "sex camp"? Many people are sceptical about the idea of what I like to call "sexy addiction", thinking it a spurious notion, invented primarily to help Hollywood film stars evade responsibility for their priapic excesses. But I reckon there is such a thing. Addiction, by definition, is a compulsive behaviour that you cannot control or relinquish, in spite of its destructive consequences. And if my life proves nothing else, it demonstrates that this formula can be applied to sex just as easily as it can be to drugs or alcohol, both of which I know more than a bit about.

At one point, about five years ago, I had a harem of about 10 women, whom I would rotate in addition to one-night stands and random casual encounters. But shagging - incessant as it was - no longer seemed to have the required calming effect. I was on the brink of becoming sufficiently well known for my carnal overindulgences - with lapdancers and prostitutes, to say nothing of all the women who didn't sell sex for a living - to cause me professional difficulties. There's nothing especially peculiar or odd about my erotic predilections. It's the scale of my sexual endeavours that causes the problems, not the nature of them. I just like girls, all different ones, in an unsophisticated, unevolved way, like a Sun reader or a yobbo at a bus stop in Basildon, perhaps because, at my core, that's what I am. I'm a bloke from Grays with a good job and a terrific haircut who's been given a Wonka ticket to a lovely sex factory 'cos of the ol' fame, and while Augustus Gloop drowns and Veruca Salt goes blue, I'm cleaning up, I'm rinsin' it baby!

I haven't always treated women well - more than one relationship has collapsed because of my infidelity - but to this day I feel a fierce warmth for women who have the same disregard for the social conventions of sexual protocol as I do. I love it when I meet a woman and her sexuality is dancing across her face, so it's apparent that all we need to do is nod and find a cupboard.
My manager, John Noel - think of a big, kind, lovely, vicious bastard, like a Darth Vader from Manchester running a school for disadvantaged children - who had previously successfully forced me into drug rehabilitation, thought a little stretch in winky-nick would do me the power of good, and used threats, bullying, love and blackmail to make me go. I eventually agreed for the same reason that I had given up drink and drugs - because my ambition is the most powerful force within me.

While some celebrities have "yes men" surrounding them, I have "fuck-off" men. And so John spitefully decided not to send me to some sort of celebrity treatment centre, like the world-renowned Meadows Clinic in Arizona, but a facility where not all the places were private, where a certain proportion of people were there on judicial programmes - "jail-swerves", they call them, when you're a drug addict and you're offered a choice of prison or rehab. The same option exists for the terminally saucy - get treatment or go to prison; in prison there'll be much more sex but it could err on the side of coercive.

I had no idea of what to expect when I arrived at KeyStone, although I'd spoken to one of the counsellors several times on the phone - the reassuringly named Travis Flowers. I told Travis about the lack of control I was exercising over who I was having sex with. I was pursuing hanky-panky like it was a job, like there was a league table that I had to be at the summit of. And as I explained how I toiled each day with the diligence of Bobby Moore and the grit of Julian Dicks, humming slave songs to keep my spirits up, Travis reassured me that I was just the sort of person who needed KeyStone's help.

The clinic was in the middle of this square in some quiet Philadelphia suburb. The house looked like a normal American family home does - you know, where they've got the sloping roof to the porch bit and gardens around it, a bit like where the Waltons lived, all pastoral and sweet, but with John-Boy chained up in the mop cupboard scrabbling around trying to fiddle with his goolies through a mask of tears. Over the road there was a church: a modern grey building, which constantly played a recording of church bells. Strange it was. Why no proper bells? I never went in but I bet it was a robot church for androids, where the Bible was in binary and their Jesus had laser eyes and metal claws.

I was greeted on the steps of the clinic by one of the counsellors. I can't remember her name, but she was wearing a T-shirt with frogs on. It turned out she was obsessed with 'em, and when I asked her why she said, "When I was a kid, there was a pond near my house which all the frogs would try to get back to, and they'd get killed crossing over the road, so I used to try and help them across."
"Fucking hell," I thought. "D'ya wanna have a clearer analogy etched on your T-shirt? How troublingly apposite that your mission in life should now be to save people from destruction as they pursue their natural instinct to spawn."
At this point, the frog-lady introduced me to a subdued and pinch-faced individual. "Arthur will show you around," she said cheerfully. "He's gonna be your roommate." (In the film, Arthur would be played by Rick Moranis or William H Macy.) Arthur showed me round the kitchen with its horrible meaty American meals. Meals which I, as a vegetarian, couldn't eat, so I would have to live on fruit for the month, like a little ape.
One by one, I began to meet more of my fellow clients, or patients, or inmates, or perverts - whatever you want to call them, including an intimidating Puerto Rican cove who looked like a hybrid of Colin Farrell's "Bullseye" character from the film Daredevil and Bill Sykes's dog in Oliver Twist (whose name was also Bullseye, strangely enough), who kept calling me "London" - "Hey, London!" I resented being called "London". There are eight million people living in London, and my identity, I hope, is quite specific. He addressed me the same way he would've Ken Livingstone or Danny Baker - God knows what they'd be doing there. I'm not even from London; I'm from Essex. (Though I suppose "Essex" would have been even less appropriate - it has, after all, got the three letters "s-e-x" in it and that's what caused all this bother.)

