Pepe Mime

Pepe May 2025 Photo by Dave Pickens

Pepe Mime, in my opinion the best follow clown ever, died this September, after a lifetime of alcoholism and a brief battle with liver cancer. I'm guessing he was in his early sixties.

My first memories of Pepe were back in 1987 near the Pompidou Centre, Paris. I remember a large crowd and at the centre of it a small man in a red hat. I didn't speak to him then, indeed I was just passing by, and I only stopped for a moment, but I clearly remember the hat. That would have been when he was at the height of his powers. He even had a teaching residency in Sweden.

It was not until I arrived on the cobblestones at Covent Garden in the winter of 1994 that I met him again, and already the alcohol was starting to be a big problem, but he was still able to perform the most incredible show.

A follow clown for those of you who don't know primarily, as the name suggests, follows people and mimics their gait, posture and sometimes mood. The performer will fall into step behind the person they are mimicking and within a couple of strides become a caricature of that person. Pepe had a gift for this, he also had the ability to be able to see three people ahead of his current subject.

It's not as if I didn't know what a follow clown was before I arrived in Covent Garden, my friend, colleague and sometime performing partner Srdjan Soric, who is the second best follow clown I have known so far, was also phenomenal, and we had just spent two seasons working together in Sweden and Germany, including a joint performance by the two of us at the Gothenburg Culture Festival. Srdjan (Serge) went on to feature in several movies and has a very nice cameo as the parking attendant in Blitz from 2011. Also, following was drummed into us at Circus school and theatrical workshops as a way of devising characters.

During the winter of 1994 and the spring of 1995, I started to get to know Pepe well, I was the new boy and eager to find friends and Pepe always needed a friend to go to the pub with. He would start as soon as the Punch and Judy opened at 11 am, and I was often persuaded to go along with him, however I could only really have one (or maybe two) pints before my show, which was usually between 12 pm and 3.20 pm during the week. Saturdays and Sundays we were lucky to have a show at all as everybody wanted to work the weekend. Pepe's favourite time was 3.20 pm and the best place to watch was from the Punch and Judy balcony which overlooks the West Piazza of the market. I was very friendly with one of the Australian barmaids Justine, who soon became my girlfriend, as well as being pretty, she also had a room above The Strand Tandoori restaurant on Bedford Street (it's still there), which meant getting up for the 8.15 am morning performer draw was easy. One of my greatest regrets in life was letting Justine go, I was a young idiot back then! But I digress.

From the balcony of the Punch and Judy, you can see the entirety of the West Piazza, which is the most iconic street performing pitch in the entire world. Samuel Pepys witnessed a Punch and Judy show there on 9th May 1662, so obviously there is a bit of history.

Pepe would start with his battered old suitcase balanced on top of one of the dustbins, and then the fun would begin. He would spot someone who looked interesting from a distance and hide behind one of the church pillars and as soon as the subject passed him he would fall straight into step with them, usually they were completely oblivious to his presence. The crowd would grow and grow. He would go down on his knees and pretend to be a mother's child, hold up businessmen with a water pistol, and faint in front of old ladies. My favourite gag was when he spotted a man going into the Public toilets and without saying a word would have the whole crowd, which was always substantial, applaud and cheer when the man reappeared from the toilet. Sometimes he would spend an hour following and playing with the people. The finale of his show was a short melodrama, where he would direct two men and a woman in a little scene in which the men would spar for the woman's affection, it was hysterical, and he would never say a word. The only time he would speak was in his bottling speech (asking for the money), he had a very strong "Brummie" accent (Brummie is someone from the Birmingham area of the United Kingdom) and following a clever mime to encourage people to get out there wallets, he would simply say "That was my art and this is my hat!" and the audience would come forward and pay him, handsomely.

After that he would go pretty much straight to the Essex Serpent, often placing his hat on the bar and drink until the money was gone. It wasn't always the Essex Serpent, and he didn't always drink all of his money away. But it did happen quite often! To be fair, I wasn't that much better and neither were most of us young performers, Covent Garden was like a fountain of money for us back then, and we just assumed we could drink from it whenever we chose to and forever, none of us had much thought for the future. We lived like Kings, or more accurately, Football players and Rock musicians. Pepe would always take a taxi and very rarely the underground.

