My booky wook for the kids: Russell Brand is telling fairy stories

Is there anything more spiritually bankrupt and presumptuous than celebrities who think they can write for kids? Don’t these boneheads remember that episode of Black Books where Dylan Moran and Bill Bailey decided to become Rowling-rich by knocking off a story about an elephant who’d lost its balloon? Now there’s a story that didn’t have a happy ending. Writing for kids, like everything else about raising the little horrors, is harder than you’d think.

But that, heaven knows, doesn’t stop them. Yes, even now you may be reliving the trauma of sullying your dearest’s childhood by introducing into it Budgie, Sarah, Duchess of York’s fearful helicopter. And seven years ago, Anita Silvey, author of 100 Best Books for Children, told the Guardian: “Celebrity books are one of the great negative features of children’s publishing in the 21st century.”

But look at it from the celebrities’ perspective: four-year-old girls may never have heard of Madonna, but their parents may well be fans and so buy her English Roses sequence of novels to read to their daughters. In this way, celebrities open up a new market for their products, one that, fingers crossed, extends their careers as bankable cultural workers.

But what do they write about? Often celebrity kids’ books are a genre mash-up of roman à clef and bildungsroman – involving a story that plunders its author’s biography for purportedly edifying effect. Hence, Curtis Jackson, otherwise known as 50 Cent, wrote a novel called Playground from the perspective of a school bully. Hence too, Sandi Toksvig’s rather wonderful The Littlest Viking, about a Norse poppet who leaves her home and shacks up with some cute kids who find her and her squirrel on a beach, can be read as an allegory of how she conquered British hearts.

So why has Russell Brand joined the Prince of Wales, David Walliams, Ricky Gervais, Julianne Moore and David Baddiel as a celebrity writer of kids’ fiction? He has a rather high-minded answer. “Somebody once said to me: ‘Don’t worry about adults any more. We’re all doomed. Communicate to the children. Wake up the children.’ So I thought, right, yeah. Writing this book came very easily. It wasn’t something I laboured over. It’s how I thought I’d talk to myself at that age.”

The comedian is talking about what he describes as his puerile, scatological and shocking reworking of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Other rebranded fairytales will follow – The Emperor’s New Clothes and Rumpelstiltskin are already earmarked, he tells me, in a series entitled Russell Brand’s Trickster Tales. “Once upon a time, a mysterious time that exists through a window in our mind, a time that seemed, to those present, exactly like now does to us, except their teeth weren’t so clean and more things were wooden, there was a town called Hamelin.”

So begins Brand’s droll, dirty and temporally unspecific version.

So what is he trying to communicate to the children? “The message of this book is: be aware, be awake, be tuned in because at some point nature is coming back to claim its dominions, to claim its domain from man.”

These are heavy burdens for a picture book to bear. Not, perhaps, your usual celebrity-authored old tut.

Brand believes that his book for kids has the same message as the one he’s written for adults, also out now. “It’s telling kids not to trust anyone in authority and listen to the voice within themselves and be awake to the possibility of radical change. Otherwise they will be killed.”

Brand laughs: he’s joking about murdering his target audience.

But why would an old fairytale be a suitable delivery system for his ideas? “There’s a sort of a code in all folk tales, fairy stories, religions, myths that talks to something in us psychologically. Like, the basic story of ‘town has rats, town employs piper to get rid of rats, piper gets rid of rats, town doesn’t pay piper, piper takes children’ – it’s jarring and disruptive. When I was a kid I never disliked him even though the thing he does is fucking mental, really, taking the children, but I never thought that was bad.”

But didn’t he wonder what the piper did to the kids? “I think I read a more sanitised version in which he just takes them to a cave. That ain’t the original. I mean in some versions there’s implications of the darkest things imaginable.”

What, some sort of paedophile allegory? Brand laughs uproariously. “Yeah, I thought enter the children’s market with a paedophile allegory. That’s the clearest way to reach the target audience, particularly at this time as an entertainer. That’s me – the Pied Piper of Yewtree.”

In fact (spoiler alert), in Brand’s version, the children, lured out of town by the piper, disappear mysteriously. Only one survives, a lame boy, Sam, who has been bullied for the crime of being different. “Sam is outside of what is normal and his lameness is a device for other children to ridicule him,” explains Brand.

Did he feel like that as a kid? “Yes, I did actually. I felt very exposed and vulnerable and inadequate, yeah.”

Brand is more interested in the Pied Piper than in Sam. “He comes into a settled situation, disrupts it and then you’re not really sure what to make of that character.” As drawn by illustrator Chris Riddell, the Pied Piper is both seductive and scary. For Brand, he resembles characters from native American myths, like Raven or Coyote, as much as from European fairytales. “While you’re reading the story you kind of love them. Then you think it’s terrible that they ate that baby or whatever. They live between God and man, between what we’re concerned with materially and the divine and the unknowable.”