This demeaning and geographically inaccurate mode of address was just one aspect of what soon began to seem like a concerted campaign to dismantle every element of my persona. It was not just my copy of the Guardian that had been confiscated on my arrival, but also my Richard Pryor CDs and my William Burroughs novel. And I'd not been at KeyStone long before my attire began to attract complaints. Apparently, the way my excess belt hung in front of my crotch was confusing and enticing to the pervert fraternity as it suggested a phallus. So they censored me. I was like Elvis "the Pelvis" Presley on Ed Sullivan, I tells ya, punished for the crime of being sexy.
As the days went on, I started to learn why other people were in there. I found out that Arthur was a paedophile who had eloped with his 13-year-old foster daughter. If he went back to Arizona to face the charges, he'd be in line for either lifetime imprisonment or execution. Peter, a well groomed, silver-bearded Christopher Lee figure, had had sex with his wife's sister when she was 12. These revelations came as a bit of a blow and made me question the rationale of the whole dashed trip. "OK," I thought, "I've a bit of an eye for the ladies, now as a kind of punishment I'm rooming with a paedophile. Is that gonna be helpful?" Like them lads that get sent down for nicking a car radio and end up sharing a cell with a diligent bank robber mentor who schools them in criminality. I went down to the office and started making frantic phone-calls home, saying, "Get me out of this place." If I'd been less terrified I might've paused to dream up a new reality show format, I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of This Demented Sex Centre", where minor faces off the box are forced to doss down with, say, Peter Sutcliffe for the amusement of an apathetic nation.

John was on holiday, and no one I spoke to was prepared to sanction my departure so, out of fear, desperation and a kind of morbid curiosity, I decided to stay.
It's extraordinary how quickly you get institutionalised in that kind of environment. You start wearing, not pyjamas exactly, as you do get dressed, but certainly indoorsy sorts of clothes. They have meetings every morning and afternoon. The rituals are astonishing. You have to go round the room introducing yourself - "Hello, I'm Russell" - and then admitting to your recent transgressions. These aren't really wrongdoings as we would normally understand them, more everyday actions that have developed a sexual component: "I had an erotic thought"; "I experienced eroticised rage"; or "I did some eroticised humour". Then you'd round the whole thing off by saying, "My goal for today is to get through the KeyStone experience and just live it as best I can."

People began to customise this closing declaration, I suppose as a way of emphasising their own particular characters. But far from lessening the institutional feel of the whole proceedings, it kind of exacerbated it. Soon enough, each person seemed to have their own slogan: "Hello, I'm Stuart, and I'm gonna swim like a KeyStone dolphin." These customised slogans would often be drawn from the totemic cuddly toy that we were each obliged to select from the mantelpiece. I had a camel. Or someone else would say, "I'm gonna ride the KeyStone Express," and all the others would make supportive train-noises - "Wooh! Wooh!" And I'd be sat there in the middle thinking, "Oh great, I'm in a nuthouse."

In that situation, however, alienated from my normal surroundings, I realised that the outer surface of what I thought was my unique, individual identity was just a set of routines. We all have an essential self, but if you spend every day chopping up meat on a slab, and selling it by the pound, soon you'll find you've become a butcher. And if you don't want to become a butcher (and why would you?), you're going to have to cut right through to the bare bones of your own character in the hope of finding out who you really are. Which bloody hurts.

Perhaps you're wondering what formulated my peculiar sexuality? It ain't that peculiar. I'm a bloke from Essex who likes birds with big bottoms and big boobs, lovely dolly birds. I don't mean to be dismissive - they might be incredibly dark, fretful Sylvia Plath-style heroines for all I know - but if they are, I'd rather not find out because life's difficult enough.
The episode that defined my relations with women - and with myself - occurred in Hong Kong with my dad. I was 17. His third marriage had just broken up, so he needed someone to go on holiday with. I was unemployed, penniless, birdless and desperate for his approval; we were the perfect holiday companions. On the plane home he said, "I went away with a boy and came back with a man." Both of those people were me, so what happened to induce such a significant transition?

In addition to Hong Kong we visited Bali, Singapore and Thailand, and in all those places we saw incredible things. There was only one sight I was interested in seeing. Or rather one thing I was inerested in doing, repeatedly. One thing that chewed its way into my barren little soul and gave me, at long last, a physical pursuit that I was good at. Sex. Disposable sex, sex as leisure, sex for pleasure, sex you sordid little treasure, drag me from monotony and give me kicks too hot to measure.