He wasn't always fun to hang out with, I remember on two separate occasions returning from the toilet in the Punch and Judy to find Pepe had picked a fight for me, once with some firemen, who had been taking industrial action and the second time with some "squaddies" (Soldiers). Fortunately I was quick on feet back then, and I knew my way around Covent Garden better than my pursuers, so both times I managed to get away.

He was a nightmare to his long-suffering wife Cheryl and their two (I think) girls and later his son Guy. She would often be on the phone begging for him to come home with some money. I visited their home with him in Brownhills, Dudley. The garden was full of sculptures he had made. She was a nice woman, I felt very sorry for her and her children. She did eventually see the light and divorced him.

He could also be a terrible bully and would berate other performers for having "Shit acts and no talent!"often forcing people into tears or just rage.

He was flawed, but he was talented. I once (and only once) did a double act with him, I basically shadowed him, it was at the time possibly the biggest show at Covent Garden I had ever been in, I still remember bits of it 30 years later, afterwards I felt elated.

Richard Garaghty reminded me of the following episode when we were in Landshut in September, the alcohol was starting to take more and more of an effect upon Pepe's body. Pepe wanted me to perform in his short mime play "Monkey's" and we had been rehearsing at his friend Jane's flat in Stockwell. We had been working at it (literally pretending to be monkeys) for around two hours when we decided to take a smoke break, all of a sudden Pepe leaps off the sofa and starts spasming on the floor, at first I thought he was joking, and then very quickly I realized he wasn't, he was foaming at the mouth and his eyes had sort of disappeared, so all I could see was the whites of them. I got him into the recovery position (Thank you, Boy scouts) and called 999 for an ambulance, I remember the lady on the other end of the phone telling me to make sure he didn't swallow his tongue, she also told me to sit tight and that he had had an epileptic fit, and it was going to take a long time for the ambulance to get to us. He wasn't conscious at this point. I sat with him for a couple of hours, but I had an important appointment myself, so I called Richard who fortunately was at home, just a couple of tube stops away, Richard thankfully was able to come and take my place. The ambulance never showed up, but according to Richard, Pepe just sort of woke up and that was that. I think the year was 1999.

On another occasion, we had been booked to provide entertainment, for the 1995 T in the Park which was a music festival held in Glasgow, we had dropped Pepe off in the city centre with the understanding we would all meet up again a little later and head in for the gig. He didn't show up, in fact I didn't see him again for several weeks when he just turned up again in Covent Garden. A similar thing happened a few years later at the Edinburgh Fringe festival, and that time he disappeared for about six months.

As the years went on, he became less and less lucid. After I left for Key West in 2001, I didn't see him again until I returned to the Edinburgh fringe festival in 2006. I tried to watch one of his performances on the High Street of the Royal Mile, he kept forgetting the material he had done, and I had to walk away when he repeated the same gag in the space of five minutes. It wasn't fun to watch. They had to stop him performing at Covent Garden in the mid 2010s, when he appeared from behind one of the church pillars naked except for a bear mask on his head, "Bear naked!" That apparently was the final straw. He would still come and hang out at the marketplace, but after two o'clock in the afternoon he had stopped making sense, and he wasn't really making much sense before that.

He would never eat onions and loved the film Braveheart. He was also the whitest Jamaican I ever met. His father was a native of St Ann's parish (I was there earlier this year on a cruise, and it is beautiful), and Pepe would often tell other, usually skeptical at first, Jamaicans all about it, whenever he came across them. He tried moving there briefly, but Jamaica can be a tough place.

In short Pepe had an extraordinary talent and an extremely flawed character. Alcoholism is a disease, and we should all try and be compassionate with those that suffer from it, but that can be very difficult. It ruined his marriage, career and in the end killed him. I'm glad that I knew him and I would even say that I was his friend, we certainly had some adventures together. The performers of Covent Garden had a whip round (Go Fund me) to cover his funeral expenses, at the end we were all he had left, there was a small wake, which I couldn't go to and that is that. He was a fucking great mime!

Pepe