Viewed thus, the Pied Piper isn’t just a weirdo in motley, nor a score-settling outsider, but the portal to a mystic realm. “He plays a pipe and it takes over people’s minds and rats’ minds. He takes over consciousness.”

Brand rolls up his left sleeve, revealing a tattoo of Krishna, from the Hindu pantheon. “The figure of Krishna is depicted as playing a pipe – and in the beginning was the word, the vibration from which all phenomena emerge. And the Piper is similar. The fact that he’s pied is significant: he’s about opposites, good and bad, right and wrong. For me, that is what the story is about – this ambiguous character that lives beyond morality and connects us to the divine.” Brand breaks off and laughs. “And the only way you can couch the thing is in a story where a load of kids get nonced off to a mountain.”

So you’re trying to liberate children from a materially fixated, spiritually empty world? “Everywhere I look, every myth, every new-age book, every eastern tome I look into, the story is the same. Be present in the moment, don’t be a slave to the basic desires. I thought that because of the simplicity of the format of a folk tale and the presumed simplicity of the audience – children – it gave me an opportunity to convey ideas that are simple but kind of hidden and unusual. I don’t know if it amounts to anything more than be nice to one another.”

Brand took inspiration from the kinds of books he read as a child. “I hope the influence of Roald Dahl is visible. And I loved Enid Blyton.”

More predictable, perhaps, is his fondness for Oscar Wilde’s children’s stories such as The Nightingale and the Rose and The Selfish Giant. “Look at the yearning and the love in there. In The Nightingale and the Rose there are lizards and flowers that are sarcastic little bastards, but then it’s all held together by this longing for Christ and longing for true love – yearning for connection, for transcendence, for revolution – something beyond.”

What Brand says of Wilde is true of what he is trying to do when he writes children’s fiction, too: after all, he wants to communicate to the children because adults are doomed. As if to prove the point, when I ask him to sign the book for my daughter, he kindly does and adds: “You are great. You can do whatever you want.” Fair enough, but I hope she knew that already.

• Russell Brand’s Trickster Tales: The Pied Piper of Hamelin is published by Canongate on 6 November, £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99, including free UK p&p, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846

Other celebrity children’s books

Emma Thompson: The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit

One hundred and 10 years after Peter Rabbit was given a dose of camomile tea and sent to bed following his misadventure in Mr McGregor’s garden, Oscar-winning actress/screenwriter Emma Thompson in 2012 disinterred the little bunny and sent him to Scotland for more adventures.

Geri Halliwell: Ugenia Lavender

“She’s streetwise, sassy, has a sense of humour but most importantly has a sense of right and wrong,” said Halliwell of her nine-year-old heroine who first appeared in print in 2008. The former Spice Girl says she based the character on herself (no really? Shut up!).

Bob Dylan: Man Gave Names to All the Animals

Adapted from a song on his Bobness’s 1979 album Slow Train Coming, this book, first published in 2010, targeted at three to 10-year-old life forms, comes with a CD of Dylan singing the song.

Ricky Gervais: Flanimals

Since this franchise first appeared in 2004, adults and children alike have been identifying with its useless, inadequate, existentially hobbled life forms, haven’t we? Oh, just me then.

Katie Price: Katie Price’s Perfect Ponies

As well as several volumes of autobiography and novels for grownups, the pony-mad former glamour model and multi-millionaire has written a series of children’s stories called Katie Price’s Ponies. Six were published in 2007 alone.

Kay Thompson: Eloise

Who was the first celebrity to write a kids’ book? The answer is Kay Thompson, who was not only a vocal coach and friend of Judy Garland, but also an entertainer in her own right. In 1955, she wrote about a little girl who lived, like the author, in New York’s Plaza hotel, in a “room on the tippy-top floor” with her Nanny, pug dog Weenie and turtle Skipperdee. Some say Eloise was inspired by Thompson’s goddaughter, Liza Minnelli.

David Walliams: The Boy in the Dress

This was the first of seven novels for children that the comedian has written since 2008. Now adapted as a TV film to be screened later this year. Is Christmas 2014 ready for a cross-dressing, effeminate hero?

HRH Prince Charles: The Old Man of Lochnagar

Underwater swimming haggis? Miniature green people of Gorm? A grouse who repels visitors somehow? I’ll have some of what HRH is smoking.

Frank Lampard: Frankie vs the Pirate Pillagers

The first of eight football-themed kids’ stories for boys and girls aged five-plus, written by the football star. It’s like Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree stories, but with a football instead of a tree. Result!