Andy Richardson: Stardom alters the persona, but not always the person...

There are even fewer occasions where you can ask the GQ Wine Waiter of the Year to hold a couple of bottles of Krug champagne and pretend they’re guns. Bang. Bang. Bang. And you don’t often get to ask one of the regular hosts of Saturday Kitchen to make a pair of bunny ears and plonk them on the top of his gorgeous PA so that she looks like Jessica Rabbit and he looks like, well, the guy off the telly making rabbit ears for his PA.

On high days and holidays I make books. And that gives me full licence to be as creative – you can use the word daft, or stupid, or ridiculous, if you prefer – as I’d like. So if we just so happen to be making a book about a guy who cooks a superlative octopus dish, what better than creating a Bob Marley Octopus Face. It’s what every discerning three-year-old might do, given the chance. And who doesn’t like to listen to their inner three-year-old every now and Saturday.

And if you’re focusing on a dish that was marvelled at by millions on a prime time TV show, what better than getting the guy who made it to smear the ingredients across his face? You don’t get to do that when you’re sitting down to dinner and paying £80 for the privilege. And he wouldn’t have done that in front of an audience of two million TV viewers.

It’s funny what happens when you’re allowed behind the curtain into a celebrity’s inner sanctum. From the sublime to the ridiculous, from the ordinary to the extraordinary; you get to see that stuff that is never shown on the telly, or in front of 10,000 fans at an arena. There are those who are as straight laced as Jacob Rees-Mogg and want nothing more than a cheese and tomato sandwich after an exhausting gig in front of adoring fans. And there are those who get up to the sort of stuff that is beyond the darkest of imaginations.

And then there are others who, improbably, reveal themselves to be not so different to you and I – if you take away the fact they’re multi-millionaires who sell millions of records and have entourages filled with more people than your average HoSeasons holiday park.

So, for instance, you see that Prince was just a regular genius who kept really, really, really, really late hours and was consumed by music (and sex and drugs). Behind the shades, he was able to converse as freely and eloquently as Neville the librarian and was as personable as Shelia at Morrisons. You realise that Noel Gallagher is as funny and direct in real life as he is in interviews and that his brother is just as gobby, truculent and difficult as his reputation might suggest.

My favourite encounter behind the celebrity curtain came with bespectacled U2 singer, Bono. He didn’t place an octopus on his head, sadly, though there were none in the room at the time otherwise he may well have done. We met backstage at an intimate theatre in Cardiff, where he’d been giving a talk about literature, of all things. Funny what the rich and famous do when they’re not entertaining the masses.

Bono was holding court and talking like some fella you’d meet at the bar. There were no airs and graces, no starry mannerisms or ‘me, me, me’ affectations. He was funny and down to earth. He was – dare I say it – entirely normal. He’d no idea who I was or what purpose I was there to execute, and in those blissful, unguarded moments he was the same as any charming Irish guy you’d meet over a pint of Guinness. Unvarnished, unpretentious and disarmed; he was thoroughly likeable.

And then I was introduced as a writer and as though a switch had been flicked, he was transformed. The regular guy you’d meet at the bar was gone and in an instant he became rock star. Shades were affixed, a cigar was lit, his voice changed and his mannerisms went all ‘global superstar’. After a 20-minute interview, he checked that the words were fine. The shades were removed, the cigar stubbed out and he reverted back to his guy in the bar persona. And I’m pretty sure that if I’d have had a spare octopus about my person, he’d have worn it.