On day one in Hong Kong we went to some sleazy dive hidden behind a thick black drape where women from the east traipsed louchely along the mirrored promenade in garish beachwear. That promenade was a conveyor belt from which produce could be selected; I didn't know that then but my cock did, twitching, preparing frantically, trying to recall correct procedure. "This is not a drill, repeat, this is not a drill." My dad sat there next to me, familiar with this glistening and foreign terrain.

I didn't understand what I was witnessing, but by jingo, I knew I liked it. Dumbstruck, I sat looking at the women, their hair, each strand identifiable as it responded to a fan that had been placed there to elicit exactly the reaction I felt in my pantaloons, their toenails, painted and perfect, each solitary toe a match for me. They didn't seem enslaved or exploited - to me they weren't; they were mistresses, goddesses, salvation.
"I can't wait to tell my mates that I saw these women in swimsuits," I said to myself. Before long, I was sat on a barstool with a Filipino girl called Mary-Lou, or something similarly unlikely. I thought, "I can't wait to tell my mates I was sat talking to Mary-Lou." That quickly became, "I can't wait to tell my mates I was kissing her." Then we were leaving, a street, a cab, perfume, hairspray, the three Asian prostitutes that my dad was drunkenly herding - Mary-Lou, another girl and the madam of the club, who had come along just for sport (when I learned that she'd come along without payment, I thought that a testimony to my dad's powers). Back at our hotel room, my dad set about unwrapping his two prostitutes, like pass-the-parcel where the music never stopped, and I sat nervously on the edge of the other twin bed with Mary-Lou, kissing her and thinking she was beautiful and falling in love. I'd only had anything close to sex once before - a week before my 16th birthday. I'd been careful to cultivate an image of myself as an aristocratic sex-pert, but she must have known I was a virgin as soon as the bungling encounter commenced.

In Hong Kong, I was naked and shy about my body. I had trouble getting hard, and the blow job seemed daft, not sexual, just giggly and intrusive.
After the un-sex, I carried Mary-Lou in my weedy arms out on to the balcony to look at the view of a great, looming skyscraper, disapprovingly observing. Mary-Lou didn't make me feel embarrassed, and was incredibly romantic really, given the context. I stroked Mary-Lou's hair and kissed her cheek and traced my finger down her perfect nose, scored by the cacophony from the adjacent bedlam, "Yeah, come on!" and "Phwooar, you're juicy!"
As she was about to go, she said expertly, "Russell, I must leave now before I fall in love with you." My heart skipped, and I heard, "Oh, fucking hell, I'm gonna be sick" - a disapproving announcement from dear old Ron.

The next morning, my dad, concealed behind a newspaper, folded down the top right-hand corner. "Did you wear a condom with that bird last night?" "Oh, no I didn't, Dad." He sniffed, "You should've." Then the corner of the page flicked up once again, and he was gone.
In the course of the rest of that holiday, I had sex with loads more prostitutes; always got a hard on, never wore a condom, and never fell in love. In Bangkok, when bar girls in Patpong left their posts to follow me down the street, cooing and touching my hair, I felt that I had my dad's unequivocal approval.

When I came back from Asia, I was much more comfortable around women, and my sexuality had morphed forever from bewildered innocence into something more complex and rapacious. Once my career as a comedian and TV presenter started to pick up, I began to have loads of encounters after gigs. As my sexual appetite grew, I found myself engaged in an increasingly desperate quest to satisfy it. I became so open to suggestion that when someone asked me if I'd like to go to an orgy, I didn't think twice before accepting this invitation.
The word "orgy" is undeniably an evocative one. It conjures up sumptuous images of delicate muslin drapes being teased by a breeze, Turkish music playing everywhere (in fact my whole orgy scenario seems to have been lifted pretty much wholesale from a Turkish Delight advert), nubile Nubian women entwined about each other like a Henry Moore statue, people decadently devouring grapes. I thought there'd probably be a sort of Swiss bloke with no irises or pupils in his eyes as well, just kind of staring. But what I got in a tower block in Hackney was people who looked like they were made out of Ready Brek, swathed in clingfilm, waddling back and forth with towels about their waists. And everywhere there was this intangible sadness, as if the orgy was being directed by Mike Leigh. I remember this woman came bustling out of a doorway when

I first got there - she reminded me of my mum, which didn't help - and said, "Just done my second . . . better go and rinse my mouth out." Then a washing-machine repair man turned up - not as a guest, but to repair the washing-machine.

It was to rescue me from these kinds of grisly scenarios that John Noel sent me to KeyStone. And I'm glad he did. One day I had to write a victims' list - a litany of the women I'd wronged as a result of my sexual addiction. I felt like Saddam Hussein trying to pick out individual Kurds.

· My Booky Wook, by Russell Brand, is published by Hodder & Stoughton on Thursday priced £18.99. To order a copy for £16.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.